By the Author

The Cherry Pit (1965)

Lightning Bug (1970)

Some Other Place. The Right Place. (1972)

The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks (1975)

Let Us Build Us a City (1986)

The Cockroaches of Stay More (1989)

The Choiring of the Trees (1991)

Ekaterina (1993)

Butterfly Weed (1996)

When Angels Rest (1998)

Thirteen Albatrosses (or, Falling off the Mountain) (2002)

With (2004)

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Ekaterina - Text copyright ©1993 Donald Harington

Butterfly Weed - Text copyright ©1996 Donald Harington

When Angels Rest - Text copyright ©1998 Donald Harington

Thirteen Albatrosses - Text copyright ©2002 Donald Harington

With - Text copyright ©2003 Donald Harington

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by AmazonEncore

P.O. Box 400818

Las Vegas, NV 89140

eISBN: 978-1-61109-437-4

Table of Contents

The Joyful Noise of Donald Harington

Donald Harington’s Grand Jamboree

Ekaterina

Butterfly Weed

When Angels Rest

Thirteen Albatrosses (or, Falling off the Mountain)

With

About the Author

The Joyful Noise of Donald Harington

No oeuvre in American literature, past or present, can equal the combination of joy, humor, and wonder contained in Donald Harington’s fifteen novels. He is America’s Chaucer. Ever since I first discovered Harington’s work twelve years ago, I have expected each new novel to be the one that brought its author the literary awards and acclaim his work deserved. When With came out in 2004, I told a fellow writer that if the novel didn’t win the Pulitzer or National Book Award, it would be a damning indictment of our nation’s literary sensibilities. Yet With appeared and disappeared with hardly a review, much less any award. The novels Fred Chappell described as “an undiscovered continent” remained so. Chappell made that comment over a decade ago and, unfortunately, little has changed.

My hope is that this republication of Donald Harington’s work will finally bring him not just literary acclaim but a large popular audience. Harington’s mythical town of Stay More is a delight for any reader to visit. As with Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, each novel reveals more about the place. We meet generations of Stay More’s denizens. We learn the town’s history, and not just of its humans. Animals and ghosts reveal their place in Stay More’s existence as well. Even the cockroaches weigh in with their perspective. As John Dryden once said of Chaucer, “ ’Tis sufficient to say, as according to the proverb, that here is God’s plenty.” Best of all, though we can leave Stay More, a switch in tense will not allow Stay More to leave us. As Harington once explained in an interview, the use of the future tense “is specifically designed to help prevent the book from ending, because anything in the future tense does not end.”

Donald Harington died in November 2009. During his lifetime, he did not get the recognition he deserved, but perhaps, finally, the time has arrived for the continent to be discovered. Those of us who love and revere Harington’s work call ourselves Stay Morons. Delve into one of these novels and you will likely become one too.

—Ron Rash

Donald Harington’s Grand Jamboree

Right here at the beginning I want to say that I loved Donald Harington, loved him as both a human being and a writer. He filled these essential roles magnificently. What he offered as man and writer was manifold and multisided: passion, laughter, dignity, sensuality, pride, playfulness, honesty, intelligence, a huge capacity for appreciation, and an astonishingly fertile and original imagination. In both capacities he had wonderful style, too.

Although once he took me through the campus of the University of Arkansas–Fayetteville and into a handsome old building to show me the big, shadowy room where for decades he had taught courses in art history, I never saw what Don was like in that classroom, and have always been curious about it. Because he was severely hearing-impaired, he could not have depended much on class discussions. So I wonder if, on many, many days, he did not turn off the lights, project a series of blown-up slides onto a screen, and go through for the benefit of all, including himself, the central act of art history professors: to muse aloud, speculating, thinking, describing in eloquent and ravishing detail what he saw on the surfaces of the paintings. I bet he burnished those paintings with the richness and sensitivity of his responses to them; I bet he made them glow. His students, most of whom would have had no idea their professor was a great novelist, must have loved him; I bet the accuracy and emotional depth of his responses to works of art every now and then moved a couple of them to tears.

Don Harington was a master of language to whom the rhapsody, the elegy, and the soliloquy were native nearly from the first, and because he always had a sort of down-home experimental sense, an innate tendency to push the formal boundaries and subvert the usual narrative structures, the way he built his words into phrases and his phrases into sentences and paragraphs always seemed fresh, vital, moving. It was as though the complexity and power of his thoughts and feelings demanded that he move into extravagance and daring. He took risks most novelists of his vintage would never have considered, firstly because of their sheer difficulty, secondly because to most American writers these techniques were simply unimaginable. (But not so to Marques, Milorad Pavic, Javier Marias, or a clutch of other non-Americans.) Yet Harington never really feels like an experimental writer. He is always anchored in the basic stuff of storytelling, in ongoing, interconnected accounts of bawdy, painful, comic, mysterious human relationships in a thoroughly defined and witnessed locale.

The setting for nearly every scene in every one of the sequence of novels beginning with Lightning Bug is the village of Stay More (in two cases morphed into Stick Around) in the Arkansas Ozarks, which Harington sometimes liked to call the Bodarks. In the same spirit, he liked to insist that the residents of his state should not be called Arkansans, but Arkansawyers. Hamlet may be the right term for Stay More. It is a tiny ville out in the boondocks, too tiny to appear on any map and so friendly in the backcountry way that when visitors declare the intention to depart, its citizens say something like, “Stay More and have some food with us.” These citizens are sometimes referred to as Stay Morons, though not because they are at all moronic. In fact, their inventiveness, high good humor, and love of life propel them through scrape after scrape, adventure after adventure (many of these erotic), and novel after novel, from 1969’s Lightning Bug to Enduring in 2009.

Perhaps not so much anymore in these days of sensibility watchdogs alert for signs of offensiveness, people who, like the inhabitants of Stay More, lived in tiny hamlets in the Ozark Mountains, did not have electricity or running water, made their own liquor, owned guns, were almost entirely self-sufficient, and spoke in a pungently colorful regional dialect (“If I had the sense God gave a chipmunk, I’d get up and get Joel’s gun and shoot ya.”), were once commonly known as hillbillies. And hillbillies were a national joke, two-dimensional rubes with bare feet, a jug in one hand and a rifle in the other. They were cunning but not very smart. From the thirties through the sixties, the cartoonist Al Capp, an urbane type from New Haven, Connecticut, had a lot of cornpone fun with hillbillies named Li’l Abner, Daisy Mae, Moonbeam McSwine, who with many others of their kind lived in his fictional Dogpatch. Donald Harington didn’t object to having his characters referred to as hillbillies; in fact, the term seemed pretty accurate to him, but when Don thought of hillbillies, he didn’t see the uncomplicated denizens of Dogpatch or even the slightly less comic-strip Lum and Abner, Arkansas yokels popular on film and radio. Instead, he saw fully developed human beings with rich interior lives who happened to inhabit a particular region.

Harington had a particularly insightful and comprehensive understanding of that region, but he did not grow up there. He was a city boy from Little Rock who every summer was sent up into the mountains to visit his relatives in the tiny village of Drakes Creek. I think that is why he understood the region and its people so thoroughly, but also so poetically, so generously, with such passionate yearning: he was an outsider. For a writer, outsider status confers certain built-in advantages. The single most representative case I can think of is F. Scott Fitzgerald, who grew up on the fringes of a moneyed world in Buffalo, New York, and St. Paul, Minnesota, and at seventeen went to Princeton, where he pressed his nose so firmly against the glass he nearly succeeded in passing through it. In Fitzgerald, all the magical glamour and beauty of the very blond, very blue-eyed, and very wealthy emanates from the whole-bodied yearning for immediate assimilation on the part of the bright young man from the provinces who stands posted, hair combed and eyes wide open, on the sidelines. He’s hoping you cannot see that he is memorizing the codes of speech, dress, and manners of the golden children of America’s gentry.

As an outsider, I mean, a boy whose urban background must have aroused at least some degree of wariness amongst the natives of Drakes Creek—who nonetheless had to grant him semi-native status as “Jimmie’s boy” (Jimmie being his mother)—the young Harington was positioned to take in the mores and language of a way of life he found both deeply entertaining and deeply rewarding. The other half of this process, as for Fitzgerald at Princeton, involved the thorough internalization of the so ferociously and joyously observed. Although you are not and never can be the Other, you do become a version of the Other.

Harington beautifully described this bittersweet, ambivalent process in a 1994 interview published in the Appalachian Journal. “I am too educated to be a hillbilly…I forfeit my hillbilliness in order to write novels about hillbillies. It is some consolation that certain characteristics of hillbillies—fierce independence, shyness coupled with loquacity, a wry if not sardonic humor—remain in my bloodstream, remain in my genes, and permit me never to forget what it is like being a hillbilly, at the same time that they deprive me of complete objectivity about hillbillies. I can’t laugh about hillbillies because I am still laughing with them.”

In the same interview, Harington also reveals that in Drakes Creek, he read like a demon. For hours each day, he parked himself on a swing chair at the end of his grandmother’s porch and devoured novels by Twain, Dostoyevsky, and Faulkner. One after the other. In a swoon of pleasure, aided by an absolute separation from the familiar, daily self. I really do think that this is how it’s done. At the age of ten or twelve, the true, the most dedicated, the fated reader, the reader destined for a life at the forge, disappears into the text and can be pulled from it by only the need to pee or the necessity of eating something. This is how you begin to create a literary sensibility, by gorging on stories other people have written, the best stories you can find. Later, at seventeen or eighteen, you begin to notice how these great writers go about doing things, how they use language, how they set up episodes that grow into scenes, how chapters begin and end. Something like this movement from rapture to awakening would certainly have been going on in young “Dawny,” Jimmie’s boy—that nice, good-looking kid from the city who spends so much time reading books on his grandmother’s porch.

Reviewers have often described Harington as a regionalist, and although if you squint it is possible to see him that way, when applied to him the label has always struck me as a sort of confinement. Harington is not a writer like Zona Gale, Hamlin Garland, or August Derleth. He is bigger than that, weightier, trickier, more inclusive, less solemn. Calling him a regionalist has always struck me as inaccurate as it would be to say that Stephen King, too, is a regionalist because most of his books are set in Maine. I don’t even think Harington wrote southern novels, particularly. He lived in the South, yes, and his novels are set there, but his fiction does not feel like the work—as different as these writers are from each other—of Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Reynolds Price, Walker Percy, or Harper Lee. Though it is just as deeply felt as the work of any of these fine writers, Harington’s fiction is more aerated and propulsive, more effervescent, bawdier, more playful, more open to transformative brainstorms. He’s like a weird combination of Twain and Nabokov—I can almost imagine Twain deciding to write a novel about anthropomorphized cockroaches, and Nabokov’s influence, visible everywhere in Harington’s work, emerges undisguised in one of my favorite Harington novels, Ekaterina, an inversion of Lolita set in the daffy, ebullient resort town of Eureka Springs.

My absolute favorites here, though, are Lightning Bug, Some Other Place. The Right Place., The Choiring of the Trees, and Enduring. The first and the last of the Stay More novels, plus the second and the fifth. He was thirty-five on the publication of Lightning Bug, and seventy-three on the publication of Enduring, which looks back over the thirty-nine years between it and the first of its kind and remembers every word and phrase. (It remembers every bit of all the other novels, too, for in it all of their characters and each of their situations parade right past the reader, chapter by chapter, as—in a literal parade—does every single character in The Sun Shines Bright, John Ford’s own favorite of all his films. In both cases, the effect is almost unbelievably moving.)

Thirty-five years of age, more or less geriatric senility for tennis players but springlike youth for novelists, is an excellent time at which really to stretch your arms and see how much of the world you can encompass. Harington just simply parachutes into the first pages of his novel, calling them “Beginning” (later followed by “Middling” and “Ending”) and slipping in a lovely, reverberant line of stage direction:

From a porch swing, evening, July, 1939, Stay More, Ark.

So we have a tone, immediately, and I believe it to be the tone of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which is to say that of the ordinary and everyday imbued with the miraculous and eternal. By way of beginning “Beginning,” Harington then sets up what is seen and heard from that porch swing, and does so with great tenderness and patience, concentrating first on the most musical element of the scene, the delightful, ravishing, complex sounds that reach the boy on the swing, who bears his own name but is not he.

Music and musicality have a prominent role in the Stay More novels. Those odd part-titles indicate “Movements”; the conversation of lovers at the end of the book will be in adagio un poco mosso. And the first words in the entire Stay More cycle are:

IT BEGINS WITH THIS SOUND:

…which is that of a screen door, instantly familiar to anyone who has ever lived with or near one, “a plangent twang,” which Harington represents as “WRIRRRAANG,” and tells us that it “seems to evoke the heart of summer, of summer evenings there in that place” just before he drops down a line space and delivers the next bit of stage setting:

IT BEGINS WITH THESE PEOPLE:

Grover’s Corners may be in New Hampshire, but it is not far distant. In place of Wilder’s stage manager we have the omniscient narrator, who both is and is not Donald Harington, a young writer discovering new muscles he had (I bet) always hoped and secretly known he’d had, and doing so by the foolproof method of paying close, reverential attention to everything near at hand, especially that which he most loves, in this case the village postmistress, Latha Bourne, “the heroine, the demigoddess, of this world.”

The narrator, the grown “Dawny,” says, “I love to look at Latha Bourne, which is something I do more often than anything else, except sleep. Maybe I disturb her, looking at her so much.”

In all of Thornton Wilder’s work, there is no Latha Bourne. Nor in Saul Bellow’s, Philip Roth’s, or John Updike’s; and not in David Foster Wallace’s, Michael Chabon’s, or Jonathan Lethem’s; and certainly not in mine. In American fiction written by men, women with such powerful moral and erotic force fields tend to be manipulative, untrustworthy, unreliable, if not treacherous, and witchlike. It is unimaginably difficult to create a universally loveable female character, a woman taken to be ideal, even as she is a normally functioning human being. It cannot be done by cheating, by which I mean by craft alone—the writer must be fully present, completely open and engaged, vulnerable to his own creation. The only other such female character I can think of now is Lady Glencora Palliser, whom Trollope burnishes to a warmly persuasive glow over the six “Parliamentary” or “Palliser” novels.

The emotional honesty and readiness that permitted the creation of Latha Bourne, along with an even more stunning level of ambition and an even greater degree of imaginative immersion, went into shaping Some Other Place. The Right Place. into—to put this as simply as I can—one of the great American novels of the era that followed World War II. It was the first Donald Harington novel I read, and it both puzzled me deeply and opened my eyes to what was formally possible in the English-language novel. Whatever this writer thought he was about, he was fearless.

In the early seventies, while I was living in London, I read a review of SOP.TRP., to use Harington’s own shorthand system for his titles, in the daily Times. The reviewer liked and admired the novel, that much seemed certain, but he appeared to be less positive about his grasp of the book than reviewers (especially male English reviewers, especially in the Times) ever wish to seem—the impression I had was that the man was not at all unhappy to feel that he had been left on the shore of some greater understanding than had been granted him.

This attitude makes a lot of sense. I don’t think anyone is capable of discovering all the secrets of SOP. TRP., of seeing what informs its various narrative feints and dodges, in a single reading. It is much wiser, as well as much more generous, to be open to the possibility that there is more to be learned than it is to feel that the failure to understand a work of art immediately means that the work must be muddled. So it muddled you; so what? Doesn’t that, on the whole, just make it more interesting?

Something like this reasoning caused me to visit my local library and withdraw the Jonathan Cape edition of the book I was too poor to otherwise obtain. I read it over a couple of days. Certain parts of the last hundred pages, I read two and three times. I was under no illusions that I understood everything about Harington’s novel, yet I felt enriched by it. The book seemed luminous to me. About eighteen months later, I bought a copy of the mass market paperback, tricked out to suggest that the book was a horror novel. That misleading little edition endured three or four more rereadings over the next two decades. Then another publisher brought out nice trade paperback editions of the Stay More cycle, and I bought and read it again. Finally, Don and Kim Harington appeared on my doorstep on August 4, 1998, and Don surprised and moved me by presenting me with an inscribed first edition of the book. The next day I saw something new in a jacket I had looked at dozens of times previously: In Wendell Minor’s gorgeous jacket painting, the grain of the canvas is visible through the orange and green of the trees, the yellow-green of the marshy grass, and the glowing red of Diana Stoving’s red Porsche 911E. Through the ravishing representations of the imagined world hangs the pebbly texture of the painter’s ground and medium. The visibility of the underlying canvas is a steady, omnipresent reminder of the fictionality of the images. This reminder only makes them more beautiful. They are simultaneously real and imagined, and the dichotomy/dialogue between these two irreconcilables speaks of a lost, more perfect world.

The central, most famous paragraph in the novel, which Harington knew by heart and can be seen reciting, in his late-manner deaf man’s accent, on YouTube a few years before his death, poses the issue more directly:

“Oh, this is a story of—you know it, don’t you?—a story not of ghost towns but of lost places in the heart, of vanished life in the hidden places of the soul, oh, this is not a story of actual places where actual people lived and dreamed and died but a story of lost lives and abandoned dreams and the dying of childhood, oh, a story of the great host villages of the mind, a story of untold stories, oh, of lost untellable stories, of a boy who loved a girl whose villages had been abandoned, of a boy who took a girl on a long outing to the town of lost dreams, of a boy who wanted to help her find her hidden It, oh…”

He then drops down a line to complete the long sentence in a new paragraph the length of a single phrase:

“…a story of a boy who tried but then lost her.”

Well, in a way; but as you will see, what was lost is also forever held, contained, and protected. Toward the end of this novel, just at the moment Harington moves, as he always did, into the future tense, SOP.TRP.’s long-deceased but still lively main character interrupts the narrative to turn to the sorrowful life of Harington, his author (now “G”), recently alerted by his doctor to allergies involving dust, mold, weeds, trees, dogs, cats, brunettes, book paper, bananas, and babies (though not, alas, bourbon), and that he has achieved a condition “like a town… on the verge of becoming a ghost town.” Thereafter, he is sent spinning off to the Bodarks in search of his lost heroine, Diana Stoving. After he finds her, she miraculously recognizes him as the author of Firefly and recounts to him, step by step, the entire story of the present novel. At that point a mystery occurs: Through the voice of the dead poet Daniel Lyam Montross, whose entire Selected Poems takes up a long, central portion of the novel, SOP.TRP. itself begins to speak to “G” and explains the connection between Montross and the until-now unexplained rescue of the lost child-G, or “Dawnie,” from the forest at the end of Firefly/Lightning Bug.

And everything else, too: for everything else worth explaining is contained in that story. Donald Harington lived by stories—rich, humane, emotion-freighted stories that touch our deepest chords. More than that, he knew that we live by stories, too.

—Peter Straub

To Kim

Contents

Part one

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

Part two

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

V. Kelian

Afterword By Clive Henry

Part one

BEGINNING

winter

Shortly after the Second World War, or the Great Patriotic War, as Ekaterina was taught to call it, the fabulous American poet Theodore Roethke wrote a long poem called “The Lost Son,” the conclusion to a volume of the same title. Critic Lawrence Brace said of it, “No poem in the English language has better light.” The fifth section, last section, is entitled “It Was Beginning Winter,” and it concludes:

A lively understandable spirit

Once entertained you.

It will come again.

Be still.

Wait.

Chapter one

Ekaterina you were, and you were not at all. You were from a land far away, once upon a time and upon no time at all, where stories always begin, “There was, and there was not at all…,” as if to confute truth or affirm invention, in celebration of the imagination’s freedom to transcend the stubborn facts of “reality”: you were, and still are, Ekaterina: all of this is real, and not a word of it is true: you escaped the clutches of a sadist named Bolshakov (a real name) who could not separate truth from fiction, and you came to America.

There was and there was not at all a great city in an eastern state, a city devoted to the manufacture of a hard but malleable metal commonly used in straight pins, a hilly city at the confluence of two rivers of Indian names and the beginning of a third, a city that, like you and I, gave up smoking—oh, why do I have to shield its name? You did not choose the city, except to whatever extent it may have been chosen for you by your guardian angel, Anangka, and you suspected that Anangka was still half-asleep from jet lag or, at best, becoming frustrated and grim in her efforts to provide a destiny for you.

No, you were sent to this city involuntarily, under the aegis of the Fund for the Relief of Russian Writers and Scientists in Exile, whose New York (a real name) office had met your plane, had interviewed you (in both Russian and English, noting that you were not sufficiently fluent in the latter, and, making you a gift of a purse-size paperback, Akhmanova’s Russian-English Dictionary), had given you in dollars the equivalent of 176 rubles, enough to last out that month of December, and had put you and your pasteboard suitcase (containing one change of clothes, basic toiletries, and a few souvenirs from “camp”) on a bus for the ride of 365 miles to the city of your referral. “Wait,” you’d said in English to your agent from the Fund, before he put you on the bus. “Am I Writer, or am I Scientist?” He had laughed, thinking your question in jest, and had made no move to answer it.

The bus ride took you through some snow-covered farm country where the people, called Amish (a real name), still wore old-fashioned clothing and the women wore black bonnets. You were wearing a black scarf wrapped around your head like a bonnet, or babushka, knotted into a bow beneath your chin. It covered all of your hair—or rather, your lack of hair, which was just beginning to grow back from the last time it had been shaved in camp. None of your fellow passengers seemed to make anything of your headgear; maybe they thought you were some kind of Amish.

You were, and you were not at all, at least not any longer, Svanetian. It was nothing like Amish: rural and old-fashioned, yes, but not deliberately so, and not particularly religious. Just as the county in which I spent my last years, and our ultimate destination in this story, was and is the most remote of all the seventy-five counties in that (unnamed) state, Svanetia is the most remote district, formerly a principality, of the rugged mountains of the Southern Caucasus in Georgia, once part of a Communist confederation called the Soviet Union, now independent again but anxiously so. You had not been home for three years, not since they sent you to camp at the age of twenty-four, and that was a dozen years ago from now, and you still have not been home…except in some of your splendid writings.

Just the other year, and not any year at all, the people of Georgia, making a bold move to assert their independence from the still-existing Soviet Union, established as their president the selfsame Zviad Gamsakhurdia who had been your mentor and friend and whose arrest as a political prisoner by the Communists had led to your arrest. Zviad (your stringing of consonants is going to give me some trouble, although we ghosts are multilingual) was not a Svanetian but a native of Tbilisi, or Tiflis, the capital, and a son of the writer Konstantine Gamsakhurdia, whose work you admired; and Zviad was a lecturer in English (American literature) at Tbilisi University when you taught there (not, alas, in English). He had published your first poems in his samizdat journal Okros Sacmisi, which means in Georgian “Golden Fleece,” and you can remember when you fantasied being Medea to his Jason—you were twenty-three and he was thirty-six—and in his fifties he became president of the whole country, something you couldn’t have comprehended in those days when the Kremlin still had all of you under its iron fist.

But you hadn’t gone to jail for Zviady. You had gone to jail for Georgia, and for Svanetia, and for the honor of the royal name you carried, Dadeshkeliani, and for human rights everywhere: after Zviady’s arrest you became co-chair of the Tbilisi Watch Committee, to observe and protest the violations of human rights that were occurring all around you. By then you had stopped writing poetry. No one, as I discovered myself some years ago, reads poetry.

Chapter two

Standing on the sidewalk below the mansion, you studied again the slip of paper in your hand, to verify the address. You had expected perhaps one of those singular dwellings you had seen so often from the bus, what we call “suburban ranch style”: one-story, low or flat roof, cozy, convenient, conventional. But this was urban, and miles from the nearest vestigial ranch. This was a castle, nearly, larger than the ancestral manors of the Dadeshkelianis in Etseri and your own village of Lisedi, manors that had been broken up into apartments when Svanetia, along with all of Georgia, was collectivized by the Communist Soviets. This castle had no tower looming over it, but it was made largely of dark stone, with enough busy classical details in wood to decorate it like certain town houses of Tbilisi. You looked up and down the avenue to see that there were other mansions of similar size if not similar style in the neighborhood, and, in the distance, the soaring gothic tower of the city’s university.

“Im, imte, imetchu, Anangka?” you addressed in Svani your unseen purveyor of Providence. “Have you got in mind for me to live here?” Surely these Elmores were very wealthy capitalists, with servants.

The door was answered not by a servant but by a comely youth: a smiling lad of twelve years who instantly struck you as a synthesis of your Islamber and your Dzhordzha: he was tall for his age and skinny, like Islamber, with the Svane’s slightly hood-lidded eyes that made him look sleepy or sly or Oriental, depending upon whether he looked straight at you or sidelong; but he seemed to possess Dzhordzha’s quality—aura or emanation—of makap, precocious sexuality, of being what your fellow writer and near-compatriot, Nabokov (a very real name, of whom you had not yet heard), called (coined and minted) a faunlet: the male equivalent, if there is one, of his immortal nymphet.

“Ivasu khari, Anangka!” you said aloud, which is to say, Thank thee, Anangka. The boy stared at you, and his smile was uncertain. You were tempted to give him his first lesson in elementary Svani on the spot, or even to introduce him to your invisible companion, but instead you announced, “I am Ekaterina Vladimirovna Dadeshkeliani.”

The boy made a sound like “Whew,” and then he said, “How do you, like, spell all of that?” but he giggled (Islamber’s vulgar giggle!) to let you know he didn’t really require you to spell it for him. And then he said, “You must be the die sinner.”

You attempted to repeat the words, “Die sinner?” and your hand instinctively reached for the dictionary in your purse.

“What Mom calls you,” he said. “I’ll go get her.” He turned to leave you on the doorstep but turned back, remembering what little manners he had: “Hey, come on in.” And he motioned to a spot in the spacious foyer where you could stand and wait for Mrs. Elmore.

But in Svanetia one never crosses a threshold without express invitation from the male head of the house, and, unless this pubertal youth was already as mature as you hoped, he was probably not the head of the house. So you remained standing outside the door, the cold air at your back (mild, even balmy by Svanetian standards) rushing through the open door.

You brought out the dictionary. You were sure of die, but checked it anyway for other meanings: singular of dice; to desire greatly, as if pining away; stamping device; but also possibly just di-, prefix meaning twice, double, or two, as in dicotyledon. Of course! Sinner you did not know at all, and you found it quickly: one who sins. Sin: any offense, violation, fault, or error.

You were meditating upon the idea of being a double sinner and the fantastic chance that these people already knew about both Islamber and Dzhordzha, when the hobbledehoy returned, saying first, “Don’t you understand ‘Come in’?” and then, “Mom’s upstairs trying to, like, help Professor Ogden. I think that old sinner is dying! Anyhow, she says for me to, like, fix you a drink and she’ll be down in a minute. I hope you don’t drink, though. Do you?”

Still you hesitated outside the door, searching for the English word for baba (Svanetian), mama (sic, Georgian), otyets (Russian), and remembering it without having to look it up: “Your fadder. Is home?”

“Dad? No, he’s at the Hillman.” (I ought to shade the library’s name, as I’m taking pains to shade so much else, but I like the real name, being a hillman myself.) “Hey, if you’re not coming in, we’d better shut the door.” The faunlet put one hand on the doorknob and the other on your coat sleeve, and began tugging each, to see which would move first. You reluctantly entered the house.

The entrance hall was enormous, with a floor of marble, and all the walls were covered with mirrors. Throughout the house, you would discover, there were mirrors everywhere, as if the original builder of the house were either extremely vain (he was) or inspired by Louis XIV. In Leningrad you had seen buildings that had many mirrors, but not like this, and in Svanetia there were several houses that had no mirrors at all.

You glanced at yourself in one. At a rest stop on the bus route, because you had noticed that some of the other women on the bus had been wearing them, you had taken the one good pair of dzhinsy out of your suitcase and had put them on: they were comfortable and kept your legs warm, and you saw now how they matched almost identically the pair of dzhinsy that the boy was wearing, just as faded. But your coat, the prison-issue palto, was shabby, grimy, and patched, and, with the black babushka around your head, it made you look like a peasant.

Reading your thoughts, the boy held his hands as if to pinch your shoulders and invited, “You wanta take that off?” and helped you out of your crummy coat. Then he gestured to the left: “This is our apartment,” and led you through some slid-open sliding doors into a suite of rooms, one flowing from the other, each layered with more mirrors, and with shelves and antique furniture festooned with bric-a-brac and lace.

He led you to a polished buffet truly covered with bottles of all sizes and shapes. “‘Name your poison,’” he said and giggled again, and you knew he was quoting his elders, so you did not bring out the paperback to look up poison. His fingers began to hop from bottle to bottle: “Rye…Scotch…rum…bourbon…gin…” His hand stopped and lifted a bottle. “I guess you’d want this one. Vodka. There’s hundred-proof Smirnoff and eighty-six-proof Popov.”

You thirsted. The night of your leave-taking from camp, the other women had pooled their rations of tea to brew a quantity of chifir, a powerful drink, black and thick, invented by inmates, that requires fifty grams of tea leaves; and, in flagrant violation of regulations, they had toasted you with it and helped you consume it, enough of it to make all of you quite tipsy. The chifir had given you your first real high since your arrest and your last one until the possibility that now lay before you.

“But like I say,” the boy was saying, setting the Smirnoff back down, “I hope you don’t drink. You’re, like, too pretty to drink. I could give you a soft drink, I mean, you know, some pop, Coke or stuff.” Your fingers were groping for your purse, for your paperback. But you did not resort to it, waiting, and trying to understand him: one of his strange words had seemed familiar: Coke.

“Coke?” you said.

“Oh, cool!” he exclaimed. “I’ll get you a Coke from the fridge.” He turned to go but turned back. “Because, you know, everybody in this house, and I mean everybody, is, like, getting fried all the time, you know?”

While he was out of the room you looked up fried, without much success.

Chapter three

“That Kenny!” the woman said, flapping her hand in dismissal, then snatching the aluminum can out of your hand. “He doesn’t have the manners of a billy goat! I’m Loretta Elmore, and I’ll bet you’d like some vodka, right?”

“Mayest thou be victorious,” you said in a fairly good English rendering of the common Svanetian greeting.

“Do what?” said Loretta Elmore. She held the bottle of Smirnoff above a crystal glass, raising one eyebrow in expectation of your approval, and when you nodded she splashed a couple of jiggers into the glass. “Ice?” she said.

It sounded nothing like the Svanetian kvarmal nor the Russian lyod. “I am having much problems with the English,” you said. “How spells ‘ice’?”

She took the lid off the ice bucket and lifted out a palmful of cubes. “I-see-ee,” she said. She dropped the cubes into another glass, into which she poured some of the amber liquid from another bottle, as if in demonstration. She held it up, said, “Bourbon and branch on the rocks. Can you say that?”

You were always good at mimicry, at repetition. You repeated her exactly, with just a slight misinflection.

“Very good,” she said, and pointed her glass at you and said,

“Cheers,” and drank most of it in one swallow.

You drank your vodka, without ice, in one swallow. It was the real stuff, as we say, and the first you’d had since the days in Tbilisi when you spent too much of your university salary on a daily dose of it.

Loretta refilled your glass and asked, “Don’t you want to take that scarf off your head and sit down?” When you hesitated, she pantomimed removing the scarf and sitting.

“Sit, ya,” you agreed. “But ‘scarf,’ no. I am having no hair.”

“You don’t mean to tell me!” she said. “Now that’s terrible. Is that what they did to you? Did they cut it all off!” She scissored together her first and second fingers and you nodded, and she said, “That really sucks! How long were you in the die sinner’s slammer?”

“Pardon. What means ‘die sinner’?”

“What you were. Weren’t you?” She spelled the word for you and it did not spell exactly as she and her son had spoken it.

You brought out your paperback, showed her the cover, and apologized, “I am having to use.”

“Use,” she said. “Go right ahead.”

You looked it up: one who dissents, as one who refuses to accept a religious doctrine. Your finger moved a short distance down the page, to another, better word. You tried not to sound didactic, let alone superior. “I think,” you told her, “thou want other word, dissident, not dissenter.”

“Yeah, that’s right!” she said. “That’s the word Kenneth—Big Kenny, who’s Pa—that’s the word he uses. I just got it mixed up. You’re not a die sinner. You’re a dissident!”

You smiled. And that was your first awareness, dear Kat, that all of us have problems with English.

Chapter four

Big Kenny, or Pa, came home from the Hillman in time for supper and was delighted to find that you had arrived safely, since it had been his idea in the first place: in the course of the evening, and with much help from your paperback dictionary, you were able to determine that your host, or rather your landlord, or perhaps a little of both, Dr. Kenneth L. Elmore, Sr., 71, was a retired professor of anthropology at the university who, in his superannuation and idle hours, espoused several worthy social causes, including Save-a-Child and Urban League and Amnesty International, and had somehow got his name on the mailing list of the Fund for the Relief of Russian Writers and Scientists in Exile. He had not contributed any cash to the Fund, and he did not now intend to contribute anything at all to your welfare, other than excusing you from paying your first month’s rent, or rather what remained of the month of December, and it was to be hoped that you would be able to pay your January rent out of your salary from the university, assuming that his efforts to help you find employment there were successful. Thus far, his efforts had been limited to sending interdepartmental memos to his colleagues in Biological Sciences and Slavic Languages and Literature; he was prevented from phoning or visiting them by an advanced hearing impairment that, in addition to what problems you already had with the English language, rendered communication between the two of you almost impossible. (“The stubborn old gomer refuses to try a hearing aid,” Loretta said in the presence of the nonhearing old gomer, a word not in your dictionary.) Dr. Elmore had received, in reply to his memos, an offer to have you interviewed by Dr. Schvann of Slavic and Dr. Dalrymple of Biological Sciences, and, as soon as you got settled into your apartment upstairs (adjacent to, on one side, Dr. Edith Koeppe of Sociology and, on the other side, Dr. Knox Ogden of English), you would be expected to appear for your interviews. (‘I’ll loan you the borrow of one of my dresses,” Loretta offered generously. “I think we’re about the same size. And you really ought to wear some of my jewelry, at least a necklace.”)

But Dr. Elmore had very little to say to you, that evening or later. At the supper table (Kenneth, Jr., “Little” Kenny, the only sober person at that late hour, cooked and served a supper of cheeseburgers and french fries), Dr. Elmore casually remarked, not looking at you, “I have the greatest respect for dissidents, particularly those against the Bolshevik ideology,” but in a voice so hoarse and weak that Loretta had to repeat the words for you, slowly, and yell at her husband, “SHE HAS TO LOOK ’EM UP!” while you successfully found ideology, which sounded pretty much the same in Russian, with a different accent. Then the three Elmores, including smiling Kenny, waited for your response to that remark.

“Dissidents,” you said, “are being…Excuse”—you looked up a couple of words—“successful only if famous. Like Solzhenitsyn. I not famous dissident. I, nobody know.”

Loretta yelled this at her husband, and he smiled politely and shook his head in sympathy, or in disavowal of having heard; you could not tell which.

You were not drunk, and neither, precisely, were Dr. and Mrs. Elmore, although all three of you had consumed large quantities of, respectively, vodka, Scotch, and bourbon. You were out of practice, and a quantity of vodka that would have given you only a pleasant buzz in Tbilisi or Leningrad now rendered you a bit stuporous and stuttering and inattentive. Each time Loretta got up to refill your glass, her son would whine, “Mom!” and roll his eyes in disgust and give you assorted facial contortions of disappointment, pity, concern, and beseechment.

At one point during the evening, Loretta observed that your unusual name was difficult, to put it mildly, and she delivered herself of the opinion that you ought to pick one of the many American translations, Cathy, perhaps, or Katy, or Cassie, or Kitty, or perhaps just Kay. At the very least, Catherine. “What can we call you?” she wondered aloud. Without wishing to be unfriendly or in the least aloof, you announced, “Ekaterina Vladimirovna,” dropping, at least, your unwieldy surname.

Finally, when Dr. Elmore seemed to have withdrawn entirely into himself and was making no effort to respond to his wife’s shouts of “SHE WANTS US TO CALL HER EE COTTERINA VLAH DEEMER ROV NAH!” Kenny said to his mother, “Can’t you see she’s tired?” and Loretta suggested that maybe it was time that Kenny showed you up to your room, and the boy leapt at the chance.

Chapter five

Your room, on the second floor of the mansion, west side, was large enough to house, by Soviet standards, an entire family, but you had it all to yourself, and even a bathroom! You could not believe, at first, that you would not be sharing the bath with Professors Koeppe and Ogden, who, Kenny tried to convince you, both had separate bathrooms. The mansion contained a total of ten apartments, each with its own bathroom, each populated by a single faculty member or graduate student, the latter on the third floor. Each apartment even had its own small cooking niche (Kenny gave you the word: kitchenette.) Yours had a gas stove, a small refrigerator, and a sink, but there were no pots, pans, dishes, or cutlery. (“I could, like, snitch you some stuff from downstairs just to get you started,” Kenny offered.)

Kenny had already taken from his parents’ apartment a table lamp and a reading lamp, which he now put upon your desk and plugged in and turned on. Then he struck a match and lit the gas heater embedded in the exterior wall, and he showed you how to adjust it. The same exterior wall had five tall windows interspersed with mirrors, four of the windows with a view of the busy avenue, now traversed by many car lights; one of the windows (as Kenny, pulling aside the heavy drapes, showed you) had an oblique view of the illuminated window of your neighbor Professor Ogden. He had not drawn his blinds, and his undraped window revealed a dim glimpse of his person, supine upon his couch, one arm flung over his face to shield his eyes or comfort his head. (“That old nerd’s really, really sick,” Kenny said. “I mean he’s, like, barfy and gross, you know? He oughta be in the hospital, but Mom can’t make him go.”)

The furniture of your room consisted of a small circular dining table with three simple dining chairs (two for company, said our Thoreau, and a third for society); a sofa like the one Ogden was confined upon; a spacious desk with desk chair; a comfortable stuffed armchair; two empty bookcases waiting for you to fill them up (you possessed at this point only three volumes, including the Russian-English dictionary: the other two were a fragment [less than half] of a coverless, torn, much-used Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the only thing you’d been able to read in camp, where books were forbidden and this fragment had served several inmates as a toilet-paper supply before falling into your possession, as if Anangka wanted you to learn a little about the language you would be using for the rest of your life, even in its Middle form, and even without any help from a Russian-English dictionary; and a slim hardbound of Günter von Büren’s Protomycetaceae of Switzerland, which the KGB man had permitted you to browse for and purchase cheaply under his suspicious eye at a Zurich bookshop before driving you on to the airport); a chest of drawers waiting for your undies and socks and such, once you acquired some; and a pair of what we call “occasional tables”: good for ashtrays, magazines, clocks, spare change, TV dinners (your room had no TV). In fact, there was a clean crystal ashtray already upon one of them, and you looked wistfully at it and asked your boy guide: “Thou do not objection if I take…papirosa, cigarette, no?”

“It’s your room,” Kenny pointed out and, looking around him, noticed the door was still ajar and closed it. “Can I have one too?”

It’s ironic, my Kat, that you, who had already throughout the long dull course of exchanging civilities with the Elmores amused yourself with elaborate plans for a soon seduction of this lad, now scrupled against “corrupting” him by letting him have a cigarette. You studied him and his eager face for a long moment before shaking your head. His face fell. His face, you realized, was much more mobile, expressive, mercurial, than Islamber’s. But you hadn’t shaken your head in denial of his request, only in the realization of your corrupting him. A cigarette is as nothing compared to what I am going to give you, you thought, but in Svanetian, not English. You held out the pack of Virginia Slims (its colors had attracted you, and you’d smoked two entire packs since leaving New York, thinking of the coarse shag makhorka that you’d only occasionally been able to smoke in camp), and his face brightened all over again, and the two of you lit up and smoked.

There was one essential piece of furniture missing from the room, and you wanted to ask about it but did not know how for the simple reason that the tiny word for it eluded you, that basic appurtenance that is laqvra in Svanetian, logini in Georgian, postyel in Russian, but less than half as many letters in English. You could have tried to look it up, but you would have felt a certain embarrassment in mentioning it, so soon, to Kenny. Staring at the sofa, you supposed that either that was it, or even perhaps the sofa was convertible for sleeping…and seduction.

And then—it was so uncanny the way he seemed to read your thoughts, or perhaps Anangka, bless her, was on the job and sending messages to him—Kenny hit himself on the brow (not with the hand holding the Virginia Slim) and said, “Hey, I almost forgot!” He moved to the wall and grasped two of the tall mirrors by crystal knobs attached to them, and the mirrors swung out like doors, revealing a recess in the wall containing a contraption that you recognized even in the instant that he began to pull it out and down. “Your Murphy bed!” he said when he had it fully in place on the floor. It was almost a double bed, you realized, as you filed the word murphybed into your vocabulary, but the mattress was bare. Again, as if reading your thoughts, he declared, “I guess you’ll have to buy some sheets and stuff, but I could, like, snitch you a pillow and some stuff from downstairs, just for tonight. Soon as I finish this.” He indicated his cigarette. Suddenly he laughed uproariously at some thought—you hoped not the same thought you were teasing—and he said, “Listen, have you ever heard of Murphy’s Law?”

You knew coleslaw but not murphyslaw. You shook your head.

He said, “It goes, like, ‘Anything that can possibly go wrong is sure enough going to go wrong.’” He studied you. “Get it?” You nodded, although you were not certain of the connection between the murphyslaw and the murphybed. Or was he insinuating something, subtly? Perhaps that your attempt to love him would go wrong. He said, “I’ll be right back,” and put out his cigarette and left the room.

Within minutes he was back, bringing a pillow, blankets, sheets, and a pillowcase. “Oh, ivasu khari!” you said. “Thank thee!”

“I nearly got caught,” he declared proudly. “But if you ever need anything, hear, I’m your man.” You smiled, enjoying that expression, and thinking in English, Thou art my man, and you wondered how you could possibly tell him at this point, with your limited language, what you most needed. He began to make the murphybed for you, and you searched for words to protest but could not find any. There are no good words to tell somebody to permit one to make one’s own bed. Finished, he looked around the room, as if searching for other hidden doors behind the mirrors to show you anything else he had neglected to show you. “Well, I guess that’s it,” he declared at last. “I hope you’re comfy and all. I hope old Professor Ogden doesn’t bother you. Sometimes he, like, makes a lot of noises in the night, coughing and stuff.” The boy made facial expressions of both wonderment and annoyance. “But,” he said, “maybe his noises will, like, keep you from hearing the other noises.” He waited to see if this had registered with you before he went on, “I hate to tell you, but this place is haunted.”

“Excuse,” you said, and took up your paperback. “H,” you said, “O, N…”

“A, U, N,” he corrected you, and you found it quickly, your fingers getting better and nimbler in their constant turning of the pages.

Finding it, learning it, you closed your eyes for a moment in ecstasy. “O sakvrel Anangka!” you uttered, which is to say, O marvelous Fate-Thing. The boy’s announcement was, as we like to say, too good to be true. But it was true. I, who am a ghost of sorts myself, and have to be, to get this strange story told, can tell you: Lawren Carnegie, the cousin of Andrew, and the man who built this mansion in 1893, a man who had made his fortune supplying his cousin with coal from mining interests in West Virginia, on the night in 1901 when the Titusville mine disaster took the lives of 187 of his employees, tried to put himself to sleep with cognac but, being a corpulent man, required two whole bottles just to make himself drowsy, drowsy enough to consume a third, which deprived his physical entity of its involuntary functions, such as respiration and heartbeat, and his “spiritual” entity has been vacationing behind these mirrors ever since, sometimes clumsily causing scrapes and screeches and an occasional clank to echo between the glass and the wall.

“You hear what I’m saying?” Kenny wanted to know, his eyes big and his eyebrows high. “There are ghosts around.”

You did not need to look the word up, it was so close to the Germanic Geist, even if far removed from your Svanetian lanchal. In Svanland you had known many a splendid lanchal. “I love ghost,” you told Kenny.

He stared at you in disbelief, his stare slowly shading into one of tentative dislike, as if, smitten with you but reluctant to give you his heart wholly, he had had to search for a flaw, which he had found at last. He did not know what to say. At length he said, “Well, if you’re not jacking me around, you’ll sure be happy here, I guess. If you meet the ghost, just tell him to stay away from me, okay?”

You smiled and said, “I tell him,” and then, suddenly, you were overpoweringly weary and wanting to sleep. How does one bid farewell best in the English? Lishdobe, lishdobe. You tried a bit of sign language: You touched your hands together as if in prayer and laid them beside your cheek as if in slumber. “I am needing rest,” you said.

“Oh, yeah, sure!” he exclaimed, and made to leave. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Night, tomorrow,” you promised, “we talk. We play game. I tell thee stories. Thou like story?”

“I’m kind of old for that,” he said, thinking perhaps you had in mind the bedtime tales he hadn’t heard since his old father stopped telling them seven years before. “But yeah, we could, like, play games. Do you know chess? Aren’t all Russians real good at chess?”

“Am not Russian,” you declared firmly. “Mushwan. Shvan. Can thou say ‘Svan’?” He tried. It was not easy, and sounded more like Swan than Svan, which was all right. You told him, “But I play chess, ya. So we play chess. Thou have…?” Your fingers pantomimed the pieces: pawns, royalty, clergy, horsemen, crenelated mansions.

“No, but I know where I could snitch some,” he declared, and turned again to go. “Well, good night, I guess.” But he hesitated. “Could I—?” he tried. “Could I stay and watch you take off that scarf!”

You gave him your very best smile, and, dear Kat, even your middling-to-fair smiles are a wonder to behold, but you slowly shook your head. How did you tell him, Not yet? Or, It is too soon? Or, Comfort yourself with the thought that soon you’ll see all of me, but not tonight. But you knew a word, ugly, without looking it up. “With no scarf,” you said, “I am looking very ugly.”

“You couldn’t,” he said. “You couldn’t if you tried. You are the prettiest lady I ever saw.”

You blushed, knowing that adjective too. You had learned from him a farewell: “Good night,” you said.

“What color is your hair? I mean, what color was it?”

You touched your eyebrows, which were still all there, perhaps too much so, because you would never pluck them. “This color,” you said.

“Sorta like mine,” he said, and his hair was, in truth, very like yours had been: an ordinary brown, a common brown, the color of mice, or of nuts, or, according to your Chaucer at least, “broun as a berye,” or, best of all, of the forest floor that nurtured the mushrooms that were your singular overriding interest in this life. “Good night,” he said again, and reached out and took your hand and shook it. The handshake was the first time you had been touched since Bolshakov let go of you.

Before putting out your lights and climbing into the murphybed, you spent a good hour in the cozy, easy company of your paperback book, looking up poison, bourbon, dope, billy goat, cheers, borrow, wrong, etc., etc. Some of the words, e.g., sucks and gross, did not have the meaning that apparently had been intended, whereas other words, slammer, snitch, nerd, barfy, jacking around, could not be found at all.

And one simple word gave you the most difficulty. You were still thinking about its possible multiple meanings or usages when you drifted off to sleep: like.

Chapter six

The ghost of Lawren Carnegie would not make contact with you that night. If he made any sounds at all to indicate his stale and bumbling residue in the physical world, you did not hear them. You slept well, not even wakened when your next-door neighbor, Professor Ogden, had one of his fits of coughing. If your sleep was troubled at all, it was not by Carnegie or Ogden or Kenny Elmore but by the sinister Bolshakov in his trench coat, walking constantly toward you. But the only dream you’d remember when you woke did not feature Bolshakov at all; rather, it was your old familiar dream of climbing and descending an endless sequence of stone steps, concrete steps, iron steps, and wooden steps, staircases that led up or down to significant places whose significance always eluded you.

The next day, bright and sunny but cold enough to remind you of winters in frozen Svanetia—even the distant snow-clad hills that surrounded this city suggested the topography of the purlieus of Lisedi—was, you realized with a pang of nostalgia, appropriately December 10: International Human Rights Day, the day that the women in camp fasted in solidarity. So you did not need breakfast. You dressed, and rewrapped the black scarf around your head, and counted your money, and went out to explore the town. You walked the short distance, less than a verst (two-thirds of a mile), past other mansions; past the modern building housing WQED, whose fm station was going to serenade you on many a sentient occasion; past the first of the three churches you came to, Saint Paul’s, which was Irish Catholic and where you were tempted, despite being neither Catholic nor even Eastern Orthodox any longer, to go inside and cross yourself and say to Saint George a prayer of thanks for your deliverance; past an institution that even more than the church was unknown in Russia, a bank, Mellon’s, where it was to be hoped you would one day have an account; past the second of the churches, the Heinz Memorial Chapel, with its enormous stained-glass windows, where on any Saturday afternoon three to five happy couples were joined in matrimony; past this to the third and grandest and tallest of the churches, a Gothic skyscraper really, with over forty stories, much taller than the central tower of Moscow University, which you had visited on several occasions without ever being a student or a teacher there. Its central shaft, if you squinted your eyes, could pass for a Svanetian tower, much magnified.

This building, you discovered upon entering it, was called the “Cathedral of Learning,” and indeed this morning it was already crowded with students on their way to their eight o’clock classes, some of which were meeting in opulent classrooms off the central high-vaulted nave, where there were not pews or altars but tables for study. The students hurrying past you did not stare at you or take any note of your appearance, your black kerchief shrouding a lovely face. Strange for a cathedral, there were two rows of elevators, and the students were rushing into the cars of these, and you followed and rode, because you did not know where to get off, all the way up to the forty-second floor, where you stood in a hallway and stared out a window at the city sprawling in every direction out and out and onward: the distant steel-and-glass skyscrapers of the downtown, crowded together, made a technological phantasmagoria of the towers of Svanetia, those battlemented columns that, poking up all over the landscape (but a mere six or seven stories tall), may have inspired, even subliminally, your initial interest in mushrooms.

This city spread out beneath you was less than half as populous as Tbilisi, where you had taught and worked, and not even one-eighth the size of Leningrad, where you had studied for your advanced degrees, but somehow it seemed bigger and busier than both. For the nonce, it could suitably prompt you into recollections of Tbilisi: There were those two rivers, bigeminal tributaries like the Kura and the Vera of Tbilisi (these were called longer, more poetic, and more romantic names, Monongahela and Allegheny, words from languages that truly fascinated you, the Indians’). And in the distance, you could see the tallest of the surrounding hills (Mount Washington), which, even if its height was no match for Tbilisi’s Mount Mtatsminda, miraculously had an important feature in common with the latter: a funicular railway running up its slope (in fact, it had two of them, but from your vantage you could see only one, the Duquesne Incline), and you decided to make the fun of that funicular your immediate objective, if you could learn how to get to it.

But you would not reach it on this day. Other things would divert you from your destination. Coming down from the top of the Cathedral of Learning, you spent some time exploring its International Rooms: There was no Georgian Room, but there were, among many others, each donated and decorated by people of that nationality living in this city, a Russian Room, a Greek Room, a Yugoslav Room, and a Polish Room, each containing objects familiar to you. But the room that most attracted you was the Scottish Room, an especially elegant result of careful planning in imitation of seventeenth-century Scottish workmanship: each of the students’ tablet armchairs was elaborately carved of imported oak; there was an elegant fireplace (nonfunctional) surmounted by a portrait of Robert Burns, and carved thistles everywhere; each of the four large windows facing the avenue was emblazoned with the symbols and devices of the four great ancient Scottish universities, Glasgow, Saint Andrews, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh; and innumerable little details made me sorry my ghosthood wouldn’t allow me to point them out to you, such as the rear window bearing the arms and emblems of the Clan Montrose, my ancestors.

Leaving the Cathedral of Learning, you sought out the closest bookshop, where you might find a city map that would have transportation routes on it, so you could find out, without the embarrassment of stopping someone on the street to ask, how to get to the funicular railway. The bookshop you entered happened to be the chief bookstore for the university, and you could not resist, while there, browsing. You spent two entire hours in that bookshop, enchanted, and only your sense of the need to protect what little cash you possessed kept you from going on a spree and buying volumes right and left. You even resisted an exceptionally attractive book, a Penguin paperback of a modern English “translation” of the Middle English Chaucer of which you already owned a fragment. But there was one book you did buy—or perhaps, as we shall see, it was Anangka who bought it for you: Roaming through the shelves of student textbooks, taking note that “Winter Term” books had already been arranged in neat heaps by academic department, and searching until you found the section on biological sciences, you discovered that there was only one course, apparently, in mycology, as such, and you snatched up its textbook, J.W. Deacon’s Introduction to Modern Mycology, and you paid at the front desk a price that, like all textbook prices, was exorbitant.

You would carry the heavy book in its paper bag with you for the rest of the long day, but carrying things in bags was a way of life where you had come from.

You did not find a map with transportation routes on it, so, at the first bus stop you reached, you tried a combination of sign language and bad English on a waiting passenger, female, middle-aged, large, very dark complexion: “Where catching bus for ramp train?”

The woman said, “Sugar, where you from?”

“Georgia,” you said.

“Shit,” said the woman. “I’m from Alabama myself. You don’t sound like no Georgia to me. And I don’t study no ‘ramp train’ neither.” She turned away from you.

You waited, watching several buses arrive and depart, reading their destinations on their crowns, finding no words that meant anything to you. Finally, you simply boarded one of them, paid the driver, and asked him, with inclined motions of your hand, “Ramp train? Slope rails?”

Without taking his eyes from the road, he tore off a slip of paper from a pad, a transfer, and said, “You want twenty-seven.”

Seated, you attempted to read the transfer, but it offered no clue as to where you should make the switch. The bus took you down from the heights of the university and into the heart of the so-called “Golden Triangle,” with its dazzle of commercial, financial, and mercantile establishments. When most of the rest of the passengers got off, you went with them, and you found yourself face to face with an enormous department store, Kaufmann’s, which would hold you captive for at least another hour. Noontime came, and Kaufmann’s even had an appealing little café inside it, but you remembered it was Human Rights Day, and you ate no lunch. Kaufmann’s let you go, reluctantly, but only to hand you over for the rest of the afternoon to Saks Fifth Avenue, to Horne’s, to more. You bought nothing, could afford nothing, but you wandered up and down the aisles, touching nothing, just looking, looking, looking.

In one of the stores, you finally touched something: There was an entire department devoted to artificial hairpieces, or rather, actual hair made into headdresses. In every conceivable color. Your fingers almost touched one adorning a simple mannequin head; it was a lustrous auburn, with a reddish cast you’d always wished you’d had. Your fingers could not resist touching one, not attached to a dummy, that was exactly the color your lost hair had been, Chaucer’s berye. You picked it up, fondled it, lifted it as if to place it upon your head. You looked around to see if you were observed. You realized you’d have to remove your scarf for a moment in order to place the wig upon your head. You found a mirror nearby and, first setting down your book bag, attempted to summon the courage to remove your scarf. You summoned it.

A floorwalker accosted you, a nattily attired gentleman of very erect carriage who lifted his eyebrows at the sight of your bare head as if it were crawling with worms and said, “Perhaps madam would rather try another store.” Quickly you re-covered your head with the scarf, blushing furiously, more than you had blushed when Dr. Bolshakov had forced you to remove your scarf. Indeed, this floorwalker (a word you didn’t know, but you knew he was in charge of this store) reminded you in other ways of Bolshakov, although he was not wearing Bolshakov’s trench coat: the same tightness of facial skin and pucker of lips and point of widow’s peak typical of the habitual onanist. He lifted the wig out of your hands, returned it to its place on the counter, and, when you made no move to depart, said to you, “Go.” When that failed to provide the impetus he intended, he took you by the arm and said, “Take a hike, lady,” and propelled you out of the hair department.

For his rudeness, I, who restrain myself whenever possible from intervention in the affairs of mortal, earthbound organisms, decided on the spot to punish him, and I hit him instantly with a maximum dose of alopecia areata, which would leave the son of a bitch scratching his scalp before nightfall and would have him pulling out tufts of hair in the next morning’s shower, and would render him totally bald within a fortnight. Can your Anangka do things like that? I got carried away, I’m sorry, but nobody can treat my Kat in that fashion.

Oblivious to my thunderbolt, you left the store and wandered northward through the Golden Triangle to an area where the triangle was no longer gold but brass, or just brass plated: there were several movie theaters whose marquees each contained the letter X in triplicate. In Georgian, as in Svanetian, the X is pronounced “kh,” almost the way some of us, privileged few, begin the sound of your nickname, Kat. The meaning of the triple X eluded you but piqued your curiosity, and you realized that perhaps the best way to practice your English skills would be to listen to the spoken word in the cinema. These particular films, however, had you sat through one of them, would have disappointed you with their paucity of actual spoken words; at the same time they would have totally captivated you with their bold images. You read the various titles, Hot Prom Girls, Wild West Wild Women, Peek-a-Boo Pah, and The World According to Gwyn, and, on impulse, picked the last. You approached the ticket booth, saw that the price was affordable, and tendered a five to the ticket seller, a middle-aged, morose, pinched woman who reminded you of some of the hardworking peasant women of Svanetia who become old before they’re thirty.

She would not take your money. She studied your face long enough to see it and to perceive that even though you’d attempted to hood it with that black kerchief you had a surpassingly gorgeous combination of sparkling, innocent eyes, a perfect nose, delicate cheeks, silken skin, and the sweetest mouth this side of the celestial cherubim. “Hon,” she said, “you don’t wanna go in there by yourself. Come back with your boyfriend.”

Twice today you were turned away! But this woman was not being rude, like that bastard floorwalker, and I felt kindly toward her, even grateful, because the time wasn’t ripe, yet, for you to be watching pornography all alone.

Chapter seven

“Well, where have you been?” exclaimed Loretta Elmore when you used your key to let yourself into the mansion’s foyer.

“To main city. Shopping,” you told her, and began to count the places on your fingers, “Kaufmann’s, Saks, Home’s…”

“In that coat?” Loretta said, and reached out to finger your threadbare shinel. “It’s a wonder they didn’t throw you out.”

“They did,” you said.

“Huh?” she said. “We didn’t know where you were, and we’re holding supper for you. Kenny fixed it himself. He got off his paper route early so he could come home and fix supper for you.” You were abashed, even more so because you would have to find some way to explain, in this difficult language, that you were fasting (a word you didn’t know in English) because it was International Human Rights Day. “Of course we’re not going to feed you every day,” Loretta went on, “and I expect you’ll find the supermarket pretty soon, but Kenny wanted to fix you a little something just for tonight.”

“I talk to him,” you declared. “I tell him why no thank thee.” You followed Loretta into her apartment, into her kitchen, where Kenny was stirring something in a pot. His face went wild at the sight of you. “Mayest thou be victorious,” you said to him, and then you touched him lightly on the arm (your second touch) and said, “I am much sorry. But today I not eat. Today being Human Rights. Thou understand?”

He looked at first crestfallen, dismayed, but then stoic and even moved. “You’re not hungry?” he asked.

“Much hungry,” you said, and patted your stomach, then you thrust your nose over the pot he was stirring, a sauce for something. “Smell good. Look good,” you complimented the sauce. “But today…everywhere…all over Russia, all over Georgia…many people not eat. People go hungry to say, ‘We know how it feels for prisoners to go hungry.’”

Kenny seemed to understand, and he quit stirring. “I hear you,” he said. “Rats, it’s only gravy for the mashed potatoes.”

“After thou eat,” you told him, “thou come up. We talk, tell story, play game, something.”

“Sure,” he said.

As you were leaving, Loretta said, “Hey, next time you go out, you better let me give you a decent coat to wear. And some jewelry.”

In place of supper, you had a pleasant hour at your desk with your new book and your dictionary, looking up decent along with mashed potatoes, boyfriend, and hike. You attempted to look up simply X but only found, among many other things, that it was a symbol for Christ or Christian, and you wondered if those movies were restricted to religious people accompanied by their sweethearts. But why three X’s?

When the knock came at your door, you assumed it was Kenny, and you called out, “Coming in!” But he did not come in. “Door is open!” you called. Actually the door was closed, but you had not locked it, something you hadn’t yet learned the absolute necessity of doing. A man entered. A stranger. It could have been Bolshakov wearing a disguise of beard and mustache, even though the beard and mustache were grayed, and the man was shorter and fatter than bony Bolshakov and not wearing a trench coat or any coat at all but a cardigan sweater with elbow patches, and he looked old and stooped compared with your malefactor, and he was attempting a smile that would been entirely beyond Bolshakov’s ability or inclination, and he was holding in one hand a slim book and in the other hand a glass containing a liquid of the same amber color as that preferred by Loretta, called…yes: “Bourbon and branch on the rocks,” you observed, aloud, but rising to defend yourself.

“Indeed!” he exclaimed. “And may I offer you one? But forgive me, perhaps I should first offer to introduce myself. Knox Ogden, your neighbor and, I hope, your friend.” He offered his hand unsteadily, and you realized from his movements and his speech that he was well along the way to intoxication. You did not take his hand. In Svanetia, one never touches someone without having known them for at least two hours. “Well,” he said, withdrawing his hand and sitting abruptly on your sofa. “Excuse me, I’m not feeling too fit.” Clearly he wasn’t: pallid, his eyes hollow and dark, his movements feeble or jerky. He took a deep but spasmodic breath and said, “You don’t have to tell me your name, Ekaterina Vladimirovna; I know it. It is a beautiful name, like that of a heroine out of Tolstoy, although your Georgian surname is not at all familiar to me. Dadiankeliani? Is that royal?”

“Dadeshkeliani,” you corrected him. “Very royal.”

“You are a princess?” He was the first person in America to know it, unless you include me, and to say I’m either a “person” or “in America” would be misleading. You nodded your head, feeling grateful; Bolshakov had consistently refused to acknowledge that you had been a princess. “I am honored, Your Highness,” Knoxogden said, and from his cupped position in the sofa attempted a bow. No one had bowed to you for a very long time, and no one had ever called you “Highness,” not in English. You were no longer frightened of him and you were not entirely annoyed with him. “Did you know,” he asked, “that Edgar Allan Poe had a cat he called Caterina? It was a tortoiseshell and would sit on his shoulder while he was writing, and when Poe was away from home he would write to Caterina as if she were family. But I suppose you don’t know the poet Poe?”

“Ya, in Russian I read Poetpoe.” Actually you were more familiar with translations of his short stories than with his poems, but you knew him well and admired his gad, weirdness, although you had never learned of his Caterina.

“I am a poet myself,” declared Knoxogden. He held up the volume he was carrying, a very slim green book, and passed it to you. You read the gold letters on the thin spine: KNOX OGDEN, THE FINAL MEADOW, DOUBLEDAY. You opened it and found handwriting on the flyleaf, a palsied scrawl just barely legible, For Ekaterina Vladimirovna Dadiankeliani, With the warmest regards of—The palsy suddenly became a controlled but unreadable arabesque in which you could make out only one letter: X. You were embarrassed at the gift of the book but only mildly annoyed at his misspelling of your surname. What most disturbed you was the thought that he had inscribed it without ever having met you; how could he have the warmest regards for you? You searched for proper words of thanks and had difficulty. But there was one word of English you knew well, one of the first English words you had ever learned, when you were young: kind.

“Thou art much kind,” you said. “Ivasu khari. Thank thee.” He laughed, or made a coughing sound that resembled a laugh. “I teach English at the university,” he said. “And it looks like I’m just the man you need. We’ll start with your use of the archaic second-person pronouns. We don’t say thou and thee in modern English. You replaces both, and, alas, is used ubiquitously, without regard to the addressee’s intimate familiarity. English doesn’t have any equivalent of the German du, the French tu, or the Georgian shen.”

Your sweet, reserved face became unusually expressive. “Thou—you—are knowing Georgian???”

He made a pinch of his thumb and forefinger. “A tiny bit,” he said, then used his other hand to lift his drink and lustily swallow most of it. “I once was required to translate some stanzas of Rustavelli, and I had to pick up the rudiments.”

You were overwhelmed, as if meeting an old acquaintance in a faraway place. “You know Shota Rustavelli? The Man in the Skin of…Big Cat?”

“Panther,” he said. “Sometimes Tiger, but I think the beast Shota intended was the panther.”

That great epic is to Georgia what The Canterbury Tales is to England, but not even most educated Russians have ever heard of it. Most Georgians know it virtually by heart, and you could recite it backward in your sleep…but not in English. Here was a man, your next-door neighbor, who could probably recite parts of The Man in the Panther’s Skin in English. Abruptly you were aware again of Anangka, that she was taking care of things for you, that she had “arranged” to give you an erudite neighbor who could help you with your new language. What a pity she could not have found a more attractive person, a more sober person, a healthier person.

The door, which Knox Ogden had left partly open behind him, opened fully, and there was Kenny. He was carrying a folded chessboard and a box of chess pieces. The youth glowered like a panther at Professor Ogden, then looked at you and pouted.

“Coming in,” you invited Kenny.

“Most Russian speakers tend to overuse the participle,” said Knox Ogden. “That’s simply ‘Come in,’ not ‘Coming.’”

Kenny said to him, “You know you’re not supposed to be drinking.”

“Now there’s an awful participle,” Knox Ogden observed. He returned Kenny’s fierce glower and said, “I’m not drinking. I’m just bringing it to her.” And he thrust his glass into your hands.

You were not able to hold it as if it belonged to you, and Kenny observed, “She drinks vodka, not bourbon.”

“Oh, my mistake!” said Knox Ogden, and he lifted himself slowly up out of the sofa, took your glass, and said, “I’ll be right back with your Stolichnaya. No ice, right?”

“No ice,” you said.

“No dice,” said Kenny. “You just stay away from her, you leem!”

“‘Leem’?” said the professor. “That’s a new one. Is it anything like ‘geek’?”

“Worse,” said Kenny.

“I’ve been promoted,” the professor said to you. “I used to be a mere geek. Before that, a nerd. Before that, a dork.” He turned to Kenny. The two males were almost the same height, but the professor was much heavier. “Listen, punk, you spoiled my friendship with Edith. Damned if I’ll let you drive me away from this beautiful princess, who needs my help as much as I need hers.” He bowed to you.

“She doesn’t need anything from you,” Kenny said. “Why don’t you go play with yourself!”

“Why don’t I smack you one upside your insolent face?” said the professor, drawing back his hand.

“Try it,” Kenny challenged him. “I’m not afraid of you. Don’t fuck with me.”

“Watch your language,” the professor said to him, then he said to you, “You don’t want to expose yourself to this punk’s disgusting English. He’ll infect you with his contagious slang and vulgarities.”

Kenny said to you, “Yeah, so you want me to take a hike?”

You had just recently learned the word, and you said, “No, I am not wanting…I do not want for you to hike.” You were a little flattered, dear Kat, to have two men (three, if you could’ve counted invisible me) fighting over you. But you were distressed that they did not get along with each other. You were abashed to be thrust into the position of having to choose between them. If you’d had to choose, of course there would have been no choice: simply as a desirable male, Kenny had it all over the professor. But wouldn’t you antagonize Anangka if you chose him? Didn’t Anangka want you to choose the professor, so that you could learn good English as soon as possible? And perhaps Anangka wanted the professor to divert you from your lust for Kenny. As gently and politely as you could, you said to the professor, “Kenneth and me, we have plan to play chess.” As if on cue, Kenny unfolded the chessboard on your dining table and began arranging the pieces.

“‘Kenneth and I,’” Knox Ogden corrected you. “Okay, I know when I’m not wanted.” He made to leave but turned at the door. “But you haven’t seen the last of me, either of you!” He went out.

Kenny continued setting up the chessboard. “What a total jerk,” he said. “‘Eye-ther!’ It’s pronounced ‘ee-ther’—don’t you ever let him tell you different. ‘Eye-ther’ is the way that stuck-up goody-goodies say it. That’s stuffy and chicken shit.”

Kenny was going too fast for you. “Wait,” you requested. “One word at time. What means ‘jerk’?”

Kenny giggled, and the sound of his giggle brought him down from the tough grown-up that he’d been trying to be and made him into your adorable twelve-year-old all over again. “That’s just short for ‘jerk-off,’ and I can’t tell you what that means. But a jerk is sort of, like, like a dork, only it’s kind of, like, ‘jerk’ is what you do with your dork, your prick, like, you know? I mean, I don’t mean you, because ladies don’t have pricks.” Kenny was blushing.

You and Kenny sat at the dining table with the chessboard between you, and first you corrected his misplacement of the black king and queen, transposing them. You wished you had something to offer him in the way of refreshment. Your little refrigerator was still empty. You wished you had something to drink yourself, for although you fasted on Human Rights Day you were not required to thirst. As if in response to your thought, the door opened and Professor Ogden returned, briefly, carrying a tumbler with clear liquid in it. “Your Stolichnaya, Your Highness,” he said, and bowed and made his exit backwards without turning his back to you. You did not even have time to remember how to say thank-you.

“Shit,” said Kenny. “I wish you wouldn’t drink that.”

“But I have thirst,” you protested.

“I put a six-pack of Cokes in your fridge,” he said. “I guess you didn’t notice.” He jumped up and fetched one, popping open its top.

“Thank thee—thank you much,” you said. “But you drink it. Please, I drink this.” A thought occurred to you. Although you were touched and grateful for his gesture (you would discover later, when you looked in your fridge, that he had also put there a dozen eggs, a carton of milk, and a package of margarine, none of these items “snitched” from downstairs but all purchased at the store with his own money from his newspaper route), you wondered how he had gained admission to your apartment while you were out. For even if you were careless about leaving your door unlocked while you were in the apartment, you still retained your habit, from Tbilisi and from Leningrad, of locking your room when you went out. Hesitantly, searching for the words, you asked him, “How did you come in room while I am out? You have key?”

“Oh, sure,” Kenny said, and reached into his dzhinsy pocket and fished out a whole ring of many keys and showed them to you. “I guess nobody told you. I’m the super.”

“‘Super’?”

“Superintendent,” he elaborated. “Of this building. I’m, like, in charge of the whole place.” When you looked surprised, he added, “With all of these lushes on every floor, somebody’s got to stay sober enough to, like, watch out for everything and stuff. You know?”

Chapter eight

Kenny could not play chess. Oh, he knew the rules, and the rudiments, and even some of the refinements, but he had no grasp whatsoever of such instruments as the gambit, the knight fork, or the defrocked bishop, and while he was all too eager to demonstrate he knew how to castle, he castled kingside when he should have castled queenside, and he castled either side when he did not need to castle at all. The first game ended in eleven quick moves, interrupted when you had to hush him, his talkativeness, his trying to explain that although he had access to your apartment and to everyone else’s, he would never “snoop” (a new word you loved) or “mess around with your stuff.” The second game lasted a bit longer because you relaxed your defense and let him explore. By the fifth game, because you’d finished your drink (on an empty stomach), you were almost tempted to let him mate you, just to keep up his interest and confidence; you were walking him through the steps of the Winawer Variation of the French Defense, trying to explain why he should be patient, not take pawns just because they were there to be taken, hold back and wait for the chance to let his queen pounce, hold back, now pounce, now retreat, stay back, be patient, control himself, wait, watch for the right moment, respond to your movements, not cause them; and for a time he did exercise remarkable endurance, but then impetuously he plunged forward and lost his rook and thus his strategic advantage, and the game.

You doubted he could ever mate you, but you were determined to teach him how, and thus disappointed when he sat back and said, “Shit, I can’t put it together. I guess I’m not, like, old enough for you yet. Let’s do something else.” You told him of the chess players who had already been masters at the age of twelve: Capablanca, Alekhine, Reshevsky, and of course those great precocious American kids Paul Morphy and Bobby Fischer; and you assured him that all he needed was practice, and more practice. You almost told him about Islamber and how Islamber had become very good in chess at the age of only eleven. But you were not ready yet to tell him about Islamber. You asked Kenny what he would like to do, what game, or maybe he would like to hear you tell a story? Maybe you would like to take off dzhinsy? you wanted to ask.

“Wanna see my telescope?” he asked. You caught your breath, uncertain about the word: Maybe it was another slang word, like prick, for the private part. When you smiled but looked puzzled, he tried a pantomime that didn’t help: one fist held to his eye, the other fist stretching slowly out from it, swelling, expanding outward. You nodded your head eagerly. He told you you’d need to put on your coat, and, mystified, you did. He ran downstairs to get his own jacket, then took you up to the third floor of the mansion and to a door to another stairway, that led upward to a shed on the roof.

Climbing to the shed reminded you so much of climbing to the top of the Dadeshkelianis’ tower in Lisedi, where you had first made love to Islamber. The shed was very cold, thus your coats. It was also very private, but with windows on three sides. Kenny showed you his telescope. It was a big thing, hard, shiny, pointing toward the stars. It was mounted upon a tripod, and you had to stand on a box to put your eye to its hole and look into it. You did not know astronomy, and he took an almost prideful revenge, considering your superiority in chess, in pointing out to you, eastward, away from the interfering lights of the city’s downtown, the constellations of “Little Dog” and “Big Dog,” naming the stars of each and telling you how many light-years it had taken for their light to reach the earth. Awesome. You reflected upon, but could not tell him yet, this contrast between your interests: That his was upon the faraway, the unreachable, the unknown, while yours was upon the close-up, smellable, touchable, woods-musky growths of this earth.

You stayed in the shed on the roof for quite a while, until even you with your immunity to cold grew chilled, and then you returned to your room. Did you like the stars? he was eager to know. They were fine, you said.

He looked doubtful and asked, “What do you like to study?”

“Mushrooms,” you said.

“Really?” he said. “To collect, or just to eat?”

“Not to collect nor to eat,” you said, but to watch, to examine, to learn the growth of, to wonder at how and why and upon what they lived, to measure the way they took the air, to ponder the brevity and urgency of their lives, to look closely at the way they created their spores and spread them to perpetuate themselves.

He wanted to know, “Can you tell the difference between the ones that are poisonous and the ones that aren’t?”

You laughed, and you laughed, and then you said, “Oh, I am much sorry for the laughing but, you see, I can even tell the chemistry of each poison they use, and why, and how much, and toward what other creatures the poison is intended as a defense.”

“Sunday,” said Kenny, “let’s you and me go to the museum.” Before he left you that night, he gave you four things: a quick, spontaneous (but carefully prefantasized) peck on the cheek and three magazines that he had obtained at the same store where he got the stuff he left in your refrigerator. They surprised you: Glamour, Ladies Home Journal, and Playgirl. The first two would keep you for hours, for days, showing you a foretaste of all the things you should be and do, what you should wear and put upon your face, what you should cook and how, what you should smell like, what you should say; but the third would keep you for weeks, because it sanctioned the proposition that all women are sexual creatures bent upon the celebration of their sensuality. You thought aloud in English, “Is okay for woman in America to be like this,” and you wondered if his gift of it was some message from Kenny that he found you desirable or had at least thought about it. You stayed up very late that night with your magazines and your dictionary, and that was the beginning of your concentrated study of our complicated tongue.

And early on Sunday afternoon (Loretta lent you a decent coat, a very nice one, better than any you’d ever had, and some costume jewelry, a necklace, earrings, a bracelet), you and Kenny walked the not-considerable distance to the museum of natural history that was part of the institute named after the cousin of the man who’d built the mansion and still haunted it. You spent an hour pointing out and trying to explain items in the small but impressive mycology section of the museum, and then Kenny returned the favor in the astronomy section, and then almost by accident you turned a corner and stumbled upon the section devoted to the American Indian, which thrilled you, and you had to spend more time there than in either (ee-ther) mycology or astronomy. Had Kenny ever seen Indians? you wanted to know. Only on TV, he said. After you’d read, or tried to read, every label in the Indian section, you suggested to Kenny that, because it was just next door, you might drop by the institute’s museum of art, where you found a collection of modern paintings almost as good as in Leningrad’s Hermitage; you had spent many weekends at the Hermitage and thus could tell Kenny without reading the labels which were the van Goghs and which the Cézannes, which the Picassos and which the Matisses, but Kenny was very quickly bored with art, and, since darkness was still an hour or so away, you asked him if he knew how to get to the ramp trains, slope rails, whatever, and he said, “Oh, you mean the inclines?” and he got the two of you onto a bus, paying the fare himself, that took you to the Duquesne Incline, where you had some fun at last on the funicular, from the top of which Kenny could point out all the landmarks of the city: Three Rivers Stadium, Point State Park, and each of the tallest skyscrapers by name. Twilight came while you were up there, and all the lights of the town came on like Kenny’s stars.

Weekdays, when Kenny was in school (at Schenley Junior High, where he was in the seventh grade) and when Professor Ogden, who had apparently been required to cancel the remainder of his classes for the term, came knocking at your door, you had a series of intensive private lessons in English grammar. Many years before, when he was a mere assistant professor and overworked, Knox Ogden had “moonlighted” by teaching evening classes in Fundamentals of English for Foreign Students, of which there were thousands in this city, and he could regale you with stories of malapropisms, blunders, and solecisms committed in the speech and writing of his students that made your own mistakes seem trivial and not ludicrous. Ogden always began each session by bringing you a generous tumbler of Stolichnaya (although by this time you’d acquired your own bottle of less expensive Popov, as well as some County Fair bourbon to offer him in return) and then asking you, “Have you had a chance to sneak a glance at my poems?” In truth, you’d sneaked more than a glance at them, you’d applied your dictionary substantially to them, from the opening piece, “The Yearning,” to the concluding and terminal, “Again, the Dance,” but Knox Ogden’s late (and last) poems, as his critics have since pointed out, verged on the mystical, the metaphysical, the entranced; as if, wrote the critic Lawrence Brace, “he attained not an ultimate serenity but a dark and hesitant glimpse of some grandiose and terrible truth,” and you were never able to tell him what you honestly thought, or were unable to feel, about his poems.

One day (or not any day at all) when Loretta was picking you up to give you a ride to the supermarket (an experience that, in contrast to your market shopping in Georgia or Russia, was so fabulous that I’ve got time to mention only the most fantastic difference: that you had to wait in line for only five minutes), she remarked, “He sure has got a powerful crush on you!” and you replied, “Yes, he certainly has. But he writes such strange poetry.”

She looked at you strangely and then said, “Oh, I didn’t mean him! I meant Kenny.”

Chapter nine

Your crash course in English lasted only six days, albeit every day for two hours or more, and on the seventh day two things interrupted it: Professor Ogden was simply too weak to get out of his murphybed and meet you, and you had appointments to be interviewed at the university. The night before, Loretta reminded you that Dr. Elmore had reminded her to remind you, since you obviously found the whole thought terrifying and were seeking to forget it. Loretta urged you to help yourself to her wardrobe, and she gave her advice on picking out a smart dress and shoes for the interview, and which jewelry was most tasteful, and she even tried to persuade you to wear one of her blond wigs—but you declined, accepting instead the loan of a bright Paisley silk scarf to replace the black cotton one. “Well,” she observed encouragingly, at the end of your dressing session, “You sure have caught on fast! Your talk and all, I mean.”

But perhaps not fast enough to land you a job that required good English. Your first interview was early in the morning in the Cathedral of Learning with Dr. Hector Schvann of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature. Professor Schvann, whose Ph.D. was from prestigious Berkeley, first exchanged polite chitchat with you in Russian. How did you like America so far? Which part of town were you living in? Did you miss Leningrad? In which politicals’ camp were you interned? Really? A terrible reputation, that place. And obviously they have depilated you, Yekaterina Vladimirovna. But an attractive scarf. Professor Schvann spoke excellent Russian, with an American accent, and while it was good for you to listen comfortably to someone whose every word you understood, his language reminded you of people you wanted to forget.

He opened a folder and switched abruptly from Russian to English, and pointed out that according to your curriculum vitae your advanced degrees were apparently in botany, not in languages, and did you feel qualified to be teaching elementary Russian to young Americans? Certainly, you said, with synthetic bluster. Well, perhaps, Yekaterina Vladimirovna, he said; and as a matter of fact there was an opening for a teacher of two sections of Intro, but it also required teaching a literature course, in English: The Comic Spirit in Russian Literature. Think you could handle that? No problem, you said. Which writers and works would you include? he wanted to know. Well, you said, I would start with Gogol, of course, his Dead Souls. And I’d probably want to include Dostoyevski’s Idiot, because he saw Prince Myshkin as somewhat like Don Quixote, did he not? Yes, but, Yekaterina Vladimirovna, he said, but what else? Let me think, you said: And yes, something by Turgenev, because it was Turgenev who said, “Whom you laugh at you forgive and are ready to love.” You had always liked that line. Whom you laugh at you forgive and are ready to love. The professor nodded and wrote something down; perhaps he was writing this quotation. Finally he asked you, But wouldn’t you include something by Nabokov? Alas, sweet Kat, you didn’t yet know the man’s work (it would be a gift on a saint’s day, a favorite American saint, Valentine, when someone would give you your first novel by V.N.), but you knew enough to say:

“No. Is not his funny stuff written in English, not Russian?”

Professor Schvann laughed and agreed, but he said that, quite frankly, he didn’t think they could use you. There were other applicants for the position, some with Ph.D.’s in Russian from prestigious American schools like Berkeley. Thank you for your interest, however, Yekaterina Vladimirovna, and thank you for dropping by to chat. Give my regards to Professor Elmore.

I was tempted for a moment to punish the guy, to afflict him with something, ideally some disease with a Russian name, but he was only doing his job, after all, and he wasn’t unkind to you. I let him alone.

For your second interview, you were required to enter a building elsewhere on the campus, away from the Cathedral of Learning, a drab and forbidding building that unfortunately reminded you very precisely of the Serbsky Institute in Moscow, that infamous psychiatric hospital where you first fell into the snares and pillories of Dr. Bolshakov and were saved from utter madness by the boy Dzhordzha. Your knees failed you, and you were able to force yourself up the steps and into the building only by concentrating upon your awareness that there were not two swinish KGB men holding you by either arm. You were unescorted. You were free. If this Dr. Dalrymple turned out to be wearing a trench coat, you could simply turn around and run, and nobody would stop you.

But Leonard Dalrymple was (and is) a very nice guy. He offered you coffee and a doughnut, and he told you to smoke if you wanted to (you did), and he put you completely at ease. “Ken’s told me where you came from,” he said, “and why you have to wear that scarf. No doubt, you’ll have your own hair grown back in before we know it, right? No problem.” He opened his folder and made some appreciative murmurs, like a gourmet settling down to a feast. “Hey, did you know I saw your paper on the mutant spores of the phallales last year in the summer issue of Mycotaxon? I read the English translation, of course. Also your paper on the Geastrum fornicatum in the recent Mycologia. Very impressive stuff.”

You assumed he was being polite, that he had seen the articles mentioned in your curriculum vitae, that he had not actually read them. But it was nice of him, all the same. You smiled modestly and said, simply, “Thank you.”

“You’ve been stateside how long now?” he asked.

Alas, Knox Ogden had not taught you stateside, but he had taught you how to show ignorance gracefully. “I am sorry,” you said, laughing, “but I haven’t been here long enough to learn the word stateside.”

Len Dalrymple laughed. “Well, that’s not very long at all!” he said.

“I expect you’ll have to learn a lot of words. But you already know the scientific terminology pretty well, don’t you? And that’s what counts.” Then he told you that Bill Turner, their mycologist, had received a sudden call to London for a six-week symposium and thus had been required to take an unexpected “off-campus duty assignment” for the winter term. He winked at you and said, “Lucky for you.” Filling in for Turner would require teaching two sections of Intro Bot, plus the Intro Mike. Think you could handle it? Certainly, you said, without having to manufacture any bluster.

“What text d’you think you’d want to use for the Intro Mike?” he wanted to know.

It was a test question, not conversational, a key part of your interview, but you were ready for it, thanks to Anangka and that previous morning in the campus bookstore. Correctly you guessed that “Intro Mike” was campus slang, and you said, “I’d like to use, if I may, Deacon’s Introduction to Modern Mycology.”

“Lucky for you!” he said, beaming. “That’s what Turner has already ordered for next term, so you won’t have any problems with the bookstore.”

“Excellent,” you said, smiling with approval.

“Of course, you understand, the appointment’s only for the one term, January through April, while Turner’s away?”

“Good enough.” You smiled again.

He stood up and offered you his hand, and even though you hadn’t known him for two hours yet, you permitted yourself to take it. “Well, glad to have you aboard, Katherine. First classes are January eighth. Marilyn will show you—you met Marilyn, our secretary, out there—she’ll show you where your office is and give you the university faculty packet and stuff. Merry Christmas.”

Knox Ogden hadn’t taught you that expression, but it sounded familiar enough for you to repeat it, “Merry Christmas to you, Dr. Dalrymple.”

“Please,” he said, “just call me Len.” And there, on the spot, I made three of his wishes start coming true: I arranged for his promotion from associate professor to full professor to be cleared through the dean’s office that very afternoon, I made airplane reservations for his daughter to fly home from the West Coast for the holidays, and I nudged the editors of Cytologia into accepting for publication his article “Mitotic Chromosome Pairing in Allopolypoids of the Atylosia.” The next time you saw him, Len Dalrymple would be a most happy fellow.

Chapter ten

In frozen Svanetia, December 25 is just another winter’s day. Not that Svanetians permitted their Russian rulers to make them into atheists, but traditionally they follow the Julian calendar of the orthodox Church, whereby Christmas, Shob, is celebrated on January 6. Even in my part of America, the middle mountains, the old folks used to observe the same distinction between “New Christmas” and “Old Christmas.” (See my poem “Presents. Presence.”: The day the “younguns” think to gift / Is on December twenty-fifth. / The oldsters feel that they should mix / The day of January six.) Anyhow, when you responded to the knock on your door that Tuesday morning and found Kenny standing there with a big smile and bright eyes and a package done up in shiny red wrap and bow, you thought at first that he had simply “snitched” for you one more item, as he was always doing, except that never before had he bothered to gift wrap any of his snitchings.

“Come in,” you invited. “What is this?”

“Merry Christmas!” he said. Taking the package, you thought that his greeting was simply, like Len Dalrymple’s, in advance of the occasion, but you realized that, unless America had drastically different customs, one would present the gift on the day. “Go ahead, open it,” he urged you. And you sat down to open it, almost dreading to find that perhaps thoughtful Kenny had bought you a wig of real brown hair. But the box was too heavy to contain only hair. Slowly, taking care not to rip the paper, you undid the ribbon and Scotch tape and opened the package. It was a small radio. Plastic and black-brown, two knobs and one switch, capable of being switched from AM to FM. “Now you can, like, grab some sounds,” he said, and took it and plugged it in, and fiddled with the dial until he found a station playing some heavy rock. “Or do you want some longhair?” he said, and began twisting the tuner again. On the job, I arranged for WQED to come in, playing Tchaikovsky, my little Christmas gift for you. “How’s that?” Kenny asked.

“Oh, wonderful!” you said. “Thanks so much, but I do not have Christmas present for you yet.”

“You didn’t have to get me anything,” he said. “I know you don’t have any money.”

“But I must give you something, when Christmas comes.”

“Huh? Today’s Christmas,” he declared.

“It is?”

“Sure. We’ve already unwrapped all our stuff downstairs, and Mom and Dad are already bombed on eggnog and, like, out of it, and I’m trying to fix a turkey in the oven. You know anything about cooking turkeys?”

You were in confusion, not from his language. You had an idea what bombed meant, and you could guess what eggnog was, and you’d seen turkey recipes in that Ladies Home Journal, so you resisted your impulse to fetch your paperback dictionary, which was falling apart by now anyway. Nor were you confused by his question “Do you want some longhair?” realizing it likely had nothing to do with a wig. You were perplexed to find that Christmas had somehow arrived twelve days before you’d expected it, and you were distressed that you were unprepared to return the favor of Kenny’s gift. Indeed, you had spent some time thinking about possible presents for him—an astronomy book, perhaps, or a nice shirt, or even a subscription to his favorite magazine, Playboy—but you had concluded that the very finest present you could give him, knowing him as you did, knowing what he might most appreciate, would be to divest him of his bothersome virginity. Now, closing your eyes to the magnificent sound of WQED’s (or my) Tchaikovsky, you thought about that: You didn’t have time to plan it, to get up your courage, to learn the right words to offer it, to make it happen. It was too soon, Christmas. Give you twelve more days and you could do it, but not now.

When you said nothing, he waited for a time, and then he tried again, “Can you do it?”

Lost in thought, you snapped back to this world, and asked, “Do which?”

“Help me cook the turkey.”

“Oh, sure, I could try,” you offered, and you rose to your feet and cast a wistful look at your unmade murphybed.

“First I’ve got to see if your neighbors want to help eat it. Mom says we should invite Dr. Koeppe and the Jerk. You know if they’re in?”

You shook your head. You hadn’t heard any movements in the adjacent apartments. During the more than two weeks you’d been here, you’d only seen Edith Koeppe on a couple of occasions, and you’d scarcely exchanged words with her: an overweight woman, early forties, perhaps, stringy short blonde hair; she seemed to spend very little time in her apartment, coming home late, leaving early. For a sociologist, she was very unsociable. As for Knox Ogden…You hadn’t seen him since the last time he’d given you a lesson in English, when he had been in such poor condition he hadn’t been able to rise from his sofa and had begged you to make a drink for him, which you had refused to do. Now you realized that you had intended to give him something for Christmas, too, and had been caught unprepared. You hoped he wouldn’t have a gift for you.

“I’ll knock and see,” Kenny said, and left your apartment. You made up the murphybed and lifted it, folding it up into its compartment in the wall, listening to the sounds of knocking, first on one side of you, then the other. After a while Kenny returned, his demonstrative face furrowed into a frown. “Neither one of ’em’s home.” He made a variety of puzzled expressions. “Maybe they, like, went off somewhere together for Christmas.” He screwed up his brow. “But they’re not even on speaking terms with each other anymore.” He spent some moments in thought. “Probably she went to visit her sister,” he determined, “and I guess he’s maybe just gone and finally croaked at last.”

“‘Croaked’?” You didn’t know that one.

“You know, kicked the bucket, bought the farm.”

You didn’t know those, either, but you had an uncomfortable approximation of a guess. “Talk straight, Kenny,” you requested.

“Gone west,” he tried, nervously, although he’d started out jokingly—unable, like all the inventors of all the hundred and one euphemisms and euphuisms for the condition, to come right out and say a word so final, so irrevocable, like the last word in the last sentence on the last page of a novel.

But his use of one of my favorite ways of putting it (because in truth that’s precisely what I’ve, what we’ve all, done, turned our puny corporeal locomotions in the direction of the setting sun in order to accept the eternal weightless omnidirection that is our lot) roused me out of my half-listening state and made me take a quick, determined jaunt into the next room, where, sure enough, I found Knox Ogden’s extract trying to learn how to exist without gravity.

“For crying out loud,” Ogden declared in exasperation, striving to give some dignity and uprightness to his topsy-turvy levitation, “where are the handholds?”

“There are no handholds, Og,” I told him. “Try not to hunt for them and you won’t miss them.”

He stared at me, and ceased his undulations. “Who are you?” he demanded. “Not the devil, I hope.”

“No, Og, just a poor defunct transient like yourself,” I said. “Dan Montross was my earthly name.”

“Not Daniel Lyam Montross the poet?” he said.

I was moved, and more than touched, that he’d heard of me, possibly even knew my work. “At your service, forever,” I said.

“But you’re…you’re…”

“Say it, Og!” I commanded, for it was very important that he acquire that ability, that honesty. “You must be able to say it.”

“Gone to a better world?” Knox Ogden tried. “Out of your misery?”

“Come on, man!”

“Passed on? Called home?”

“Og.”

“Dead?” he tried.

“Very good!’ I complimented him. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”

“But…” he said, “but…but…” He looked around at the dull walls, the many mirrors (in which he could no longer see himself), the bookcases, the things he’d never have to heft again. He saw, with detachment and what did not amount to pity so much as revulsion, the stiffening body sprawled out on the sofa, in one hand the sheet of yellow lined paper on which he had attempted unsuccessfully to scrawl his last poem, in heroic Drydenish couplets, “Ekaterina,” but indecipherable to you and to any except the critic Lawrence Brace, who would not attempt its decoding for another few years; and in the other hand the almost empty glass of Jack Daniel’s, tilted at a steep angle, its ice slowly melting.

“Ick,” said Og. “An odious corpse, aren’t I?”

“It will take you a while,” I pointed out, “to become accustomed to the new sense of aesthetics that we have on this side, where everything’s so beautiful that earthbound forms seem to be incomplete, if not inelegant.”

“Funny,” he observed, rubbing his plasmic hands along his gossamer arms, “I don’t feel dead. How do I know I’m not just blind drunk and you’re some joker pulling a trick on me?”

“There’s someone who wants to meet you,” I told him. “Someone who—if you’ll forgive the expression—is just dying to meet you.” I gestured dramatically with my hand, in presentation, and out of the ether the extract appeared in all its glory.

Og gasped. “Lawren!”

“Hello, old buddy,” said Lawren Carnegie, and I left the two chums to chew the fat, settle old scores, explain a few things to each other, and my colleague to undertake the business I didn’t want to handle: determining if Og desired to remain here and compete with him for the possession of this mansion or to accompany his remains to their burial in his home state, Utah, out west.

I returned to you and Kenny, who was fishing his keys out of his pocket and suggesting, “Maybe I oughta, like, open up and see?” And then, his voice quavering, he requested of you, “Would you go with me?”

“Sure,” you said, and went with him, hoping to find that, as he sometimes did when he’d been drinking too much, Knox Ogden was simply sleeping late. Kenny unlocked the door, and the two of you stepped inside and at once saw the odious body sprawled out on the sofa. His murphybed had not been pulled down from the wall. You were more interested in studying Kenny than in studying the corpse. You did not know whether the boy had ever had any encounters with death or how he would take it, and you were apprehensive; Kenny’s eyes were very large, and his mouth was open, and he could scarcely speak—just whisper to suggest that one of you, ideally you, not him, should shake the man. You went through the motions of shaking the man by his shoulder, just to buy time, just to give Kenny a few more moments to get used to the inevitable, because you already knew, from the moment you’d seen him, that Knox Ogden was dead. Your experience was great: In Svanetia, in Tbilisi, in Leningrad, and especially in Camp 39 at Ishimbay, you had seen dead people. You knew that the human body, once it is no longer inhabited by the kvin, is as harmless, as expired, as meaningless, as a fallen tree. Except that a fallen tree can be cut into firewood, or it can be left to nourish many generations of mushrooms, but a human body can do nothing, can do nothing, can do nothing at all, ever, anymore.

“Kenny,” you said as gently as you could, “Professor Ogden is not any longer living.”

“Oh, shit, no!” Kenny insisted. “How can you be sure? Did you feel his pulse?”

You lifted Ogden’s wrist, the one holding the sheet of yellow lined paper, as if to offer it to Kenny to feel. “You want feel?” you asked. He declined, and when you released the wrist it dropped obviously like a deadweight, but not before you’d grasped the sheet of paper and, attempting to read it, made out what appeared to be, at the head of a column of verses, your name. You were very sad, then, thinking that the last thing he’d done was to try to write something to you, or for you. And you’d never even been able to tell him what you thought of his poems. And now it was too late. Soundlessly, because you were not yet ready to make the sounds, you wept; your cheeks were bathed, and you had to turn your head so that Kenny could not see.

“Jesus,” Kenny said. “Oh, holy shit. I didn’t hate the dude. I mean, sure, I said some bad stuff about him, sometimes, and yeah, I, like, probably made him feel bad, I guess, but I didn’t hate him. He wasn’t so bad. Why did he have to go and die?”

You wiped away your tears so that you could turn and face Kenny. “Is not your fault,” you said. You saw that his own eyes were very wet, his mobile face very stricken, and he was clenching and unclenching his hands as if he wanted to make a fist and hit something.

But his lip began trembling, and then his whole jaw was trembling, and he stared at you beseechingly, as if there were something you could do to help. He said one thing more; it was like a question, not a statement: “He was probably a real good guy?” And then he sprang, lurched, fell into your arms. He wrapped his arms tightly around you and buried his face against your breasts. You tightened your arms around him. It was the first time you had been hugged since Dzhordzha had let go of you. It was the first time you had hugged someone with passion since you had last held Dzhordzha.

The two of you remained clenched there, thus, for a very long while, longer even than you actually needed just to comfort each other, while we three Magi, having seen the star in the east, turned our attention to the spectacle of the chemistry in your hormones, each of you, the rainbow-colored spectra, the atomic fusings and burblings, the microscopic kaleidoscopic splash and splurge.

“Hey,” remarked Og. “Is that boy getting an erection?”

“’Pears so,” observed Lawren.

“But isn’t that rather unseemly,” Og asked, “at a time like this?”

“Didn’t you ever get a bone on,” Lawren retorted, “when you got too close to a woman?”

“Can’t she feel it, up against her?” Og wondered.

“Of course she can,” I assured him.

Chapter eleven

Of course you could, dear Kat, and it took your breath away, and took the fiber out of your knees, and it dampened you in your groin and grabbed you by your heart and twisted and wouldn’t let go, and you knew that if Knox had left the murphybed down you would have tumbled into it despite the presence of his lifeless form, which couldn’t decorously be dragged off the sofa so that you could use it, and you began to disapprove of yourself angrily for such thoughts, you began trying very earnestly to ignore that darling bulge in the dzhinsy down below and concentrate instead on the practical matter before you: Somebody had to be notified.

The rest of that day that had been a surprise Christmas to you, was not Christmasy at all. The fact of a death on the premises sobered up Dr. and Mrs. Elmore sufficiently to get them to handle things: A coroner’s assistant had to come and supervise the removal of the corpse, and an autopsy had to be performed and a cause of death determined (advanced cirrhosis of the liver), and distant relatives had to be notified (distant only in the sense of the physical distance to Utah, from where a younger brother sent directions for transporting the body home). Kenny’s turkey was forgotten, and, as near as you could remember, the dinner was a quartet of Swanson’s frozen deep-dish turkey pies.

Knox Ogden’s kvin, to my modest disappointment, decided to accompany his remains to Utah for the burial, to enjoy the final tributes of kin and Mormon clergy, and to remain forever among the bees in that state of hives, hanging out at old boyhood haunts below the Wasatch Range and along the river and in the town named after his ancestor the trapper Peter Skene Ogden. Lawren and I were sorry to see him go, but, as we agreed, two’s company, three’s a mob scene, and we took leave of him by accompanying him on his last expedition in that great city—an expedition made for the purpose of testing his new powers, to put the whammy on his department chairman, or rather chairwoman, who had caused him some grief over real and imagined derelictions of duty. He shamelessly haunted the poor old girl for forty-eight hours, until the train with his casket pulled out, leaving her with a permanent case of halitosis that could be helped only by constant gargling of Listerine. We refused his request to spend his last night here as your incubus. You, observing the old Svanetian custom of providing sustenance for the departed in the afterlife, left out a tumbler of County Fair bourbon, and Og raged at his inability to consume physical spirits. After three nights, only a small amount was gone, possibly through evaporation, and you drank the rest yourself, discovering that bourbon is not at all bad or undrinkable.

For the rest of the holidays, until the winter term of classes began, you and Kenny were inseparable…Not literally, for you did not dare, either of you, to hug that tightly again. You didn’t have a good excuse. For his part, he kept trying to think of an appropriate pretext for hugging you, but it would have been premeditated, not spontaneous, and it wouldn’t have worked. He spent a lot of time in your room, or you in his—although your room was more private, with Knox gone and Edith Koeppe still on holiday, and his room, as Loretta kept saying, was “a disaster area” (and she was embarrassed for you to see it): the piles of clothes everywhere; his “toys,” some of them outgrown; his collections, some of them, too, outgrown; and, beneath his murphybed, a considerable pile of back issues of Playboy. Once, he let you borrow a few issues of his favorite reading matter, and you discovered that the magazine was much more daring than the one issue of Playgirl he’d given you, as if boys had different, or more profound, interests than girls. But both, true to their names, were play; and lishdral (or ludus in the Latin), play in all its forms—prelude, interlude, allusion, collusion, illusion, delusion, and ludicrous—was your heart’s delight.

Most of the playing that you and Kenny did, apart from an occasional silent hand-language game of rock, scissors, paper, was confined to chess, in which he was steadily learning how to hold back, wait, think, and attempt to reach a mating.

But during that interlude of the holidays, most of what you and Kenny did was talk. He had many questions. What happens when a person dies? Is it just a matter of the heart no longer beating and the lungs quitting, or does some other stuff start beginning at the same time the old stuff is ending? Does the dead person know when the other stuff starts happening, does he understand what’s going to come? If people didn’t die, there would be just too many people on the earth, wouldn’t there? Eating everything up? Everybody has to die, sooner or later, don’t they? Is there any such thing as somebody never dying? Have you ever been afraid of dying? What have you wondered might happen to you when you die? Would you rather die in your sleep or when you’re wide awake? If you had to choose, would you rather freeze to death or burn to death? What about dying in a car wreck? Or if the Bomb fell? Would you want to be shot? Or choked, or stabbed, or what? Do you think maybe when a person dies, everything just suddenly becomes blank or black, or just stops, like a movie or a book, and that’s all, there’s just not any more? Or do you think, like, you know, like you could always pick up another book or go watch another movie, there’s another life afterward? Is there any sort of life after death? Do you think that what I’m doing now, I don’t mean right this minute, but what I’m doing all the time nowadays, is going to determine what will happen to me after I die? You don’t believe in hell, do you? But don’t you think there might be some kind of heaven? I wonder, if a person goes to some kind of heaven, can they remember everything that happened to them when they were still alive? Or what do you think about the idea that maybe a person gets another chance here on the earth, only it’s as a different person? I mean, what if I come back but find out that I’m just a dog, or a horse, or a girl, or something? Who would you like to be if you could come back as anybody else? If I died all of a sudden, would you miss me? Would you try to find another friend right away to take my place?

Now, Kat, I suppose I ought to tell you about the experience that Kenny had already had with what is so charmingly called the “little death,” that brief exquisite pang that so many mortals, totally without any expertise at actual dying, have compared to it, as if there were any analogy at all. So far, alas, it had happened to you only a few times. The first time it happened to Kenny, for a terrible instant at least he wondered if he might actually be dying. And when the instant passed, he felt immortal, indestructible, everlasting, and couldn’t wait to die all over again. Of course all his little deaths so far had been suicides. Many of them had been abetted by the fold-out pictures in Playboy, the magazine that, indeed, had verbally implanted the original suggestion in his just-turned-twelve mind with an article, “Doing It Without Chicks”—or rather, doing it with a surrogate cutely identified as “Mary Fist.” Clumsy Mary had brought him, after several failures and dry runs, to his first little death, his first liquid death, a liquid that because of its composition and color had led him to suspect that if he wasn’t dying he had something virulent and pustulant. By the time you came into his life, six months later, he had already learned, from his magazine and from his less ignorant schoolfellows, the basic facts of life and loving, and he knew he was normal and healthy, and doing it all the time wasn’t going to cripple him or derange him or even leave telltale growths of fuzz on his palms…although he had been unable to resist the superstition that small amounts of the liquid applied to one’s chest would cause one to become hairy chested, which accounted for the musky, woodsy fragrance that sometimes emanated from him and drove you wild.

But you did not know the source of the fragrance, just as you did not know that he had already died a little, several times. You continued to hope, as you pictured your first seduction of him, that his initial experience of the little death would come at your hands or—let me rephrase that—with your presence beside him to explain to him what was happening and to vicariously share the thrill of it, as you had done with both Islamber and Dzhordzha—because the supreme joy of the older woman with a pubertal boy lies not in what he can do to you or for you but in your vicarious pleasure in what he gets from you.

Never had you experienced the “little death” yourself with another person, neither Islamber nor Dzhordzha. The few times you’d reached an orgasm had come from listening to music, specifically Tchaikovsky, more specifically his First Piano Concerto.

You wondered, but never aloud, why Kenny didn’t ask you any questions about sex—he was filled with questions about death and everything else, but not sex. Because, Kat, he already knew, or thought he did, all that was to be known about sex. But why didn’t he ever, on any of the numerous private occasions when it might have been possible, express a desire to see you without clothing? Both Islamber and Dzhordzha, at his age and at about the same stage of familiarity, had been all too eager to have a look at you. You could still see Islamber’s face at the instant he first beheld your breasts. And you recalled that first night you met Kenny, when he’d asked, so sweetly, “Could I stay and watch you take off that scarf!” If he could be so bold the first night, why had he not, more recently, asked, “Could I stay and watch you get ready for bed?”

The answer, and I’m sorry you’ve had to wait this long to learn the particulars from me, was simply that he did not need to ask. He had seen your head without the scarf. The hair on your scalp was growing back, and you would have been relieved to know that he did not find your bare head “gross,” to use his word. He had seen your entire body without clothing. More than once. How? In the hall outside your door, there was a small closet, a so-called broom closet, for the convenience of the upstairs maid (a comely Scottish lass named Christal) in the days when the mansion was inhabited by Lawren’s physical body. Kenny, familiar with every nook and cranny of this mansion, had discovered that it was possible to make a small hole through the wall of the broom closet that would, if he stood upon a box, provide him with an overlook of your murphybed. You never discovered the hole for two simple reasons: it was hidden by the machinery that held the murphybed to the wall in its closed position, and he always plugged the hole when he wasn’t using it.

By the time you wittingly gave him an erection, holding him close beside the body of Knox Ogden, you had already unwittingly given him a dozen or more erections, which he had served to Mary Fist, disguising her in his imagination as you, or part of you. It was a wonder, sometimes, that you hadn’t heard, through the wall behind the murphybed, the panting and the gasping.

In the Hirshhorn Museum of Washington, D.C., is a painting titled Eleven A.M. by the supreme American realist of the twenties, Edward Hopper, which depicts a girl alone inside her room, naked except for her shoes, sitting in a stuffed armchair, staring out the sunlit window. Her long brown hair obscures her face, which might be identical to yours. Her body, naked, not nude—and the distinction is important—is not as desirable as yours, but the painting’s mood, its theme, its gentle eroticism, and above all its loneliness will remind any viewer/reader of my Ekaterina, and it would certainly, years later when he saw it on a trip to Washington, bring back to Kenny the most haunting recollection of how he’d seen you in your room at the mansion, sitting in a chair like that, naked like that, enjoying your nakedness and the eleven A.M. sunlight warming it, staring out the window, thinking, remembering, planning,

Shocked at his recognition of the painting, Kenny would say to himself, “I wonder if what she’s thinking at this moment is how she can get me into bed with her.”

But what you were actually thinking at that specific moment was simply whether you ought, when you got your first paycheck, to buy a wig the exact color of your own hair, or to buy the auburn one and improve upon your already gorgeous looks. Then you heard sounds in the next room, Ogden’s room, and you got up from the armchair and clothed your nakedness and peered through your blinds at the people through the window of the room opposite, which because of the building’s staggered facade was at a visible angle to your own room.

Loretta Elmore was showing the room to a prospective tenant. Kenny had spent much of the holidays helping to clean the room after Ogden’s belongings had been removed. (Ogden had left a will and had, despite his antipathy for his department, left all of his books and papers to the university’s Hillman Library). Now Loretta was showing it to an Oriental assistant professor of physics, Dr. Chou Wen-Tseng, who was tall, handsome, and wore a constant smile of affability and contentment: a striking contrast to the previous tenant. Kenny later told you that his mother had been very eager to “land” Dr. Chou, a real good old joe, but that, unfortunately, the man had a Pekingese toy bitch from whom he was inseparable, and the Elmores had a strict no-pets policy (which would keep you from fulfilling one of your three wishes, to have a cat).

The next prospective tenant was a tautly muscled figure of swarthy cast, flat nose, and huge lips, named Roosevelt Smith, who had learned of the vacancy through his friend and former teacher, Edith Koeppe, now back from her sister’s; Dr. Koeppe was as eager to have Smith here as he was to live here, on the same floor with his friend and former teacher…albeit with you separating them. But despite Dr. Koeppe making herself increasingly visible and vocal for a change, in order to lobby for her protégé (“He can drink me under the table,” she declared in one of her rare attempts at humor, thinking it a qualification for the tenancy), the Elmores decided that Smith, because his dissertation (in criminology) was not completed and he was therefore, strictly speaking, despite teaching four sections of Intro Soc, still a graduate student, was not eligible to join the faculty on the mansion’s second floor. He would be welcome to have one of the third-floor apartments, but there were no vacancies this coming term, and none anticipated. Rest assured the Elmores had no prejudice against blacks.

Two days before the winter term was scheduled to start, on the day that you would have celebrated, or that I would have preferred celebrating, in my young-manhood, as Christmas, you returned to the mansion from an hour of sitting in your office in the Biological Sciences Building, just sitting there, getting the feel of it and trying to rehearse your opening remarks to your students, and found this message from Loretta: E.V., There’s a man coming to look at the apt. this P.M., but I’m downtown on some business, and just in case I don’t get back, and if Big Kenny is not back from Hillman or Little Kenny is not home from Schenley, could you show the apt. to him? Here’s the key.

Thus it was that Loretta, or Anangka, or, who knows, maybe even I, arranged for you to be the one to welcome into the mansion, and into your life, the dzhentlmyen who, in this tale, was, and was not at all, fated to become your agent, your deus ex machina, your “helper” (as your Vladimir Propp calls them): your conductor to your ultimate destination.

How about if I call him Professor Agathon N.O. Dirndl? Would you buy that? Nor would I, but here is certainly a situation where the real name will not do. I’ve played around—I did this before, as noted below—with such ludicrous rearrangements of the real name as your fellow Svanetians might carry: Thornan Dlogdani, Handon Ingaldort, or Dorn Glonthadani. But he wasn’t Svan, though he looked it. Nor was he Norton Idhagland or Thogdon Inlandor. I like best of all Anthoni Gradlond, but that’s a real name and we don’t want to get ourselves into trouble.

Twenty years ago I published (posthumously, of course) a novella called A Dream of a Small but Unlost Town, wherein this same person served some critical functions akin to the demanding but entertaining job I now had laid out for him. That was ostensibly a work of fiction, and, according to the accepted tradition, I did my best to conceal his actual name, calling him, finally and consistently, by a mere initial. I’m tempted to do the same here. It’s convenient and lends itself to collusion and allusion as well as delusion, to the sort of playing around that is so dear to you. But I can’t reveal (“reveil” is the meaning of that word: to replace one veil with another) the actual initial used therein, which was west of his real initial. So, to make a long veil short, I’ll just shut my eyes and pick the initial to the east of his real one. I.

Let it stand, as it will, for Irresponsible, for Incognito, for Inept, for Indiscretion, for Inebriated, or for Idhagland, Inlandor, Ingledew, Ingraham. Just never, please, dear Kat, let it stand for I, meaning me, your phantom lover. You’ll have to endeavor to keep us apart.

Chapter twelve

Waiting in dread that the man might show up before Loretta or one of the other two Elmores returned, you began to convince yourself that this would indeed be the expected Bolshakov at last, although probably he’d known where you were all along and was just waiting for the right moment to move in next door to you, to inhabit (appropriately) a dead man’s room and to haunt your days and nights from that proximity, to taunt your “pretense” of being sane, to flaunt his warped sense of “reality,” to daunt your efforts to know what is true, to want your body finally and fully. You had never yet told Kenny about Bolshakov, though you had wanted to; you hadn’t been sufficiently confident that your English was adequate to explain to Kenny just who Bolshakov was, not confident that Kenny was old enough to comprehend just what Bolshakov had done to you. But you realized now that part of your motive for desiring so urgently to tell Kenny was to inform him that you intended to kill Bolshakov if you ever saw him again, and precisely why, and to ask Kenny if he knew where he could “snitch” a gun.

Waiting, you told yourself it wasn’t unreasonable to expect that cunning Bolshakov might have found you. All the time you’d known the man, he had boasted of his mobility, calling himself “the best-traveled psychiatrist in the Soviet Union.” He was free to come and go as he pleased, and several times each year he attended conferences in England, Italy, Germany, even the United States.

You could not wait in your apartment listening for the downstairs doorbell to ring. You paced the mansion’s foyer, pausing to look out the front door’s sidelights at the driveway. The mansion’s driveway, now covered with snow, cut in abruptly from the busy avenue, climbed slowly in front of the mansion, made a loop around the building, and gained the spacious parking lot behind the mansion, where at least half of the building’s tenants kept their cars, along with the two belonging to the Elmores, in spaces that Kenny had to keep shoveled free of the snow. You expected to find Bolshakov arriving by rented car.

Thus, because a Hertz or Avis vehicle is usually clean and shiny and new, the vehicle coming up the driveway fooled you. It was a truck, or some kind of trucklike vehicle, with a white hard-plastic top or cover over a body of rust-cankered metallic blue. It was, in fact, although you had no familiarity with American vehicles, a seven-year-old Chevrolet Blazer, a four-wheel-drive car good for back roads or bezdorozhye, roadless areas, and snow and middle mountains. You watched it pass the front entrance; it seemed to be loaded down with stuff: boxes, clothing on hangers, rolled-up things. It had an out-of-state license, from one of the New England states, with what we in this country call “vanity” plates: personalized words or messages or names, this one six capital block letters: BODARK. It did not look at all like the kind of vehicle Bolshakov might have obtained, and thus you were taken aback when it stopped and he got out of it.

Yes, he was wearing a trench coat! You wanted to run out the mansion’s rear exit and keep running. But no, this trench coat had a fur collar, and Bolshakov had never worn one of those. Walking up the front steps, the man appeared also to be much taller than Bolshakov, and he was not wearing a beard as disguise, simply a mustache that might have been his own. He rang the doorbell. You continued studying him, at close range, through the door’s side window. He saw your face behind the glass. He watched you studying him. He studied your study. He attempted a smile, failing as miserably as Bolshakov would have failed.

You took a deep breath and opened the door. His mustache was real: the center of it was well seasoned with nicotine, and it was grizzled like his hair, which was too grizzled to reveal its original shade of berry brown. He wore glasses, one lens thicker than the other. Protruding from his ear appeared to be an immature mushroom, perhaps Amanita phalloides. You could not take your eyes off the mushroom.

“This is a mansion,” he observed in a booming bass voice. “Are you sure you’ve got an apartment for rent?”

He did not sound at all like Bolshakov! And you decided, because of his great height, his deep voice, and the fur trim on his trench coat which up close seemed to be very—what was Kenny’s word?—very grungy: seedy, grimy, threadbare, manifesting a complete lack of neatness that Bolshakov could never have brought himself to permit, even for disguise), that he was no threat to you. Months would pass before you discovered that although he was not Bolshakov he had in common with your nemesis a total misunderstanding of “reality.”

“Yes. Yes,” you said. “Do come in.”

You led him upstairs and unlocked Knox’s—you’d have to stop thinking of it as his—unlocked the vacant apartment. He did not spend a long time looking around.

“Why all these mirrors?” he wanted to know.

“The better for see yourself,” you observed, “and proof you exist.”

“Pardon?” he said. He pointed at the mushroom in his ear. “I’m extremely hard of hearing.”

“So is Dr. Elmore,” you told him, thinking it a qualification for his liking it here, as a drunkard might like a house with other drunks in it.

“Are you Mrs. Elmore?”

“No, I am but living here. That is my room, next door down hall.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t hear a word, I’m afraid.” You started to repeat yourself, louder, but he held up his hand. “No, it’s a matter not of volume but of clarity. You have a luscious mouth, but I can’t read your lips.”

“I am not Mrs. Elmore,” you tried, and whether or not he got it, you could not tell. You decided you’d better demonstrate the sleeping apparatus, and silently you opened the mirrored doors, pulled out and down the murphybed. “Behold,” you said.

“Hey!” he said. “How about that!” He lay down on it, to try the length of it, which was too short for him. But if he slept slanticularly, it would do. He got up. “Well, I’ll take it,” he declared.

That was quick. But how did you explain to a deaf man that since you were not the landlady you didn’t have the authority to rent it to him? The owners did have some standards to be met.

“Do you have pets?” you asked.

“What?” he asked. “Bats?”

“Pets,” you said, and pantomimed the stroking of the ghost of the beautiful cat you could never have.

“Mats? Do you mean mattress? I’ll need my own mattress, is that it? No, but I could get one.”

“Dog,” you enunciated carefully. “Cat. Goldfish. Monkey. Parrot. Budgerigar.”

“Oh, pets!” he said. “No. No, I don’t. Just me.”

“Do you finish dissertation?”

He took a bunch of cards out of his shirt pocket, common three-by-five index cards, unlined, blank. He took out his ballpoint pen. You thought for a moment he intended to finish his dissertation on the spot. “I could understand you a lot easier if you’d just jot down a key word or two,” he requested.

You took a card and the pen and wrote, Dissertation?

He read it and said, “Many years ago, at Harvard, my dissertation adviser read the first draft and told me I ought to be writing novels instead, so I gave it up.”

“But you are faculty?” you asked, and wrote down the word Faculty? “Not simply graduate student?” And you wrote down, Graduate student?

“Oh, I’m a student all right, and graduated,” he said, “and I’ll always be a graduated student. But right now, starting day after tomorrow, for one term only, I’ll be teaching.”

“What do you teach?” it was not a test question; you were simply curious and wanted to get to know as much as possible about your next-door neighbor. You wrote the question down: What do you teach?

Maybe he should have written down his answer, because now it was your turn to misunderstand. “Riding,” he said, or you thought he said; his pronunciation was not of the best. If he’d said “Riding,” then that explained his appearance and his grungy coat: He had just come from the stables.

You had only one more question, which was not a test so much as an effort to see how he would fit into the climate of the mansion. “Do you drink?”

You started to write it down, but he apparently had understood you. “Why, thank you!” he said. “Don’t mind if I do. Would you happen to have any bourbon and branch?”

You decided against trying to make the effort to clarify your question. “On the rocks?” you asked, and once again he heard you, and he nodded, and you went next door and got the rest of the bottle of County Fair you’d kept for Knox Ogden, and you made a drink for this man, who was clearly not at all Bolshakov, and another drink of the same beverage, for conviviality’s sake, for yourself.

Chapter thirteen

By the time the Elmores came home, the new man had already moved in. Pausing after each trip to swill his drink, he had made a dozen trips out to his Blazer to carry in his stuff. You had offered to help in some way other than merely keeping his drink refilled, and he had let you carry in the lighter stuff, some of his wretched shirts, on hangers, odds and ends from the corners of the back end of the vehicle. He had carried in the heavy things: his big black electric typewriter, his boxes of books, his two suitcases, his grocery bag full of liquor bottles. By the time the Elmores came home, the carrying in was completed, and you had had several drinks together, and, although you had declined his offer of a handshake (because it had not yet been two hours), you had exchanged some basic information, your names and your places of origin; where you’d grown up. On a card, you had written your name for him in three languages. First in English:

EKATERINA VLADIMIROVNA DADESHKELIANI

and beneath that, in Russian:

Екатерина Владимировна Дадешкелиани

and beneath that, in Georgian:

He had wanted to know how you would write it in Svanetian, and you had had to explain that Svanetian has no written language, no alphabet, that it is, like the American Indians’ languages, entirely a spoken language…which did not mean, as Bolshakov had insisted, that you had only “imagined” it. It existed, as Svanetia did; a mountainous country, a mountainous language. Right then and there you and I. began to discover some things you had in common. On one of the trips down to the parking lot, he had explained his vanity plate: BODARK referred to that area of mountains in middle America from which he had originated. Later, over drinks, you wrote on one of his cards, What do you miss most about the Bodark Mountains? and he got glassy eyed—or maybe it was just from all the drinks he’d had or all the driving he’d done—and he answered that what he missed most was the smell of tomato plants, the particular acrid tang of their leaves. And you had written on a card for him: That is exactly one thing I am missing most about Svanetia. And he said, “You must tell me all about Svanetia.” And you wrote: You can be sure I shall.

When the Elmores came home and you went to tell Loretta about him, she said, “What? Already? How does he spell that name? E-I-G-H or A-Y-E or E-Y-E or A-I or what?”

“Just I., I think,” you said.

“What department is he in?”

“Equestrian Department,” you said. “He is riding master.”

“PA!” Loretta yelled into her husband’s ear, “HAVE WE GOT ANY HORSE PEOPLE AT THE SCHOOL?” But she had more trouble getting across to him than you had had with I., and without the advantage of note cards to write upon. You realized one thing you liked about I.: The necessity of writing things down was good for you; you could communicate better in written words than spoken ones.

“No pets,” you assured Loretta. “Also, he drinks like fish.”

“Well, I guess I’d better run up and say hello,” she declared, and took her glass of bourbon with her.

You remembered your own first night at the mansion, how the Elmores had fed you, or rather Kenny had: the simple cheeseburger with fries. You assumed that I. would be in no condition to prepare his own supper, even if he had groceries. He had told you he’d been driving all day in the snow, sometimes in blizzards. You assumed he’d probably want to go out for supper to Burger Chef or some such; none of his clothes were good enough for a nice restaurant. It occurred to you to offer him something that Kenny had not wanted, or had not shown much interest in: a real Svanetian supper of chikhirtma soup, chicken tabaka, and eggplant salad, with hot khatchapuri bread. You got busy in your kitchenette. You hoped that I. would not think you were making a play for him, trying to lure him, trying to find your way to his heart through his stomach. You hoped he would understand you were only being neighborly and considerate of his first weary night here and that you did not intend to do it again. And you hoped that the coziness of having supper together would not make him want to use a familiar name for you prematurely.

But his first question upon sitting down at your table, as you began to serve the chikhirtma, was, “What can I call you?”

You wrote down on a card for him the information that in Georgia, as well as in Russia, unless you know somebody very, very well, or unless somebody is clearly your inferior (and how are you to know?) you could not use a nickname; you should use both the full first name and the patronymic. But Loretta, you told him, had taken to using just the initials of your first two names, which she had converted into the nickname Evie.

“That Loretta,” he said, shaking his head. “Quite a bimbo.”

You wrote, Many words I am slow to learn, yet. What is “bimbo”?

“Probably it comes from the Italian for baby.”

You smiled and wrote, Because she is childish?

“No, baby in the sense of a babe, a dame, a gal, that is—although it might be considered disparaging or offensive—a girl or woman, possibly an attractive one.”

You wrote, You remind me of Knox Ogden. But then you realized that you were not going to tell him about Knox Ogden, not yet. You tore up the card.

“Hey!” he protested. “Don’t ever destroy the written word.” And thus you discovered that writing things down had both its advantages and its disadvantages: It was easy, more comfortable than speaking, and helped you to master the language, but it could not be taken back, it could not be forgotten, it was too permanent. “What did you write?” he wanted to know, and shoved a fresh card to you. But you simply wrote, Let us eat, and then I will write to you about Loretta. There was another disadvantage to note writing: You couldn’t eat and write at the same time.

I. did not seem to have the appetite that you would have expected from a man his size, although he was properly appreciative of the food, especially the khatchapuri bread, which was hot (and in Svanetia must always be served hot). But he did not finish his soup, ate just a small bit of the chicken, and did not touch the eggplant salad. Months later, in a different part of the country, you would learn that his drinking sometimes killed his appetite.

When you were finished eating, you held out your hand and said aloud, “Give me four or five,” and he did a strange thing: slapped his hand down on top of your open palm. You looked puzzled, even wounded, and wondered if he was already drunk.

“That’s five,” he said. “Although it was more a low-five than a high-five.”

“Cards,” you said. “Four or five cards.”

“What?”

He could not hear you. It required a card to ask for a card: You took a used card, turned it over to its blank side and wrote, Please give me 4 or 5 cards. Which wasn’t sufficient, as it turned out, for all you had to write: You told him about the Elmores: Once upon a time, and upon no time at all, Loretta, a local girl or bimbo, then twenty-four, had been working as a typist, not even a full secretary, in the university’s Anthropology Department when the then-distinguished Professor Elmore, fifty-four at the time, had seduced her, starting a torrid affair that had resulted in Dr. Elmore’s divorce from his first wife and his invitation to Loretta to accompany him on one of his periodic expeditions to Manaturu, in the Cook Islands of the South Pacific, where he was gathering material for what was intended to be an exhaustive document on the quaint sexual customs of the Manaturuans. It had been quite a culture shock for Loretta, whose father was a steelworker and whose grandparents had been West Virginia mountaineers, to find herself living among the Polynesian “savages” and eventually, on the second and third expeditions there, learning their language and serving as an interviewer of the women, who were too shy to tell their most private customs to her Kenneth Elmore. It was on the fourth and final expedition that Dr. Elmore and Loretta, then sixty-two and thirty-two, had themselves experimented with one of the customs and in the process had conceived Kenny, who was born upon their return to America and their marriage.

I read your cards, occasionally attempting a smile. Then his only response to your narrative on its five cards was to ask: “Who’s Kenny?”

You will meet him very soon, you wrote on a fresh card, and you paused, and reflected, and sipped your drink, and then continued, He is 12, tall for his age but skinny, and he thinks he is the superintendent of this building. Perhaps he is. He is very—again you paused and sipped your drink and did not know how to write this, but tried—jealous and protective of me. He is probably downstairs at this very moment becoming angry because I am feeding you and talking to you.

Inebriated, I. read this and chuckled and said, “Your boyfriend, huh? Well, bring him on, and let’s see.”

Almost as if in response to this request (and actually Kenny had been spying for some time through his peephole), there was a knock at your door, and you called out, “Come in, Kenny.”

“How did you know it was me?” Kenny asked, coming into the room. He was not pouting at you or glaring like a panther at the professor.

“I knew it wasn’t Professor Ogden,” you told Kenny, and then you introduced them to each other. They shook hands; Kenny was tall, but he had to reach up to take I.’s hand.

“Have you got everything you need?” Kenny asked him, very politely. “In your apartment, I mean? Have you got all the lamps and stuff you need? Have you got all you need to cook with and eat with and stuff? I could snitch you anything you don’t have.”

“Thank you,” I. said. “I think I’m all set.” I. seemed to be following what Kenny was saying. Probably Kenny’s voice, you realized, was clearer than yours, or, you decided, it was undergoing a voice change, as Islamber’s and Dzhordzha’s had done, and was lower in pitch than yours, therefore more intelligible to a deaf man.

“Have you got enough to drink?” Kenny asked him.

“If I don’t,” I. said, “she does.”

“Well, good,” Kenny said. “We want you to be happy here.”

“Thank you,” I. said. “I’m sure I will be.”

You were amazed that Kenny was being so nice to him, and then it suddenly occurred to you that Kenny probably still felt guilty over Knox Ogden’s death, or that at least he was overcompensating for his hostility toward Ogden. And you realized that you yourself were trying to atone for not having been as nice to Ogden as you could have. Also, it crossed your mind that Anangka intended this new man for some specific purpose, perhaps to divert you from your lust for Kenny. You could not conceive of yourself lusting for this new man, or even pretending a sexual attraction toward him, but possibly Anangka intended for you to receive his sexual attentions and thus be distracted from the temptation of seducing Kenny.

“Kenny,” you suggested, “maybe I. will let you ride his horses.”

“Yeah!” Kenny said, lighting up. “I’ve never been on a horse, but, yeah, I’d like to learn how to, like, get off and on one of them like you’re supposed to.”

I. was looking puzzled. He reached for his cards, but you already had one ready for him: You might offer to let Kenny ride the horses. You don’t have to teach him a lot.

“What horses?” I. asked of both you and Kenny. And neither you nor Kenny knew exactly how to answer that question. You scribbled on a card, Do you not say you teach riding?

I. read it and laughed, or made a sound that was painfully like the way that Bolshakov on rare occasions had got something caught in his throat in an effort at expressing mirth or sadistic glee. “Oh, dear, no,” I. said. “Not riding. Writing. What they choose to call ‘creative writing,’ as if there were any sort of writing that wasn’t creative.”

You and Kenny stared at each other, and then at I. Kenny said, almost with a sneer, “You mean you’re just, like, in the English Department?” I. nodded. Kenny observed, “Just like Knox Ogden!”

“Who?” I. asked, and you wrote the name on a card and showed it to him, but he shook his head. “Who is Knox Ogden?” I was a little disappointed myself, at the moment, to discover that I. hadn’t heard of Knox Ogden, whose poetry, after all, was not without some national recognition and who had, after all, heard of me.

You whispered to Kenny, “Let’s not be telling him yet.” And then you wrote on a card, What are the courses that you will teach?

He read it and showed you three fingers, and ticked them off one by one: Intro Fick, Short Story, Narrative Techniques. No poetry? you wrote. He shook his head. “Just fiction. Only fiction.”

“Ivasu khari, Anangka,” you said, realizing what the Lady of Fate had in mind for you (actually I ought to get some of the credit). You wrote on a card: Have you publish fiction?

“Some,” he said, and on four fingers he ticked off the titles of novels he had published. Then he observed, “I couldn’t help but notice, Ekaterina Vladimirovna, how bare your bookcases are. Would you like to decorate them with some of my volumes?”

He ran next door to fetch you some of his books, and while he was gone Kenny said, “You like him a lot, don’t you?”

“Oh, not more than you,” you said.

He blushed. “What did you tell him about me?”

“How do you know I tell him anything about you?”

“He asked you.”

“How do you know he asked me?”

But before Kenny could answer that one, I. returned, with a stack of four books in his hands, which he placed into your hands. They were still in their dust jackets—nice designs on the jackets, and photos of the author at different times of his life, usually with a beard, which made him look older than he did now. “Just a loan, you understand,” he said. You admired each book, one at a time, and passed them along to Kenny, who did not read novels but was impressed with the author photos and observed, in an aside the author could not hear, “He’s published almost as many books as Ogden, but his are, like, much thicker, so I guess he’s published more words.”

You wrote on a card, Could I take one of your courses? And you came perilously close to giving him the card, but you decided, for several reasons that we are to examine, that it wouldn’t be a good idea. You tore up the card.

“That’s twice,” I. told you.

“Twice what?” Kenny asked.

“Twice she’s torn up a card, although I told her not to,” I. said, and then to both you and Kenny he said, “I’ll tell you a little joke from the Bodark Mountains. There was this old boy, Dingletoon, reticent but tough, who married a strong-willed, domineering vixen named Sadie, and all the fellers in town laid bets to see which of them would get the upper hand. Well, Sadie had a little dog, and the first day after they were married the little dog up and bit Dingletoon. ‘That’s once,’ says Dingletoon, and he pronounced it the way they do in the Bodarks, ‘wunst.’ And about a week later, the dog bit Dingletoon again. All he says is, ‘That’s twice,’ pronouncing it ‘twice-st.’ Everything went just fine for another month, and then the dog bit Dingletoon again. ‘That’s thrice-st! ’ he says, and whipped out his six-shooter and let the dog have it right between the eyes. Sadie threw a fit at the sight of her dead dog, and she began cussing Dingletoon all over the place, and then she hauled off and slapped him as hard as she could. He just blinked a couple of times and said, ‘That’s wunst.’ And from that day forward, Sadie and old Dingletoon got along fine and never had another squabble between ’em.”

“That’s funny,” Kenny said, but he wasn’t giggling or even smiling. Then he said, “Well, I guess I’d better go do my homework.” You knew that of all the things on this earth that he hated most, he most hated homework. “Maybe I’ll catch you later,” he said to you, and then he said to I., “Just remember, if you ever need anything, I’m your man.” He said one more thing, to both of you, pointing at his chessboard and pieces, which he’d left on one of your occasional tables, “If you want to use my chess set, that’s okay with me.”

Chapter fourteen

But I. was not yet ready to play chess with you. In the coming few months, you and I. would play chess many times, and he would eventually succeed in mating you, but this first night he was simply too tired to think, and he declined your offer of a game, saying he’d have just “one more for the road” and then take off. Road? you asked. The “road” between your apartment and his apartment, he explained, which, as it would turn out, over the next months became a well-traveled road, in both directions.

But that night he had more than one more for his road. And so did you. Kenny came up more than once to creep into his broom closet and put his eye to the peephole, and to see that you and I. were still sitting there at the table, whose surface you could use for the cards you wrote. Finally Kenny’s mother made him go to bed; he had school tomorrow and hadn’t done his homework. But school for you and I. was not until the day after tomorrow, and you could stay up very late this night, exchanging your fears. You were both scared of facing your students. Without telling him anything of Ishimbay Camp 39, yet, or of Bolshakov, yet, you told him (or wrote on cards for him) that it had been four years since you’d last conducted a class in elementary botany, let alone mycology, and that while you had no doubt of your mastery of the material, you were petrified at the thought of talking to the students in a language that was still strange and new to you.

It was the other way around with I.: He had no fear of the students, plenty of experience with talking to (or at) students, but his classes for the last twenty years had all been in art history, which was his real field, and he had no experience teaching creative writing, which he was now going to do for this one term simply because he needed the job: The small liberal arts New England college where he’d been teaching art history had suddenly gone defunct through mismanagement and declined enrollment. His life was filled with deaths: His college was dead, his marriage was dead, his father was dead, his current novel was dead, his relationship with his publisher was dead, his ties with New England were dead.

“I’m an impostor,” he said. “I can’t teach writing. I’ve been telling anybody who would listen, for years now, that ‘creative writing’ cannot be taught. It can only be learned.”

You wanted to write on a card, Then would you help me learn it? but you’d probably have torn up the card, and that would have been thrice.

You both became almost drunk, as Kenny observed in his last view through the peephole. Neither of you became dizzy or stinking or addled or sloppy or roaring, but both of you were a little loopy and pie-eyed and mellow and woozy and piffled. Old Lawren got rather supercharged at the sight and began to rattle the mirrors: No, he didn’t actually rattle them audibly, but he caused them to vibrate, to shimmer. The shimmering mirrors were nothing new to you, but they caused I. to wonder aloud if there was a train going by, or a heavy truck. You wrote, Just our resident spook. “Maybe we should offer him one,” I. suggested. You wrote, I have. You wanted to write words for him telling him about Knox Ogden, if not about Lawren Carnegie, but knew you’d probably have to tear up half the cards you wrote.

You wrote, and did not tear up, and he preserved (he kept all your cards, the hundreds upon hundreds you would write over the next few months), several cards about Svanetia, that mountainous wonderland that sometimes seemed like only an Arcadian dream to you and was the secret lost heart of the Caucasus just as I.’s Bodarks were the secret lost heart of America. You did not tell him, yet, nor did he guess, as Ogden had, that you were a princess. All you said in that regard was that the Dadeshkelianis had owned large houses with towers in Etseri, Betcho, and your own native village of Lisedi, the three principal towns of the most beautiful valley of the Ingur, between massive Mount Layla (13,169 feet) and glacial Mount Ushba (14,882 feet), but that the houses had been collectivized by the Soviets, and now each contained many different families, which was ironic, in more ways than one, for originally the purpose of the towers, the four-to seven-story stone structures with battlemented caps, was defense: defense not against outlanders or invaders but against neighboring families, fellow Svanetians. Family rivalry, clan warfare, blood feuds, or simply mountain feuds, as I. told you they are called in the middle mountains of this country, were widespread and constant, a way of life in the old days, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the towers were built.

These towers seized I.’s attention, drunk though he was. He had spent a good deal of observation on architecture in one of his novels, and in his art history classes he had always been fascinated by the symbolic “human” qualities of buildings, the personalities of houses, and he wondered if the Svanetian defense towers, which dotted the whole valley of the Ingur River for fifty miles, had any possible phallic significance. The thought had occurred to you more than once. Your own interest in mushrooms, as you consciously knew, and as we shall see, but as I. was not to learn yet on that night, arose because of their suggestiveness and their insinuative reminder of the towers of Svanetia. Although Bolshakov had refused to believe in those towers, claiming that such a rustic and unsophisticated backwater as Svanetia couldn’t possibly have built them, he had repeatedly tried to show that your “invention” of them was a possible clue to your worship of twelve-year-old penises. Your story of how you’d lost your virginity to Islamber in the top of one of the towers only confirmed Bolshakov’s claim that you invented and mythologized your life.

But that night you were somewhat taken aback by the boldness with which I. discussed phallic matters, and you declined to make comment, or card, and he did not come to possess a single card of yours concerning penises. Attempting to change the subject, you wrote on cards that what you missed most about Svanetia was not the skyline of frequently upthrust towers in each village, the manmade erections, but the natural tumescences of the countryside: the fantastic flowers; the elephantine plants; the monkshoods taller than a man on horseback; the great Heracleum, with its yardlong leaves and ten thousand blossoms; the so-called enchanter’s nightshade; not even to mention such mushrooms as the strange four-legged earthstar, Geastrum fornicatum. These were the things that Bolshakov had cited as proof that you were only “inventing,” these were the splendors that he could not accept, and you were curious to see if I. would believe you, as Bolshakov had not.

But I. began singing. In a vibrant bass voice that you would have considered abominable had you realized how off-key it was but that you considered operatic because you didn’t know the key and because you’d never heard a darkie crooning, he began singing this: “Way down upon de Svani ribber, Far, far away…Dere’s whey my heart is turning eber, Dere’s whey de old folks stay.”

When he finished the song, you wrote, There is no ‘Svani River.’ The rivers of Svanetia are the Ingur and the Nahkra and the Tskhenis Tskali.

He explained that he’d just been making a kind of pun on a famous song by Stephen Collins Foster. Did you know Foster, America’s greatest troubadour? No? Well, he was a native of this city and had lived most of his life here. I. intended to do a little research on Foster while he was in this city, for a possible future novel. Supposedly the university’s campus contained a building, the Stephen Foster Memorial, that was the only museum and archive devoted to an American composer. Foster wrote wonderful, nostalgic, sometimes overly sentimental, but always folk-inspired songs, like “Beautiful Dreamer,” “My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night,” “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” and the aforesung “Swanee River,” or “Old Folks at Home,” as its proper title was. (There really is, I. told you, a Suwannee River in Florida, and a Sewanee College and Review in Tennessee.) “When he was only thirteen,” I. said, and your ears perked up, “the age when most boys are just learning to play with their little flutes, he wrote his ‘Tioga Waltz’ for an ensemble of flutes!” But like so many creative geniuses, Foster drank too much, and he died of it at the age of thirty-seven.

“All de world am sad and dreary,” he repeated.

You wrote a card, We drink too much. We must go to murphybed.

“Sure. Yours or mine?” I. asked, lighting up.

You wrote, You for yours and I for mine.

He read it and smiled and pointed to one of the pronouns, I. “This is me,” he said.

You wrote, You are very tired man, very sad man, and you must get sleep so you can be good teacher, and teach all your students, including me, how to learn to write. You read this over and crossed out, blacked out, the including me. And you helped him up and to the door.

Again, in your sleep that night, you entered your old familiar dream of climbing and descending an endless sequence of steps, stone steps, concrete steps, iron steps, wooden steps, staircases that led up or down to significant places whose significance always eluded you.

The next day, bright and early, you counted up your remaining money. You had little left, just enough; the new term’s first paychecks would be received on the fifteenth, just a few days off. You could afford to buy some things, and you took a bus downtown to buy the following: an inexpensive wig of long artificial hair, not in Chaucer’s berye or even in a tasteful auburn, but in a rather garish and flaming red; a lipstick to match, that is, equally reddish orange; some rouge; and a pair of dark sunglasses. And at your request, Loretta was all too happy to let you help yourself to her vast collection of costume jewelry, boxes and boxes of it; it took you nearly an hour to pick out what you needed, the wildest items to match the wild hair, and then one of Loretta’s somewhat outmoded but still brazen dresses, shorter than any you’d ever worn; and one of Loretta’s old hats that she hadn’t worn for years, a broad-brimmed thing like a parasol that would completely shade your face. “Evie, you’re not gonna wear that stuff to class?!” Loretta said.

“No,” you said, telling your first little lie. You were going to wear that stuff to class, but not to your classes. For your classes, you had made up your mind what to wear, and you would wear it: your dzhinsy, which so many women wore for all occasions in this city. You would wear your blue dzhinsy beneath the white laboratory coat that Marilyn the secretary had given you, with your name embroidered in script on the breast pocket: E.V. Dadeshkeliani. And on your head your bright Paisley scarf that had brought you good luck on the day you got the job.

Your first classes went, as we say in this country, without a hitch. No sweat. A piece of cake. Section Two of Intro Bot met a little too early in the morning for you, but you needed an excuse to have to get to murphybed earlier. Giving them their first assignments and a small pep talk on the joys of botany, you did not commit, as far as you knew, any major gaffes in the use of the English language. They seemed to understand what you were saying, and you apologized sweetly to them for your inability to speak more fluently. “I am just arrived in this country,” you said, “and, like you, I have much to learn.”

You stayed on the campus after class, ate a light supper at a grill nearby, returned to your office, and changed into your “costume,” taking a full hour to put on your makeup, especially the cheeks and lips. You were as excited as you’d been the very first day of school when the bus had taken you to the collective school in Mestia. You were as excited as the day you’d started at the university in Tbilisi. You were far more excited than you’d been this very morning getting ready for your own classes. And as on those previous school-starting occasions, part of your pleasure had been in getting the equipment you needed: your clean, fresh spiral-bound notebook; a packet of fresh three-by-five index cards (pink); a yellow highlighter; and the required texts (which fortunately the bookstore had let you charge to your faculty account), three paperbacks and a hardbound: Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction; William S. Strunk, Jr., and E.B. White, The Elements of Style; Wallace and Mary Stegner, eds., Great American Short Stories; and a thumb-indexed Crowell Roget’s International Thesaurus.

You tucked your books and notebook in your arm and stood for a moment in front of the mirror in your departmental office. The mirror lied totally, for the young woman facing you was your first and finest fictional creation: your broad-brimmed floppy hat, your dark sunglasses (it was nighttime now, and only celebrities wore sunglasses at night…or people with eye problems), your makeup, atrociously overdone: a heavy application of a lipstick too brightly reddish orange and circles of rouge so unblended you looked like a clown, and all over you Loretta’s loudest costume jewelry: cackling bracelets and jangling earrings and clacking necklace, and, best of all, your hair, a cascade of red flames that billowed out from under your hat and spilled down your shoulders.

If only Bolshakov could see you now. But, indeed, if he did see you now, he would not know you at all. Or, if he knew you, it would confirm the falsehood he’d spent three years trying to get you to believe: that your whole world is your own fabrication.

Chapter fifteen

I swear I had nothing to do with the coincidence that English 101/801, Narrative Writing, met in the Scottish Room of the Cathedral of Learning. I have “arranged” many things for your life in America, dear Kat, but not that. And I doubt that Anangka concerned herself with it. And I’m sure that I. himself had no choice in the matter; it’s where he was assigned to meet the class, and he probably wouldn’t have chosen it if given a choice: The room was too large, and too long, and too formal, and he had to stand up there beneath that elaborate blackboard covered by oak folding doors that he didn’t know how to open and was too drunk to cope with, doors carved with the names of great Scots: Robert Louis Stevenson, author of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which Nabokov adored; James Boswell, Johnson’s biographer; David Livingstone, the African explorer whom Stanley presumed to find; and Sir Henry Raeburn the portraitist, all of them surmounted by the canny Scottish proverb GIF YE DID AS YE SOULD YE MIGHT HAIF AS YE WOULD, which you could almost make out from your seat in the rear of the room, although you could not then “translate” it, and you still can’t.

I floated in the vicinity of the single window at the rear of the room, over your shoulder, which was blazoned (the window, not your shoulder) with the arms of the Montrose clan, a red rose on a silver field; and from there I observed you and your professor both, and I thought how appropriate it was that you were disguised from him in this room. According to Scottish history, King James v of Scotland (1512–1542) loved to mingle with his people disguised as a peasant. You would have loved the man; he was “erected” king at the age of his first erection, twelve; and his last erection, at the age of only twenty-nine, produced his daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots. Once while he was riding around the countryside disguised as a peasant he was attacked by brigands, and an aide beat them off and washed his wounds; a lineal male descendant of that aide was Reginald Fairlie, the architect of this Scottish Room.

The professor, who was wearing not a jacket and tie but one of his grungy sport shirts, had clearly soused himself to prepare for facing this large group of night students, forty mostly older men and women who had worked at wages during the day and were now indulging a dream: to learn from somebody, even this drunk, deaf, unknown visiting novelist with a Bodark accent, how to put words on paper creatively. You shared that dream, and if your assessment of the instructor was more charitable than theirs, it was only because you knew some of his reasons for being drunk, disheveled, and defeated.

He began by pointing to the oil painting over the nonfunctional fireplace. “That’s Bobby Burns, isn’t it? Yup. Probably a copy of the original by Alexander Nasmyth. How do I know this stuff? This is my first time in this room. I’m as new here as you are. Newer, if you’ve ever had a class here before. I know that’s a Nasmyth because I’m an art historian by profession. It’s what I ought to be teaching instead of this. I write novels for a hobby, you might say. I’ve never made any money at it. I’m not going to teach you how to make money, writing.” He paused, waiting to see if this would elicit any response. “Nobody wants to leave? You’ve resigned yourselves to the possibility that you’ll never get rich from writing anything? Okay, then, let’s begin.”

You wished you had sat a little closer, to better hear what was to follow, but you couldn’t risk being too close to him in the bright lights of the room. You took notes in your fresh new spiral-bound notebook. Writing, he said, is an art, not a science, and he wasn’t going to mess around with “scientific” concepts like plot, characterization, tension, conflict, and especially that hideous thing called POV for “point of view,” with such resulting diagnoses as POV shift. Breaking the act of writing down into such components would be like breaking the act of lovemaking down into suggestion, maneuver, foreplay, penetration, optimal thrusts, climax, and post coital tristesse: The lovemaker so conscious of what he is doing or trying to do is not going to be doing anything worthwhile, let alone pleasurable.

“Art has nothing to do with ‘reality,’” he said, and paused, and then said, “I see several people not troubling to write that down. Write it down!” He went on to point out that Nabokov, one of the greatest of novelists, said that “reality” should always have quotation marks around it because there is no such thing, and with the first two fingers of each hand wiggling in the air, I. made the quote-marks that would often separate “reality” from art. You underlined your recording of this in your notebook twice. How Bolshakov would have hated that!

“If we avoid ‘reality,’ what have we got left?” he demanded. “If we were musical composers, we would have notes, tones, tunes with which to express our deepest feelings. If we were painters, we would have pigments, hues, lines, and shades. But we are writers, and all we have are words. Words are our salvation and our delight. Let me give you a gift of four words.”

It was then that he had trouble with the reality of the blackboard, trying to open the oak doors covering it. It took him a while, and finally a student who must have been in this room before leapt up and assisted him, and they got the doors open, revealing the blackboard, upon which some previous teacher had left a hodgepodge of algebraic formulae. I. erased this, then replaced it with block letters:

EXTRAVAGANCE

OUTRAGE

EXAGGERATION

OFFENSE

He proceeded to take each word and explicate it: that extravagance means, literally, “wandering beyond,” and that the art of fiction lies in wandering beyond the conventional into the original and the outrageous; that outrage is closely related to the French outré, “deviating from what is usual or proper,” and that good fiction is always eccentric. How does one deviate into wandering beyond? By heaping, by piling word upon word: exaggeration means literally “piling up,” but art often involves magnifying beyond the truth, distorting “reality” into a new truth, often at the risk of offending: Offense comes from the Latin for “to strike against.” The good fictionist must always strike against something, if that something is only convention, putative “reality,” bourgeois morality, philistine taste.

You covered pages of your notebook. “Now, are there any questions?” he asked. “If you have any questions, you’ll have to write them down, because I can’t hear you.” He waited a long time, long enough for them to write, but only two questions were presented to him: Do we have any tests? and WHAT are we supposed to write?

No, he answered, there would be no tests, and as for what you were “supposed” to write, he said, “I’m afraid you’ll never hear me say to you, ‘I want you to—’ or, ‘I would like for you to—’ with the idea that you will be doing ‘assignments’ to my specifications, prescriptions, or liking. The task of truly creative writing is always purely voluntary. Forcing your writing to conform to what you think is expected of you is foredooming it to mediocrity. Your greatest ‘assignment’ is to develop the ability to assign yourself.” He paused and waited, and then asked, “Are there any other questions?”

One question was passed to him: But what do you want us to DO?

“Okay, I want you to read a few things. For next week, and I’m sure you know we meet only once a week, each Thursday night, please read the first story in the Stegner anthology, ‘Rip Van Winkle,’ by Washington Irving.” There were some audible groans in the class, and I. said, “You were hoping, perhaps, for John Irving instead?” Several students nodded their heads. “Well, the Washington Irving story is sufficiently filled with extravagances, outrages, exaggerations, and offenses.”

A question was passed to him: But don’t you want us to write anything?

“Sure,” said I., “write something.”

But what? Can we write a poem or a story or a novel or what? Can we write science fiction? Detective stories? Can we write true confessions?

“‘True confession’? No, you don’t ever want to write anything autobiographical. Fiction based on yourself is poison. Get it out of your system. I’ll have more to say on this subject next week. Good night.”

Nobody got up. Several students wrote on slips of paper and passed them down front to the teacher. “I can see you’re disappointed that I’ve kept you for much less than the full three-hour period. And all of these questions ask the same thing in different ways: What do I want you to write? Okay, if you must have an assignment to get you started, let me suggest that you write your obituary. Write it as it might appear on the front page of the New York Times forty years from now…or on the back page of your hometown newspaper the day after tomorrow. This will be your last chance to write about yourself, so make it good, fill it with extravagances, outrages, exaggerations, and offenses, let it all hang out, and get it out of your system. Class dismissed.”

Chapter sixteen

Because you folded up the murphybed each morning upon arising, you couldn’t hide your books beneath it, as Kenny hid his Playboys. And you certainly couldn’t leave them on the bookshelves, shoulder to shoulder with I.’s novels. You had thought of leaving them in your office, where you kept the wig and hat and other articles of the “costume,” but then you wouldn’t have been able to consult your books in the middle of the night if you needed to. So you hid the books in your closet, beneath your folded grungy coat, which you would keep forever for sentimental reasons (you now wore a nice new one). And this first night, as soon as you got rid of I. (he dropped by to ask, “Well, how did your first day go?” and to invite you to his apartment for drinks, but you said you had much, much work to do—which was true), you started on your homework: reading “Rip Van Winkle” very thoroughly and making copious marginal observations about its exaggerations and outrages, pausing to look up certain words in your dictionary: posthumous, henpecked, termagant, virago, etc., etc. You were fascinated with the Kaatskill Mountains and their being haunted by strange beings. You identified with Rip and reflected upon your incarceration in Russia as akin to his long sleep. And the strange figure with the keg of liquor who put Rip to sleep was unquestionably Bolshakov with his syringes. You wondered: If you were finally able to return to Svanetia, after even five years, let alone twenty, would you know the place? Your homesickness brought tears to your eyes and a profound depression came upon you, but you ignored it and went on with your work, reading and rereading until you knew almost by heart the seven points of Strunk’s and White’s Elementary Rules of Usage, and then Wayne Booth’s first chapter, on Telling and Showing, wherein he debunks the myth that the good writer should always do the latter rather than the former. You made notes to obtain, on your next trip to Hillman, two of the books that Booth discusses, Boccaccio’s Decameron and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.

You could scarcely wait to get to Hillman, and you went there the next morning, right after your mycology class, which had some good students in it. You surprised yourself during your first mycology lecture, speaking in English of the concepts you knew by heart in Russian as well as Georgian, although your mind kept wandering: You were thinking constantly of your obituary. You found yourself prematurely introducing into your mycology lecture your reflections upon the mortality of mushrooms. It is of course an essential characteristic of their being that they endure upon this earth such a short span, just long enough to fulfill their intended destinies, but you had usually not taken your students deeply into the ephemerality of fungi until late in the semester, when they had been prepared for it by appreciating the sensational aspects of the brief but spectacular life span of the fungi.

At the Hillman, you ran into Dr. Elmore, on his way to his private carrel, and you attempted unsuccessfully to get him to hear your polite answer to his polite question “How’s school?” then you began to load your arms with books: In addition to the Boccaccio and the Flaubert, you got several volumes on Scotland and Northern Ireland. When you had more books than you thought you could carry home, you realized you had more than you could safely hide at home, and you determined then to do much of your work in your office.

“My office,” became your standard reply to the frequent question of Kenny, “Where have you been all day?” and the occasional question of I., “Where’ve you been keeping yourself?” A question that I. asked more often than that, “Have you had a chance to sneak a glance at my novels?” bothered you for its echo of Knox Ogden and made you wonder if your failure to have sneaked a glance at his novels would drive him to drink. But he was already driven to drink, so you couldn’t be blamed for that. You would look at I. and smile and imagine writing down on a card, The reason I have so little time for you is that I am spending all of my time on your “assignment.” But then you would try to be polite and friendly and as accommodating as you could, to both I. and Kenny, leaving them both to believe that the beginning of the term had simply overwhelmed you with responsibilities and that you hoped later, sometime conceivably later, to accept I.’s invitation to take you to a movie, and to do something about Kenny’s marvelous, expanding libido, manifested in his more frequent telling of the latest risque joke or story he’d heard or read. The chess set collected dust. “Let’s play something,” Kenny urged you one night. Soon, you promised. Soon, but for right now you had an enormous job to complete.

And finally, just in time, on Thursday, the day it was due, after an all-night session with the dictionary and your new thesaurus (“A good writer,” Professor I. had told the class, “will wear out, entirely wear out, at least one thesaurus a year”), it was done and remained only to be made presentable. Marilyn the secretary, who was so kind and amenable, gladly agreed to type it for you, appropriately on her latest-model futuristic IBM Executive. “One of my favorite students,” you explained to Marilyn, “is too poor to have a typewriter and needs this for another class.”

Chapter seventeen

April 24, 2021

Cathlin Ursula McWalter, the popular novelist known as “Scotch Mist” to her many readers, died yesterday in her hotel suite at Suwanee, North Carolina, at the age of sixty-nine. The editors of the New York Times are pleased to publish herewith the first document produced by IBM’s newly developed Telemedium, the machine capable of recording messages from the afterlife.

Excuse my dust. It won’t take me as long to get the hang of this thing as it did to discover that there are no guides over here, no officers, no bureaucrats, no delegates, no committees. Of course there aren’t any restrooms or restaurants either, but I wasn’t expecting those. I was hoping I’d be met, however, and it came as a surprise to discover that there’s nothing social about death: It’s the most solitary condition imaginable.

The first thing you’d like to know, if I’m reading your mind correctly from this distance, is: Who done it? I was in good health. Certainly I drank more than was good for me, but year after year my doctors said that wouldn’t kill me. Every day, including yesterday, just before my death, I went for a twelve-mile hike into the mountains, collecting young specimens of the elusive Cathlin-weed (Datura mcwaltera) for inclusion in the book that looks like it’s going to have to be posthumous, volume two of my avocational Wicked Weeds of the Western World.

There was nothing organically wrong with me. And I had scarcely one white hair among the thousands of scarlet strands that prompted so many of you to write me complimentary notes about my appearance, my fantastic jewelry and eccentric hats as well as my flaming hair. Thank you. It might pain you to learn that we don’t have any appearance over here, not even phantasmagoric—not even smoke, not even, if you’ll forgive me, Scotch mist.

Speaking of which, I’m bound to point out that all of the McWalters of that ilk were notoriously longevous, and I should’ve lived much longer than a mere sixty-nine years. My great-great-way-back, Parlane McWaltir, he of Auchinvennell, in the shadow of Ben Lomond in Dumbarton, the first of our line to leave the ould sod and emigrate to North Ireland in 1609, lived to be almost a hundred, and many of his male descendants, including my grandfather Francie McWalter, of Londonderry, where I was born in 1953, managed to reach the age of at least ninety.

Of course, there were some who met untimely ends: Margaret McWaltir, a Covenanter, was tied to a tidal stake and left to drown in 1685, and Joanna McWalter, my aunt in Londonderry, leapt to her death in the Foyle River.

Could my untimely exit, you’re asking, have been suicide? Not me. Oh, certainly the reception given by critics in the popular press to my last novel, my thirty-second and possibly best book, Lady McBovair, would have depressed any author to the point of self-murder as a substitute for not being able to murder the Times reviewer who called it “watered-down—or McWaltered-down—Flaubert.” But what the hey? as they say; it was both a BOMC and a Literary Guild selection, and it made a mint, which I didn’t need, despite what my first writing teacher said forty years ago—a forgotten novelist named I.: “You’ll never get rich from writing anything.”

Do you think I might have been done in by some person driven mad by envy of my riches? (Even Professor I. himself?) Then why didn’t he or she murder me thirty-five years ago, when my first novel, Geordie Lad, catapulted me to fame? Or when my collection of retellings of Boccaccio, The Ten Ludic Rooms, brought me serious literary recognition as well? The time to have murdered me out of envy or spite would have been right after the appearance of The Long Sleep, my epic psychobiography of Rip Van Winkle, which more than any other volume probably got me my Nobel in 2007.

I wasn’t ready to die, and no one was more shocked by it than I was. But I’ve lived all my life by Murphy’s Law (although he was Irish, not Scot) and to the extent that extinction of one’s life is something gone wrong, it sure went wrong. And yet I had so many things going right for me: that lovely suite of rooms on the top floor of the Moonbeam Hotel, with Jacuzzi and Jenn-Aire, with my own futuristic kitchen where I could whip up one of those chicken dishes that grace the pages of Cathlin’s Quick Chick Cookbook; a dozen absolutely beautiful cats of every color and breed who were contented beyond their wildest expectations by the attention lavished on them by their owner and by Miss McTavish, my maid; and my almost completed research on John Ross, the Cherokee Indian chief (half Scotch) who grew up in these mountains and came to lead his people into exile from them. At the moment of my death, I still had not determined whether Ross would be the subject of my next novel or of my fifth nonfiction book on American Indians. And now he will be neither…unless the IBM people aren’t lying when they brag about their Telemedium.

And I was scheduled to start, this very afternoon, a best-of-seven match with American Grand Master Billy McFarland, who, even as I speak, is down in the lobby crying his little heart out. He would have beaten me, of course, and probably with several of his clever Sicilian Defenses, but just to mate him once would have made the day, the month, the season, for me.

Is he a suspect? Not Billy: He has already convinced the detectives that he was still on his bicycle, pedaling this way but ten miles off, at the moment the death occurred, and they, not even knowing he’s a grand master but taking some account of his age, eleven, have let him go and are concentrating all their brutal “grilling” on poor Timmy McLachlan, my houseboy. That’s stupid. Timmy is…Well, no, it’s stupid to suspect Timmy. I have never denied that I hired him because he reminded me of Geordie McGraw, the model for the hero of Geordie Lad. But now, for heaven’s sake, he’s pushing fourteen and was planning to leave my employ next week.

So who are the suspects? I’m a writer, after all, and I can’t give away endings, and this isn’t the ending. You haven’t heard the last of me. But my devoted readers who are familiar with my memoirs, Louder, Engram! will recall that I spent some years in my early twenties incarcerated in Armagh prison for my part in the Belfast riots of 1976, and that subsequently I was committed to the Ulster Psychiatric Hospital in Coleraine, where I came under the “care” of a Dr. Fomin Bolshakov, a Viennese-trained psychoanalyst whose job apparently was not to “treat” any real mental disorder I might have had but to punish me by giving me a mental disorder. For three years, this Fomin Bolshakov tried everything he could to drive me insane, and in the process he developed an overpowering sexual lust for my body. He was unsuccessful in both. For the rest of my life thereafter, following the daring escape that Geordie McGraw helped me make and that I have truthfully recorded in the otherwise fictional Geordie Lad, I was certain that Fomin Bolshakov was still, literally, out to get me: that he was bent upon finding me and obtaining revenge for my frustrating his efforts and his desires.

I’m not going to tell you, yet, who killed me. But I can say this much: Fomin Bolshakov is actually at large. He is out there, even in the vicinity of the Moonbeam Hotel on its hilltop in Suwanee, North Carolina. In my present condition I no longer need to wear the very dark glasses that I wore all my life because of photodysphoria, and I can see him clearly without them. I could bore you with a long analysis of Fomin’s Bolshakov’s own peculiar mental disorder, a delusion that all “reality” must conform to his own limited concept of what “reality” is, and I could warn you he is out there, waiting for all of you. But I won’t. It would take away what little pleasure you find in your remaining physical inhabitance of that earth.

Please tell those guys to put away that Hammond organ and bring out instead a Steinway grand. For my funeral I want them to play, as you’ll discover when you take the trouble to open my will, the Piano Concerto no. I in B-flat Minor by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

Chapter eighteen

I was mighty proud of you, Kat. It remained to be seen what I. would think of it, but I personally thought you did a splendid job, an inspired job—although I must disclaim any direct influence on your brilliant decision to write the piece as if you were a ghost, a true ghostwriter, ghosting that “Cathlin” on behalf of Ekaterina. Of course I immediately understood that your alias names were allusions to your own: Cathlin being the North Irish form of Ekaterina, McWalter a Scots form of Vladimir, and that middle name, Ursula, as close as you could get to Dadeshkeliani, both deriving from bear. Would I. catch these allusions? You were gambling that he would not. You were distracting him with the multiple allusions to Nabokov to keep him from catching the more subtle allusions to yourself. I was nervous about that “Suwanee, North Carolina.” (There is no such place, although there is a Swannanoa, North Carolina.) Wouldn’t he recall that he’d told you about Florida’s Suwanee River and Tennessee’s Sewanee and wonder about the “coincidence”? You were gambling that he would not.

I was especially pleased with your development of the Scottish angle: I suppose there’s sufficient topographic similarity between the Highlands and Svanetia for you to feel “at home” there in your imagination. My ancestor Glendenning “Mountain Horse” Montross, who emigrated from Scotland to Connecticut and fought in the American Revolution, had been a feuding crony of some of those McWaltirs of Dumbarton. Your research was almost as meticulous as the research that “Cathlin” had been conducting into the life of the Cherokee John Ross (about which, as they say, more later).

And I think I understood why you took the risk of keeping Bolshakov’s actual name, as an afterthought following an unsatisfactory attempt to disguise it as Fomin (which is also Russian, a form of Thomas). Bolshakov himself, with his insistence upon authentication and “reality,” would have disapproved of becoming a fictional character. Would I. wonder how a Russian psychiatrist could come to be practicing in Northern Ireland? You were gambling that he would not.

The only minor correction I would have made to your otherwise flawless piece (your newfound grasp of English astonished even me) was “Cathlin’s” assertion, in the beginning, that “it came as a surprise to discover that there’s nothing social about death: It’s the most solitary condition imaginable.” This isn’t, as I hope you’ll find, strictly true. At the moment of arrival at “the other side,” the lifeless are often overwhelmed to find that everyone is there! I’m reminded of those surprise birthday parties, only with, if you can possibly imagine it, the entire departed population of earth in attendance. The lifeless are free to pick and choose which of those billions they may communicate with, but all of them are there, almost like a multitude of angels dancing on the head of a pin. So death, angel, is unimaginably not solitary but social.

Unlike your classmates, you didn’t have to wait a whole week to find out what your instructor thought of your obituary. The very night after you’d handed it in, he arrived at your door with a drink in one hand and a stack of papers in the other, asking, “Want to have some fun?” and then explaining to you that he had assigned his Narrative class to write their own obituaries, and here were the results, and some of them were pretty darn good, if you’d care to read them. This one. And this one. Here, this guy writes it as if it appeared in a newspaper on Mars. And this lady writes a very short but funny piece from her hometown newspaper as if her wake had been held in a swimming pool. What do you think? Wait, here’s a great one. Read this one. I want to know what you think of this one.

Reading it and pretending, like the very best writers ought to be able to do all the time, that what you’d written had been written by someone else, you couldn’t suppress a giggle or two, particularly over Lady McBovair and Cathlin’s Quick Chick Cookbook. And when you finished it, you felt that sure enough this Cathlin student of his was pretty darn good, certainly better than the others whose obits you’d just read.

“Well?” said I.

“Clever,” you said.

“More than clever,” said I. “Dynamite. Out of this world. The real George.”

“George?” The name grabbed you, but it wasn’t a name.

“State of the art. Something else. Cracking. This is some kind of superfuckingfantastic.”

It was the highest accolade you’d ever had, and you came perilously close to saying, “Thank you.” But all you said was—or, rather, you wrote it on a card—You have some talented students in that class. You must be enjoying them.

“Yeah, but the work load is driving me crazy. I’ve got forty papers to correct and grade for this class, and sixty short stories to read and correct for my other classes. I need to take a break. Want to go to a movie?”

You wrote, Yes. I am not so busy, now. I have finished project. Let us see movie with three X’s.

He read it, and his eyebrows went up. He coughed. “I don’t guess they have those in Russia. Or Georgia. But sure, let’s go find one, if you want.”

Yes, there are certain places in Leningrad (or Saint Petersburg, as it has regained its real name), and even in Tbilisi, where one may watch a pornografeechyesky feelm, but you had never seen one before. Driving you downtown in his Blazer, I. gave you the American synonym, skin flick, and said he hoped you would be ready for it. You strolled together down the street of cinemas, reading triple-X’ed marquees. “Take your pick,” he suggested. “They’re interchangeable. One is as good—or as bad—as the other.” You discovered that The World According to Gwyn was no longer showing at the place where the lady in the booth had suggested you come back with your boyfriend. Now you had your “boyfriend,” but the movie wasn’t there. It was, however, showing at another theater just down the street. Interchangeable. “I don’t like that title,” I. protested. “It reminds me of a guy I would have liked to ‘do in,’ to quote that Cathlin’s obituary, because I was driven mad by envy of his riches.”

But you and I. went to see it. It bore not the slightest resemblance, I. told you afterward, to the novel about one Garp. The actress Gwyn Tiffany (not her real name; she was born Thelma Jean Mankowicz) was a sudden surprise when first you glimpsed her, because of her resemblance to Cathlin McWalter—except that Gwyn’s flames were not the gaudy scarlet of Cathlin’s: rather, a more tasteful shade of sienna ginger. But she wore much jangling jewelry, and dark eyeglasses! At least in the beginning, because it was California and the sun was hot and bright. Soon she took them off. Soon she took everything off. So did some male, the actor Scott Irish (real, but pseud.). You did not understand the role of the male in the plot; perhaps his function was to persuade her to undress. His nakedness was utter: even his dangling qvem, his generative organ, was exposed to full view. You said aloud, “Ot!” which is “Oh” in Svanetian. There was a great contrast of skins: hers light, undulant, soft, flowing, circular, flowerlike; his dark, knobby, hirsute, hard, lumpy, diagonal, animal-like. You were reminded then, and throughout the movie, of the things you do not like about grown men, mature men, developed men: their hairiness, their musculature, their swagger and aggression, even their smell, which you were almost certain you could detect here: the excrement of certain fungi and bacteria that infest only the full-grown man. “Ot!” you could not help saying again as the smelly man put his hand on Gwyn’s head and forced her to her knees, where she was required to devote the next many minutes to the use of her vishkv, which in Svanetian means “face” or “mouth,” or both together, especially her nin, tongue. The eye of the camera, which reminded me in a limited way of the telescopic and microscopic vision we have here in the happy hunting ground, kept zooming in to reveal the wet quiverings of the frenulum and the glans, making them gigantic and scary, like certain mythical toadstools you’d seen only in dreams. Was Gwyn allowed to stop when she had the thing ready for its proper use? She was not: She had to continue, many minutes, until, with the aid of her jugvmard, fist, as well as her vishkv and nin, she caused the toadstool to erupt and spew its spores, which resembled dollops of toothpaste, all over her pretty vishkv. “Ot! Ot!” you cried, not even aware you spoke.

I. must have heard you, however limited his powers. “Want to go?” he asked.

But you could not. You had to sit there the whole eighty minutes, thinking, This is like a recording of dreams, like a peephole into fantasy, but I like my own fantasy and dreams much better. Before it was all over, it had become repetitious, trite, unimaginative, almost boring, and the actresses and actors seemed to view their work as an assignment, a workout, a perfunctory fucky and an insouciant sucky. “Here comes the obligatory lesbian scene,” I. warned you, and a full ten minutes were consumed by another actress, Candi Dare (pseud.), pretending that she had a lust for Gwyn, and employing her nin all over her, and later an artificial penis with rubber glandes at both ends of its yardlong length for mutual male becoming. Ot. The movie was full of props and devices: There were several bananas fondled, peeled, licked, and eaten; several phallicized instruments of different shapes that seemed to have on-off switches and that pulsated; and a string of small balls to be inserted rectally and jerked out. Ot. As the movie progressed, the motions and devices became more and more stilted, synthetic, and desperate, until you were no longer aware of individuals or any pretense at plot, but only of a variety of light and dark lefva, meats, in constant urgent motions that were sometimes aimless, pointless, funless. You stopped saying Ot. Eventually you discovered that you could appreciate the film as a total abstraction, like a nonobjective painting by Kandinsky: thrusting diagonals and oscillating circles, overlapped, underlapped, lap upon lap.

Back at the mansion, you offered I. a nightcap and he offered you his cards and said, “Well, tell me what you thought of it.”

You wrote, There must be a better way to earn a living.

He asked, “For the actors, you mean? But didn’t the movie make you horny?”

“‘Horny’?” You reached for your dictionary.

“You won’t find it in there,” he said. “What I meant was, didn’t it make you want to go to bed?”

Yes, put me to sleep, toward the end, you wrote. I. did something he hadn’t done yet: touched you. He put his hands, his palms, on the sides of your arms, as if to draw you to him. “The movie made me horny,” he said.

You put two fingers up beside your head, horns, and then wrote, Like cokewold? You remembered only the way Chaucer spelled it. Or like bull? Or like points of crescent moon? Or maybe you are impaled on a dilemma.

He read it and made his strangled chuckle. “Not like cuckold,” he said. “Maybe like bull.” He waited to see what you would say next, and when you said nothing, he waited more, and then said, “To be blunt, I want to screw. How do you say ‘screw’ in Svanetian?”

“Tchackrog,” you said, and then you wrote it down: caxrag. You pantomimed the insertion of a corkscrew.

He corrected your pantomime: not a spiral motion, but an in-and-out one, like the urgencies of the movie. Then he asked, “How do you say ‘fuck’ in Svanetian?”

You wrote: It depends on who is doing to whom, bull to cow, man to woman, man to man, man to cow, man to himself. Different word each situation. Basic root is čoš-. I pronounce it for you. “Chosh,” you said, forming your beautiful lips carefully.

Again he put his hands on your arms. “Let’s me and you chosh.”

“In Svanetia, one never does ‘chosh’ without having known each other for at least two months.” This was a fabrication of yours, Kat, an improvisation; it’s not true at all. But how else to handle him?

“Really?” he said. “I’ll remember that, then.” He consulted his wristwatch, which had a calendar but badly needed cleaning. “On March eighteenth, I’m going to chosh you out of your eyeballs.”

Chapter nineteen

That remained to be seen. When that March with its sweet showers had rolled around, as we shall see, I. had given up horning after you. He had fallen in love with someone else, we might say, and had left you alone…or left you to Kenny.

At the beginning of the third class in narrative techniques, the professor, who uncustomarily was wearing a necktie, returned the obituaries to their authors. Written in red on a sheet attached to yours (Cathlin’s) was the letter grade A+ and this note: I am mightily impressed with this. It is the only obit in class written in the first rather than the third person, an achievement of singular inventiveness. It is also the only obit with a true narrative thread of suspense. It is one of the few obits with good humor and an attempt to observe my guidelines re exaggeration, extravagance, outrage and offense. To whatever extent it is “real,” i.e., based upon your own life, you are a marvelous person and I am dying to get to know you better, even if you call me “a forgotten novelist.” Ha ha! But you will get rich if you continue to develop the talent you show here. What would you like to write next? Do you really know about John Ross the Cherokee? I once thought of doing a novel on him myself. Let’s get together for a chat after class, shall we? But meanwhile, do you mind if I read this obit to the class? If you don’t mind, hold up your hand momentarily after you’ve read this note.

And from his vantage at the head of the Scottish Room, he kept throwing glances toward the rear of the room, where you were slumped in embarrassment in your seat. You didn’t want him to read your work to the class. Proud as you were of it (proud as I and I. were of it), you hadn’t written it with this audience in mind, and you didn’t want them hearing him read it aloud. So you did not hold up your hand, and after a while he gave up waiting for it, although he continued glancing at you, as if to assure himself that you actually existed. He read other obits, commenting upon their shortcomings and their good points. He analyzed in detail the work of the lady whose wake was held in her swimming pool. You sat half listening, wondering how you could get out of any after-class meeting he had in mind for you.

He began to discourse about, or against, autobiographical fiction, telling the class that now that they had their obituaries out of the way they could start to ignore themselves. Stories about oneself are doomed, he said, not because of lack of objectivity nor because of their egotism but because art must always transmute “reality,” and the reality of one’s own self is the hardest to transmute.

“Allow me,” he said, “to read you a poem. Not mine. A colleague’s, and you may have heard it or read it before. Don’t stop me if you’ve heard it. The title is, ‘My Penis.’” Without embarrassment I. proceeded to read the forty lines that describe, in infinite lyrical detail, the configurations, the associations, the sensibilities, the impressions, the history, and the uses of the poet’s personal qvens, the organ whose Svanetian word, in one of those coincidental transpositions wherein mama means “father” and deda means “mother” in Georgian, is closer to the English female quim. It was a good poem. Too good. “Now, if that had been my own poem,” I. said, “you’d think me a dreadful exhibitionist, a flasher. It’s a marvelous example of the so-called confessional school of frankly self-obsessed poetry. Is it art?”

I. began to stroke his necktie, and you began to guess why he had worn it, that broad regimental-striped silk foulard that was, as far as you knew, the only necktie in his closet. “Now consider this,” he said, fondling his necktie and presenting it. “See how long it is. See how it hangs down. Notice the swelling down here. Look at the brilliant stripes all over! See how the knot expands at the top and clinches it. If men are advertising their pricks with their neckties, the double-Windsor knot must be a big pair of balls, right?

“The question is: Which would you rather look at and believe in, this necktie or”—he suddenly unzipped his trousers and thrust his hand inside.

“Ot!” you cried out, but your Svanetian was drowned amid the gasps and exclamations of others.

But I. did not expose himself. He had made his point, and he zipped himself up and said, “I want you folks to write some gorgeous neckties and leave your pricks in your pants.”

Thus it was that you spent the rest of the class period secretly practicing Cathlin’s handwriting, to make it as unlike your own as possible, so that, after class when the professor caught up with you outside the Cathedral of Learning despite your hurried footsteps, you could stand there beneath the glare of the street lamp and hand him a card, not one of his blank three-by-five whites but one of your own lined pink ones, already inscribed: I am only a necktie. You do not want to see my prick. He was standing closer to you than you’d ever expected him to be, and while you knew that the combination of the floppy hat and the dark glasses was shielding you from his identification, you began to wonder if possibly you smelled like Ekaterina.

“I hope this doesn’t mean you’re a transvestite in drag,” he said.

You did not know those words, but you had another card ready for him: Thank you so much for the kind things you said about my obituary, but I think you and I should be teacher and devoted pupil, not pals.

“But, pal, we have so many interests in common!” he said. “Did you know I’m part Scotch-Irish myself! And I’m crazy about that Tchaikovsky first piano concerto.”

You did not have a card ready for that one, and you had to write it down, using your books as a desk, there beneath the street lamp. Can you hear music?

“Listen,” he said, “you don’t have to write down everything. Sure, I can hear music, and I can probably hear your voice. Try me.”

But of course you could not. You could not hear me, you wrote, because in addition to my photodysphoria and hebephilia I also have speech defect.

“Hebephilia?” he said. “What is that? Did you mention it in your obituary?”

I alluded to it, you wrote.

“Speaking of allusions,” he said. “Talk about allusions. In your obituary, those allusions to Nabokov really killed me. Nabokov, I should tell you, is one of my very favorite writers, but so few of your classmates have read him.”

You wrote, I have not read him myself, but I know of him.

“Who have you read?” he asked. You hesitated. Whom, indeed, had you read? You started to mention Gogol and Dostoyevski and Turgenev, but decided against it. Fortunately, he took your hesitation to mean that you were exasperated to be standing here under the street lamp on a cold winter night talking about literature, and he said, “Say, there’s a nice little pub down the street there, called Tiffany’s. Do you know it? Could we have one drink together as teacher and devoted pupil without becoming pals?”

So you stopped off, farther along the avenue, at the bar at Tiffany’s, the only oasis between the campus and the mansion. It was rather posh, a quiet, dimly lighted lounge, and he was poorly dressed and you were overdressed, his trench coat threadbare and soiled, even if he was wearing a necktie, and your coat (borrowed from Loretta) a fluffy, shaggy thing that belonged to some flightier era. You wanted vodka but had to be careful not to give anything away, so you had Scotch instead and found it not at all undrinkable.

You discussed many things over more than one drink. Several drinks. I. chain-smoked his Pall Malls but you had decided, in order to distinguish Cathlin from Ekaterina, that Cathlin would not be a smoker. It took much willpower for her, for you, to do this.

I. started off by observing that the light in Tiffany’s was awfully dim, so why couldn’t you take off those dark shades? Because, you said (or wrote), your photodysphoria, extreme light sensitivity, was really terrible. In fact, it was the reason you had come to this city, to be treated for the condition at the university’s medical center, whose chief of ophthalmology, Dr. Morris Heflin, was doing his best for you. For old Inquisitor’s benefit, and in answer to his several questions, you began to assemble the details of Cathlin’s current situation in life: You worked days as a typist in the payroll office of one of the steel manufacturers. In the eighth form of school, back home in Ulster, you had begun to manifest the symptoms of hebephilia, which, along with the speech and vision disorders, had led you to leave Ulster and come to America. You were also under the care of Dr. Horace Mifflin, specialist in personality disorders at the Western Psychiatric Institute. The depth and extent of poor Cathlin’s afflictions brought empathetic tears to your eyes, and your sunglasses couldn’t conceal them as they rolled down your cheeks, and you concluded a card, I am a crazy mixed-up kid.

I. laid one of his hands on top of yours and said, “But a potentially brilliant and successful writer.” He skipped just a beat before his next question, which caught you by surprise: “Was there really a Bolshakov?”

Yes, there is really a Bolshakov.

“Then perhaps you ought to write, for me, for the course, about the story of your experience with Bolshakov.”

But you insist we write neckties, not penises.

“Wasn’t Bolshakov a prick?”

You laughed. It was the first time since coming to America and escaping from that prick that poor Cathlin had really experienced a good, resounding laugh. Oh, Ekaterina had shared a good laugh or two with Kenny, and with Dalrymple, her boss, and even with I., but Cathlin, who was destined to become, if her own predictions and Instructor’s came true, one of America’s wittiest writers, had not yet had a good laugh on these shores. It was almost like having her first orgasm, and laughter is, after all, a close cousin to climax.

And such was the relaxation and release of the laughter that your guard was down when the old Inveigler said, “Why don’t we stroll over to my apartment and talk about chess and Cherokees and Tchaikovsky? Without becoming pals, of course.”

You went, challenged by the task of pretending you’d never been there before, challenged by being that close to your own room and having to think of it as a place remote from you, and challenged by something else too, although you could not quite formulate the words or even the thought for it—but I can do that for you: Ekaterina was passionately enamored of faunlets and almost constitutionally incapable of feeling desire for a grown man, but might not Cathlin possess the “psychological distance” requisite to such desire? You were curious. And curiosity, as I. or I could have told you, is the supreme faculty of the creative artist. When curiosity flourishes, worlds can be changed.

On the way upstairs, Kenny spotted you but looked at you only long enough to convince himself that you were some bimbo that Professor I. was bringing home with him. You were glad that Loretta hadn’t seen you; she might have recognized her clothes and jewelry. In I.’s room, you looked at his accommodations as if you were seeing them for the first time: the mirrors, the tall windows, even the murphybed, an interesting contraption. On his windowsill, in a Burpee Seed-N-Start container, he was sprouting twelve tomato seedlings, and, remembering that Cathlin was interested in weeds, you dutifully sniffed them. He tried to get you to take off your huge hat, but you couldn’t, and you insisted that he leave the room’s illumination as dark as possible: just one reading lamp on, nothing else.

“I’d like to show you my novels,” he said, “but I’ve loaned all of them to my next-door neighbor.” His face lit up with a thought. “You’d like Ekaterina. She’s about your age and has some interests in common: ghosts, and chess, and Indians. She’s a European too. Comes from Svanetia, in Soviet Georgia. Why don’t I pop next door and ask her if she’d like to meet you? She’s read your obituary.”

You didn’t like the thought of his having shown your obituary to his neighbor. And you didn’t like the thought of some woman as his next-door neighbor. You wrote: Is she single? Is she attractive? And you lifted an eyebrow while he read it. “Yes, she’s alone, and she’s quite beautiful, but I’m not having a relationship with her or anything like that. I’ll be right back.” He was gone three minutes, knocking next door longer than he needed to, in order to bring the woman out of her shower or her bed or her trance or whatever she was in. She was not in. “I guess she’s working late,” he said. “She teaches botany at the university. Are you really interested in weeds?”

Not especially, you wrote. But I needed to give myself in the obituary an avocation. Didn’t Nabokov chase butterflies?

“I can’t believe you haven’t read anything of his,” I. said. He scanned his bookshelves and fetched a paperback for you. “As I say, Ekaterina has all my novels, but I can loan you this. You must read it.” It was Pale Fire, and I. gave you a précis of it: a professor named Kinbote who thinks he is the exiled king of Zembla comes to extensively annotate a long poem, “Pale Fire,” by his colleague John Shade, who was mistakenly murdered by an assassin out to get Kinbote, whose annotations of the poem become the story of himself. “The main reason I was hoping Ekaterina would be in was so I could borrow a cup of Cutty Sark from her. I’ve only got bourbon. Can you drink bourbon?”

You could, and he certainly could, and the two of you proceeded to get pickled. You told yourself to be careful; you wanted enough to relax your inhibitions, to make you amenable to things your sober self wouldn’t want, but you didn’t want enough to let you do something you’d be sorry for tomorrow or something that might give away your disguise.

I. apparently had no restraints, and he threw back a snootful. After a while, he got up and staggered next door again to pound on Ekaterina’s door, and he staggered back to say, “Maybe she’sh gone out on a date.” Then he sat down beside you on the sofa (where Knox had died) and said, “Y’know, I t’ink I like you a lot better’n her anyhow.” When he was not sober, I. pronounced “I” as “Ah,” so for the rest of this evening, and whenever he’s drunk, I think that I shall call him that instead.

Ah began to sing. In the same vibrant bass voice that he had sung his “Svani Ribber” for Ekaterina, which she and you would have considered abominable had you realized how off-key it was, but which you considered operatic because you didn’t know the key, he began singing this: “Oh, Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling. From glen to glen, and down the mountainside…

“The summer’s gone, and all the roses fall-ll-ling.

It’s you, it’s you must go, and I must bide…”

Even off-key, it was lovely, beautiful (even my own exquisite sense of pitch was not offended, since the words are addressed to one Danny, and I, after all, am Dan), and after the first stanza, he interjected, “Don’tcha know it? Ah wish you washn’t mute and could sing it along wif me.” And he resumed singing,

“But come ye back, when summer’s in the meadow,

Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow.

It’s I’ll be here…”

But he faltered then and asked, “What comes next? How does the resht of that line go?” and handed you your pen and one of his cards.

But you did not know what to write. Making Cathlin into a very good Scotch-Irish lass who would know not only the tune of “The Londonderry Air” but all the words to “Danny Boy” was going to take you a while. All you could write was: I am too drunk to remember.

“Really? Well.” Ah moved closer to you on the sofa, draping one arm over the back of the sofa as if to embrace you. You got yourself ready for the touch of his arm on your shoulders. Preparing the nerve ends of your shoulders, you were caught by surprise when his touch came not there but on your bare knee. He put his other hand on your other knee and then began to slide it up your thigh.

“Ot!” you exclaimed.

“Say! You aren’t mute,” he observed. He removed his hand and looked at it. “Ish my hand hot? Did you say hot’?”

You nodded your head.

“Ah wish you could take off those glasshes, so’s I could see your purty ahs. Couldja maybe closh your ahs tight and then take ’em off!”

You shook your head.

He lifted his glass, bourbon and branch on the rocks, and after draining it, he held the glass with its cubes in his hand for a while, then said, “Now my hand’s not hot.” And he slid the hand up your thigh again, almost to your bud.

“Ot!” you said.

“No, it’s not,” he protested. “It’s cold. “Why’re ya sayin ‘hot’?”

You took card and pen and wrote: Excuse. I am not uttering “hot.” I am vocalizing “och,” which is Scottish expression of surprise.

Ah stared at you, long and lovingly, and then he declared, “You fashcinate me, y’know it? And y’know, you’d be a ravishing creature without all that makeup and that getup. That hat and hair and dressh and jewelry and sunglasshes.” You drew back from him as if he’d insulted you. “I mean, really,” he tried to elaborate, “didn’t anybody ever tell you that you’re sort of too much?”

Identifying so completely with the poor mixed-up kid that Cathlin was, you felt humiliated. Cathlin couldn’t be blamed for her honest attempt to express her personality through her attire, and it certainly wasn’t her fault that the photodysphoria required her to wear the sunglasses. You took a fresh card, and you spent a while with it, scribbling furiously on both sides, and then you stood up from the sofa and thrust the card at him. No, nobody ever told me that. And you are very rude to do so. Do I tell you that you dress shabbily and haven’t bathed recently and you don’t even comb your oily hair? No, but it’s true. And you smoke too much, and drink too much, and your breath reeks. I hope this isn’t going to affect my grade in your course, but I wanted very much to talk to you about Bolshakov and a novel I want to write, and all you’ve got on your mind is your prick. You’ve hurt my feelings. Good night.

Then you grabbed your coat and the paperback of Pale Fire he’d lent you, and you stormed out.

Ah made only a feeble, drunken effort to follow you, to stop you, to apologize, to get you back. Probably he was still sober enough to realize that you’d have to walk home alone in the dark, wherever you lived, and he ought to offer to accompany you. But you fled from the mansion and gained the street before it dawned on you that you did not know where Cathlin lived. And this time of night, you weren’t about to walk all the way to your office to change out of your costume.

You waited in the dark street for a time, casting an occasional glance upward at the windows of Ah’s room, hoping his lights would go out and he’d go to bed, but knowing that he wouldn’t. Finally you let yourself back into the mansion very quietly and went up to your apartment and quietly entered and removed your costume and your makeup and went to murphybed.

Chapter twenty

February was your busiest month ever. In addition to giving and grading quizzes for each of your classes, attending departmental meetings, and finding yourself elected to the chairman’s advisory committee, which would consume large chunks of your free time, you actually began, without quite knowing it yourself, the long story that would become Cathlin’s first novel, Geordie Lad. What started as merely an attempt to fulfill one of Professor Ah’s peculiar assignments—“Observe and describe a place, and through description of the place alone attempt to evoke the person(s) whose place it is”—became Chapter One of the novel because the place you chose to describe, from memory more than invention, was Dr. Bolshakov’s office in the Serbsky Institute. Without any mention at all of the man himself, except to note and translate the diplomas on the wall, you began spinning a web of depiction all around him, so that the reader already knows him before first meeting him.

But it was a chore. You did most of the writing not in your office but in your apartment; the meager accoutrements and auras of your office would have spoiled your vision of the office of Bolshakov. Thus the questions of Kenny and I. were not Where have you been all day? and Where’ve you been keeping yourself? but rather When can you come out and play? and Are you doing anything in there that I could help you with? You were not able to find much time for them. You could pretend, to Ah, that you were indeed a bit miffed over his relationship with this red-headed student of his: he had clearly tried to make you jealous in his full “report” on the visit of Cathlin to his apartment, embellishing the truth of what had happened that night. He claimed that he and Cathlin had sung a duet of “Danny Boy,” and that she trilled her R’s thrillingly. He claimed that Cathlin had spent the night with him. “Well, since you can’t ‘chosh,’” he said, “it was either her or Edith Koeppe. I’m a horny man.”

For Valentine’s Day, I. gave Cathlin a copy of the hardback (not a first edition) of Nabokov’s Lolita. But he also gave you, for Valentine’s Day, the same thing. Thus you had two copies, and you managed eventually to read one of them, the only novel you finished while in this city.

Although you could avoid I. because he was “two-timing” you with Cathlin, you had no pretense or excuse to offer to Kenny other than “work.” Kenny had been all too eager to let you know, in case you didn’t, that Professor Ah had brought “some dishy broad” up to his room, and Kenny wondered how you liked that. You told Kenny that I. wasn’t your boyfriend. “You are my boyfriend,” you told him, and he blushed and screwed up his face, and said, Well, if you were his girlfriend then you ought to “make time with” him.

“Soon I will make time with you,” you promised.

One of your greatest problems with the chapter was describing Bolshakov’s dolls truthfully. He had a large collection of matryoshka dolls, the peculiarly Russian playthings made of hollow wooden shells, one doll inside another, like Chinese boxes, ever smaller. Some of his matryoshki were quite large and made of exotic woods; some of them were cheap lacquered lathe turnings. All of them had in common that the outer doll, the one containing all the others, was a man, shaped somewhat like a bowling pin; inside him was a woman wearing a babushka, round spots of rouge painted on her face (the source, you suddenly realized, of Cathlin’s overdone makeup); inside the woman, yet another doll, a lad of not-yet-puberty; and inside of him was the smallest, most reducible of the dolls, a little girl.

Bolshakov had used the dolls didactically, to illustrate his theory that males have females inside themselves, and that females have males inside themselves, and that grown-ups have children inside themselves, and that you, Yekaterina Vladimirovna, have inside yourself both a little boy wanting to be seduced by an older woman and a little girl wanting to grow up and acquire a penis.

Contrarily, you had seen Bolshakov’s dolls as a manifestation of his problems with “reality”: For him, your external personality was only a disguise, an outer shell covering up an inner self that was not your own but a creature of his invention.

Your big problem, now, for Cathlin’s chapter, was whether or not to prop the dolls hither and thither around Dr. Bolshakov’s office. If you stressed the Russianness of Bolshakov’s dolls and explained their historical significance, mightn’t you make the reader (I.) suspicious that Cathlin might actually be Ekaterina? You tried to find out if there were a Scottish or Irish equivalent of the matryoshka, but a thorough search in Hillman Library failed to uncover any. It was too late to change Bolshakov’s name, but you considered Anglicizing (or Scotticizing) his first name and patronymic, which were Vasili Timofeyevich, into something—William T., perhaps calling him Wullie, a Scottish diminutive of William. But finally, late one night with the help of a large quantity of vodka and some Tchaikovsky coming from WQED (and from me), you convinced yourself to leave Bolshakov’s names as they were and to let him keep his dolls-within-dolls, although you did not call them matryoshki, and to have certificates on the walls licensing a man of Russian origin and Viennese training to practice psychiatry in Ulster. You finished a brilliant first chapter without any human characters, just objects in a room.

That was when you discovered that a good novelist, finishing a good day’s work, often feels not only elated but horny.

There was a timid knock at your door. Not like Bolshakov’s. Not like Ogden’s. Not like Ah’s.

Chapter twenty-one

“Come in, Kenny,” you called quietly, because on both sides of you there were professors grading papers or gone to murphybed. You turned down the volume on WQED.

“How did you know it was me?” he asked, coming into the room. He was in his plaid bathrobe, it covering his pajamas.

“I wanted it to be you,” you said.

“Huh?” he said.

“In Svanetia, there is superstition, tval, that if you want something and call it by name before it appears, it will appear as you called it. Please sit.”

He sat on your sofa. “Teach me how to talk Svanetian,” he requested.

“This late at night?” you said. “I love to, but it would take many lessons.” You were thinking of how Knox Ogden taught you English.

He sniffed the air, your breath. “Have you been drinking a lot?”

“Some,” you admitted. “How can you work and drink at the same time?”

“Drinking helps me think,” you said. “You should try it sometime.”

He made a face. “No, thanks,” he said. “But I could sure use a cigarette.” You gave him your pack, took one for yourself. He gallantly lit yours for you, after only two attempts at igniting a book match. “Mom and Dad are both fried. I could be gone all night and they wouldn’t know it.”

“Be gone all night,” you echoed, suggested.

He studied you, to make sure your repetition wasn’t a mockery. “Are you working hard again?”

You lifted the stack of pages, flourishingly handwritten in Georgian and yet to be translated into English, that would constitute Chapter One of Geordie Lad. “I am done,” you announced.

“Well, that’s good,” he said. “We could play chess or something.”

“Or something,” you said.

“Or you could, like, teach me a few words of Svanetian.”

“You point at something, I give you the word,” you offered. He pointed at your dining table. “Table? Tabog. Say it.” He tried to say it, then pointed at a chair. “Chair? Skom.” He pointed at himself. “Boy. Nafvzhur.” It took him two tries to pronounce it, then he pointed at you. “Girl or woman? Dina or Zurail.” He spoke the first, but moved his pointing finger closer, almost touching your breast. “This? My lisv.” You touched it and smiled and told him, “In Svani, the word for breast is very like the word for ‘to dance,’ lisvbi, perhaps because”—you stood and held out your arms as if to dance, and I arranged for WQED to be playing something slow and soft and shuffling, and he eagerly stood and put out his cigarette and came into your embrace—“because we dance breast to breast, see?” It was not exactly breast to breast: His breast mashed against your stomach, yours against his chin. Kenny did not know how to dance, and neither did you, but you took enough slow drifting dance steps around the room, tightly in each other’s arms, to illustrate the relation of lisv and lisvbi, and to have all the excuse you needed, for the first time since Knox died, to hug, and this embrace, just as it did that time, began to straighten and stiffen his qvem, and if he could feel your breast mashing against his cheek you could feel his qvem mashing against your thigh.

He tried to whisper, and it made his cracking voice drop a register. “How do you say ‘kiss’?”

You honestly did not yet know the word in English. “Point at one,” you requested. “Or touch one.” He touched your lips. “Face? Mouth? Vishkv?” He touched his own lips, then transferred the fingertips to your lips. “Oh, patchy!” you said, in a transliteration of the Svanetian child-language word pači. “Kiss-kiss.”

“Let’s patchy,” his cracked voice croaked. You puckered and gave him a little peck on his mouth. Quick and light as it was, it was enough to turn your knees to jelly, and you had to let go of him and fall on the sofa. He stood over you, his face warped into an expression of disappointment. “That’s the way they kiss in Svanetia?” he demanded. He dropped down to sit beside you.

“They who?” you said. “Babies patchy. Little boys and girls patchy. Men and women lickwhál.”

“Then let’s lickwhál,” he hoarsely whispered.

You showed him how they do it in Svanetia, men and women, or nineteen-year-old girls with boys of eleven in the top of the abandoned towers, which was your only Svanetian experience with it. You and Islamber had stood beside the embrasure looking out over the valley of the Ingur. You and Kenny sat side by side on the sofa with your arms awkwardly shifting for a comfortable embrace. You and Islamber had eventually wound up on the stone floor. You and Kenny would wind up in your murphybed, where anything that can go wrong will go wrong. But nothing would, except in the sense that it may be very wrong for a twenty-seven-year-old woman to sleep with a twelve-year-old boy.

A patchy is quick and light; lickwhál goes on and on, and involves all parts of the vishkv, inside and out, especially the nin. Kenny had kissed girls before but never touched tongues with them, let alone entwined tongues, wrestled tongues. Boys this age can do this sort of thing for only a short time before becoming uncomfortable. It was he who broke the lickwhál with an exaggerated panting as if he’d run a verst. In his lap some fruiting body had pitched its tent, which peaked beneath his robe. “I know one,” he said, thinking to tell you something that would lighten the heaviness of the lickwhál, like coffee after a liqueur. “It goes, What’s dry and hard when I put it in, but soft and sticky when I pull it out?”

You stared at him for a while before asking, “Is this another riddle?”

He nodded, and smirked, and waited. You thought. After a suitable time, you announced, “I give up.”

“Chewing gum!” he cried, and roared with laughter.

“Chvotirk!” you hushed him. “Shh! You’ll wake Dr. Koeppe.”

“Aw, she never sleeps,” he declared.

“How do you know? Have you been in her murphybed?” You nudged him with your elbow.

“What if I have?” he said.

“So you are not…a virgin?” you said, teasing, not believing that he had ever slept with anyone, and certainly not wanting to believe it.

“Nope,” he said, proudly.

You hoped he was kidding. You would not be able to bear it if he was not kidding. “Truth?” you said. “Did you put it in dry and hard and bring it out soft and sticky?” And you laughed, nervously, though not loud enough to be heard beyond the confines of the sofa.

His face grew thoughtful, and he decided to stop kidding. “No,” he admitted. “I can’t even, like, imagine, like, what it’s like. Did you?”

“I have nothing dry and hard,” you said.

“Aw, shoot, you know what I mean. Did you ever ‘chosh’?”

You stared at him, and your mouth fell open. “Kenny! I did not teach you that word! Where did you learn it?” He hung his reddening head and wouldn’t let you see his eyes. You wondered if he had been talking to I. Or maybe he’d just been listening outside your door, which is what you asked him, giving him a way out: “Have you been putting your ear to my door?”

“Yeah,” he gladly confessed. “That’s it. I was just, like, getting ready to knock one time when you were talking to Professor I.”

“Bad boy!” you said, feigning a severe reprimand. “Snoop! You said you would never snoop. I ought to spank you.”

“So spank me,” he requested.

Laughing, you grabbed him and turned him face down over your lap. You pulled up his robe and tugged down the bottoms of his pajamas, exposing his samt’rock, buttocks, the sight of which made you abruptly all moist in your groin. You began to give his buttocks mild slaps with your hand, not hurting him at all. His qvem was extending down between your knees, and by closing your thighs you could squeeze it as you spanked him. He was making murmurs and groans and occasionally speaking the name of Jesus. You stopped and said, “Okay. Enough. You can sit up,” and you hoped that when he sat up he would not reclothe himself.

“Don’t stop,” he said. “That feels way rad.”

But you could not strike your hand against his buttocks again. You could only rub your hand over them, slowly, with much love, all over, allowing your fingertips to wander to the wonderful place beneath his scrotum and even to touch the small, hairless, crinkly balls.

Abruptly he sat up, but he did not pull up his pajamas. He sat there studying his qvem, which was exposed to your full view for the first time. It was longer than Islamber’s, but not as thick or erect as Dzhordzha’s. It was a tower of Svanetia, a mushroom of the forest, but it was made of human flesh. And it was very hard, but not quite dry: A dewdrop glistened on its tip. Kenny stopped studying it and began to study your face, which must have been in some kind of trance. “Do you want to hold it?” he asked you in his hoarse whisper.

“How long have I known you?” you asked him.

He thought. “Over two months,” he said, breathing hard. “Why?”

“Is enough,” you said, and reached a hand over and wrapped your fingers around his qvem. His whole body shuddered. His pelvis jerked upward, and he gripped the sofa cushions tightly in both fists and clenched shut his eyes, and a great gasp came out of him just an instant before his dwvis exploded out of him, shooting onto the floor, the sofa, his legs, your hand.

When the last gush had subsided, he sighed, “Nobody ever held me before. Except me, I mean. I guess it was, like, just too much.”

Dzhordzha, the first time, had lasted only a little longer and had, you recalled fondly, been ready again within minutes. “Do not worry,” you said. “It will now be soft and sticky.” You laughed. “But soon will be hard again. And”—you drew your nin over your lips—“and I will lick it dry.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Kenny said again.

Chapter twenty-two

Kenny stayed all night. Of course there was penetration, eventually, and more than once, but that was not your goal, just as your goal was not the orgasm that you failed to have. What mattered most was not consummation but recreation: a good time of exploration and discovery, of experiment and play, greatly enhanced by the multitude of reflections in the mirrors on the walls. For you the very best phase of it all, as you had tried unsuccessfully to explain to unbelieving Bolshakov, was not the actual sequence of coital wrenchings and plungings, which any animal can do, but rather the explorative quests of eyes, fingers, hands, tongues, an abandonment to the wonder of discovery, a marvelous sexual hide-and-seek in which the seeking is always more fun than the finding. You became Kenny. As you would learn to become your readers, as you had already become your readers in the opening of Geordie Lad, you wanted the slow, playful reconnaissance of the room to be more important than the inhabitance of the room. “You cannot believe in real fucking,” boorish Bolshakov had said to you in Russian. “You can only contrive infinite fanciful foreplays.” You had attempted a retort: that one never gets pregnant from such; and you had to explain to Kenny, this night, answering his fears, that it was unlikely you would bear his baby because the moon’s stage of ripening was not yet. “Do not worry about it,” you whispered to him. “I can take all of your dwvis inside me, in my vishkv as well as through my bud, and it will not tonight make me liffnavy. But we must get you some balloons to wear on your qvem for the next time, so that I do not become liffnavy.”

And sure enough, Kenny snitched some balloons the next time he came to spend the night. Where had he snitched them from? you asked. From his father? No, somewhere else, he said; his father couldn’t even “get it up” anymore. How did Kenny know? Did Kenny snoop on his father and mother? No, his mother had told him. Did he and his mother talk a lot about such things? Sometimes. He wasn’t going to tell his mother about this? Of course not. Never. What did you take him for? Did you think he didn’t know from nothing? “Do you think I’m a mushroom?” he demanded.

“Yes,” you said.

“I mean, like, no, that’s not what I mean. A mushroom is a nerd, a goofus, who doesn’t know jack shit. I may not be a rocket scientist but I’ve got sense enough not to rat to my mom and dad.”

The balloons, a brand named after an Egyptian pharaoh, didn’t fit Kenny; they were too large for his qvem, and they easily slipped off afterward; so you had to be careful, especially when the moon’s stages were very ripe, not to let any of the dwvis spill before he could withdraw.

When he came to you one night, one of the many nights that he was certain his parents were bombed into such deep slumber they would never notice him missing, he had a package of a whole dozen of the pharaonic balloons, and you demanded to know where he had been snitching them. “From a drugstore, of course,” he said, and you told him that stealing was bad and he ought to let you give him some money to pay for them.

But Kenny continued to steal from the drugstore, not only the balloons but candy and, eventually, items he did not need, women’s things, useless medicines, greeting cards for occasions he would never have for greeting.

One night when Kenny was with you, a graduate student on the third floor was holding a party that was becoming increasingly noisy and drunken, with loud music from open doors and drunks wandering down to the second floor, and Kenny got up and dressed and said, “I guess I got to go do something about it.” That was only the first of many occasions when Kenny would have to leave your murphybed to handle his duties as “super.”

Another time, you and Kenny were just drifting off to exhausted slumber together when you smelled something burning. It smelled like—the only resemblance you could recall was from an incident at Ishimbay—like human hair burning. Kenny went to investigate, and he returned to ask you to go with him, as he had when he went to find dead Ogden, and you followed him down the hall to Edith Koeppe’s door, which he opened with one of his keys. She was sprawled out in a drunken stupor up against the wall’s built-in gas heater, her hair and one side of her face badly burned, but she was alive, although unconscious. Kenny phoned for an ambulance, and Dr. Koeppe spent several days in the hospital.

“This is a terrible town,” I. said to you once, over drinks in his room, and waved a stack of student stories. “These kids write endlessly about this city’s murders, divorces, muggings, rapes, child deaths, wife beatings, suicides, infidelities, betrayals, and endless dope addictions. The only student who doesn’t write about this city is Cathlin, and she writes about killings in North Ireland and a psychopathic psychoanalyst.”

Kenny couldn’t stand having you talk to I., but he always seemed to know when I. was in your room, and he would interrupt rudely. As if his stealing and increased truancy from school weren’t sufficient manifestations of his becoming what Knox Ogden had called a “punk,” Kenny began to act increasingly tough, coarse mouthed, and mean, and his manner toward I. became as hostile as it had been toward Knox Ogden. You experienced an uncomfortable déjà vu: Here was your next-door neighbor drinking too much, coughing too much, almost on the verge of whatever terminal debility had required Knox to cancel his remaining classes the previous term (I. insisted he didn’t have cirrhosis but admitted to “some problems with pancreatitis”), and here was Kenny openly hostile toward him. You did not see I. all that much—not as Ekaterina; you saw him more often as Cathlin—but you had to be very careful when you saw him that Kenny not discover you, because Kenny would become furiously jealous if he did. “I wish the old fart would hurry up and die off, like Ogden did,” Kenny blurted.

“Kenny!” you replied.

One day Kenny brought home a stack of pamphlets from somewhere, and giving you the first one and telling you to be sure and read it, he went from door to door throughout the mansion, slipping one of the pamphlets under every door. It was entitled 20 Questions for Alcoholism, and it began, If you can answer ‘yes’ to half of the following questions, you should seriously consider joining Alcoholics Anonymous. The questions each had drink as their verb, and out of curiosity you decided to score yourself on them: Do you ever crave to drink at a definite time daily? (No.) Do you feel under tension much of the time while not drinking? (No.) Do you need to drink the next morning? (No.) Of the twenty questions, the only ones which you answered positively were Do you drink to escape from worries or troubles? and Are you at times possessed with unreasonable fears?

At the end of each pamphlet was scrawled in pencil, If you scored more than 10 yes’s, please see me for free book, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions. Kenneth Elmore, Jr., Superintendent. Half-jokingly, the next time you saw Ah, you asked him if he’d taken the test and what his score was. Seventeen, he said; you? Two, you said. Good girl, he said. After a week, Kenny admitted that only one person in the building had asked for a copy of the book, and “it sure wasn’t that asshole who lives in the next room.” But he gave you a copy of the book and asked you to make sure the asshole read it.

Late one night, when Kenny was “staying over,” you had a bad scare when you answered a knock at your door and there was Loretta, who was supposed to be bombed. She was somewhat drunk, and half-asleep, but lucid enough to ask if you had seen Kenny, who had crawled under your murphybed. You feigned drunkenness and sleepiness and said you hadn’t seen him since “before murphybedtime.” Loretta apologized for waking you and declared, “Well, that brat’s probably taken up running around with street gangs.”

Kenny did not take up running around with street gangs, but his tendency to juvenile delinquency escalated from his shoplifting the drug-store and supermarket to the cultivation of a new hobby: amassing a considerable collection of automobile hubcaps. His room was filled with the ones he couldn’t sell, and his complaining mother was told that he’d found them in the street, which was partly true.

If, sweet Kat, you were inclined to blame yourself for his descent into delinquency, truancy, and punkdom (and there is a small but substantial body of recorded cases of such effects of older women’s seductions of youths), you did not consider that his premature assumption of a full sexual life was what corrupted him. You thought, rather, that he had been corrupted because you were not able to accept, and had thus declined, his proposal of marriage.

Kenny had made a mistake in falling in love with you and proposing marriage. He never used the word love, but he began to exhibit all the symptoms. Falling in love wasn’t so bad—both Islamber and Dzhordzha had professed the same condition, liltuneh for Islamber, vlyubeetsya for Dzhordzha—but Kenny had become obsessed with making you into Mrs. Elmore, Jr. You had laughed when he first brought the subject up, and you thought he didn’t mean right away but eventually, when he grew up, but he was serious and wanted to “run away” with you as soon as you consented to it. You couldn’t consent. You tried to explain to him that you had a job that you would have to keep, even if you married him, and that meant not running away. “Aw, you said your job would be over in April,” he insisted. Yes, but then you had to find another job somewhere, and you couldn’t take him with you.

“Why not?”

“It is against the law, I think,” you said.

“So? Lots of things are against the law, but people still do ’em.”

“I cannot marry you, Kenny,” you said. “You are very sweet to ask, but when you are truly old enough to be married, according to the law, I will be…Let me think…I will be in my midthirties, much too old for you.” And you told him about Svanetia, how the women there, although they often live past 100 (you had a great-aunt who was still living, the last you’d heard from home, at the age of 123), often become “old” by the time they reach their midthirties.

“I don’t care,” he said. “I’m still going to marry you.”

Chapter twenty-three

You began to understand, as you reached the chapters of Geordie Lad in which Dzhordzha (or Geordie) first appears, that poor Kenny Elmore, for all his simple attraction and likability, was nothing at all like Dzhordzha. Would Kenny have devised a plan to get himself into the prison camp and extricate you from it? Would Kenny have been able to stand up to the bogeyman Bolshakov and humiliate a man four times his age? Would Kenny know how to drive a truck over a tract of bezdorozhye to get you from Ishimbay (Armagh) to the road to Tbilisi (Londonderry)? Could Kenny, for all his toughness and his devotion to you, kill the three guards who tried to stop you and the five who followed you?

Be careful here, Professor Ah scribbled in the margin of your (Cathlin’s) manuscript. You are “telescoping.” Or is it “telegraphing”? Whatever, you are telling the reader too much information too early about this boy, Geordie. You want to make him into a superhero, but too much extravagance and exaggeration too early can only lead to disbelief.

For all of his increased drinking, Ah still somehow managed to read his students’ submissions dutifully, slowly, and critically, and he continued to give Cathlin’s ever-expanding Geordie Lad an honest appraisal and sufficient suggestions and encouragement to keep her going, and to keep her coming back to class each week with another twenty or thirty pages of new material. Ah’s assignments to the class had taken an erratic turn, an eccentric sequence of directions on experimenting with flashbacks, “collages,” “lucky accidents,” and shifts of tense and person that confused many of them and that he privately told Cathlin to ignore or follow, as she wished.

Ah no longer made any pretense of assigning stories from the Stegner anthology or other outside readings. He told Cathlin, again in private, that he simply didn’t have time to keep up with the readings himself, because he spent all his hours reading student stories. The last reading he was able to assign, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher,” fascinated you, Kat, (although you had already known a bad Russian translation of it) and enthralled you, Cathlin; and you both hoped, for different reasons (Kat for its supernatural elements, Cathlin for its fear and trembling), that Ah would discuss it in class, but he never did. A student in class handed in a question, What are we supposed to be reading? and Ah ungraciously lost his temper and lectured them on the use of supposed to—as if creative people are supposed to do anything. Eventually he announced, “Y’all just read whatever y’all want to. It hardly matters. I never did like for anybody to tell me what to read.”

One night in late March when Kenny was out somewhere stealing hubcaps, Ah knocked at your door and you let him in and did not need to offer him a drink because he brought his own. In his other hand he held a sheet of paper, a piece of stationery, a letter that he showed you. “This was forwarded to me from my most recent residence,” he said.

The stationery bore the letterhead of something called bow: Bodark Organization of Writers; and Ah himself was not certain whether it should be spoken as something you do from the waist or a weapon you hold. The letter, from a woman named Agnes Roundtree Mazzarelli, secretary of bow, said some flattering things about his “famous” novels set in the Bodark Mountains and then invited him to be the main speaker at bow’s eleventh annual conference, to be held in the Halfmoon Hotel at Arcata Springs on April 27. BOW would pay his transportation, provide lodging for the three days and two nights of the conference, and offer him an honorarium of one thousand dollars.

“Frankly,” Ah said to you, “I long ago made up my mind that I would never attend a writers’ conference, for any reason. But until this letter came in the mail today, I had, really, nothing much to live for. So I’m ready to swallow my scruples…provided, that is, that you will go with me.”

Me? you scribbled hurriedly. Why should you want me to go with you?

“Because you are so homesick for Svanetia,” he said. “Of course, you’ll find that the Bodark Mountains are nothing at all like your homeland. They are mere pimples on the arse of the midcontinent, the highest of them less than three thousand feet, not to be compared with your eighteen-thousand-foot Mount Elbrus. But some of the valleys of the remotest parts of the Bodarks may remind you of your Ingur Valley. There are no towers, of course, but this Halfmoon Hotel, if I remember it correctly, has stone towers that may resemble your Svanetian strongholds.”

You were greatly attracted, or at least intrigued, by his invitation, but you wrote, I should think you’d rather take your girlfriend, Cathlin.

“I considered that,” he admitted. “Although to call her my ‘girlfriend’ may not be accurate. We’ve never gone out on a date. I’ve never been to her place. She’s under constant medical supervision for some problems, photo—phototropism, or some kind of eye disorder, and a severe personality problem called hebephrenia or something like that. Maybe her doctors wouldn’t let her take a trip with me. But the main reason I can’t take her is that she’d look terribly out of place there. Do you know, she’s never changed her hat or her dress since I’ve known her? She looks weird.”

You controlled yourself, did not wince, and made a mental note to take Cathlin shopping for a new outfit. You wrote, But perhaps it would crush her if she knew that you were asking me. I think you should invite her.

“Okay. But if she won’t go, or can’t go, will you?”

You wrote, I would have to give that some careful thought.

At the next meeting of the Narrative class, the instructor was visibly surprised to discover that his star pupil was wearing a new dress and a new hat and had left off some of those cackling bracelets, and that her earrings were pendulous but not noisy, and that she did not have quite so much rouge on her cheeks, and that although her lipstick quite obviously attempted to redraw the entire shape of her mouth it was not a gaudy orange but a relatively modest pink. She may still have seemed too weird to be in the company of the ladies of bow, but she was no longer a caricature.

And whatever her appearance, she had been knocking herself out doing the work for the course, not only writing, diligently, a new chapter each week (with the help of much Hillman research into the history, folkways, and features of North Ireland), but also assigning herself the readings that the instructor had been neglecting: many chapters of the Booth, many stories of the Stegner. As but one example of her conscientious devotion, she had made an honest effort to locate, and learn, the words to “Danny Boy,” so that if the instructor ever sang it to her again, drunk or sober, and wanted to know any of the words, she would be able to tell him.

But try as she might, Cathlin had not been able to find the words to that song. Even with the help of three reference librarians at Hillman, one of whom said, “Sure, everybody knows that song,” but had been able to sing only six lines and hum the remainder, Cathlin could not find any book in Hillman that contained the lyrics.

I am yours, precious Kat, and I did not feel obliged to perform any favors for this alter ego you had fabricated to permit the mycologist to study writing undetected. But Cathlin’s beating her brains out trying to find the words to that song finally got to me, and I decided I’d better give her a hand. So I arranged for her to stop off, on apparent impulse, at a back-street secondhand bookshop, where I arranged for a dusty volume to fall off a shelf into her hands, and for her to flip through it and chance upon, on page eighty-nine, “Danny Boy.” The book was Songs that Changed the World, edited by Wanda Willson Whitman, Crown, 1969. Cathlin bought it for two dollars. It would also furnish her, if she needed them, with the words and music to “Old Folks at Home,” “Loch Lomond,” and “The Blue Bells of Scotland.”

But after all that trouble, Cathlin did not get an opportunity to demonstrate her knowledge of “Danny Boy” when she accompanied her instructor back to his apartment after class. For the first hour or so, I. remained I. and did not become Ah, and sang no songs, because there was something important he wanted to discuss. “Your latest chapter,” he said. “Chapter seven. As I attempted to point out in my note, you are getting lost in your flashbacks. This may be a result of what I’ve warned you about: the mistake of making your heroine, Cathlin, yourself. Cathlin is too obviously nostalgic for her County Derry, and she is carried away with all these lyrical descriptions of her native countryside and the people and their way of life and all.”

I. went on, making his perhaps valid point that the narrative pace of the story was considerably slowed and hampered by Cathlin’s abandoning herself to romantic longings for the somewhat idealized highlands of the Foyle Valley. As you listened, divorcing yourself for minutes from your Doppelgänger, you realized that everything he was saying about Cathlin’s being lost in her highlands applied painfully to your own feelings about Svanetia, and you were overcome with such a terrible homesickness that your tears could not be concealed as they rolled down from beneath your opaque spectacles. I. laid a hand on your arm and said, “I know how you feel, believe me. Sometimes I’m so eager to see the Bodarks again that I’d sell my soul to the devil for just a glimpse of them. But I have to struggle not to let that yearning contaminate my writing. Here, let me freshen our drinks.”

It was almost welcome to watch I. becoming Ah, and Cathlin began to hope he’d sing “Danny Boy” so she could tell him the missing words to the other stanzas, wherein Danny’s sweetheart, left behind to die, tells him what it’s going to be like for him when he returns and finds her dead. But Ah, despite tossing back several that he no longer diluted with branch, remained sober enough to say, “I’ve got a theory. Many of the people who first settled the Bodarks in the first half of the nineteenth century were descendants of those Scotch-Irish you write about. I’ve never seen the Ulster highlands myself—the closest I got was a visit to Yeats’s Sligo—but from your description of them I think there must have been something in the genetic memory of the Bodark settlers that made them seek out a countryside that looked exactly like your County Derry.”

Cathlin waited, and she wrote nothing in response. She had not got out her pink cards once so far this night. She had thought a lot, with your help, about his upcoming invitation, and she knew, more or less, what she would have to write when it came.

“Is it true,” he asked, “that if you went back home you’d be arrested?”

And without lying at all, you were able to nod Cathlin’s head.

“So you’ll never be able to see your home country again? That’s terrible. Here, let me freshen our drinks.” Although he never touched the stuff himself, Ah had acquired a bottle of Glenlivet unblended Scotch for Cathlin’s benefit. “I have an idea,” he said, pouring her fourth drink, and he proceeded to explain to her what bow was, an organization of amateur free-lance poetesses and poetasteresses and a few fair writers who actually sold something to the Sunday supplements, and then he told Cathlin that he had been invited to address their annual convention in April, and he “wondered” if “there was any chance” that Cathlin’s doctors might not have apoplexy if she were to accompany him for a few days to that “enchanted land of glens and dells and gentle peaks.”

Ah got so carried away in his description of it that she wanted to caution him against “too obvious nostalgia,” but she only wrote, These Bodarks. Are they in North Carolina?

He read it, puzzled momentarily, but then he seemed to remember her “obituary” and said, “No. That’s the Appalachian Mountains, south of here. The Bodarks are a sort of range of Appalachians misplaced westward”—he gestured—“out in the heart of the country.”

You thought he said—or maybe it was his tipsy mispronunciation—“apparitions.” You wrote, I would like to see the Apparition Mountains.

“Would your doctors let you go for a few days?”

You wrote, They cannot cure me. They have given up. And in sympathy for poor Cathlin’s hopeless condition, you shed a few more honest tears.

He did not have any Kleenex. He got you a paper towel. He said, “I’m sorry. But are you okay to travel?”

You dried your eyes (careful not to dislodge the sunglasses) and wrote, I could not share a room with you.

Ah wanted clarification. “You mean a room, period, or a bed?”

You and Cathlin had given this much thought and discussion between yourselves, and had considered the possibilities. Did he intend to drive his Blazer to the Bodarks? How far was it? Would you not have to stop at motels overnight en route? And this Halfmoon Hotel, would they frown upon your presence? Also—and this was the biggest hitch—making the trip would mean that he would see Cathlin, often, in broad daylight. Thus far, he had only seen her at night, in dim illumination. Wouldn’t he perhaps recognize you in the strong glare of sunlight? And one of the reasons (there were several) why you could not share a room with him was that you couldn’t sleep in your red wig with your sunglasses on. For bed, you’d have to remove all your disguise.

You took the last card you’d written and wrote additionally upon it, Room, period. Bed, whatever. We could not be pals.

“But aren’t we already pals? How could we spend all that time together without becoming better pals?”

Not sleeping pals, you wrote.

“Well, thanks anyway,” Ah said, and dropped the subject. He did not take it up again. You and Cathlin both began to wonder if he had simply abandoned the invitation. He proceeded, as usual, to become very drunk, but when he began singing, it wasn’t “Danny Boy.” It was something truly operatic but waltzlike that went:

“Ah! sweet mystery of life, at last Ah’ve found thee!

Ah! Ah know at last the secret of it all!

All the longing, seeking, striving, waiting, yearning:

The burning hopes, the joy and idle tears that fall!”

You thought, for a while, that the “Ah” he was addressing was himself, and you thought it a conceited song, though it had its tender sentiments. Cathlin hoped it wasn’t a North Irish song that would require more library research. It was, in fact, Irish of sorts, or rather the composer was Irish in origin, one Victor Herbert, who, Ah explained, had been an American master of light opera, or operetta, and had, coincidentally, spent much of his life in this city, as director of the burgh’s symphony orchestra.

“He wash a drunk, too,” Ah said. “Like Stephen Foster, only worsh. Do you know, as soon as Ah knew Ah was coming to this town, Ah started thinking of Foster and Herbert, and that melody started helplessly playing itshelf over and over again in my head: Ah, sweet mystery of life, at last Ah’ve found thee! Does that ever happen to you? I mean, do you ever get some tune stuck in your head and can’t get it out? Stop looking so spooked. I don’t know the secret of it all. I haven’t found any sweet mysteries of life. I never shall.”

Chapter twenty-four

That April was not the cruelest month you’d ever known, but it ran a close second or third. The mansion began to go to hell. You couldn’t help thinking of the Poe story: This was “Fall of the House of Elmore.” Poor Kenny couldn’t cope with the heavier responsibilities of superintending the place: He could fix plumbing, but trying to fix the electrical problems that were developing was too much for him. He almost electrocuted himself, and you fussed at his mother and demanded to know why she didn’t hire a professional electrician. “Why are you out to take up for the brat?” she retorted with a supercilious glance that was your first indication she had an inkling of where Kenny was spending his nights.

On one of the rare nights when Kenny stayed in his own room because his parents weren’t sufficiently bombed for him to sneak out and up to yours, you were lonely, and Lawren visited you. He actually, confound him, materialized, and you knew you’d had too much vodka but not that much. He actually spoke to you, as a Svanetian lanchal would have done (he even spoke Svanetian, your first experience of another talent we ghosts have). He told you you’d better think about getting out of here. He told you the house’s days were numbered. He said, “If you don’t believe me, watch this.” And he caused one of the tall mirrors to detach itself from the wall and crash to the floor.

Elsewhere in the mansion, including next door in the rooms of Professors Ah and Koeppe, mirrors crashed to the floor. The spring’s first thunderstorm began, with much dramatic lightning, although it was only like fireflies compared with a real Svanetian lirkunal. It woke everybody and petrified them, and gave them an explanation for all the falling mirrors, but you knew that the mirrors had fallen before the thunder crashed.

Sometimes your little radio came on by itself, without your having consciously turned it on. It was always WQED, but that station had invariably played good “longhair,” as Kenny called it, and this hair was rather short and curly: Stephen Collins Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer,” “Old Folks at Home,” and “Swanee River.” Victor Herbert’s “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life,” as performed by both Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. And, over and over again, night after night, “Danny Boy,” as sung by Colleen MacNamara. The question of Ah’s you’d never answered, “Do you ever get some tune stuck in your head and can’t get it out?” (of course you did; everybody does), began to take on new meaning, only this wasn’t stuck in your head, it was stuck in your radio, and if you turned your radio off, it would turn itself back on. You thought of complaining to Kenny, but he’d get himself electrocuted taking your radio apart.

Ah never brought up the subject of the trip to the Bodarks again, so after a while you went to him and asked him (writing it on a card) if Cathlin had agreed to go with him. He was already so drunk that he held your card upside down and stared at it for a long time before righting it and responding to it. Then, half-incoherently, he delivered himself of a tirade against Cathlin. She was a “maybe talented” writer, he said, but she was a goofball, a clown, a “daffy damshel.”

But why won’t she go with you?

“She’sh just too dumb to ‘chosh’.”

Bur you told me she’s been sleeping with you here.

“I lied.”

Toward the end of the term, you began to cut several of your morning classes, preferring to stay in murphybed. You examined your motives and decided that since you were only a “temporary” and would be out of work in another week or so, and since the students appeared free to cut classes whenever they wished (and they often wished), you might as well. Len Dalrymple called you in for what was to be your last visit with him, and not a pleasant one. He had been watching you, he said. Did you know they had considered extending your appointment? Bill Turner would be taking over mycology again, but they had thought of finding “some use” for you. Now, however…You seemed to be indifferent to your work, and you weren’t doing any research at all, were you? So it would be difficult to recommend you for continuance. What were your plans for the future?

WQED was playing in your head, and you were strongly tempted to sing to Dalrymple, “Oh, Lenny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling…,” but you said, “I’m doing a research project in the Bodark Mountains.” How interesting, he remarked. Phallales? Geastra? Everything, you said, and Len Dalrymple said, Well, he hoped you’d show up for your final examinations. And you cleaned out your office, everything except your “costume.”

Ah came to your room that night, not yet drunk or, rather, still sober enough to declare, “I never wanted to ask Cathlin to go with me, anyway. I just did it because you suggested it. You said that if she wouldn’t, or couldn’t, you would consider it. Have you?”

You had, but you wanted his sober answer to a question, Why do you prefer me?

“Because…” He had to give it some thought. “Because you’re much smarter, and nicer, and more attractive. You’ve got everything she hasn’t. The only thing she’s got is a perfect nose, but it’s not a bit better than your nose.”

You smiled and resisted the impulse to feel your nose. You did, however, feel your hair, which was now long enough that you did not need to cover it with the scarf when you were at home. She has such beautiful red hair, you wrote.

“How would you know? Have you seen her?”

Yes, once when you were bringing her here, I saw her.

“Every time I’ve brought her here, I’ve pounded on your door so I could introduce the two of you. You’ve never been here.” You were slow to think of something to write in response to that, and he, looking around the room to emphasize “here,” let his eye fall upon something you’d forgotten to hide. He spotted it on the small table beside your murphybed, and grabbed it, and waved it at you. “Where did you get this?”

It was the paperback of Pale Fire that he had loaned to Cathlin. Was the jig, as they say, up? Had the time come to confess, to reveal the masquerade? If so, then all was lost, because it was Cathlin who really needed him, not you. It was Cathlin who wanted his help for the writing of Geordie Lad, Cathlin who would love to visit the Bodarks and perhaps even meet some of her McWalter kinfolk, Cathlin who could, if given time, possibly persuade herself to share his bed. There was no way on earth that the Bodarks could be found to resemble Svanetia, but they probably did look much like County Derry.

All right, I., I will tell you, you wrote, stalling for time to think something up. Cathlin was here. After you invited her but changed your mind because she told you she couldn’t share your murphybed, she came to see me, to tell me that she thought it was I who should go with you. We argued much about it. I insisted I could not go with you. She felt I should. She showed me that book. She said I must read it, to see how much I am like Kinbote: he was the exiled king of Zembla, I am an exiled princess of Svanetia.

You handed him that card to read while you grabbed a fresh card and continued, So I read it, and yes, perhaps I am like Kinbote, his story is mine, and there is even a Gradus on my trail, but I insisted to Cathlin, because I had read her “obituary,” that it is she who must go with you to the Bodarks, not alone because of the fantasies of the Halfmoon or Moonbeam and of the Indians and all that, but because she needs your help in order to become a published writer. You must help her.

You gave him that card also and took yet another one, a third one. And it is she who can help you more than I, if you will but give her the opportunity, and if you are patient with her. She explained to me about her photodysphoria and her hebephilia. The former can never be cured, and she must always wear those dark glasses, and you will never see her eyes. But the latter, someday, she hopes, you will help her heal.

He read each of the three cards, more than once. Then his only response was a question, “Are you really a princess of Svanetia?” You nodded your head. He stared at you, got up, and helped himself to your bourbon, County Fair, which Knox Ogden used to drink when he came to your room. And, like Knox, he began to address you formally: “So Your Highness cannot go with me?” You shook your head. “Because Your Highness is royal, or because there’s something else wrong with you?”

In Svanetia, you wrote, they are saving me for the wedding night. If I slept with you, the men of Svanetia, all the warriors of Lisedi—and they are fierce and terrible—would track you to the ends of the earth and destroy you.

Later that same night, Ah enticed Loretta Elmore into his room, without any difficulty, and got her as drunk as he was, without any difficulty, and took her to bed, with some but not much difficulty, which is where Kenny, with his key, leaving your bed to investigate the strange noises coming from the next room, found them. Kenny took one look and retreated without being seen, and told you, “The old fart is fucking my mom!” He didn’t like it one bit, but you persuaded him, with some difficulty, to return to your bed, for what would be, as it turned out, the last time you ever slept with him…or tried to sleep; the radio blared Colleen’s “Danny Boy,” and then there was another horrendous thunderstorm that actually approximated a Svanetian lirkunal and could be blamed for all of the other mirrors of the mansion crashing down.

The next day, the next evening, the police arrested Kenny in the act of removing the wheel coverings from a Lincoln parked on Forbes Avenue, and they obtained a search warrant for his room, where they found a considerable collection of similar stolen articles.

After his parents posted his bond and removed him from jail, he, in retaliation against his mother’s scolding (“You’re not going to sneak out of the house any more nights, buddy boy”), told them that he had not been sneaking out of the house, but up to your room, where you had taught him how to fuck.

Loretta came to you and said, “I want you out of this house tonight, Evie. And don’t forget to give me back my jewelry and clothes and stuff, especially that coat.”

Chapter twenty-five

In Svanetia, April 23 is always observed as Saint George’s Day, and Svanetians worship the dragon slayer almost on an equal footing with Christ. Indeed, Saint George takes third place in the holy Trinity of the Svanetian church. Since the day before, April 22, was observed throughout the Soviet Union as Lenin’s birthday, Svanetians had a two-day feast that left them stuffed and still and silly. But did you know that both Shakespeare and Cervantes died on April 23, and that our friendly ghost Nabokov was born on that day? And is it entirely a coincidence that Cathlin was scheduled, according to her obituary, to die on that day?

It would have been further serendipity if April 23 marked your leaving this burgh, but it was simply the day you left the mansion; another day would pass before you could get out of town.

Late that afternoon, you stuffed everything you owned into the one pasteboard suitcase that you had arrived with: your few books, the manuscript of Geordie Lad (all except for the chapter that the professor had not returned), your little radio, and your few books, including the songbook, the Russian-English dictionary, and the two Nabokov novels. You cleaned out your room as you had cleaned out your office, and you folded the murphybed up into the wall. All that remained were the four volumes of I.’s novels, not one of which you had ever had time to read. You stacked these outside his door, with a note folded into the top one.

Dear I.:

Suddenly I received an unexpected opportunity to teach at another university, and I regret that I have to leave without saying good-bye to you. Here are your novels, and you must forgive me that I am apparently not the novel-reading type. Let me, as a final word to you, in addition to thanking you for the pleasure of your company during so many dull times in this mansion, urge you from the bottom of my heart to reconsider your feelings about Cathlin.

With fondest regards and best wishes,

E.V.D.

Then there remained only one more note to write. You sat at your desk for the last time and stared for a while at your last sheet of paper. You gazed out the window and noticed one more of April’s thunderstorms brewing, the first drops already falling. You touched your pen to the paper and wrote, Dear Kenny, but that was as far as you got. You realized, with embarrassment and regret, that you really had nothing to say to him. It was a question not simply of how to say something, but of what to say. You stared at the salutation a long time and tried to think of polite expressions of sorrow, words of grace, courteous good-byes.

You were spared the task by his breathless arrival in your room. He saw your suitcase ready to go beside the door and said, “You can’t go!”

By way of answer you simply declared, “You told your mother.”

“I was real pissed at her,” he said. “It was, like, the only way I could fix her wagon.”

“But you fixed my wagon, too, and now my wagon is heading west.”

“Huh? Where are you going?”

“I’m not sure. But I must go. Good-bye, Kenny. I wish for you much happiness. I wish for you that you will stay out of trouble, work hard in school, be a good boy.”

He stared at you, his mobile face warped into an expression of disappointment. “Is that, like, all you’ve got to say to me?”

Yes, it was. But then WQED, which was driving you nuts (your little radio was stuffed into your suitcase and wasn’t plugged in, but you could hear it clearly, all the same), compelled you to begin singing. Even I, who thought I knew you so well, was surprised at the lovely soprano of your voice:

“Oh, Kenny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling,

From glen to glen, and down the mountainside.

The winter’s gone, and all the mirrors falling,

It’s I, it’s I must go, and you must bide.

“But I’ll come back, when summer’s in the meadow,

Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow.

It’s you’ll be here, in sunshine or in shadow,

Oh, Kenny boy, oh, Kenny boy, I love you so!”

“I guess I sort of, like, love you so, too,” he said when you finished. “But will you really come back?”

You lifted your suitcase, kissed him on the forehead, and got yourself as quickly as possible out of there, out of the mansion, into the pouring rain, down to the street, the avenue, where you caught the first westbound city bus, which took you down into the heart of town, where you checked in, wet and weary, for your last night in the burgh, at the Young Women’s Christian Association hostelry.

But most of that stormy final night you spent not in your YWCA room but in your office at the Biological Sciences Building, where you graded final examinations and filled out grade reports.

And while you were engaged in this activity, an Avis rented car pulled up in front of the mansion, where I was still hanging around, keeping an eye on I. and making sure that he was staying sober enough to get his stuff ready to go. He had been so saddened to find your farewell note that he had immediately gone to his bottle and was tying one on. The driver of the Avis was a man in a trench coat who waited for the downpour to cease and, when it didn’t, jumped out of the car anyway and rang the doorbell, and then spoke to Loretta in thick English with a Slavic accent, asking for you. Loretta informed him that you had just moved out. He demanded to know where you had gone. She said she had no idea, but she was quite certain that she would never see you again. “I’d just better not,” she said. The man asked to speak with Dr. Elmore. Loretta informed him that her husband “can’t hear worth a damn; all this thunder doesn’t mean a thing to him.”

The man returned to his car but did not drive away. He was still there the next morning when Dr. Elmore came out, tested to see if he would need his umbrella, found that he would, and started off for Hillman Library. The man in the trench coat followed him.

And that night, when Ah met his last Narrative class in the Scottish Room, the man in the trench coat followed him to the Cathedral of Learning, where he parked and waited patiently for the class to end. The man waited with more patience after the class while Ah stood outside the Cathedral talking to one of his students, a girl with very long red hair and dark sunglasses. The man was not close enough to hear what they were saying.

“As I told the class, I’ve already submitted my final grades,” Ah was saying to her, “but I was sorry to discover that your name was not even on the computerized class list and grade report. You made an A, of course, but how can I report it so it will be on your transcript?”

The man in the trench coat observed that the red-haired girl was writing something on a pink card, which she then gave the professor to read; and after reading it the professor spoke to her again, and again she wrote something on a pink card. And so it went. The man in the trench coat surmised, correctly, that this professor, like Dr. Elmore, could not even hear the thunder, and this was the student’s way of communicating with him. But what was it that required so much communication? The man in the trench coat was a very patient man. People who mistrust “reality” must cultivate an exceptionally high level of patience in order to survive.

“Yes, I’m sober enough to drive, but I wasn’t planning to leave tonight. I suppose I could, though. Where are you staying?” The red-haired girl apparently had only one more card for the professor to read. He read it and spoke to her: “The YWCA? I’ll pick you up there in an hour,” and they said their good-byes, and the professor started out walking to the mansion.

The man in the trench coat, before following, wrote something on a card of his own. It was his business card, without much room on the blank reverse side, but it had enough to write his question. The man was waiting in his Avis rented car at the mansion when the professor arrived, and he presented his question to the professor. The professor read it, answered it briefly, stuck the card in his shirt pocket with his other cards, excused himself, and entered the mansion.

The storm was still abroad in all its wrath. The man waited and watched as the professor carried his clothing on hangers out of the mansion and to a trucklike vehicle. The man wrote down the license plate’s inscription, BODARK, and the state, a New England state noted for its maple syrup and red covered bridges. The professor made several trips from the mansion to his vehicle, carrying several boxes and a large typewriter, and, finally, made six trips to carry gingerly, two at a time, twelve small potted plants. They appeared to be marijuana. Then the professor stood at the door and said a long good-bye to Loretta Elmore. They kissed briefly.

The man in the trench coat followed the bodark-plated vehicle as it drove through the dark, mostly deserted streets (it was almost 10:00 P.M.) downtown to the building of the Young Women’s Christian Association. The red-haired girl came out bearing a cheap suitcase and got into the professor’s vehicle. The man in the trench coat recognized the pasteboard suitcase! The red hair was obviously a disguise to fool the man in the trench coat, and he cursed himself for not having recognized her figure, her way of walking, her lovely nose, her confounded aura! His heart leapt up, and eagerly he followed the BODARK plate and would not let it out of his sight as it gained the throughway, crossed the bridge over the Monongahela, and entered the Fort Pitt tunnel. Emerging from the tunnel on Interstate 279 just a few car lengths behind his quarry, the man was startled to discover that the radio of his rented Avis, although he had not turned it on, was playing some local station, some abominable operetta, some atrocious baritone screaming in English something about the sweet mystery of life. The man tried to turn it off. The blasted radio would not turn off. He pounded at it with his fist, but this only had the effect of increasing its volume, the wailing of all the longing, seeking, striving, waiting, yearning—the man in the trench coat thought he would go mad, and he cursed these American capitalist machines that always went wrong with burning hopes and joy and idle tears that fall!

He was so distracted by the malfunctioning apparatus that he did not notice the professor’s vehicle taking a veer from Interstate 279 to Interstate 79 South. The vehicle he found himself trailing had taken Interstate 79 North, and by the time he caught up with it he found that its plate did not say BODARK.

Chapter twenty-six

By the first light of dawn, somewhere in western Ohio, he showed her the card. On one side printed in Cyrillic letters were the name, title, and Moscow address. Cathlin didn’t know the Cyrillic alphabet, nor did I., and all you needed to know was the one word Большако, which somewhat resembled its English form so that you were surprised I. hadn’t recognized the name of Cathlin’s psychiatrist. Cathlin turned the card over and read the English on the other side: Prof. I.: It is imperative that I find Ekaterina Vladimirovna, and I have reason to believe you know her whereabouts. Can you help me? I will make it worth your while.

“I simply told the guy,” I. told Cathlin, “that I was sorry but I had no idea, that I’d just received a note from her saying good-bye, she was taking a job somewhere else, but she didn’t say where. You know, she was a very strange woman. Lovely but mysterious. This guy was obviously Russian, maybe a secret agent or something, but he was just a day too late. She used to tell me about an imaginary companion of hers called Anangka, sort of a pooka, you know—aren’t they Irish?—this pooka of hers was always looking out for her and taking care of her, and maybe the pooka warned her that this guy was coming soon.”

Cathlin tried to stay awake enough to remain Cathlin and to write a pink card in response to this, resisting the impulse to look over her shoulder to see if they were being followed. She had found herself nodding off in the middle of the night and becoming you, and she had had to share I.’s coffee. He miraculously kept on driving, never seeming to tire, but needing to stop periodically along the vast, straight Interstate 70 in order to buy more coffee or to relieve himself. Two things appeared to keep him going—or three, if you counted his dream of the Bodarks: The interior of the Blazer was filled with the tangy fragrance of the small tomato plants that were lined up across the dashboard and on the floor behind the seat, and just the inhaling of this fragrance was enough to turn Cathlin into Ekaterina if you weren’t careful; and occasionally, whenever the interstate approached a bridge, I. would suddenly pull over to the shoulder, stop, and take a lusty swig from his quart of bourbon. The first time he did this, he explained to Cathlin, “I have gephydrophia. That’s not as good as your photodysphoria and hebedysphoria or whatever it is, but it’s a big problem anyway. It means ‘fear of bridges over water,’ and somehow it doesn’t bother me if the bridge is a viaduct or the creek is dry, but just let me get out over water and I panic.” His occasional swigs from the bottle had given him courage to cross the bridges without apparently affecting his driving ability. You and Cathlin, even bringing in Anangka for a third consultation, had huddled nervously to discuss this problem of committing yourselves into the hands of a drunk driver, but as it turned out I.’s driving never once showed any sign of being affected by his drinking. Maybe it was the coffee, but I. was never Ah with his hands on the wheel.

Don’t you want to stop soon? Cathlin’s card asked, and, Yes, Kati told me some Russian KGB agents were on her trail, because, you know, she was a dissident dissenter.

“Soon,” I. said, and then he said, “‘Kati’? Did she let you call her Kati? I knew her for a whole term and she didn’t want me to call her anything except Ekaterina Vladimirovna, no more, no less.”

He had mispronounced the nickname but Cathlin decided not to attempt to correct him. We became very good friends in the short time I knew her, she wrote.

“I don’t think she even let little Kenny Elmore call her Kati,” I. said, and cast Cathlin a glance before going on, “and the funniest thing about Princess Dadeshkeliani was that she and Kenny, age thirteen at most, were lovers. Did you know that?”

No! Cathlin wrote. How do you know? Did she tell you? Did Kenny tell you?

“Loretta Elmore, Kenny’s mother, told me. Apparently she had known about it, or at least guessed, for months. The Elmores were even stranger, I think, than our ‘Kati.’ He was a retired professor of anthropology, and what the Elmores had done in the South Pacific was investigate the sexual customs of some primitive peoples, Manaturuans, who often permitted, or even encouraged, their pubertal boys to lose their virginity to experienced mature females. Yeah. It had been Loretta’s job to ingratiate herself among the Manaturuan womenfolk and try to learn the real facts of the matter, but the Elmores had never been able to discover if the experienced mature females, who were usually married women and mothers, had actually enjoyed their duties in teaching the boys how to screw, or if the young boys were in any way adversely affected by their ‘initiation,’ and both of the Elmores had a kind of scientific curiosity as to what was going to happen to their son Kenny in the company of this Russian—or Georgian—woman who had the hots for him. They had made a bet, I don’t know for how much money, over Loretta’s contention that Kenny would turn into a juvenile delinquent if he lost his virginity prematurely. And Loretta apparently won her bet, at the same time that she was required to tell Ekaterina to leave.”

Could you stop soon? Cathlin wrote. Aren’t you exhausted? The sun was coming up now, behind them. Cathlin cast a glance at it and in the process noted with relief that there were no cars to their rear.

“Can you drive?” I. asked. “Do you want to take over?”

I am sorry, Cathlin wrote truthfully, I never learned to drive. I should have warned you of that beforehand.

“Like warning me beforehand that we can’t share a room? Do we have to stop at a motel where we can take separate rooms?”

In Nabokov’s book you gave me—not Pale Fire but Lolita—there is much discussion of the American motel. I have never been in a motel. I think I would not like that aspect of America. If you can find a hotel, however, I shall share a room with you. Not a bed, but a room.

He read it and laughed. “But they have only motels near the interstate,” he said. “To find a hotel, we’d have to leave this throughway and go into some city.”

The sun was fully up now. The light was behind you, but it was sufficient to show him, perhaps, that you were there with Cathlin. Her profile was yours. Then let’s do it. Aren’t you exhausted?

The small city of Richmond, Indiana, is only a couple of miles off Interstate 70, a short detour, and I gave I. a little help in finding the street that would lead him to the Eagle Hotel, erected in 1887 and scarcely changed since its heyday, except by the addition of a multilevel parking garage for the convenience of the very rare motorist who prefers hotels to motels. The level where the Blazer parked was even with the third floor, on which your room was located, a room that bore no resemblance whatsoever to the typical motel room, furnished as it was with Victoriana and flocked wallpaper, with chromolithographs instead of offset lithos in the picture frames. There were twin beds. I. had a nightcap (or rather a morning cap) of the remainder of his bottle and went to sleep immediately, fully clothed. The thick draperies blotted out most of the sunlight coming into the room. Cathlin woke about noon to discover that her red wig had got twisted around and was covering her face. She hoped that wouldn’t happen again. She woke again, finally, at about four in the afternoon. I. would sleep another hour before she woke him. Waiting for him to wake, she read the various literature in the room, including a menu for room service. She counted her money, the remainder of your April paycheck, all she and you had in this world in the way of cash, and decided against calling room service. When I. woke up and they got in the Blazer again, he treated her to breakfast at a stop on the interstate.

He made other stops, on the highway shoulder, before crossing the Wabash River and, later, the Kaskaskia River, in Illinois, in order to fortify himself with bourbon against his gephydrophobia. But neither of these bridges nor any of those encountered thus far on the trip had prepared him for the bridge over the Mississippi at St. Louis. It is a large river. It is much wider and deeper than the Kura at Tbilisi or the Neva at Leningrad, or, as far as Cathlin was concerned, the Foyle at Londonderry or the Lagan at Belfast. The preparatory dose of bourbon was not enough; I. panicked before reaching the midpoint of the high, long span. Luckily, that late at night there was little traffic coming behind. Still, there I. was, his hands gripping the steering wheel so tightly he had no control, asking desperately once more, “Can’t you drive? Can’t you drive?” You could only shake your head, which he, with his eyes glued to the roadway of the bridge, could not see. You couldn’t write him a note. He couldn’t read it in the dark.

“Ot! Ot!” you began to lament. But something had to be done. He was clearly incapacitated.

Only poltergeists make things move. I, your garden variety ghost, had never before so much as rattled a mirror. Sure, I’d messed around with a couple of radios, but that was a matter of invisible waves or sparks, not physical objects like steering wheels and gas pedals. I was nearly as panicked as I. But somebody had to do something to get you off that bridge and across the great river. Visible even in the darkness, because floodlighted, was the great parabolic arch, gleaming aluminum, Saarinen-designed, officially the Jefferson Memorial Arch but called the Gateway. Here you were, dear Kat, at the Gate. I. couldn’t get you through it. You’d have to do something yourself.

But I think I held your hands as you grabbed the wheel and I think I held your feet as you thrust one of them toward the gas pedal and with the other one attempted to lift his heavy foot off the brake. His foot was frozen. “FOOT OFF BRAKE!” you screamed at him.

“What?” he said. He hadn’t heard you, but just the sound of mute Cathlin speaking something other than “Och” had loosened his foot on the brake, and you got it off, and the Blazer began to creep forward again. It seemed to take forever, but you steered it over the water, then far enough beyond the water that he regained his awareness, his composure, his driving skill.

Miles beyond St. Louis, switched to Interstate 44 now, he was still breathing hard, and he asked Cathlin in wonderment, “How did you do that, if you can’t drive?”

But there was no way in the dark of the car, without turning on the dome light, that he could read any answer she cared to write. So she was spared trying to explain that she hadn’t done it, that somebody, maybe Anangka, had “taken over.”

Rolla, Missouri, was the last real town you passed through; the rest of them from here on in will have to be pseudonymous. I. told Cathlin he had several friends in Rolla, and he even deliberated with himself, aloud, the possibility of stopping there, but it was the wee hours before dawn, no one was awake yet, and he decided to drive on. But Rolla, he explained to Cathlin, was the portal to the Bodarks; these hills all around, although you couldn’t see them, were the first foothills of the Bodark Mountains. By the time the sun came up and you had reached the city of “Summerfield,” you were on the mostly flatlands of the dull “Summerfield Plateau,” and I. could not yet point out any mountains to Cathlin to remind her of Londonderry.

Summerfield also has an Eagle Hotel, as well as many other nonmotels, but I. would not leave the interstate, even though Cathlin was flashing the same cards from the morning before: Could you stop soon? Aren’t you exhausted? I. shook his head and concentrated with demonic intensity upon the road ahead of him, until at last he could point out a mountain of sorts, not very high, but a mountain all the same, the first since leaving the burgh where you’d spent the winter. It was full springtime now, and full daylight now. Even from the dull, tedious interstate you could see flowers, and the omnipresent pink-blooming Cercis canadensis and the white-blooming Cornus florida. I. was so intent upon the road you lost your sense of discomfort over the possibility of his seeing you clearly in the daylight, and what little you had of this discomfort soon was forgotten as you studied the changing scenery and even began to imagine, out there in those woods, that special boletic reek that makes your nostrils dilate: the dark, dank, satisfying blend of damp moss, rich earth, and rotting leaves.

Suddenly I. pulled over to the shoulder and stopped, although there were no bridges in sight ahead. He jumped out of the Blazer and ran to the roadside and fell to his knees. You thought perhaps he was going to upheave his consumption of bourbon and the “fast food” that had nourished the two of you at many stops along the route. He knelt forward and brought his face right down to the earth.

He returned to you with crumbs of dirt still clinging to his lips, and he declared, “That’s the state line. We’re here!”

And you realized that he had gone to kiss his native soil.

Chapter twenty-seven

The Halfmoon Hotel was built of native limestone in 1886, originally as a mountain retreat for wealthy railroad executives and their families (Lawren Carnegie once slept there, when he was still alive). It is five stories of one hundred rooms, high on a hilltop overlooking the quaint Victorian spa of Arcata Springs, an alpine village of steep, narrow, winding streets lined here with shops, there with massive limestone walls and huge shade trees. After its heyday as a rich man’s lodge, the Halfmoon had a second incarnation for twenty-four years as a junior college for girls, Halfmoon College; and later, during the depression, it suffered a third incarnation as the hospital of a quack doctor who claimed to cure cancer, and among the several ghosts who have taken up permanent inhabitance of the place are a couple of nurses who endlessly wheel gurneys with terminal lymphoma and carcinoma patients and are sometimes spotted by the modern guests, who are motel-shunning tourists enchanted by the views, the elegance, and the promotional slogan, “A Castle in the Air High Atop the Bodarks.”

It is indeed a castle, its peaked roofs and towers looming over the town, and your first sight of it, sweet Kat, would be a delicious jolt of recognition—not of anything from your past, because in all honesty not even its rugged stonemasonry reminded you of the towers of Svanetia, but of a kind of answer to that half-formulated search that we all carry around with us all our lives, most of us never finding anything.

The first part of the Ot! you began to sigh was so long, a vowel so continuous, that by the time you got to the end of the exclamation you had the presence of mind to change the terminal consonant to k insteadof t and make a Scottish “Och.” Then you wrote on a card for I., It is fabulous!

“Anything like that in Londonderry?” he asked. You shook your head and went on shaking it. You would be even more fascinated when you discovered, as you would soon, that the original settlers of the town had not been the railroad executives or even the earliest health seeking white Americans, but Indians. Long before the water-faddist bathers, dippers, and drinkers of the 1880s mushroomed the village into a city, the Osage Indians had discovered the curative properties of the springs and had a small village of their own on the mountain where the Halfmoon would come to be. Indeed, they named the principal spring of water flowing out of the mountain’s east slope (water good for curing erysipelas, scrofula, photodysphoria, and dyspepsia, but not cancer or hebephilia) Mionba Athigezhe Nithní, Osage speech for Magic-Water-Beneath-the-Two-Horned-Moon, and this halfmoon spring gave its name to the hotel. Checking in at the magnificent curving walnut-and-marble registration desk, I. discovered that the room reserved for him by bow, in expectation that he would be alone, contained only one bed, albeit a double. “Have you ever heard of our colonial American custom of ‘bundling’?” he asked Cathlin, and when she shook her head, he said to the clerk, “My wife and I would really prefer twin beds.”

The clerk, a girl named Sharon, gave Cathlin a glance, then said, with a slight lisp, “We have no twin beds together. There are some rooms with a double and a twin, a queen and a twin, or a king and a queen, and some with two doubles, but…”

I. was having trouble hearing all of this. “Anything,” he said, “so long as they’re separate.”

“…but they are all taken,” clerk Sharon went on. “The bow meeting has reserved everything.” You learned then that the name of the organization is pronounced as something done from the waist, rhyming with how, the Indian greeting.

But I. missed the pronunciation and said, “I’m the main speaker at the bow meeting,” pronouncing it to rhyme with go, an injunction of leave-taking. The clerk glanced again at Cathlin and studied I. Neither of you were very presentable; neither of you had bathed since leaving the burgh, and Cathlin’s dress was wrinkled from the long car ride; I. was dressed in his customary grungy shirt and trousers, and he hadn’t shaved for two days.

“There are many motels along the highway,” the clerk said.

A cat leapt up onto the registration desk and settled there as if he owned the place. He was a yellow-striped tabby with a white-ringed tail, fat, and you could not resist stroking him—the first time you’d had your hand on a real cat in years. Worse, you could not resist asking Sharon her cat’s name. She answered, “Morris,” the terminal s lisped as th. You hoped that I. had not overheard the exchange.

Cathlin began to write on a card and gave it to I. Go ahead and take the one reserved. We can work out something.

I. smiled hugely at the clerk and waved the card at her and said, “My wife, who is here in hopes the water can cure her aphasia, says that it’s okay if we take the one we’ve got.”

Sharon said, “But I should warn you, that room has a history of being haunted.” She lightly lisped her s’s again.

Was she trying to get them to go? You wrote quickly, Tell her I love ghosts.

“My wife hopes your ghosts are friendly,” I. said. “Now do I have to hire a bellhop or can I carry my own stuff?”

Finding Room 218 without a bellhop was slightly difficult: The brass numerals had been removed from the door, and only a pentimento of the numerals was still faintly visible. Detecting the room number, 218, you nearly blurted that it was the same number as the room you’d recently vacated at the Elmores’ mansion. But you soon discovered some major differences: It was considerably smaller than your room in the mansion had been, yet the view beyond the walnut jalousies was far grander (spoiled only at one edge by an enormous cement statue of a robed male with extended arms, possibly meant to be Jesus), the furniture was much swanker (at least the bed was not a murphybed but an ornately head-boarded Victorian), the yellow floral wallpaper matched the window draperies, and, strange to relate or to discover, there wasn’t a single mirror in the room. Not even in the bathroom, which had gleaming tiles and porcelains and chromiums but no silverbacks. How could you, after showering (which you immediately did), look at Cathlin afterward to restore her disguise? At your request, I. went down to complain to Sharon and returned with a hand mirror, which was better than nothing.

Then there was the problem of the smallish bed. You were so tired that you were ready to tumble into it even if half of it was occupied by a grown man, a very large man. But even if you could risk waking up to find yourself in his arms, you couldn’t risk waking up to find that your wig and sunglasses had come off. I. solved the problem by graciously offering to let you take a nap while he reconnoitered the Halfmoon Pub. You fished in your purse for a much-used card: Aren’t you exhausted? and showed it to him once more. He shook his head and said he was too excited to sleep. So you thanked him, but you requested that he leave the key with you and knock when he returned. You didn’t want him letting himself into the room if you were sleeping.

I. was Ah when he came back, hours later. He was thoroughly Ah. You came out of a very deep sleep, during which you’d alternated between dreams about the Osage Indians (although you knew nothing about them) and your old familiar dream of climbing and descending an endless sequence of stone steps, concrete steps, wooden steps, staircases that led up or down to significant places whose significance always eluded you. You answered Ah’s knock, using the hand mirror to make sure it was Cathlin who let him in. She managed to understand, from his slurred speech, that in the Halfmoon Pub he’d encountered a gaggle of the ladies of bow, who had bought his many drinks and attempted to engage him in conversation and used up every last one of his cards. He was out of cards. He had resorted to paper bar napkins and had a fistful of those, which you read after he had fallen into the bed for a long sleep, embracing the pillow you’d vacated. Many of these women had covered the napkins with their names, home addresses, their current room numbers, and the red bow-shaped imprints of their lipstick. Many of them had, apparently, read all of I.’s novels with, apparently, much appreciation and relish. You regretted that you’d never had a chance to read anything of his. You resolved to do so as soon as you got “settled.”

While I. slept, you also read the hotel’s list of services, which was vast: in addition to the Halfmoon Pub, there was the main dining room, called the Crystal Room, a movie theater, and an observation deck on the top floor, a game room in the basement, outdoor games of tennis and shuffleboard near the swimming pool, and a hiking trail. There was also a bus that took an audience to the Passion Play, and a carriagelike vehicle called Tally-Ho that took guests down to the town’s shops and later to something called the Cook-Out. At 5:00 P.M., you put on your dzhinsy and your only fresh blouse and decided to leave off the extravagant hat and sunglasses, as long as I. was sleeping. But you wore your red wig, and you rode off on the Tally-Ho to the Cook-Out, for a real American eat-and-sing, with hot dogs, baked beans, potato salad, dill pickles, rolls, and pop. One of the songs everybody sang was “Loch Lomond,” which you had previously learned from the book. Some of the picnickers, apparently all bow members, had their children with them, and there were a couple of adorable boys, age eleven or thirteen, that you would have loved to become acquainted with, if you’d had the courage. One of their fathers flirted with you and tried to persuade you to go off on the hiking trail with him “and hunt for mushrooms or something,” but you told him your husband was sleeping and might wake up anytime. “Are you a Russkie or something?” he said. “Where’d you get that accent?”

You learned, from your conversation with him, that the membership of bow was not exclusively female, nor was it limited to amateur wordsmiths. There were artists and photographers also aspiring to publication, and several males, young and old, published and unpublished. The president was a man, even if all the other officers were women. A monthly newsletter, Take A BOW, kept members informed of workshops, contests, events, and hot tips on free-lancing, and the March and April issues had given prominent mention to this annual convention, at which the main speakers would be the two most celebrated Bodark writers, I. himself and a woman named Halfmoon Berryfairy. “Yes,” you said, in your Russkie accent. “I am Mrs. I.”

“No shit?” the man said. “Well, hey, tell me something. If it’s not too personal. Does the guy do all the stuff in bed that he writes about?”

You gave the man a coy sidelong glance and said, “He does things in bed he never writes about.”

Chapter twenty-eight

When I. woke up, sometime in the middle of the night, and was ready to give the bed back to you, he found you reading one of his novels, which you’d fetched from a box in the back of the Blazer. The novel had a bookmark: Kenny’s pamphlet, 20 Questions for Alcoholism. When I. woke up, you inserted this back where it had been and you closed the book. The main effect of his fiction on you was to make you want to write, and you were burning to get back to Geordie Lad.

Before giving the bed back to you, I. told you of an old Bodark custom called “ride-and-tie”: when two travelers on a long trip had only one horse between them, one of them would ride so many miles ahead of the other, dismount, tie the horse, and continue on foot. When the other traveler, on foot, arrived at the horse, he would untie it and ride on so many miles beyond the first traveler before dismounting and tying the horse. And so on, taking turns. “That’s what we’re doing with this bed,” I. said. “Riding and tying. I wish we could ride together.”

The horse won’t hold us, you wrote.

“Do you sleep with those sunglasses on?” he asked as you got into bed.

If there is any light, you wrote.

“I was going to sit here, while you slept, and work on my speech,” he said. “But I guess I could put out the light and go down to the lobby.” He looked at his watch. “Nobody’s up at this hour. The Halfmoon Pub is closed. I don’t have any notion what I’m going to talk about tomorrow…or, rather, today, because I’m supposed to speak right after lunch. I’ve never given a speech to a writers’ group before. Have you got any ideas?”

Sleepy though you were, you tried to think. You could not imagine, then or ever (and you’ve turned down many an invitation since), telling people how to write, or speaking to a hotel full of free lances, broken lances, daggers, and toothpicks. You got the bookmark, Kenny’s pamphlet on alcoholism, out of his book and gave it to him, and you wrote on a card, Maybe this will inspire you.

He stared at it, and then at you, as if you weren’t any help at all. But he took the pamphlet and turned out the light and went down to the lobby.

The next day, or rather, later that same day, in the Crystal Room, to the assemblage of a hundred members of bow, who had during their consumption of luncheon cast an occasional appraising glance at Cathlin sitting beside him at the head table, I., or rather, Ah, who had fortified himself in advance with the all-morning help of a bottle of bourbon, rose after the flattering introduction by Agnes Roundtree Mazzarelli and said, “Somebody recently gave me a pamphlet published by A.A., called 20 Questions for Alcoholism, and just this morning it occurred to me that you can take that list, go through it, substitute the word write for the word drink, and come up with a perfect list of questions to determine whether or not you are a genuine, dedicated, incurable writer. As follows:

1. Do you ever crave to write at a definite time daily?

2. Do you feel under tension much of the time while not writing?

3. Do you need to write the next morning?

4. Do you lose time from work due to writing?

5. Have you ever had a ‘blackout’ (complete loss of memory) as a result of writing?

6. Do you write to build up your self-confidence?

7. Do you write to escape from worries or troubles?

8. Do you have feelings of guilt or inferiority?

9. Are you at times possessed with unreasonable fears?

10. Do you write because you are shy with other people?

11. Have you become noticeably short-tempered, irritable, opinionated?

12. Is writing making your home life unhappy?

13. Does your writing make you careless of your family’s welfare?

14. Is writing jeopardizing your job or business?

15. Have you ever gotten into financial difficulties because of writing?

16. Is writing affecting your reputation?

17. Do you lie about your writing?

18. Have you become extremely self-centered and selfish?

19. Do you hold bitter resentment toward certain people—wife, husband, employer, associate, or friend—and do you continue to harbor these resentments?

20. Have you lost your self-respect?

The ladies of bow, and the gentlemen too, loved his speech, and Cathlin was proud to watch their faces during it, almost as if it really were her husband who was giving it to them. Afterward, before adjourning for the sessions on how to sell to religious periodicals and how to cope with rejection slips, the members were as eager to shake Cathlin’s hand as they were to shake his, almost as if they knew she’d put him up to it.

The speech had a lasting effect on the convention: Everybody made a beeline for the Halfmoon Pub, where they lost their tensions, built up their self-confidence, escaped their worries and troubles, and shed their guilts, inferiorities, and fears. Among these people, you were startled to notice, was bold Bolshakov. If not Bolshakov, his twin. No trench coat, and no widow’s peak in his hairline, but wouldn’t he disguise himself as a…perhaps a Bodarks dentist? He appeared, however, to be with some women who were clearly bow ladies. Could even Bolshakov have ingratiated himself so quickly with the natives?

“You’ll have to excuse me,” I. said. He truly was exhausted. Driving for hours nonstop had not drained him as much as preparing and giving that speech. “I’d better go ride and tie.”

Don’t leave me just yet, you wrote. Do you see that man over there, sitting with those women? If I am not mistaken, that is Bolshakov, the North Ireland psychiatrist, the prick.

I. squinted his eyes and studied the man, and you waited in dread to hear him say, “Yes, that’s the guy who gave me his card when I was leaving the mansion.” But he didn’t. All he said was, “Are you sure?”

Does he look familiar to you? you wrote.

“From your description of him in Geordie Lad, yes. Looks just like the creep. But come on, Cathlin, what would he be doing here in Arcata Springs?”

You wrote, You have not yet read the chapters of Geordie Lad that will make it very clear why he would be following me, trying to kill me.

“Well, gosh, Cathlin, do you want me to go ask him if he’s a shrink? He looks more like a dentist to me. Or an insurance salesman from Cabool, Missouri.”

You sighed. The man had not thrown a single glance in your direction. Finally you wrote, I am being silly. Forgive me. You go on and get some sleep.

I. got up. For appearance’s sake, he gave you a kiss. Or maybe it wasn’t only for appearance’s sake. Shortly after he left, the man you’d mistaken for Bolshakov also got up, with one of the ladies, and left, without having thrown you a glance. You removed your hat and your sunglasses and joined the fun. Morris the cat, as if waiting for I.’s departure, leapt into your lap and began purring.

Several people wanted to talk with you, to ask you what it was like living with the “celebrated” author. One of the ladies slapped you on the wrist and said, “You’re not really married to him, now, are you? You’re not wearing any ring.” And you had to confess that you were living in sin.

“Are you a Russkie or something?” another lady asked. “Where’d you get that accent?”

You passed up an opportunity to attend sessions or workshops on Environmental Writing and Selling Your First Novel (although you might have learned some helpful hints in the latter meeting). After tiring of the ladies in the pub, you visited the game room, where people were playing cards, checkers, and chess. Morris followed you down there. You got yourself into a couple of chess games and demolished your opponents so handily that one of them asked, “Are you a Russkie or something? Where’d you learn to play like that?”

Later, declining an invitation to accompany a group taking the bus to the Passion Play, you and Morris rode the elevator up to the observation deck on the fourth floor, and you got your first complete view of the lovely surrounding countryside, although a distant hill was grotesquely marred by that colossal cement hunk called Christ of the Bodarks: a quasi-primitive statue of a stiff, legless man with his arms outspread. I. had not told Cathlin that this town, for all its charm, was smack in the middle of the Bible Belt, and you, dear Kat, an unbeliever not because of Soviet atheism so much as Svanetian paganism, were going to find yourself sometimes exhilarated by the religious poshlost of these people.

Morris and I stood beside you, he visible, I not, and I was almost tempted to take inhabitance of his body, but it was much too early in our relationship for that. You did not know it then, but you were standing on the observation deck (near one of those huge, robot-like coin-operated binoculars-on-swivels, which for a dime would have given you a close look at Christ’s stern face) almost within touching distance of the slate-roofed slopes of the penthouse peak wherein, just a few years later, you would have your own lavishly appointed triplex suite of rooms with its futuristic kitchen where you could whip up one of those chicken dishes that grace the pages of Kat’s Quick Chick Cookbook, and, if not your “dozen absolutely beautiful cats of every color and breed,” at least this selfsame Morris, who would attach himself to you and in whose physical entity I would attempt to manifest what remained of my spiritual entity. I was so glad to have you there, at last, that I was desperate to give you a foreglimpse of your future, to point out to you the penthouse’s highest picture window, where your bedroom would be, to show you even the window ledge on which Morris (or my incarnation), by then permanently attached to you, would bask away his old age, approaching nineteen. But I could not yet speak to you of these things so that you could hear me. Nor could I contrive to have Morris communicate with you in any manner.

I did the next best thing. I “arranged,” if we must persist in using that verb, for you to be approached by my kinsman, or rather kinswoman, kinschild really, a charming girl just a couple of years older than yourself, whom you’d already briefly met, and to whom you assumed, wrongly, that Morris belonged. Sharon was a golden blonde with blue eyes that seemed to have depths of experience (in such contrast to your innocent eyes), and her eyes came to gaze into yours almost with recognition, as if she knew the history of your soul.

Beneath the deck railing’s gas lamps, she leaned her arms on the iron balustrade in a meditative pose identical to your own, right beside you. “Is you Cathlin or Kati?” she asked.

You stared into those deep blue eyes. What was this? You didn’t mind being mistaken for a Russkie but you didn’t want to be somebody you were trying not to be. “I beg your pardon?” you said frostily.

“I said, ‘Is your castle in Arcaty?’” She tried to correct her lisp.

“‘Arcaty’?”

“Here,” she said. “Arcata Springs. We just call it Arcaty.”

“‘Castle’?”

“Don’t you know, they call this place the Halfmoon Castle? ‘A Castle in the Air High Atop the Bodarks.’ I was just wondering if you’d found your long-sought castle, that you dreamt of all those nights in Lisedi.”

“In where, pardon me?”

“‘Endlessly,’ I said. Do you have trouble with English, or is it me?”

“Not as much as I used to,” you said.

She offered you a cigarette, a filtered Tarreyton, and took one herself, and lit yours for you. Then she exhaled her smoke with the words “Where the devil did you find I.?” So you told her that you’d been a student of his, the past term, in the municipal university of that burgh, far away. “That’s just like him, seducing a student,” she said.

“Do you know him?” you asked. He hadn’t seemed to recognize her during registration.

“I know his stuff,” she said, and you understood that all-purpose “stuff” to mean his writing. “And I know his country. My name’s Sharon.” She told you her last name too, but you didn’t hear it or understand it. It started with I but wasn’t I.’s. She wasn’t related.

Morris had continued to rub himself up against your leg and was completely ignoring her. Of course, many cats are often more friendly to strangers than to their own masters. “You have a nice cat,” you remarked. “He’s beautiful.”

“Morris isn’t mine,” she told you. “He doesn’t belong to anybody. He just sort of comes with the hotel, and some people call him the General Manager. He just wandered in, as a kitten, seven years ago, and took over the place.”

“Have you worked here long?”

“Here in Arcaty, or here in the hotel? The hotel job I just started. I’ve been in Arcaty for a few years. But I grew up in Sticker Hound.” She waited for your response, and when there was none, she asked, “Haven’t you read any of his stuff?”

“I just started reading some last night,” you declared.

“Hasn’t he told you about Sticker Hound?” she asked. You shook your head. She explained. “That’s the name—one of the names—of the town that he writes all his stuff about, ’way off in the deepest, lostest part of the Bodarks. Do me a favor, will you? Do us all a favor. Ask him when was the last time he came back to visit Sticker Hound. And then ask him when he ever plans to come again.”

Chapter twenty-nine

“ ‘Sticker hound’?” he said, reading your card. “Where did you meet this girl?” You wrote another card while he was getting dressed and combing his hair. It was late at night, you were ready for bed, for your share of ride-and-tie, but he was just getting up. And he was still half-asleep. “Sticker Hound?” he said again. Then slowly recognition spread over his face. “Oh,” he said. “I think you might have misunderstood her. Sharon, huh? Yes. If I’m not mistaken, she’s Vernon Ingledew’s older sister, one of Hank’s four daughters. Or was it five? Anyway, what she must have been saying to you was the name of that village—only it isn’t an inhabited village anymore—it was named Stick Around.”

She wanted me to ask you when was the last time you were there?

“Why didn’t she ask me herself, when we were checking in?” he said.

She also wanted me to ask when you plan to visit Stick Around again.

“Maybe she’s on night duty at the desk,” he said. “I’ll go see. Have a nice beddie-bye and ride-and-tie.”

You slept a full eight hours, more than your share of the ride-and-tie, but he was not waiting for the bed when you woke. You showered and dressed and went downstairs. The desk clerk was not Sharon but Cathy. You asked her if she’d seen him. She said he was in the Crystal Room, and there you found him having coffee with the man you’d mistaken the day before for Bolshakov. Both men got to their feet as you entered, and I. motioned for you to join them. You hadn’t had breakfast yet, although it was lunchtime, and your head wasn’t clear enough to discount the possibility that this could be Bolshakov.

“Speak of the devil,” I. said to you. “We were just talking about you.” He gave you a wry grin, and there was something in his eyes that made you suspect, for a terrible moment, that Bolshakov had been telling I. all of the untruths he had fabricated about you. I. spoke to him: “Dr. MacLean, this is Cathlin McWalter herself.” Then he said to Cathlin, “Sweetheart, you were right. He’s not an insurance salesman from Cabool or a dentist. He’s a sure-enough psychiatrist!” Your knees buckled, and I. grabbed your elbow. “Not from North Ireland, though! He practices in West Plains, Missouri.”

“Hiya,” said Dr. MacLean. “Pleased to meet you.” He didn’t sound anything at all like Bolshakov. I. was motioning for the three of you to sit, but the doctor said, “I’ve really got to run. The wife is over there waiting for lunch. Nice to’ve met you, Cath. You take care of this guy, hear?” The doctor departed.

“Nice guy,” I. remarked after you’d ordered some brunch. “He’s not a bow member himself; just keeping his wife company. She writes children’s books.”

What were you telling him about me? you wrote.

“Oh, I was just mentioning that you’d been getting treatment for your eye trouble, and I wondered if he knew anything about photodysphoria. According to him, it is pretty psychosomatic. He told me a little story about Dr. Alvah Jackson, the man who first discovered the halfmoon spring, after the Osage Indians had left it, back around 1832. Jackson’s twelve-year-old son, Timothy, had a sort of photodysphoria that almost blinded him, but after treating the boy with water from the halfmoon spring, his son was apparently cured. For years after that, the doctor bottled and sold the water as ‘Dr. Jackson’s Eye-Water.’ Too bad they don’t make it or sell it anymore. Dr. MacLean says that all the springs of Arcata Springs are now polluted, and you can’t even use them to bathe in.”

Did you find Sharon? your next note asked.

“Yeah,” he said. He said nothing else. It was almost as if you’d introduced an unpleasant subject or something he wanted to avoid. His attention shifted to the Crystal Room’s head table, which was filling up with the officers of bow and the day’s guest speakers. Following lunch, a very pretty girl with dark hair, introduced by Mrs. Mazzarelli as “our most distinguished writer, and a resident of right here in Arcaty, the one and only Halfmoon Berryfairy,” gave a speech on the subject How I Use the Bodarks, which was so encouraging that it made you too, Cathlin McWalter, believe that you could write about the Bodarks. But she was followed by a lengthy succession of ladies who read their poems, mostly saccharine odes and funereal dithyrambs.

You slipped a card to your companion: Maybe the club should be called not BOW but SCRAPE: Sisters Composing Romances And Pretty Elegies.

He laughed. Several members cast him looks, because the poem currently being declaimed was somber, even pathetic. But then it was all over, except for the afternoon workshops, which I. was not required to attend.

He rose from his table. You rose with him. He looked at you for a while, smiling…or perhaps smirking. Then he asked, “Are you ready to go to Stick Around? Or Sticker Hound, as the case might be?”

You nodded.

“Wear your jeans,” he said.

As you were leaving the hotel, standing out front waiting while I. returned to get the suitcases, there was Morris, to say good-bye to you.

“You be a good kitty, Morris,” you said to him. “And I’ll be back, don’t you worry.”

I. was at your elbow, with the suitcases. “How come you can talk to the damned cat,” he asked, “but not to me?”

Chapter thirty

But it was I. who did not talk, all the way to Stick Around. He seemed to be lost in thought, perhaps dwelling upon the world of his fiction that he had created out of Stick Around, that he had not successfully re-created for going on five years now. Perhaps he was a little scared, or apprehensive, not wanting to find that the actual Stick Around was nothing at all like his idealized conception of it. He had no illusions that it would be anything other than a ghost town. He knew that no one was living in the village itself, that the few remaining citizens were all on the outskirts of the village, and that the abandoned buildings of the village would be either in ruins or in bad repair. But he didn’t really know what to expect, seeing again with his own eyes what he had only seen in his imagination for years.

If that was what he was thinking, you thought, then you could easily identify and sympathize with him, because you knew that if you were ever permitted to see Svanetia again, it might be nothing at all like the gorgeous place you’d seen only inside your head (and heart) all these years. Indeed, the closer you got to this Stick Around, leaving behind the big highway and climbing up into the remote fastnesses of “Isaac County,” passing across the Buffalo River (a real name; he didn’t need booze to cross) through the mountain-locked village that was the small county seat, “Jessup,” and then taking an unpaved back road that meandered toward the dying-but-still-post-officed village of “Acropolis,” you began to be constantly reminded of Svanetia. There were no enormous glacier-clad peaks like Ushba or Layla as backdrops, but the small mountains uprose ever more precipitously and were covered with the great oaks, beeches, and junipers that reminded you of Svanetia’s woodlands, and the flowery meadows…Ah, the meadows were thick with ripening hay that took you right back to the fields of Lisedi. You rolled down your window to inhale the air.

Here you were, Kat, almost home. I was beside myself with—I nearly said impatience, but if there’s one commodity we ghosts have in endless abundance, it’s patience. No, I was beside myself with triumph: This was the culmination of all the tricks, large and small, that I had pulled in order to get you here. My biggest trick was your driver, and unfortunately his services were about to end. I still had not made up my mind just how to get rid of him. Soon I would want him to “get lost,” and I decided I would practice by having him literally get lost.

As the steep dirt road climbed south of Acropolis, I gave I. a fork in it, and he took the wrong one. The prong he took became increasingly rough, weedy, and circuitous. He had, for the first time, to stop and shift the Blazer’s gears from two-wheel to four-wheel, to use the gear called “low lock.” He also had to take the tomato plants off the dashboard, to keep them from falling off. He arranged them on the floor behind the seat. After a steep mile on this route, the trail petered out.

“I thought I knew this country, but I guess I don’t.” It was the first time he had spoken since leaving Arcaty, seventy miles before.

You wanted to write on a card, Are we lost?, but the Blazer was bouncing so much you couldn’t hold your ballpoint steady. Once, the car hit a bump so severe that your wig shifted its position, and you had to right it as inconspicuously as possible.

One of I.’s several flaws was that he was never able to admit defeat, nor to backtrack from a stubborn destination. He could not turn around. If he had gone back to the place where he’d taken the wrong turn, all would have been well. But he insisted on going back only as far as the next westward divergent trail, which was scarcely better than the one you were on. This trail, which obviously hadn’t been used for years, meandered up hill and down vale all over the countryside, like the sledge paths of your Mount Layla. The only advantage of it, because it clearly wasn’t getting you anywhere, was that it afforded you a view, in passing, of some interesting mushrooms. You couldn’t ask I. to stop so you could get a closer look at them.

It was late afternoon. The sun would be down in another hour. Would you have to spend the night in the woods? The prospect almost elated you. More than once, you had spent the night in the woods above Lisedi, among the bear and roe deer and gazelles of Svanetia.

But I decided I’d given you and poor I. enough exposure to the rough forest, and I arranged for the logging trail you were on to drop down from the mountain and emerge, abruptly, beside a small white church and cemetery. In shape and size, if not in whiteness, the church reminded you strongly of little Saint George’s in Lisedi. “Hey!” I. exclaimed in recognition and exultation. “That’s the Stick Around church-house!” The sweat was running down his face, almost as if he’d been carrying you through the forest and down the mountainside. “I’d like to show you the cemetery, but we’re running late,” he said.

And then you were on a dirt road smooth enough, level enough, for you to write, Late for what?

“We’ve got a lot to do before dark.” he said.

Then you were in a valley filled with green pastures and broad meadows and surrounded by thousand-foot deep-forested mountains whose tops were nearly lost in scarves of mist that could have been transplanted directly from Lisedi. Dear Kat, you almost felt what I wanted you to feel. “Yonder’s Leapin Rock,” I. pointed. “But you’ve never read my novels, have you?”

Another mile down this valley, you reached the village proper, or what was left of it: a few buildings standing but abandoned, several buildings fallen or remaining only in traces. I. gave you a quick tour without getting out of the Blazer, driving in a circle over the terrain, through a couple of creekbeds—“Banty Creek, there,” he said, “and this is Swains Creek” (both real). Here’s where the gristmill was. And here’s the tomato-canning factory, what’s left of it.

The only building in good repair was a two-story house that had a verandah, ornately inset with carved balusters, running the length of its porch and making the place look for all the world like one of the Svanetian houses of the Dadeshkelianis. If it had only had a tower beside it, it would have been perfect. “That used to be the hotel,” I. said. “But before it became a hotel, for many years a strange woman used to live there by herself. You’ll hear stories about her. She was once the mistress of a governor of the state—who, incidentally, built this house—and was one of the town’s settlers.” This hotel/house, you’d be surprised to discover years hence, would come into your possession, even if it never came into your occupation.

“Now, this,” he said, pointing to another building, at a fork in the road, “used to be my favorite. It was the last post office of Stick Around, and also the house of a woman”—his voice caught, snagged on some memory, and he could not finish the sentence. He slowed just enough for you to get a good look at its long porch, which again reminded you of the verandahs of Lisedi. “Our friend Sharon is going to move into this house a couple of years from now,” he declared. “Of course, she’ll have to fix it up and get rid of the cockroaches.”

How do you know? you wrote. Did she tell you that?

He read the card, then brought the car to a full stop and turned to you and said, “Listen, Cathlin, we’re in Stick Around now. I can hear you, and you can speak. You don’t have to keep on writing these goddamn cards.”

But you were not able to speak. He drove on, up the eastward prong from the abandoned post office. He drove past the first apparently occupied dwelling, a two-pen log cabin with an open breezeway between the pens. There were flowers planted, and the yard seemed to be kept, and there were chickens roaming free. Even the arrangement of the logs reminded you of Svanetian log cabins. “I’m not going to stop,” I. said, as if talking to himself, persuading himself not to stop. “That’s where the woman—the last postmistress of Stick Around—she lives there. She is, by the way, Sharon’s grandmother, and she can tell you enough stories to keep you writing for years.”

Still, you could not speak, or write, in response to that. He drove on. In less than another mile, he came to a clearing with gardens, tilled fields, and a charming old house painted yellow, the only painted building in the environs, its eaves and porch trimmed with fancy jigsaw work in the fashion of Svanetia’s quelvoni lisoque, “crazy carpenters.” The house was obviously occupied: there was a thriving vegetable garden beside it, a pig pen, a goat pen, and free-ranging chickens everywhere. “I will stop here,” I. declared. “But I’ll just be a minute. I need to borrow a shovel.”

You watched as he got out and approached the porch, calling out, “Hello, the house!” Two dogs ran to meet him but did not bark. He patted their heads. Soon the door opened and a boy came out. Still your leaping heart, Kat; he wasn’t old enough for you. He wasn’t yet eleven, and even when he got to be twelve, he was not going to be your boyfriend. So you could put that out of your mind.

The boy was followed by his mother, a woman you thought could have been Sharon’s sister: the same blonde hair, only longer, the same blue eyes. But she was not Sharon’s sister. Soon enough you would find out who she was, but she was not related to Sharon. Interrupted in the act of preparing supper, she was wiping her hands on her apron. But at the sight of I. she suddenly screamed his name and practically leapt off the porch and into his arms. They did not kiss, but they hugged tightly a long time, the boy standing close and touching his mother’s back as she did so.

You watched as they talked. Wasn’t I. going to bring her over to the Blazer and introduce her to you? Apparently not. Or not yet. Soon the yellow house’s door opened again and a man came out, the woman’s husband, the boy’s father. You guessed the couple were in their early thirties. The man shook I.’s hand vigorously and slapped him on the back, and I. chatted with him, and the couple both looked out at the Blazer, in your direction, at your eyes hidden by the dark glasses. Wasn’t I. going to introduce them? Apparently not. After a while, the man went out to a shed beside the house and returned with a shovel, which he handed to I., and I. talked for just a minute longer before returning to the Blazer. He threw the shovel into the back and got in.

You wanted to write, What’s the shovel for? but he had asked you not to write, and you remembered, “That’s once. That’s twice.”

“The man who built that house,” I. told you, “was a fabulous old character who came originally from Connecticut, and he lived here as a hermit. He wrote some far-out poetry. I met him once when I was very young, and again…after he died.”

The fabulous old character’s spirit arranged for I. to easily find the logging trail that led straight up the mountainside to a grove of Juniperus virginiana, a glade on the bench of the mountain, where there was a cemetery-of-one, a single gravestone in the clearing. I. stopped the car, turned off the motor, and said, “Well, we’re here.”

Although the motor was off, and although the decrepit radio in the Blazer had not been functional for years, I managed to get it to pick up, from some far-distant college town, a station called KUAF, which began playing the Piano Concerto no. 1 in B-flat Minor by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

You recognized it from the first urgent calls of the keys. You were then thoroughly torn between an elation of love for the music, an overwhelming expectancy of what the music was going to do to you, and an enormous fear: this was the music, you’d written in Cathlin’s obituary, for her funeral.

“Get out,” I. said. He took the shovel out of the rear and walked with it to a spot in the clearing, not very close to the lone tombstone, where he began digging. Listening to the Tchaikovsky, you reluctantly got out of the Blazer and moved slowly in his direction. The music’s volume increased so that you could still hear it away from the car. You arrived at a place where you could make out the inscription on the tombstone:

DANIEL LYAM MONTROSS

June 17, 1880–May 26, 1953

The last Montross of Dudleytown

The only Montross of Stick Around

“We dream our lives, and live our sleep’s extremes.”

You had not even brought your ballpoint and cards with you. “Who was he?” you asked. The Tchaikovsky had reached the passage where the piano, finding itself lost in the wonderland of strange emotions, is guided by the strings onto the right path and discovers the first glimpse of heaven.

I. continued digging. “He was the man I just mentioned, who built that house down yonder. I wrote a novel about him once, which you never got around to reading. That girl, the blonde, is his granddaughter. Her name is Diana Stoving. But she’s also his daughter, too. And their son is named after him. They call him Danny Boy.”

Is it possible to carry two tunes in your head at once? At least it was, for you, this time, because there beside the Tchaikovsky but not in tune to it was this, from County Derry:

But when ye come, and all the flowers are dying,

And I am dead, as all the flowers must die,

Ye’ll come and find the place where I am lying.

And kneel and say an Ave where I lie.

And I shall hear, though soft you tread above me,

And in the dark my soul will wake and see.

For you’ll bend down and tell me that you love me,

And we shall sleep in peace for all eternity.

“What are you doing?” you asked. “Please tell me.”

“I was just thinking of maybe transplanting my tomatoes here,” he declared. “But I guess it’s not the best spot for it. And my hole’s too deep, isn’t it? It’s nearly deep enough to bury somebody in.”

The look he gave you with these words sent shivers up your spine, but you weren’t sure the shivers had not proceeded from the music: the Tchaikovsky had reached the passage where the soft strings alone, while the piano is silent, attempt to tell the piano how heaven really appears, before the piano can complete the job of describing a mortal response to it.

You knew what was coming soon. The music was building up to it. You swayed. You closed your eyes and lost yourself in the music’s losing itself in paradise; you hugged yourself and stroked your arms and took deep breaths; the tingling of your spine was almost visible to me and the goose pimples on your skin actually were visible, and your expression revealed your longing and exultation and tender aches: The full orchestra and piano were having at it for all they were worth, and then the melodic line began to buck and jerk and thrum and heave in an ecstasy that seized your whole body, and you knew that if you did not grab I. for support you would fall on the ground and have your climax there.

You grabbed his arm. It was not simply for support during your spasms. It was almost a gesture of pleading: Don’t do to me what I think you may think you are doing.

You reached that unfamiliar summit standing up. During the last throes of it, as you and the music subsided, he gently lifted the extravagant hat off your head and threw it into his hole. Then he removed your wig and threw it in. And then your sunglasses.

He addressed the hole. “Rest in peace, Cathlin.” Then he turned to you and stroked your own hair, brown as the forest floor that nurtured the mushrooms that were your singular overriding interest in this life. And I, powerful and mighty there beside my grave, arranged for the forest floor all around you to sprout with the most marvelous mushrooms you’d ever seen.

He stopped stroking your short hair and lifted your chin. “Damned if I’m going to keep on calling you Ekaterina Vladimirovna, though,” he said. “So what can I call you?”

“I have been called all kinds of things,” you said, and he heard you. Katerinka. Katerinochka. Trina. Katrusya. Katsyaryna. Kotya. Kitti. Katrusenko. Keesa. “In camp at Ishimbay, they called me Keesa, which is a cat’s name. In Leningrad, they called me Katrina. But in Svanetia, they called me Eka, or Kati. Kati is a good nickname in Georgia, in Hungary, in Yugoslavia, in Czechoslovakia, in Finland, everywhere. But I think”—you paused and thought, and cast a fond glance at my grave—“I think that in this country I would like for those I love most to call me Kat.”

“Kat,” he said, and liked it. “Those who love you most will call you Kat.”

And thus both of you circumvented the awkward direct professing of love.

How had he seen through your disguise? Oh, long before, he had guessed, had become suspicious of the similarities between Cathlin’s obituary and Kat’s life, had realized that Bolshakov “belonged” not to Cathlin but to Kat. Despite the extravagance, exaggeration, and outrage of Cathlin’s face and costume, she could do nothing with Kat’s nose or Kat’s neck. They were clearly Kat’s perfect nose and Kat’s long, graceful neck. And then there was that exclamation, Ot! I. wasn’t as deaf as you thought, and here in Stick Around he wasn’t deaf at all.

“But the clincher,” he said, “was when I asked Dr. MacLean this morning what hebephilia is. He told me: an abnormally passionate interest in pubescent people. In your case, boys of twelve. And now that I’ve told you how I saw through your disguise, it’s your turn to tell me: Why did you do it? Why did you have to go to such lengths to cover Kat?”

“I only wanted to be your student, to study to be a writer, without your knowing it was me,” you told him, which was the truth. But only part of the truth. You tried to tell him also the rest of it: that you wanted to create Cathlin, that you needed to see if you could make a woman different from yourself who could write Geordie Lad as a necktie, not a penis. And you had also wanted to see if knowing him as Cathlin might have helped you overcome your hebephilia.

“It didn’t work, did it?” he said. “Tonight, in the bedroom that was Dan Montross’s, we’re going to have to ride and tie again, but for the last time. After you’ve gone to bed, I’m going to stay up very late talking to Diana and to Day Whittacker, her husband. Then, after you give me the bed and I get a few hours’ sleep, I’m going to take off. I’m thinking of going back up to Rolla, Missouri, and visiting some friends, and then maybe hunting for a job teaching art history somewhere.”

“What about me?” you said.

“You’re going to stick around here for as long as you like,” he told you, and when you looked surprised, he added, as if to persuade you, “Bolshakov could never find you here. Day and Diana will be happy to have you for as long as you want to stay…and so long as you don’t molest Danny. You could finish Geordie Lad here, although my advice, my final advice to you, is to forget Cathlin and write Dzhordzha Boy. Or, if you do it in English, call it Georgia Boy. No, wait, Erskine Caldwell wrote a novel of that title. But hell, there’s no copyright on titles. What’s so funny? Why are you laughing?”

“Forgive. I was just thinking, or remembering: Bolshakov was always accusing me of ‘embellishment.’ He had an obsession with ‘real life.’ Do you think he would ever believe what you, and Anangka, and…the spirit of Dan Montross have done with me?”

I. said, “But now you’re going to do for yourself. I’m not going to write about you, or about this.” His hand swept the glade of the cedars, the tombstone, the magic place on the mountainside. “Let me correct myself. I said a moment ago that tonight’s the last time we’ll ride and tie. Yes, I may never see you again, but I hope…and I think possibly Dan Montross would also hope…that you’ll like Stick Around enough to maybe write some books someday about it, about him, or maybe even about the Indians who once lived here. I can’t anymore. These people won’t let me write about them. I’ve already used them in stories, and once I do that they demand the right to be left alone. But you…you could ride and tie my country with me, picking up where I left off and creating your own characters, as you created Cathlin. It’s your turn now. Stick around. Ride and tie.”

Dusk was fallen. The long day was over. My bag of tricks was empty, but I had you here…almost. You needed time to think about it, but both I. and I were confident you’d stay, because, you see, you had absolutely nowhere else to go.

Riding down to the yellow house in I.’s Blazer, going off to meet his friends, who would become your friends too, you informed him, “I love the little serendipities of life, but this coincidence I like best: in Svanetian, Lisedi, the name of the town I came from, means ‘to remain, to stay more, to stick around.’”

Part two

LOUDER,

engram!

(from the Memoir, chapters 17–25 only)

Before death takes me to her breast, I’ll show you the Indian shelters and their little burial mounds in this glen of the waterfall. People lived here once. I was an Indian once, and so were you; our people lived here. We might live here again.

—Daniel Lyam Montross, A Dream of a Small but Unlost Town

17

I

But he actually did leave, early the next afternoon, and I would not see him again for two years. His friends in Stick Around were disappointed that he’d blow in like that, deposit me like excess baggage or castoff ballast, and take off again, without even, I was soon to learn, troubling himself to say hello to some of those who had loved and missed him most. Ingraham, as I think I’ve shown conclusively in the previous chapter, was a man with many problems, some of them beyond hope. I did not wish to become another of his problems, and thus I might almost be forgiven for allowing myself to believe, eventually, that his function in the story of my life had been simply that of a temporary assistant to beloved Anangka, who’d had her gentle hands full supervising my destiny…although, as we shall see, it was not Anangka but a male arranger to whom Ingraham was in thrall.

The next several months that I spent in Stick Around were among the most idyllic of my life, despite, or because of, the total contrast to Pittsburgh, where I had at least been gainfully employed and faced with the unremitting difficulties of learning the language and coming to grips with my deracination and festering homesickness, not to mention vastly diverted by that ardent sport with young Kenneth Elmore, the memory of which was going to have to suffice me for a while, because I had given Ingraham my solemn oath to refrain from seducing Daniel I. Stoving-Whittacker, the son of my host and hostess. Danny Boy, as they called him, had just reached his tenth birthday, and while he was precocious in ways that would surprise me (my solemn oath did not prevent me from spying upon him in various stages of nudity and observing his semierections), he would not be ready for his first sexual encounter until such time as I had quitted for good the room where I slept and wrote Georgie Boy, the room that had been the bedroom of Danny’s grandfather (I hesitate to complicate matters by revealing that he was also Danny’s great-grandfather as well as his father), the late poet Daniel Lyam Montross, the same complex, inscrutable figure—half hillbilly, half mystic—whose tangled life and small body of work would soon attract to Stick Around in search of answers the critic Lawrence Brace, who incidentally was the lover of my good friend Sharon Ingledew…But I am plunging ahead of my story, as I have already done frequently and inexcusably—or with the excuse that there are so many warps for my woof to cross that my shuttle jumps ahead of me.

Too many people in a story diminish the reader’s trust in any one of them, as Ingraham tried to teach us in that class in Pittsburgh. Thus, I must give Diana Stoving and Day Whittacker a slighting scrutiny less than equal to their actual substance to me. But knowing them, as I came to do, I think they would like it this way; they were very private people, utterly devoted to each other and to their son, keeping to themselves and to the world of nature that surrounded them and loved them, cultivating their own little gardens in the best Voltairean sense, knowing home and staying at it. I will offer no details of their sex life, although, sleeping as I did in the next room for many months, I was privy to it in all its variety, frequency, and music. I will not even essay to describe them, beyond pointing out that both were beautiful and she was perhaps three or four years older than he. I am not even going to describe their son, beyond saying he was (and is) the loveliest male I’ve ever seen.

Surely Day and Diana were not totally comfortable suddenly having a stranger as their interminable houseguest; surely their rich, cultivated sense of privacy was taxed, if not abused; surely they had some discussions between themselves about the best way to get rid of me. But they never once expressed any displeasure toward me, nor committed any lapse of complete hospitality. What could I offer them in return? Money was a subject never discussed; I had none and would soon have to think of some way to meet my minimal obligations. But the third day I was there, Anangka (or Whoever) came up with a way I could make a token gesture of repaying their hospitality with what little talent I possessed.

The murmuring engrams of that afternoon remain audible in my mind even from this distance of eleven years. Day and Diana happened to remark, over lunch, upon the dearth of morels encountered that season. Themselves good amateur mycologists who could easily tell an edible bolete from a deadly amanita, they lamented that their favorite annual spot for picking the Morchella esculenta, a once-burned-over stand of woods up the hill, had apparently not produced any of the succulent fungi this springtime and that now it was too late for them. Yes, I said, throwing in my tiny two pennies’ worth of expertise, the season for morels lasts scarcely two or three weeks. They looked at me. “Do they have morels in Svanetia?” Diana asked. Apparently their friend Ingraham had entirely neglected to tell them that I was, by training and profession, a mushroomologist of no small merit, and I was not about to boast of my credentials. But I offered to find them some morels. It was relatively easy. Day and Diana had been correct in assuming that the most favorable habitat for morels is a burned-over substratum of woodland (because the fire tends to kill competing myceliae), but I knew that there were other conditions of the substrata (type and density of leaf rot, moisture, pitch of slope, etc., etc.) conducive to footholds for Morchellae, and I conducted Day and Diana, with inquisitive, sponge-brained woods-creature Danny in tow (even then he already matched Kenny’s eagerness to learn Svanetian, at least for tqubul, “the mushroom”), on a tour of their upper acres, where, in what was once an apple orchard, long abandoned and overgrown and carpeted with a dense leaf fall from third-growth timber, we began a search that was soon fruitful, despite the pessimism in their not having brought any containers to hold the almost full peck of the spongy delicacies I found.

“But how did you find them?” Day wanted to know. “I just searched this spot yesterday, carefully.”

“Both ways?” I asked, trying not to sound at all smug. “The best way to find something, morels or other, is to re-search the same spot from an entirely different direction.”

And thus they had from me, not simply enough morels to grace our table for the next week or so, but also a handy tip that will do for life’s quests as well as for mushroom hunting. I could not resist further pointing out, to my rapt audience, that morels are of the class Ascomycete, not the Basidiomycete class, to which most other mushrooms belong, and that I subscribe to that theory of mycology which holds that Basidiomycetes evolved from the Ascomycetes; thus our porous morel was a primitive creature who had not learned how to cap or striate its spore sacs, or to manufacture protective poison, or to diminish its delectable taste. In other words, like certain people it was still innocent, naive, vulnerable, and exquisite.

On the way home, and often in answer to Danny’s eager discoveries-and-questions, we paused to talk about many other mushrooms, and thus by the time we reached the house I had to confess, in response to Day’s “How do you know all this stuff?” that I was not simply an amateur mycologist. “But Ingraham told us you were just another novelist,” Day said, and the way he put it was not without some disparagement, as if the world were full of novelists…with their feet sticking out the windows, to use a charming Bodarks expression of overcrowding.

They understood, my hosts, why I preferred to spend so much time alone in my room: I was indeed attempting to write a novel. My dormer window faced the dirt road (on which there was scarcely any traffic) and a splendid vista of Ingledew Mountain that couldn’t rival but could impersonate to the desperately homelorn the bulk of Mount Layla (2,300 feet versus 13,000 feet). The walls of the room, all four white plaster walls, plus the extra surfaces within the dormered gable, had been covered thirty years before with the penciled script of the poet, as a kind of open journal, a mural of erect tablets, containing his soliloquies (for I understood from his daughter, Diana, that except for a space of a week when she at the age of three lived there with him, he was entirely alone, virtually a hermit): MONTROSS, HIS BECOMINGS; MONTROSS, HIS LEAVINGS; MONTROSS, HIS NAMINGS; MONTROSS, HIS HUMMINGS; MONTROSS, HIS BLESSINGS; MONTROSS, HIS DAMNINGS; etc. Only two of these latter formed engrams in my mind. If I hadn’t been so preoccupied with the novel, I would have transcribed many of Montross’s words into my own journal, but I didn’t, and all I could recall were Damnings Numbers Two and Six: Wretched are they who work for wages; for the one is never equal to the other; and Wretched are they who think themselves only male or only female, for the one is not equal to the other. I had cause to remember the first because it would be a while before I could find any wages to earn, and the second because it helped open up one of Bolshakov’s matryoshka dolls that had been resisting my probes, and it prepared me for that gender switch, or gender disguise, that eventually made me famous to millions.

It was almost as if Montross’s ghost were in that room with me. Not literally: If his ghost did indeed exist, and did indeed “haunt” his former house, he was careful never to let himself be manifest to its inhabitants, even though, on occasion, I challenged him, talking to those walls, flirting with them, even teasing them. I have had experience, as I showed in Chapter Five, with summoning a lanchal back from its limbo and getting it (he or she) to prove its existence by some slight sign: action, utterance, or appearance. But nothing I tried on Dan would raise so much as a chirp or vapor out of him. I knew he was there but was keeping himself silent and invisible…Or, no, he was waiting patiently for me to understand, as I finally did, the important truth that his essential spiritual manifestation was in the Word: Words themselves are all the ghosts we need. And there were plenty of these in that room…including those that, day by day, I amassed for Georgie Boy.

II

One of the questions most commonly asked of me by reporters, especially those interviewing me for the more literate and literary media, is, “What books did you read those years at Stick Around?” Usually I reply, after first correcting the tenure (it wasn’t years but months), that one of the several books I read was One Hundred Years of Solitude. Diana owned a copy, along with a number of American novels by Updike, Barth, Cheever, Toni Morrison, Lee Smith, and of course, Ingraham. I was never without something to read, and Diana also had, in addition to Lolita and Pale Fire, the other fourteen novels by that Russo-American master whose life, or life style, I have been accused of emulating, and in all candor I did read most of these in Stick Around; but the one novel that remains most strongly encoded in my engrams is the masterpiece not of Nabokov but of García Márquez. Newsweek’s interviewer asked me, bluntly, “Did Stick Around remind you of Macondo?” and I told her I’ve never been to Macondo. But I was being coy. Yes, I suppose one could enumerate countless similarities between the Colombian ghost town and its American counterpart, and one should be careful to mention the essential difference: that Macondo disappeared into “a fearful whirlwind of dust and rubble,” while Stick Around yet manages to survive, and always shall, as if heeding the pathetic injunction of its own name. The total population, when I was there, was not more than two dozen, and this was all outside the “town limits,” whatever those limits were. The village itself was not populated, although my friend Sharon would eventually move into the old post office/general store/house that had once belonged to her grandmother, and shortly thereafter her erstwhile lover, Lawrence Brace, would come to occupy (and nearly destroy) the old hotel for less than a year. I was told that early in this century there were over five hundred people in Stick Around.

The only truly permanent resident (and I trust I’m using permanent advisedly) was Sharon’s grandmother, an extraordinary woman, then approaching eighty years of age, although ageless surely, whom I shall have to call, out of deference to Ingraham, “Lara Burns.” If Stick Around has the equivalent of Macondo’s Pilar Ternera, it is she, but again with essential differences: Lara was never a prostitute, despite rumors to that effect, and Lara will probably outlive Pilar, who outlived the most longevous old ladies of my Caucasus, where it is not uncommon to find a Svanetian dowager of 120 years. Lara was still youthful when I knew her, or at least I, fifty-odd years her junior, couldn’t keep up with her in mental or physical activity.

Ingraham had pointed out to me her house (actually a two-pen log cabin), but I did not even trouble myself to wonder, then, why he would not stop to say howdy to her. I first became really aware of her when I told Danny one of my very favorite Svan tales of lanchali and he commented, “Gran Dahl already told me that one.” I thought he said “Grand Doll,” and my confusion was to continue through his several repetitions of it: “Grand Doll loves to fish,” “You should see some of Grand Doll’s cats,” and “No, but I bet Grand Doll can.”

Finally I asked Diana who was this Grand Doll, and she explained: the widow of “Everett Dahl” (as Ingraham has shaded him), Lara Burns Dahl, the town’s last postmistress and, now, the town’s oldest native-born resident. And then Diana repeated Ingraham’s words almost exactly: “She can tell you enough stories to keep you writing for years.” How could I meet her? Diana gave me a look as if it had been a silly question, then said, “Just go up and bang on her door, if she’s not already outside, as she usually is.”

In Original Flavor, my most recent novel, I did indeed incorporate several of the stories I first heard from Lara Burns, and I used a number of others in my one venture into so-called “nonfiction,” Dawn of the Osage, which sold well for such a work, although it was not translated into very many foreign languages. During my months in Stick Around, I probably spent more time in her company than with anyone else, not excluding Diana and Day and Danny. She was the only person I’ve ever given permission to address me familiarly from the beginning: When she asked me to call her simply Lara, I said she could call me simply Kat, and she said, “Sure thing, but I’ve got a plenty of those already,” and indicated her yard, where a variety of felines were lolling and sporting, and declared with a wink, “A cat arena.” Whenever I sat with her, one of her cats would jump into my lap, and at first she’d try to shoo it away, but I protested that I was very fond of cats, and she said, “They know it, too.”

Of all the many things that Lara and I had in common, this is the most noteworthy: She, too, in her early twenties, spent three years in a psychiatric hospital, specifically the state asylum for the insane. Unlike me, she was not confined for political motives, and I will not pretend that our incarcerations were identical, beyond the fact that neither of us was certifiably mad: She was diagnosed as having “aphasic catalepsy” (whereas in truth she was simply so angry at those who were trying to steal her baby that she would not speak to anyone), and I was diagnosed by Bolshakov, as we have seen, as having “creeping schizophrenia,” the Serbsky’s convenient catch-all category for nonconformists. But both Lara and I had spent three years exposed to genuinely sick minds, among the doctors as well as the patients, and we could spend many an hour swapping memories of the dazzling flights of the truly possessed. More, even, than our repertoire of ghost stories, wherein we were constantly delighted to discover the kinship of the Bodarkian spook and the Svanetian lanchal, these tales of bughouse behavior cemented a bond between us. There are, come to think of it, many affinities between the lanchal and the lunatic: both have left this sorry world behind. Neither Lara nor I entertained Danny with tales of loonies, but we practically competed with each other in telling him ghost stories. It is a wonder we didn’t give him bad dreams, but if we did, he kept them to himself. The highest accolade I ever earned as a storyteller, more meaningful to me really than all the praise the reviewers have heaped upon my work this past decade, was when Danny told me that I could tell better stories than Grand Doll could…and he meant not that the content of the stories was any better (or even any different, considering the enormous resemblances between Bodarkadia and Svanetia) but that my way of telling was perhaps more deft than hers.

We swapped, Lara and I, not only our full and frightening repertoire of specter yarns, but also the similarities (and the essential differences) between Svanetian and Bodarkadian customs and superstitions, e.g., there is a Svanetian equivalent of the Bodarkadian shivaree for newlyweds, in which much noise is made and the bridegroom has to “ransom” himself by furnishing the revelers with much food and drink. There are also in Svanetia many little habits designed to help someone who has lost something find it, such as Lara’s superstition of bending down the stalk of a mullein plant. I recall the evening, after a very warm day in late May, when Lara and I were sitting in her breezeway (dogtrot was the local name for such, but only cats trotted—or minced—in hers), and we saw the season’s first firefly hovering over A Cat Arena, the first firefly I had seen since summers agone in my homeland. Soon there were so many of them that I was transported back to the verandahs of Lisedi and lost, for a long moment, in the legendary Svanetia of my girlhood.

“I’m sorry,” Lara interrupted my reverie. “For a while there you got to talking in your own language, and I couldn’t follow you. Is that how they say ‘lightning bug’ where you come from?”

Yes, and there was something else, how in Svanetia we worship trees (as I’ve made a motif in Lamshged; or, The Shady Side of the Mountain): Trees, no less than people, are thought to possess souls and to survive after death. Trees feel and suffer and communicate with one another. Lara herself could understand all this, not because the Bodarkadians had ever worshiped trees or even respected them, but because she herself knew that trees have souls if not minds and are capable, in their own way, of speaking, even singing. One night, when the breeze died down and everything was still, except the slow drift and twinkle of the fireflies, she said, “Listen. Can you hear that?” And I strained my ears, which, long-removed from the cacophonies of Pittsburgh, had regained their discrimination, and indeed I thought I heard a sound, almost as of a distant wordless hymn or chant. Trees, Lara said.

“Or maybe,” I offered, “the spirits of old trees long gone.” And then I asked her a question that strikes me in retrospect as pretty stupid. “Did you ever know Daniel Lyam Montross?”

“Of course,” she said, but she said nothing more, then, by way of elaboration.

III

Etymologically, Bodark derives from the French bois d’arc, “archer’s wood” or “wood for bows,” the name given to that common tree, Maclura pomifera, used so exclusively by my Osage Indians for their bows that it became known as Osage Orange (the fruit resembles an oversized orange, but greenish). Other bynames for the tree are mock orange, ironwood, yellowwood, hedge, and bowwood, and other place-name derivatives around this vicinity are the lake, creek, and wildlife refuge named Bois d’Arc; the village Bozark, or Bozarth; the town Bodark; and this whole range of mountains. Lovers of fated links, or “happenchances,” as Stickarounders call them, happy serendipities, will appreciate this connection between the basic root, arc or ark, as “a place of shelter or refuge,” and my Svan, which means, yes, “a place of shelter or refuge.” The latter was deliberate, given anciently to that inaccessible region where people could cut themselves off from the rest of the world (but not, alas, from each other), while the former is just accidental, a true happenchance. Since I thought I could never go home again, it was good for me to discover that I was in a place of refuge in America.

Falling into a steady routine of work on Georgie Boy, leaping out of bed at the first proud crow of the qwich (who I was charmed to learn was called rooster), walking a couple of miles in the morning-fragrant, sunrise-fresh woods while waiting to help Diana make the breakfast of coffee, biscuits, bacon, eggs, and that quaint cornderivative called grits, then returning after it was eaten to my (or Dan’s) room, where I’d sit at my (his) little desk and first warm up the brain traces by browsing through one of the three volumes that had constituted Dan’s entire library: a Webster’s unabridged, an anthology of Elizabethan poetry, and a King James version of the Bible—Diana told me that Dan had “read” the dictionary as one would watch a movie, following a dramatic plot, and I sometimes attempted to do that myself, with limited success. Then I would pause, before letting myself be carried off to Moscow or Ishimbay, and reflect upon the security and peacefulness of my mountain hideaway, in such contrast both to Pittsburgh and to the settings of my novel.

One reason I think I was able to depict and characterize V.T. Bolshakov as “the most nefarious villain to appear in fiction since Faulkner’s Popeye,” as the Atlantic’s reviewer called him, was that I felt so safe from him. Much as I gave him credit for mobility, cleverness, subterfuge, and strategy, I did not believe there was any way he could find me in Stick Around. Bolshakov in the Bodarks? Inconceivable. Thus I felt absolutely free to malign him with a loaded brush, to slap the pigments of his delineation onto the canvas with vengeance and honest scorn, as if belatedly completing the insults that had freed me from him. The miserable son of a bitch.

Nights, I lay awake for only moments in Dan’s bed, listening to the serenade of night-courting insects and reptiles, before falling into a deep, snug, safe sleep, during which my unremembered dreams sorted out, classified, rearranged, and coded all the intricacies of the next day’s verbal art, and even my familiar dreams of climbing and descending an endless sequence of stone steps, concrete steps, iron steps, and wooden steps seemed to have a new symbolic significance to the work I was doing.

As I said in my interview for Paris Review, I consider myself not a novelist but an idyllist, even though the one work that first brought me to the world’s attention was not an idyll so much as a buskin, stamped with the thick-soled cothurnus imprints of the Soviet regime. If I’m granted half the chance, I’ll write an idyll about Stick Around, not in competition with Ingraham, whose territory it is, but in tribute to the pastoral life I was allowed there. But the difficulty is, it would have no plot, no story, no conflict, no tension. Nothing happened to me in Stick Around…except that I finished a novel.

One thing I’d explore in my idyll, which I can only mention here, is the lone stint of labor I performed to earn a modicum of wages, as if Anangka had taken over my accounts and knew when I was penniless and would need some money just to buy the essential necessities: writing paper, cigarettes, toiletries, vodka. In early June the hay harvest started and was threatened by rains (as it turned out, the last rains for months) and every available “hand” up and down the valley of the Little Buffalo River was recruited to help, and I abandoned my novel for five days of hard work that left me sunburned, scratched, blistered, sore, and exhausted, but remunerated sufficiently by the farmers who owned the fields to buy my needs for the rest of the summer. In Lisedi (where of course there were no landowners but only managers of the kolkhoz, or collective) I had always been a spectator at the annual haying and knew the difference between chem and neni, the kinds of hay, and men, the second mowing of hay. (There was to be no meri, or merry, in Stick Around because of the awful drought that year.) This was the first time I had actually helped at a haying, and it was sufficient to implant my engrams permanently with the smell of the new-mown hay, the feel of the lashings and stabbings of the stalks and strands, the straining of never-used muscles in my back, and the intensification of pleasure that the hard work gave to a simple pause for a glass of iced tea, or, at the end of the day, a “skinny-dip” in the creek.

Mention of this engrammatizes the picture of some of my coworkers and my first awareness that outside of Stick Around, in the hills and hollers that had once belonged to Anglo-Saxon and Scotch-Irish peasants, and before them to the Osage Indians, there now existed no small number of dropouts from society, people who, ten or fifteen years earlier, had been called flower children or hippies, and now were as outmoded as those labels but still carried flowers, or wore them, along with headbands, Indian-print fabrics, quilted things, and lots of beads. Day and Diana knew most of these people but had had their own brief fling, eleven years before, with the so-called counterculture in some other place, and now were resolved to share nothing in common with them except their devotion to back-to-the-land subsistence agriculture. Ironically, the only people I’d known in Georgia like these latter-day hippies were the bands of brightly dressed Gypsies, who had no interest in the land at all.

When, at the end of the first day’s haying, after sundown, everybody headed down to the creek and eagerly divested themselves of clothing, and the girls too, wearing no brassieres, stepped out of their beaded moccasins as well as their bedspread dresses or embroidered jeans and plunged naked into the cool stream, I was obliged to join them. All of these girls—I should call them women because most of them had passed the age beyond which they had been advised never to trust anyone—had long hair, and I felt more self-conscious about my short hair (although it was long enough now that no one would know it had last been cut by a prison razor) than I did about my nakedness. On the riverbank there was also much lighting up and passing around of “joints,” and if one passed up one’s turn to pinch and pucker the smoldering roach, one was considered uncool, unhip, or at least unsociable. There were a few men, three or four, who made nuisances of themselves to me, attempting to “start something.”

The cultivation of marijuana was indirectly responsible for the one serious disharmony in the idyll of Stick Around: At least once a week, a helicopter would patrol the valley, officers of the law searching for illegal plots where the narcotic weed was grown, and the sight of this airship, not to mention the awful noise of it, ruined the day for me. My hosts grew none of the stuff themselves, nor used it, but for some reason the lawmen in the air seemed to think their property was an ideal location for shady raising, and they swept our airspace redundantly.

The helicopters disturbed the peace of the livestock more than that of the people, who at least understood the intentions of the disturbers. Day and Diana owned a number of goats, several pigs, a milk cow, and countless free-ranging chickens (in the course of my stay I taught Diana my best recipes for preparing chicken in the Svanetian manner), and a few minutes’ surveillance by the helicopter would leave these animals neurotic for several days.

Lara Burns, if she and her animals, including those in A Cat Arena, were exposed to the flight of the raucous whirlybird, would stand and defiantly raise a fist, at the top of which stood her middle finger. If I was with her, I’d join her in this gesture, and I did so on several occasions before she finally explained to me its origin and significance. That recent photograph of me in Time, lifting my hand and finger to make this sign, was inadvertent; the photographer was one of those paparrazzi who had virtually camped out at the Halfmoon in order to shoot me.

“I learned that signal, by the way,” Lara Burns told me, “from Dan Montross.”

IV

From June 8 until September 23 of that year, according to my journal, it did not rain a single drop in Stick Around. This, even more than the craggy heights of its snowcapped peaks, set Svanetia apart from Bodarkadia, because I had never in my life there known a drought; indeed, the annual rainfall in Svanetia is not only dependable and predictable but awesome. The event called by old-timers in Stick Around “a toad-strangling downpour” was a common summer day’s occurrence in Lisedi. That summer, I had not yet read any of Ingraham’s books, and I did not realize that severe droughts recur every dozen years or so. Along about the middle of July, when Ingraham’s tomatoes, which I had transplanted and staked into a corner of Diana’s garden and had been weeding and watering whenever I volunteered this effort for the rest of the vegetables, began to wither and droop, I was told by my hosts to cease using the fresh water that came from the well and begin using, if any water at all, “scrap” water from our baths and clothes washings (we had been required to give up showers and take only tub baths in a few gallons of water). Ingraham’s tomato plants managed to bear a few misshapen fruit not living up to their varietal name, Big Girl, and I abandoned the notion I’d been tinkering with, to find his address in Rolla, Missouri, and mail him a few of the mature “love apples.” We ate them. Diana’s own tomatoes were not plentiful enough for her usual canning and freezing, and then in August the tomato vines languished and wizened beyond hope. For three months we had been eating marvelously, we three cooks (Day was himself no mean chef) vying with each other in succession, and using an abundant supply of homegrown vegetables, fruit, and meat, but from August onward there was a noticeable falling off in the fare. I had just had time to discover that treat, corn on the cob, when the corn gave out, much to the distress of our local distiller-by-the-light-of-the-moon, a young man I shall have to call “Jack Chisholm” because his operation, which I understand is still flourishing in nondrought years, is just as illegal as the cultivation of marijuana. I considered his product at least superior to the County Fair I once kept to serve to Knox Ogden, and it would do in a pinch when my vodka ran out and no one was going to the nearest liquor store, which was many miles away in the next county.

I could write an idyll about Jack Chisholm, who was, for his youth, one of the very last of the real Bodarkadians and lived ‘“way back around up in there” in some remote aerie. But I have taxed my reader’s patience with these notes about Stick Around when it is another town, Arcata Springs, that serves as a far more important setting in my life. Let us head that way, with a backward glance that regrets all that has been omitted from this chapter. I see I have made no mention whatsoever of that grandson of Lara’s, my friend Sharon’s “kid” brother, who is currently attracting much attention because of his campaign for governor. Over the years, I have made three promises to Ingraham: one, to keep my hands off Danny, I’ve already affirmed; another was that I’d leave Vernon as Ingraham’s “property” for some future novel.

But I don’t like giving the impression that I didn’t even know Vernon those months in Stick Around; we played many a game of chess together, and he beat me on occasion. He told me several stories about his ancestor Jacob Ingledew, who foreshadowed him as governor. And it was Vernon whose knowledge of the Osage Indians’ long tenure of that valley not only helped me to identify some of the projectile points I found while searching (both ways) for mushrooms but also prepared me for that one great sally into truthful prose, Dawn of the Osage. I don’t think it will hurt his candidacy for governor if I confess, in this memoir, that of all the grown men I have known I found Vernon Ingledew the most attractive.

His wife, or mistress (does it matter?), Jelena, I did not come to know as well as I would have liked, although, in this world where everybody had an announced “best friend,” she called her best friend my hostess, Diana Stoving, who reciprocated by announcing that Jelena was her best friend. But another woman living in a geodesic dome near Stick Around also claimed Jelena as best friend, although it was not reciprocated at all, and this other woman, whom I shall have to camouflage as “Lillian Sparrow” because a lawsuit is still pending, was one of those full-fledged (with many feathered garments), outworn hippies, whose very talk was still sprinkled with archaic cant—groovy, dig, and outasight—and who had waist-length hair and a hat that made our Cathlin McWalter’s seem a pillbox, and who supposedly held ice cubes to her nipples to make them protrude beneath the gauzy cotton of her ankle-length dress. She happened to have a son, sired in a one-night group grope thirteen years before by one of those rock-stoned smackhead electrical guitarists, a boy who had been afflicted with a name of stunning synthetic cuteness that I regret I must transform here into “Ashram Tarot Atman.” I saw Ash, briefly, from a distance, not more than twice—once when his mother came to visit Diana and brought the boy to play with Danny, who to his credit did not like the kid but felt sorry for him. Watching them from my upstairs window as they attempted some tagging game in the yard, I studied the kid only long enough to determine that he held no attraction whatsoever for me.

Ash is now twenty-three years old and is sitting on death row in the state penitentiary for having shot a convenience-store clerk. Lillian, his mother, has told anyone who will listen (and many tabloids and even respectable newspapers have listened) that on that afternoon while she visited Diana I took her son on a mushroom hunt (but the woods were parched and the only things growing were chiggers, ticks, and copperhead snakes) and instead of uncovering mushrooms I uncovered his penis, which I subjected to such a variety of tactile, lingual, and venereal manipulations that the boy became almost instantly corrupt, spoiled, and delinquent.

That kind of falsehood, which would have confirmed Bolshakov in his convictions that we none of us can tell the truth, was going to be just part of the price I’d have to pay for becoming famous.

18

I

If people are permitted in this world to have a “best friend,” then Sharon Ingledew Brace is mine. As I’ve shown, my girlhood in Svanetia was singularly without playmates of the same sex; in college at Tbilisi there was that roommate I despised, and later, at Leningrad, those other roommates I tolerated but did not like; and the inmate at Ishimbay whom I have called Evgeniya was a wonderful companion who probably helped me preserve my sanity after those terrible episodes of SHIZO, shtrafnoy izolyator, solitary confinement. But Evgeniya was a sister, perhaps, or even a partner, not a “best friend.”

To be your best friend, the other woman must not only observe the golden rule but live it without being aware of it: doing, acting, thinking, and speaking toward you as if you were herself, keeping nothing from you, wanting you to keep nothing from her…and being totally comfortable, natural, and unforced in this ingenuousness.

Sharon was the fifth daughter of John Henry Ingledew and Sonora Dahl, Lara’s only child. Sharon’s father, like so many fathers, had wanted a son desperately and had kept trying, and when Sharon was born he was not only ready to give up trying but also ready to make Sharon’s childhood miserable for her having failed him. She was known as Little Sis, which everyone called her in preference to Sharon. She felt not only estranged from her father but unwelcome to her four older sisters, who also considered her unnecessary or superfluous.

The major difference between my girlhood and Sharon’s was that I had no playmates of the same sex; Sharon was surrounded by them but they would not play with her. Which of us, therefore, was the more deprived?

She understandably had some bad experiences with men, trying to find one who would give her the love her father never gave. At the age of sixteen she eloped with a Stick Around man, Junior Stapleton, twelve years her senior, who was one of those chronic losers so intimidated by the rest of the world that they have to take out their frustrations on their wives, and who regularly slapped, punched, and mauled Sharon. She related to me, with a wry smile, that the only time her father ever showed her any attention was the one occasion when he accosted Junior, after her husband had broken one of her arms and left her jaw needing to be wired, and “beat the living shit” out of him, leaving Junior in the hospital, from which he never returned to Stick Around.

Sardonically, Sharon Ingledew Stapleton kept her married name and monogram, sis, for several years after the marriage had been dissolved and she had left Stick Around and gone to Chicago to see if a big city might have a few good men in it. She worked as a waitress to put herself through the nursing school of Northwestern University, and she took a degree in nursing and worked for a few years in a hospital. She met a great variety of men among the restaurant customers, medical students, doctors, and patients, and she went to bed with anyone who asked her, including a few of her patients, which cost her the job in the hospital; she did not reapply at another hospital.

But one of those patients whose bed she entered was a young professor from the University of Chicago, Lawrence Brace, recuperating from a simple operation on one of his knees, which had been damaged in a game of touch football. He was not able to move his leg or the lower part of his body, and he told Sharon after she made love to him that nobody had ever made love to him like that before, in that superior position, and some weeks later, after he had abandoned his crutches and was mobile again, he returned to the hospital to find her and ask her for a date but discovered she had been fired. He spent months searching Chicago for her, and of course Chicago is a big place. Perhaps she had her own Anangka, or he his, because he happened one day to take his stereo turntable to be repaired at a shop where she was working in sales. He invited her to move in with him.

Sharon and Larry lived together almost two years. He was an assistant professor in English at the university, and, like some English professors I have known, he drank too much. He excused his immoderate consumption on the grounds that some of the greatest poets (he was a specialist in modern poetry) had been boozers. But when he drank too much, he did not listen very carefully to anything Sharon had to say, and in time she discovered that she was talking to herself. She cultivated the ability to have conversations, aloud, with herself. She became such a stimulating and witty self-conversationalist that Larry, sober enough on one occasion to eavesdrop, became jealous. He listened long enough, and carefully enough, to determine that she found herself a more entertaining talker as well as listener than he, and he wrote to her a long and sarcastic poem (this was in the days when he had not yet abandoned the creation of poetry for the criticism of it and was publishing a few poems himself) in which he so much as accused her of being in love with herself. It was a difficult poem, and she was never certain she understood its allusions, but she got its message. Writing him a short, angry note in response, she stole his car, intending to drive it home to Stick Around. En route, her Anangka arranged for the car, a decrepit Ford Fairlane, to break down in Arcata Springs, where a day later her Anangka arranged a pileup of two trucks, three cars, and a passenger bus on a treacherous curve of scenic U.S. 62 to overtax the employees of the Arcata Springs hospital, who gave Sharon a temporary job that became more permanent, at least until she found herself once again unable to resist the invitations of male patients to climb into their beds. When I first met her, Sharon had been living in Arcaty (as she and they, and now I, call it) for four years, working at a number of different jobs after being fired from the hospital, most recently as the desk clerk at the Halfmoon Hotel. As often as she could, she “went up home” to Stick Around, ostensibly to visit her grandmother, her brother, and the one sister who still lived there, but actually to talk to herself about her childhood in relation to certain scenes of memory in the village, certain buildings that had special significance for her, or certain trees and turnings of the creek and secret glades. She had long since returned the Ford Fairlane to Larry in Chicago, parted amiably and civilly from him, and obtained for herself a used Chevrolet Camaro for the trips “up home,” although the rugged roads south of Acropolis were terrible for that sporty vehicle.

She called the Camaro Camilla and personified it, and she talked to it almost as she did to herself. Cam was her best friend until Kat came along. Often, when she unexpectedly pulled into her grandmother’s A Cat Arena, she would find Lara and me sitting together in the breezeway, and she would join us, occasionally in time to hear our most recently remembered ghost story. Once, a Saturday morning in October on one of those hikes of hers to a favorite glade on a hillside, she encountered me searching for mushrooms in the aftermath of the rain that had broken the drought. We exchanged greetings, made comments on the end of the drought, and then Sharon said, “How’s the book coming?” Day and Diana, for the most part, had never betrayed any great curiosity over the novel I was writing, but on a couple of occasions Diana had asked, politely, “How’s the book going?” Now, before answering Sharon, I meditated on the difference between coming and going. (In Russian, idyot can sometimes mean either, or both.) I am sure that Sharon did not intend any connotation different from that of Diana, but I have been struck with the way English uses come for the orgasm as well as for the male by-product of same, and Lara Burns had explained to me how come is what happens to milk in a churn when it turns into butter (Lara makes her own butter come). Pondering Sharon’s question, I saw my months of labor on Georgie Boy as like the hard manual plunging of the churn dasher in cream, about to make it come but not yet turning the cream into butter. So I answered Sharon, “I’m poking the churn stick as fast as I can, but she aint come yet.” I think I may even have captured some of Lara’s intonations. Then I waited to see if Sharon would get it.

Sharon smiled. “Don’t ye know,” she said, doing a good imitation of her grandmother too, “that it aint the hurry that does it?” She made a fist of her hand and began jerking it up and down; it might almost have been wrapped around an imaginary male member. “It aint the hurry but the regularity.”

That was when I decided, for the first time, to ask Sharon’s advice. I had never asked anyone, not even Ingraham, for suggestions on how to create the “realities” of my story. Now I needed suggestions, from a fellow female, on how best to construct the climax of the story, wherein the bogeyman, Bolshakov, is demolished. The basic question I put to Sharon—What would she do if she really wanted to humiliate a man?—intrigued her so much that she could not answer it right then, but promised me she’d think a lot about it and tell me the next time she came to Stick Around. “Better yet,” she said, “why don’t you come to Arcaty and visit? You like the place, don’t you?”

Oh, I liked it! And I had been feeling shut off from the world, all those months in Stick Around. Day and Diana did not own a television set (they claimed the reception was too poor, but Lara’s son-in-law, Sharon’s father, John Henry Ingledew, supposedly was capable of erecting antennae good enough for clear pictures), and the infrequent occasions we made a shopping trip to the county seat, “Jessup,” or to the larger and better markets at “Harriman,” the only real city in that part of the Bodarks, were not sufficient to provide me with a sense of the comforts of civilization such as I had known in Tbilisi, Leningrad, and Pittsburgh. I know it will come as a shock to those readers who have pictured me as a rural, nature-loving ascetic (the Washington Post’s critic recently called me, after my true sex was at last revealed, “Russia’s answer to Annie Dillard”…and of course I am not from Russia) if I reveal that I prefer towns to the countryside, that I am suffocated by a constant exposure to nature, that the woods sometimes (even without their chiggers, ticks, and copperhead snakes) frighten me or at least make me uncomfortable. Given the choice, as Anangka (and the book-buying public) has given me, I’d prefer to dwell neither in a city like Pittsburgh nor in a village like Stick Around but in a town of modest size, of about three or four thousand people, with all of the amenities of restaurants, shops, interesting architecture, a weekly newspaper, a hospital, a drugstore, a movie theater, a courthouse, a bath house, many steep sidewalks for hiking, a colorful history (and a record of it in a historical museum), and of course a first-rate hotel. In short, Arcata Springs. By early November, I had the stunning conclusion to Georgie Boy and a place to live for the winter, both courtesy of my friend Sharon.

II

It does not trouble me to confess that Sharon gets the credit for the ultimate comeuppance to Bolshakov in Georgie Boy. The beauty of it is that her solution for an ideal retaliation against the man for all those years he’d abused me mentally was not very far removed from what had actually happened. But it was far enough removed to provide that little transmutation that turns life into art, “reality” into fiction, or, as Ingraham taught us, penises into neckties, and it keeps Georgie Boy, as the better critics were quick to notice, from being merely a glorified roman à clef.

Sharon had a spacious, sunny, well-furnished apartment in one of those Arcaty houses—a carpenter-Gothic Victorian with multibalustered porches reminiscent of homes in my Georgia—that, like so many Arcaty houses, have their entries on street level but need two or three basements to let their back doors adjust to the slope of the mountain. The spare bedroom Sharon gave me for my own, much larger than my room in Pittsburgh had been, was actually level with the street, although its eastward windows were three stories above the backyard.

My first objective was to find a job. My second was to begin the translation of Georgie Boy from the Georgian in which I’d written it into English. The first objective was hampered by the off-season of the Arcaty tourist trade; that resort’s major volume of traffic occurs in the summer months and the early autumn; in winter, it almost shuts down, except for a spurt of shoppers around Christmastime. I had sent my resume to the state’s major university, in a city only two hours distant, but their mycologist appeared to be entrenched. The community colleges, as well as the three so-called “universities” within commuting distance (assuming I could learn to drive and bought a cheap car), did not teach mycology at all and had no vacancies for botanists. Anangka preserved me from throwing myself upon the charity of Sharon (although Sharon had insisted, “I’ll be glad to tide you over until your book finds a publisher”) by finding me a position as a housekeeper for one of the wealthier widows of the town. It appeared that much of Arcaty’s permanent year-round population consisted of retired people, older people, widows and widowers, and a “Mrs. Clements,” who had another of those charming hill-slope Victorians within easy walking (or climbing) distance of Sharon’s house, hired me to come in five days a week (Wednesdays and Saturdays off) to clean her house and cook for her, and the wage helped me pay half of Sharon’s rent, pay for half of the groceries, and, the next spring, pay for a typist to make a clean copy of the manuscript of Georgie Boy.

On Wednesdays and Saturdays, and most nights until bedtime, I sat at my desk with Daniel Lyam Montross’s old unabridged dictionary (a Webster’s Second International), a “going-away” gift from his daughter, Diana, and the Roget’s Thesaurus I’d bought originally (and annotated) as Cathlin McWalter. There was not, or if there was I couldn’t find one, any such thing as a Georgian-English dictionary, or even an English-Georgian dictionary. But at least Georgian is written, whereas Svanetian is only oral, and while Georgian lacks Russian’s nuances and infinite shadings it is more liquid, more flowing, and more comfortable. So I had composed the “rough draft” of my first novel in that language, and now I had to “recompose” the draft in an English that, although it was going to require much work from a sympathetic, hardworking editor as well as a whole team of copy editors, was readable.

That unabridged dictionary was a magical book, almost as if its words were still haunted by the spirit of Dan Montross, who, I kept remembering, supposedly had been able to “read” it as if it had a plot. Often, using it, I had a strong sense of his being in the room with me, trying his best to help me find the right word. There were even situations in which I would be stumped for finding the English equivalent of some Georgian word, perhaps a word like mdgómaréoba, “situation,” and I would eerily feel that Dan was making my fingers turn to the exact page of the dictionary where I would find it. But how could he possibly have known Georgian? Once, after I’d finished a long, hard session of constant thumbing of the dictionary’s pages, Sharon happened to come into my room and, looking around, asked, “Did you have a man in here?”

Beneath my name on the title page I was almost tempted to write, Translated from the Georgian by Daniel Lyam Montross. This intense “collaboration” with Dan on the translation offered me a convenient excuse for declining Sharon’s invitations, frequent at first, to join her for an evening at one of Arcaty’s “night spots” (I loved that term as soon as I was able to determine that it did not mean a blemish on the evening, but I had little liking for the actual places). At least three nights a week, she would go out to the “Frog’s Nest,” the “Mole’s Eye,” or, her favorite place, up on the mountain, that same Halfmoon Pub where I, or Cathlin, had spent some fun hours during the bow convention, and, invariably, she would either be gone until morning, spending the balance of the night in some man’s room or apartment, or she would bring a man home with her. Once she brought two men home with her, “Michael” for herself and “Ted” for me. My only “blind date” was a very handsome, witty, well-spoken gentleman who, had I been at all romantically interested in a twenty-nine-year-old man, would have been a prize. But long after Sharon and Michael had retired to her bedroom, Ted and I were still talking, he genuinely fascinated with Svanetia and Russia and even Pittsburgh, and I pretending great interest in his boyhood and youth in a dull downstate place called Eldorado. Along about five A.M. he looked at his watch and said, “Don’t you think it’s time we got in bed?” He seemed to accept without question, as I showed him to the door, Svanetia’s ageworn tradition that a woman can never “chosh” with a man without having known him for at least two months. Ted sent me things, flowers and books, and called me up on the telephone, and rang the doorbell, and even wrote me a long letter in which he called me the most beautiful and alluring woman he’d ever met even in dreams, but by the time the two months elapsed he had given up trying, or, like so many of Arcaty’s transients, had gone on to some other place.

“Don’t you like men?” Sharon asked me one day. And I realized the excuse of the work was wearing thin, although it was a genuine excuse. I also realized that Sharon and I had become very close, very open, and that we had no secrets from each other…no secrets except that one, which I then decided to reveal to her.

“Not after they’ve started to shave,” I answered her. To Sharon’s everlasting credit, she did not think I was making a joke, nor did she even say, “Really?” or “Come on!” or even ask for a clarification: At what age did men begin to shave? Knowing Sharon as I did, I might have expected her to laugh and say, “I can’t stand whiskers either.” But she didn’t do that. What she said was: “Well, we’ll have to find you one who thinks razors are for making model airplanes.”

Which is precisely what she did. It turned out that Sharon’s “heaviest” date, Michael, had a son, “Jason,” who was constructing from kits, with much glue and many razors, quite an assortment of toy airplanes. Michael had been leaving Jason and his airplanes with an overnight baby-sitter, although Jason had been complaining that he was much too old, at eleven and three-quarters, to require the services of a baby-sitter.

In February, for Jason’s birthday, Sharon suggested to Michael that the three of us bring the boy to the house for a birthday dinner, give him a little party with some presents, and then later the two of them, Sharon and Michael, might go out for the evening at the Halfmoon Pub, leaving Jason, if he needed any babysitting at all, with “Aunt Kat,” who would be glad to keep him entertained with ghost stories or teach him how to play chess, or something.

Jason’s birthday coincided with my last day of work on the translation of Georgie Boy, during which my effort at rendering into English the tragic death of beloved Dzhordzha not only filled me with a third attack of sadness over the event but also gave me that sense of postaccomplishment horniness that I have already described in my narrative of the first sexual encounter with Kenny Elmore, which had occurred, come to think of it, exactly one year earlier. Can a quota of one seduction per year be called profligate or promiscuous?

“You’re just another baby-sitter,” Jason accused me, when his father had departed with Sharon. “Only you’re a take-out instead of a come-in baby-sitter.”

“But I’m different,” I declared, “from any baby-sitter you’ve ever known.”

“How?” he demanded. “Except for being the prettiest ever?”

“Is there anything you ever wanted a baby-sitter to do for you but couldn’t ask?”

He thought for a minute. “Yeah,” he said. “Give me a bath.”

“I will be happy to give you a bath.”

“Aw, I’m too old for that, now.”

“Or maybe you’re not even old enough,” I said, and winked at him.

The wink got to him. “I bet I am,” he said. “Let’s prove it.”

So I gave Jason a thorough bath, in Sharon’s big white claw-footed tub. With much soap and lather and bubbles. With much fondness and attention. He was modest getting out of his clothes, not from the act of undressing so much as because he already had an erection, but after I praised it suitably he lost his self-consciousness about it and was especially appreciative of the way I soaped it.

Hours later, tucking him in just before his father and Sharon returned to spend the night, I heard him sigh and say, “You sure are some kind of different baby-sitter.”

For the rest of that winter, and through the springtime too, Jason insisted that he would accept no other baby-sitter, and his father even teased him about it, telling him he was too old now for baby-sitters and asking him once in my presence, “What does she do for you?” and poor Jason blushed so furiously without being able to answer that I knew his father must have suspected something.

“It’s all right,” Sharon eventually assured me. “I’m not sure that Mike knows, but if he does know, he thinks it’s an okay thing for the kid. Believe me.”

Arcata Springs had a reputation, I discovered, for free-thinking libertarianism. A few years earlier, it had been tolerant of the largest concentration of hippies in the state, and the signs of its indulgence were still in the air. In addition to rampant heterosexual free love, there were communities of homosexuals, male and female, and assorted paraphilias: a community of transsexuals; a community of sadomasochists; and communities of sodomists, urolagnists, and coprophiliacs. To my knowledge, there was not a community of hebephiliacs. I was, and am, the only one.

III

The very first of the several million American readers of Georgie Boy was an Arcata Springs woman named Joni Lynn Miller, the receptionist, clerk, and secretary for a law firm, and thus an expert typist, whose years of typing wills, deeds, briefs, and contracts prepared her for the more exciting job of making a presentation copy of the manuscript of my first novel. She was a casual acquaintance of Sharon’s, and Sharon told me that Joni Lynn could use the money, which, as I recall, was some ridiculously low sum like fifty cents a page. Doing the job only in her spare time, nights and weekends, she finished it in less than two weeks, and I was amazed. The manuscript was not simply “clean” in the sense of what publishers call “a clean copy”; it was immaculate: not a smudge on it, and its corrections, if any had been made, were invisible. With my permission, Joni Lynn had even corrected several misspellings and a few errors in grammar.

Best of all, Joni Lynn was still crying when she gave me the finished typescript. “I don’t suppose you’d want to know what I think of it, would you?” she asked timidly and deferentially. I assured her I would be thrilled to have her opinion. She was, I told her, the very first person to see it. “Did any of that stuff really happen to you?” she wanted to know, foreshadowing dozens of reviewers who would put the same question in fancier language. And when I told Joni Lynn that most of it was genuinely a work, and a working, of fiction, although it had liberally utilized and converted some of my own experiences, she hugged me. She wordlessly wrapped her arms around me and held me for a long moment in an embrace of sisterhood, comfort, sympathy, and perhaps, I like to think, simply the wish to touch the author. Then she declared, “I haven’t read a whole lot of novels, but I’d rather read a good novel than watch TV, I can tell you. I’ve read everything by Stephen King, which I guess isn’t anything to brag about. And I’ve read everything by Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. But I’ve read some ‘real’ novelists too, like Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark and Joyce Carol Oates. And I just want to say, Georgie Boy is the best novel I have ever read in my whole life. I’ll never forget it.” Hearing that, I began crying myself, and we had a good cry together.

Sharon was the second person to read the manuscript. She apologized for being a slow reader, which she was, apparently not able to read it as fast as Joni Lynn had typed it. And she was not as well read as Joni Lynn, having confined her novel reading to Jesse Stuart, James Still, and of course Ingraham. I had mentioned to Sharon that my next step, in finding a publisher, was perhaps to locate Ingraham and send the manuscript to him and ask him if he could recommend it to his publisher. But when Sharon finally finished reading it, the first thing she said to me was, “You’d better not give this to Ingraham. It’s so much better than anything he ever wrote that it would leave him crazy with envy.”

Good advice, perhaps, but unnecessary, because I couldn’t locate Ingraham, anyway. He had left Rolla, Missouri, the previous summer and taken a teaching job in art history at the only place he could find, some college in South Dakota, of all places. But he had left no forwarding address.

Sharon hadn’t cried at the end of the book, she said. Why not? I asked her. “I realized that what is sad about it was my own invention,” she said. It was indeed, I allowed.

But Sharon had a rather naïve conception of how authors get their first novels published, although her conception, I admit, was not all that much more innocent than mine. She thought Georgie Boy was so good that all I would have to do would be to mail it off to a publisher, and anyone who read it would accept it. Because of some of the “marketing tips” that Ingraham had given that class at Pittsburgh, I was skeptical of this notion, but partly to humor Sharon, partly to see for myself, I mailed the manuscript off to Random House. Knowing what I do now, I realize it was probably seen only by a young clerk whose job was to affix a standard polite rejection slip to it and return it. Sharon thought I ought to frame the rejection slip because it would be the only one I’d ever get. She told me I should send the returned manuscript to Ingraham’s publisher with a covering letter saying that I was “a former student and very good friend” of Ingraham’s. But when I mailed this letter with the manuscript to Little, Brown and Company of Boston, I received the standard rejection slip, upon which someone had written in pencil the information that they no longer considered themselves to be Ingraham’s publisher.

Sharon had been asking around, among her more artistic friends in Arcaty, about the best way to get published, and she told me, “You have to have an agent.” But I attempted to explain to her what Ingraham had explained to his class: the so-called “Catch 22” of publishing: You can’t get published without an agent, but you can’t get an agent unless you’ve been published. “Okay, so what can you do?” Sharon asked.

I told her of Ingraham’s “Solution 23”: It helps to know somebody who knows somebody who has an agent. “Do you know anybody in Arcaty who would have an agent?” I asked.

“I don’t know her, but I know of her,” Sharon said, and told me all she knew about Halfmoon Berryfairy. She was originally from New York City, with a Jewish name, and like so many among the influx of hippies in the early seventies she had chosen an alternative name of memorable countercultureness, taken in part from the town’s major hotel. When she began to write she decided to keep her hippie name as a pen name, and had published several books, children’s books, poetry, murder mysteries, and now a cookbook under that name. “But again,” Sharon said, “if you showed Georgie Boy to her, she would just die of envy.”

As it turned out, Halfmoon Berryfairy was too busy, at that particular time, proofreading the galleys of her latest book to have any time for reading my manuscript, and, furthermore, she had promised her agent that she would not “unload” any aspiring Arcaty writers on her. But Halfmoon (who has become a good acquaintance if not a close friend of mine in recent years) knew of another agent, not her own, who might be willing to take a look at an unsolicited manuscript from an unknown and unpublished ex-Soviet. This woman told Halfmoon that if I would write a covering letter describing my background and stating in twenty-five words or less why the book was publishable, she would “see” if she could find time to read my book.

So I carefully wrote and rewrote a brief autobiographical sketch, omitting any mention that the Dadeshkelianis had been royalty but attempting to depict Svanetia in a nutshell (or in a Fabergé Easter egg) and summarizing my troubles with the KGB, the special psychiatric hospitals, and the camp at Ishimbay. Then I wrote, This novel is based freely and loosely on the author’s own nightmarish experiences as a victim of the Soviet Union’s campaign to quell dissidence with psychiatric “treatment.” Twenty-seven words, two over the limit, so I cut and loosely, and Halfmoon was kind enough to send my manuscript to the woman who might consent to become my agent. Solution 23 was put into effect.

Then I waited. And waited. Spring passed into summer. Sharon had a violent breakup with Michael, and she stopped going out to her night spots, spending her evenings in her room talking to herself and listening to music. Jason, Michael’s son, managed to sneak away from home a few times to visit me before his father put a stop to it—not because he had any objections to the relationship as such but because he didn’t want Jason visiting Sharon’s house. So Sharon and I were alone, together often, but more often entirely alone, she in her room talking to herself, trying to cheer herself up or trying, as she put it, “to give a purpose to my dumb life,” and I in my room talking not to myself but to Anangka. My fate goddess had done a great job so far, but now she seemed to have abandoned me.

“Still waiting to hear from a publisher?” Diana asked me on a Saturday in July when Sharon and I decided to escape from our apartment and return again “up home” to Stick Around for a visit. At least it wasn’t a drought summer this year; there were plenty of toad-strangling downpours and plenty of mushrooms in the woods. I wanted to put some flowers on Dan Montross’s grave, and Sharon wanted to inspect the old building that had once been her grandmother’s house, store, and post office. She was giving serious thought to restoring it and moving into it.

“Still waiting to hear from an agent,” I answered Diana, and added, gratuitously, “only an agent.”

And then I took my flowers up the hillside to place on Dan’s grave. There I soon discovered that I could talk to him more freely than I ever talked to Anangka. Not only that, but I began to believe that he had more power to help me than she did. I didn’t want to eliminate Anangka; she had been so good to me for years. But it was almost as if I had moved beyond her territory of expertise.

IV

Whether or not Dan had anything to do with it, on a day in mid-August two significant things happened: I received a letter of rejection from the agent along with the returned manuscript, and we had a visit from Sharon’s old boyfriend Larry Brace. The agent was even chattily informal: You wouldn’t believe all the problems I’ve been having lately, she wrote, and she described a few of her more interesting problems, including a broken foot. The upshot was that her main problem was simply too much to read. I’ve found scarcely a moment to give your novel the attention it deserves. I gather that it could be made into a much-wanted book. I don’t feel that I have the time or enthusiasm to give your work the necessary care to secure a publisher for it, but I want you to know that I sincerely hope you will find a person who can bring to the task the qualities that I lack.

Sharon read this, swore, jumped into her Cam, and returned shortly with a half gallon of vodka. “Let’s get loaded,” she said. We sat on the porch of the house and proceeded to do precisely that. I hadn’t become so tipsy since some of those days in Pittsburgh, and Sharon, who had a great talent for nursing one drink at a night spot through the whole evening, didn’t hold herself back. Soon she was yelling at passersby. There weren’t a lot of them, summer tourists choosing to tour the town’s picturesque neighborhoods on foot instead of in their cars. “YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE ALL THE PROBLEMS I’VE BEEN HAVING LATELY!” Sharon would yell at anybody who came along, and, if they stopped to listen (most of them didn’t, but hurried on), Sharon would add something like, “I WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT I SINCERELY HOPE YOU WILL FIND A PERSON WHO CAN BRING TO THE TASK THE QUALITIES THAT I LACK!”

Soon I got into the spirit of it myself and joined her in the yelling. “SCARCELY A MOMENT!” I would yell.

“THE ATTENTION IT DESERVES!” Sharon would add.

“I DON’T FEEL I HAVE THE TIME!”

“OR THE ENTHUSIASM!”

“TO GIVE YOUR WORK!”

Perhaps our noise was frightening off the pedestrians, for eventually we were reduced to yelling only at passing vehicles. Some of these vehicles would slow down and pause long enough to attempt to hear what we were yelling, then speed up and go on.

“I GATHER THAT IT COULD BE MADE!”

“INTO A MUCH-WANTED BOOK!”

One of the cars, a Ford Fairlane, came to a complete stop and parked at our curb, and its lone occupant sat listening to us run through the whole sequence of phrases yet again. My first inkling that this was not a tourist came when Sharon slightly modified what she was yelling:

“BUT I WANT YOU TO KNOW, LARRY, THAT I SINCERELY HOPE YOU WILL FIND A PERSON WHO WILL BRING TO THE TASK THE QUALITIES THAT I LACK!”

He yelled back at her, “GODDAMMIT, SHARON, THERE ARENT ANY QUALITIES THAT YOU LACK!”

“WELL, GET YOUR ASS OUT OF THAT OIL BURNER AND COME HAVE A SNORT WITH US!” Then, as he accepted her invitation, she said to me in her normal voice, “Here is ole Larry, my onetime best fellow.”

It did not take Larry very long to catch up with us, in consuming the vodka, and when that ran out he had his own half gallon in the Ford. He was a good-looking man, although his beard and mustache were so heavy it was difficult to imagine what he’d look like cleanshaven. My first impression of him was that he was what the late Knox Ogden must have looked like thirty years before. Sharon showed him the letter from my agent—or rather, would-be but never-was agent—and Larry declared, without any inkling of what manuscript of mine had accompanied it, “What fatuous bullshit!”

And he added his loud bass voice to our streetward yellings for a little while, until Sharon decided she’d rather just talk. “So what brings you to the Bodarks?” she asked.

“You, of course,” he declared. “But I want to see your Stick Around before you disappear thither. I’ve been thinking. As soon as I finish the Ogden study, I’d like to do some research on this Daniel Lyam Montross.” I did a genuine double take. Two different names he’d dropped, both of intimate familiarity. Or was I just very drunk? “Pardon,” I said. “Did you say Ogden?” He smiled, and nodded. “Knox Ogden?” I said.

Again he nodded, and he smiled even bigger. “Do you know his work?” By way of answer, I jumped up, stumbled, staggered into the house and into my room, and got the book and brought it back to show it to him, The Final Meadow, with the inscription on the flyleaf. He peered closely at that inscription, and then his mouth fell open. He stared at me. “This is you?” he asked. “Are you Ekaterina Vladimirovna Dadiankeliani?”

As I had once done for Knox himself, I corrected him. “Dadeshkeliani,” I said.

“I told you,” Sharon said to him. “I wrote and told you I had a roommate named Ekaterina.”

“But I had no idea…,” Larry said, and then he drew himself up and declaimed:

“Ekaterina, hear my final song:

The dying bird drops down from breaking bough

To perch on earth, and not continue long

The notes and cries that deafened broods allow.

“I think that’s what it says. That’s all of it I’ve been able to decipher at this point,” Larry said. “I was just inspecting it the other morning, among his papers at the Hillman Library in Pittsburgh.”

“Larry makes a specialty,” Sharon said, “of writing books about poets that nobody’s ever heard of. So who is this Knox Ogden?”

I told Sharon, “I lived next to him the last few weeks of his life. And Larry has just been quoting from the very last thing he wrote.”

“Isn’t it a small world?” Sharon said.

Larry stayed a week. It was, he revealed, the last week of summer before the fall semester began, and he’d meant it as a kind of vacation, a final fling after a stint of hard work at the Hillman, but now it looked like it was going to turn into a “working vacation” for him, especially because he needed to preserve, on his tape recorder, everything that I could remember about Knox Ogden, and also because Sharon wanted him to use his nights, instead of trying to sleep with her, reading the manuscript of Georgie Boy. She promised him that if he would read it and give us his honest professional English teacher’s opinion of it, she would take him to see Stick Around, and, possibly, she might even consent to sleep with him.

Sharon and I gave him a good tour of Arcata Springs, dining out evenings (at his expense) at the Plaza, the best restaurant in town, and having great lunches at Bubba’s Barbecue, and we even went swimming, one splendid afternoon, at Lake Lucerne, a tiny fraction of the size of its namesake in the real Switzerland and obviously so named because it was the only substantial body of water in close proximity to “America’s Little Switzerland,” as the Arcata Springs Chamber of Commerce called the town.

The fifth morning of his visit, Larry announced, over breakfast at the Paragon Café, that he had been awake until approximately 2:30 A.M., finishing Georgie Boy. He took a dramatic pause to stuff his mouth with a doughnut, which required several long moments of munching before he could answer Sharon’s “Well—?” and my “So—?”

“What did Knox think of it?” he asked me.

“He didn’t read it,” I answered, “for the simple reason that I hadn’t started writing it before he died.”

“Have you shown it to anybody?” he asked.

“Sharon, of course,” I said, “and the girl who typed it, and that agent, who didn’t, I think, take even a peek at it.”

“Knox would have loved it,” he said. “In some ways it confirms his final view of the world.”

Sharon put in, “But did Larry love it? Does it confirm any of your views of the world?”

He nodded. “Can you ladies give me a couple of days to think about it? Just to think about it, before I let you have my thoughts?”

“Let’s go to Stick Around,” Sharon suggested.

We took Larry for the full tour of Stick Around, such as remained of it. Sharon introduced him, first, to her grandmother, Lara Burns. “I didn’t know anybody lived in log cabins anymore,” he remarked, then was surprised to discover that in Lara’s modest library were volumes by two of the poets, John Clare and Christopher Smart, on whom Larry had written monographs, copies of which he promised to send to her as soon as he got back to Chicago. Sharon and I conducted him on a tour of what was left of the village, including the building, its post-office boxes still intact but dusty, that Sharon was thinking of turning into her next home. She showed him also the house that had once been a hotel, now vacant and deteriorating rapidly, in the attic of which he found, among the detritus of yesteryears, a letter once written by Daniel Lyam Montross to the woman who had been the last occupant of the hotel. Larry asked for permission to borrow this and photocopy it, but Sharon had to explain that the house and any contents of it legally belonged to her brother, Vernon. We took Larry to meet Vernon and his Jelena in their extravagant nonconformist house (yurt? dome? bubble?) on the mountain, and Larry got permission to borrow the letter. Larry asked of Vernon, “Would you consider renting that old hotel sometime?” For what? Vernon asked. “For a scholar’s retreat,” Larry said.

We also introduced Larry to Day and Diana and showed him the upstairs room where I’d written Georgie Boy…although I didn’t boast of this; the reason we showed it to him was so he could see all of the thousands of words on the walls, in the handwriting of Daniel Lyam Montross. “God! I’ve got to come back!” Larry declared. “I’ve got to come and photograph all of this!”

Our last stop was Dan’s grave. The flowers I had put on it a month before were still miraculously fresh…Or else somebody, maybe Diana, had replaced them with fresh flowers of exactly the same kind, daisies, Queen Anne’s lace, black-eyed Susans, and buttercups. Larry stared, properly reverential, at the gravestone for a long time, and then he demonstrated his ability to quote the rest of the poem that provided the gravestone’s inscription, a pretty villanelle called “The Dreaming,” whose message is that the purpose of sleep is the manufacture of one’s future.

“He’s living his sleep’s extremes,” Larry observed. “Knox Ogden and he would have really appreciated each other.”

“Maybe they did,” I said, and then corrected my tense: “Maybe they do.”

That night, back in Arcaty, Sharon let Larry sleep with her. I listened, almost envious, until they hushed and went to sleep. And in my own dreams, later, I joined them.

The next morning, before getting into his car to drive back to Chicago, Larry said to me, “Let me keep your manuscript. I know a novelist in Chicago who would love to read it. He’s not famous, but he’s important. And he’s got a wonderful agent. Your book must be published, Ekaterina.”

19

I

Liz Blaustein thought so, too. And she did not keep me waiting forever for her answer. In late September, just a month or so after Larry had taken the book to his novelist friend (a brilliant but little-known writer whose entire output of thirteen books I have since read, and who, in his enthusiastic report on the novel, promised to “fix me up” with his agent, Liz Blaustein, on condition that I never tell anyone that he had done it…so he must remain anonymous here), I received a letter from her that began, You did not give me a telephone number, or I would have called you sooner with this good news: You and I were meant for each other. Georgie Boy is everything that __ __ told me it was, and more! It literally and figuratively cannot be put down. I have already sent it to a publisher who has a special interest in this kind of book.

As I tried to explain to Sharon while we were finishing off a bottle of champagne in celebration, I wasn’t entirely comfortable with those words this kind of book, which implied that Georgie Boy wasn’t completely original, in a class by itself. At that point in my career, I had no idea if any other novels had been published in America by Soviet dissidents, and during the weeks I waited for Publisher W’s reaction I visited the Arcata Springs Public Library, in a quaint limestone building donated to the town by that philanthropic cousin of our old haunter Lawren, and tried to find out what “kind of book” Publisher W published. But the only similar thing they’d done was not a novel: A Question of Madness, by the twins Zhores and Roy Medvedev, published a decade earlier. The book had been widely circulated in samizdat in Russia, and I had read it years before: the compelling story of how Zhores was railroaded into a mental hospital because of one of his books and because of his campaign to open up the Soviet scientific establishment to dialogue with the outside world. Alternate chapters of counterpoint—Zhores inside the “special psychiatric hospital” and his brother Roy outside it—chronicle the desperate battle to gain Zhores his freedom. It is paced like a novel, nervous like a novel, but it is not a novel.

And perhaps Publisher W would have preferred that Georgie Boy be nonfiction too. After six weeks during which I spent a lot of time walking the steep streets of Arcaty, up to the Halfmoon and around it and back, Liz Blaustein sent me a copy of Publisher W’s letter of rejection. Several editors had read the book, and they’d even had a fact-checker attempt to verify the “truth” of it. Their only criticism, if that’s what it was, was that “this Bolshakov character is such a beast that he stretches credulity.” But that wasn’t their reason for rejecting the novel. “The young boy-narrator’s voice,” the letter said, “is somewhat arch, glib, even disagreeable.”

“I disagree!” Sharon yelled as we sat on the porch swigging vodka in the early November chill, watching the leaves fall. In this off-season, there were no tourists, pedestrian or vehicular, to yell drunken remarks to. Sometimes, during the off-season, Sharon would let me come up to the Halfmoon and spend the night in one of the rooms there, pretending I could afford it. Given a choice, I would pick Room 218 and hope to meet its ghost, but I never did. I did meet Morris the cat, who was always thrilled to see me. The first time I saw him I said, “I told you I’d be back, didn’t I?” and he purred loudly and rubbed against me as if he’d been waiting patiently for me ever since.

Liz Blaustein next sent the book to Publisher X, who had published Vladimir Bukovsky’s magnificent (but nonfictional) To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter. Now, there was a voice that was arch, glib, and sometimes disagreeable, but I had loved it, and so had all of us in Russia who had worshiped Bukovsky as a brave, obsessed, articulate victim of the system of psychoprisons and the horrors of their “treatment.” Like myself he had suffered the double punishment of stretches in a “strict regime” prison with much time in solitary confinement, as well as time in a mental hospital subjected to the same “regime” of drugs and little tortures like the “roll-up” in a wet canvas sheet that wracks the victim excruciatingly as it dries. Also like myself (and like, I might add, Solzhenitsyn), he was educated as a scientist, a biologist, and became a “literary” person almost by default because of his experiences in the prisons and hospitals. Yes, I felt good about having his publisher, Publisher X, look at my novel. I seemed to detect some of the footprints of Anangka in that contingency. But if they were hers, they were pointed the wrong way, for Publisher X, too, turned me down.

At least Publisher X, when they rejected Georgie Boy in the week before Christmas, made some flattering comparisons to Bukovsky, calling my experience “comparable” to his, “reminiscent” of his, and acknowledging that “the narrator’s voice is often as unrelentingly cocky and self-obsessed as Bukovsky’s.” Their main reason for the rejection appeared to be the editors’ personal distaste for the concept of sexual relations between a twelve-year-old boy and a woman nearly twice his age. “Liz, we don’t need our noses rubbed in this.”

For consolation, during the dark days of the holiday season following that rejection I reread Nabokov’s charming essay “On a Book Entitled Lolita” at the end of that volume that Ingraham had given me. For further consolation, I was tempted to visit Ingraham, who, I had learned, had returned yet again to his native state; but, eschewing Stick Around for whatever reasons he had, he was living in a shack on a lake, or a reservoir, named for the dam-building rodent. Not two hours away by car, if I could drive, or if I could get Sharon to take me. But I suspected, rightly as it turned out, that he might be plunged into some depression or soul searching himself and would not be able to respond to my bad luck.

For bad luck it certainly was, as the Nabokov essay reminded me in narrating his own unhappy experiences trying to find an American publisher for Lolita. The reactions of his Publisher X, who thought the book too long, Publisher Y, who thought it had no good people in it, and Publisher Z, who thought he’d go to jail if he printed it, somewhat surpassed the feeble rejections I’d had so far. I had still to hear from Publisher Y, the third place Liz Blaustein sent the book. Publisher Y had brought out, just the year before, Victor Nekipelov’s Institute of Fools: Notes from Serbsky. I had known Victor Alexandrovich, had been a fellow victim of incarceration in the Serbsky Institute, had enjoyed several opportunities of talking with him, but had not yet read his book, which of course had the same principal setting as mine (although I disguised the Serbsky Institute as “the Laboratory”), and many of the same cast of characters, including the nyanki, a word like baby-sitter that he applied to the ward orderlies. Now, while waiting to hear from Publisher Y, I ordered for myself a Christmas present—through the Gazebo, Arcaty’s lone bookstore—a copy of Nekipelov’s book, and I spent January reading and rereading it, partly out of envy, because there it was, in cold print between hard covers, the same place, the same people, some of the same doctors, including a thinly disguised Bolshakov, in a nonfictional memoir that was distinctly Chekhovian, and, despite being deliberately oversimplified or nonarch in style, was greatly readable. I consoled myself that if my book never did find a publisher and thus could not bring any pressure to bear to stop the psychiatric abuses of the Serbsky, Nekipelov’s book could do the job, for all of us—a damning document of evidence against those doctors.

Publisher Y liked my book very much…which is why they kept it so terribly long before rejecting it. It reminded them very strongly, they said, of the Nekipelov, but it had the “virtue” of being a novel, and thus of “enjoying the benefits of the author’s rich imagination.” In the final analysis, however, the editorial board’s vote, very close, was to decline, because there appeared to be two irreconcilable separate stories involved here: that of Kathy with Bolshakov, and that of Kathy with Georgie.

“Bull manure!” Sharon said, hauling out a fresh half gallon of vodka. We could sit on the porch again: Springtime had returned; the daffodils and tulips were blooming, the trees leafing. “‘Irreconcilable,’ my hind foot! The jerks don’t even realize that you meant to play off the relationships one against the other, the badness of Bolshakov, the goodness of Georgie.”

“I love you, Sharon,” I said, holding back my tears. The next day, with a hangover, I sat myself down and composed a little letter to Liz Blaustein. Could you please, I requested, try the book on some publisher who has not published any books by Soviet dissidents?

And thus, ever after, I had myself to thank for the book’s finally going to Publisher Z, who took it.

II

Then, as now, it required roughly an entire year to take a manuscript from the author’s hands and put the finished book on the shelves of bookstores. That span of twelve months, it seems to me in retrospect, is a kind of “missing year” of my life: There aren’t any engrams for it upstairs in my head. Oh, if I took the trouble to consult my journal, I’d find plenty of little jogs to my memory of that year, March to the following year’s April, when Georgie Boy finally appeared: During that twelvemonth Sharon moved out of our apartment and took up residence in the heart of what had been Stick Around, where, within that same year, her Larry followed, not to move in with her (which she would not permit) but to take up lone occupancy of the old hotel; my employer, Mrs. Clements, became very ill and was required to move into a nursing home because I had to decline her request to move in with her and work for her seven days a week around the clock. Unemployed, I once again attempted to find a teaching post, and luckily (or with intervention by Anangka) the mycologist at the state university took an on-campus sabbatical and turned his fall semester classes over to me, one semester only: no general botany courses, mycology alone, at junior, senior, and graduate levels, with many idyllic field trips into the autumnal woods outside that city which is called “Athens of the Bodarks” because it is an intellectual oasis in a state without intellectuals.

To my surprise, Ingraham was also living there, as I discovered by accident when I bumped into him one Saturday afternoon at the supermarket. We embraced, then blocked an aisle with our carts for nearly an hour. He expressed surprise and delight at how “gorgeous” I looked with my hair grown long again. I observed that he looked healthier than I had ever seen him. He was able to report that he was on the wagon, for good as it turned out, and had acquired a girlfriend who, in October of that year, was scheduled to become his second wife. (He would invite me to the wedding, a Bodarkian “costume” affair, but a previous commitment to take my mushroom-hunting students on a field trip would keep me from it.) Ingraham was not employed at the university but was doing some research there in preparation for a nonfiction book he and his wife-to-be were collaborating on, concerned with, naturally, ghost towns. For some reason that I was never able to determine afterward, I could not tell him that my novel had been accepted and was “in production.” I thought, possibly, that to do so might leave him envious and discouraged. Later during that one semester I lived in that cultural oasis (which Ingraham told me could be spelled either as celebrative Fêteville or as momentous Fateville, so I shall opt for the latter) I met and liked his wife, Kay, a charming blonde who was about my age yet had a beautiful son named Andrew who was just turning twelve. “Unt-uh,” Ingraham grunted at me, wagging his finger back and forth negatively in my face when he introduced me to Andrew.

But Fateville was filled with many other twelve-year-old boys, although few of them found their way into the pages of my journal that fall. Most of my available free time off campus was spent in writing letters and making phone calls to my editor at Publisher Z. Since, as I’m about to show, that editor was responsible for tampering with my gender, making me sexless, or more implicitly male than otherwise, I think I shall return the “favor” (or the sex-change operation) by never revealing that editor’s sex, if he or she actually had one.

So I shall call the editor, him or her, “H. (for Heinrich or Henriette) Wölfflin,” which happens to be the name, Ingraham pointed out to me, of a famous Swiss art historian. Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945) is dead, and my dear editor nearly, not so long ago, became dead because of me, as I’ll ultimately have to reveal.

The many long letters I received from Wölfflin while Georgie Boy was in production concerned such matters as choice of words (my editor’s forte was the exact word, the perfect word, the, to use Wöfflin’s own oft-employed French, mot juste), narrative (excising the more clinical, less lyrical descriptions of lovemaking between Kathy and Georgie), grammar (I confess I am still not certain about the distinction between that and which), and even such mundane matters as choice of “dingbats” (not, as I first thought, silly eccentric persons but the ornamental pieces of type for separations, chapter headings, etc.). But in one of the letters there appeared suddenly one day this sentence leaping out and shaking me: Do you know, dear Kat, that your full name is entirely too long to appear on the title page, let alone the spine?

My first reaction to this was that I had never given any thought to the spine. My second reaction was to run to the university library and check the title page of Princess in Uniform, the autobiography of my great-aunt and namesake, Ekaterina Alexandrovna Dadeshkeliani, one of the few Svanetians ever to publish a book. Naturally the library did not have the book, but a young woman named Debby Cochran who was running the interlibrary loan department was able to obtain it for me within a few days. And, alas, there on the title page, instead of Auntie’s full name with patronymic, was simply, By Princess Kati Dadeshkeliani. (And also, Translated from the French by Arthur J. Ashton, London, G. Bell & Sons Ltd., 1934.)

“All right,” I conceded to Wölfflin by return mail. “So what do you propose?”

I have been giving this some serious thought, Wölfflin replied in the next letter. Your narrator is, of course, not only male, but a twelve-year-old male. This is a tour de force, I assure you, that puts such child-narrator novels as To Kill a Mockingbird and True Grit entirely to shame. But I think many of your readers (and particularly your reviewers) might be thrown by the discovery that you are female. Don’t answer this precipitously or impulsively. Please give it some long and hard thought. But let me suggest that you consider using only initials that would not reveal your sex.

I gave it some long and hard thought, perhaps a month’s worth. Until I had to return it to Interlibrary Loan, I kept and reread my great-aunt’s book, Princess in Uniform, in which she tells the exciting story, a true story, of her life: how after a conventional childhood in Svanetia not very different from my own and a study of medicine until the age of twenty (and an early marriage to an aristocrat who turned out to be a homosexual), she found herself by a fluke of destiny in the First World War given an opportunity to masquerade as a Russian soldier on the Austrian front. Her disguise would have shamed Cathlin McWalter. (And I refer the curious, especially those with access to interlibrary loan departments, and especially those who are badgering me for a photograph of myself, to the frontispiece of her volume, with its stunning photograph, full-length in uniform, of “Prince Djamal,” as my great-aunt was known during her imposture. If you look carefully at the “prince’s” face, you will see a very close resemblance to my own. It was this photograph of my aunt in her soldier’s cap that inspired me to have the jacket photo and the publicity photos for Georgie Boy show me wearing my short hair inside an American “farmer’s bill cap,” like a baseball cap, and wearing a denim jacket that does not reveal the bulge of my breasts, and thus to appear more masculine than feminine.)

As far as anyone in my family was able to determine, or as far as I could determine by a careful rereading of the autobiography, there was nothing bisexual, let alone androgynous, about Aunt Kati. She was simply a strong willed and beautiful woman who found it expedient for the duration of the war to serve as a man. As she pointed out, Svanes take an enormous pride in having fine guns, and she enjoyed carrying and using guns. She genuinely adored the czar, Nicholas ii, and considered the revolution that occurred shortly thereafter “the greatest and bloodiest tragedy that the world has ever known.” But for the space of a few years she transcended her womanhood and got herself into an adventure, with some narrow escapes, that would keep her for the rest of her life. In Paris, where she remained forever in exile after the revolution, and during my brief trip there as a student from Leningrad, I talked with her in her old age—she reminded me, come to think of it, of Lara Burns—and she was the most remarkable woman I’ve ever known.

Would she, I asked myself, have approved of my decision to become male, or sexlessly initialed, in my nom de plume? And the conclusion I reached was yes.

I thought also of beloved T’hamar, or Tamara, queen of all Georgia during its golden age, A.D. 1184 to 1213, who was clearly a female and yet was thought of as a king. She was our Alexander the Great, and the chroniclers of our history call her the greatest of our kings. This gender confusion, if that is what it was, was part of my heritage. Would the Georgians approve of my decision to become male, or sexlessly initialed, in my nom de plume? Yes.

Yes, I wrote to Wölfflin. So let’s just make it V. Dadeshkeliani. Using both initials troubled me for their association with the nickname Evie, what Loretta Elmore had called me.

Some time after that, Wölfflin thanked me for my decision but added, Here in the office we are pretty much agreed that nobody can pronounce your last name, let alone remember it. Can you think of any way to shorten or Anglicize it?

Keliani? I reluctantly wrote back.

How about simply Kelly? Wölfflin replied by return mail,

Would you shorten your name to Wolf! I replied. No, I think Kelly makes me sound Irish. I wouldn’t mind being Scottish, or even Scotch-Irish, but not Irish.

We haggled. We experimented. We eliminated such choice cuts from my last name as Dade and Skelly and Deskel and even Liann.

We ended up with the compromise that is, of course, dear reader, the name that you and millions have come to know, and that adorns the spine of this book also.

III

The New York Times Book Review, in its catch-all “In Short” columns on page 47 (“That far back in the back just kills us,” Wölfflin sadly commented) of that early April issue, said, V. Kelian is apparently young; that appears to be all that is known about him. His publisher offers virtually no clues as to whether this stunning novel is autobiographical or not. We would like to know. At the risk of sounding like the despised Bolshakov, we wonder why he simply didn’t tell the truth. Why couldn’t he have simply given us the unvarnished Kathy, or whoever she was, without straining to turn her into a fictional victim? Kelian is going to have to decide whether he wants to be a novelist or a historian.

The review did manage to give a capsule synopsis of the story that, like all plot synopses, was absurdly unreadable and demeaning. But the review itself, coming as it did and where it did on the heels of rhapsodic notices from Kirkus, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly, was inexplicable, damaging, and so unfair it turned me into a lifetime enemy of the New York Times Book Review, not even changed by their favorable, indeed fawning reviews of my later novels. (Wölfflin tried to console me by pointing out that we were able to salvage that one adjective, stunning, for use in advertising.)

The April issues of two influential monthlies, the Atlantic and Harper’s, both contained reviews that could be classified as “raves,” albeit both of them succumbed to gender confusion. V. Kelian is a new star in our literary galaxy, the Atlantic said, but added, His choice of a name for himself in the novel, and for the novel itself, Georgie Boy, brings to mind both Erskine Caldwell’s 1943 best-seller, Georgia Boy (also narrated by a twelve-year-old boy, although not one who becomes involved in sexual intrigues with an older woman), and the 1966 film with Lynn Redgrave and James Mason, Georgy Girl. Of course there is no evidence that V. Kelian was familiar with either of these, or, if he was, that he wanted, for example, to convert his girl into a boy.

The Harper’s review, written by a woman, gave the first good and accurate plot synopsis, then digressed into a little essay on gender. V. Kelian understands the sufferings of the female heart so admirably that I cannot help but wonder if he might not be a woman. The choice of George as a name reverberates with associations: Both George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) and George Sand (Amandine Dupin) were women writers hiding behind that husbandman’s name, and then of course we are today witnessing the pop phenomenon and androgyne known as Boy George, whose very name is almost an inversion of this great novel’s title. This blather was redeemed by a concluding paragraph: No one who reads this totally original novel will ever be able to forget it. No one who reads it will remain unchanged by the experience. No novel in recent memory succeeds on every level as brilliantly as Georgie Boy.

Congratulations on those splendid notices in Atlantic and Harper’s, Wölfflin wrote, but we are still waiting for a “biggie,” in Time or Newsweek.

But the biggie, when it came, was from a totally unexpected source: the New York Review of Books. Wölfflin phoned the joyous news, quoting at length from the lengthy review and promising to send me the issue by express mail. This periodical, Wölfflin explained, was not to be confused with the New York Times Book Review; it had been founded originally to counteract that powerful review medium. It was considered the “chief theoretical organ of Radical Chic,” and if it had a flaw, it was that it was inclined to print long-winded discussions of obscure books that were in no danger of becoming popular. It rarely reviewed fiction, and Georgie Boy was the first first novel it had reviewed in a long time.

When I received my copy of the issue, I was amused to see that the review was accompanied by one of those striking pen-and-ink cross-hatched caricatures, by “D. Levine,” based obviously upon the publicity photos of me that did not reveal my sex. The creature in the caricature manages to be very handsome despite what Levine does to him/her. I was told that Mr. Levine always did his caricatures of famous people or recognizable people, and that I was the first “unknown” he had ever attempted.

I would like to reprint the entire review, all 4,200 words of it.

IV

Evil Shrinks

Georgie Boy

by V. Kelian

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 348 pp., $15.95

Clive Henry

TEN YEARS AGO I.F. Stone observed in these pages, in his article “Betrayal by Psychiatry,” that “socialism without freedom, whatever its declared intentions, turns into a suffocating nightmare.” The literature of that nightmare has burgeoned apace; within the past few years these pages have carried reviews of important new indictments of the Soviet order by Eugenia Ginzburg (Within the Whirlwind), Vladimir Bukovsky (To Build a Castle), Lev Kopelev (To Be Preserved Forever), Zhores and Roy Medvedev (A Question of Madness), and Andrei Sakharov (Alarm and Hope), to mention only those that I have read myself.

But all of these, and the several others that I have not read, have in common that they are nonfiction, first-person eyewitness accounts of the merciless punishment that the Communist regime metes out to those citizens who dare to question its ideology. Without wishing to denigrate the very real worth of any of these accounts, I have the unmistakable impression that the voices of these victims become merged into a single, pathetic lament that seems to lose some of its strength or effectiveness because it is first-person and because it is eyewitness and because, after a while, it loses whatever novelty it possesses.

Now comes a voice that is unforgettably remarkable for at least three reasons: First, it is that not of the victim but of a child, literally, of the victim’s oppressors; second, although it is clearly based upon, as I shall show, actual experiences in a Soviet psychiatric hospital and a Soviet politicals’ prison, it never once identifies its locales, thus rendering them universal; and third, perhaps most important in terms of literature, although it must have come out of a profound personal experience, it is clearly a work of fiction.

That alone, its novelistic complexion, sets it apart from the entire body of Soviet protest writing, with the exceptions of Solzhenitsyn and Voinovich, with both of whom the mysteriously named newcomer, V. Kelian, must now be compared. The novels in English of both Solzhenitsyn and Voinovich have been translated from the Russian; Georgie Boy was apparently written in English by a Russian emigre (Keliansky? Kelianko? Kelianovich? One guesses, at least, that the V is for Vladimir).

Georgie Boy is not a political novel. It is not even, despite its surface, a novel about the political abuse of psychiatry. Nor can it, by any extension, be called a psychological novel, as such. Certainly it concerns corruption in the practice of psychology, but it has no “mission” in that direction. If by some miracle it reaches an audience in the general book-buying public, it may even come to be denounced as a pornographic novel about the intense affair between the victim, a beautiful woman in her twenties, and the narrator, her savior and lover, a boy of only twelve named George.

Inevitably, because of this “twist” of the story, comparisons may be made with the most celebrated novel by another Russian, Nabokov, but really the only similarity between the two books is the precocious sexuality, in the one, of a girl, and in the other, of a boy, vis-à-vis a “mature” lover. There is hardly a single point of resemblance between Monsieur Humbert and “Princess” Kathy, other than their awareness that their fondness for pubescent lovers is considered wrong by society. If the sometimes graphic scenes of lovemaking, as seen and told through the fresh eyes of the boy himself, serve to attract readers who otherwise would overlook this wonderful novel, then they will have accomplished one of their two purposes—the other being to examine the whole question of what is real, if the same “reality” is experienced by a woman of twenty-four, a boy of twelve, and an unscrupulous psychiatrist whose grasp of reality is entirely egocentric.

ALL OF US have endured those mildly inquisitive moments, sometimes stretching into hours, waiting in a doctor’s or dentist’s (or psychotherapist’s) office with nothing to do but examine the room, the tiles on the floor, the pictures and diplomas on the wall, the familiar and unfamiliar instruments, the furniture of boredom. Georgie Boy introduces us to the subject, and to our friendly narrator in the title role, with a brilliant opening chapter in which there are no people at all, and yet the major personae of the novel are not only presented but depicted clearly, as seen innocently by George (there are no last names in this novel, except that of the villain, Bolshakov), an eager, intelligent, kindhearted (for annealing reasons of his own) boy of twelve, the son not of the doctor whose room this is but of one of the doctor’s professional colleagues, a woman psychiatrist in the same hospital—for this is clearly, as Georgie lets us know, an office not in a professional building or clinic but in a psychiatric hospital—and these documents and pictures and dolls that the boy describes and imaginatively analyzes in the room are clearly those of a senior staff psychiatrist in an institution whose purpose is ostensibly the treatment of mental illness but in “reality” is the punishment, through Pavlovian conditioning, of nonconformists, dissenters, the heterodox misfits in the social or political order.

Here, and throughout the book, Georgie refers to the hospital only as “the Laboratory,” which is no part of its name but only the name his doctor mother calls an unused part of the hospital in which she “parks” her son, leaving him to play or somehow amuse himself while she works. Thus by imaginative synecdoche he applies to the whole institution the two “purposes” of a small part of it: the consumption and management of his idle hours, and radical experimentation with the mechanisms of the human psyche.

It may be argued—and the reader is certainly wary of this throughout the first chapters of the book—that young George is simply too perceptive for his age, in what he observes and illustrates around him in the Laboratory, and this wariness is encouraged by his lovely use of language. But the truth is that, as the reader abruptly realizes along about the end of the second chapter, George is not “interpreting” anything; he makes no value judgments, no appreciations or denunciations, of the world around him. He simply describes his world with the candor and innocence of his youth, the awkward age, and permits the reader to do all of the thinking. This is, of course, the highest condition of literature as opposed to the “entertainment” arts.

The closest George ever comes to voicing an opinion is when he betrays his real feelings for his (and our) heroine, whom he has chosen to call “Princess,” thereby endowing his narrative with some of the charm of a fairy tale. We learn eventually that her first name may be Kathy, but we learn also that it could conceivably just as well be Kofryna or Catalina or Aikaterine or Caron or Katerina or Karena, “the pure” in any language. She might very well be from a royal family and thus actually a princess, or that may simply be a title George has bestowed upon her. She is not Russian—or, if she is, she is also Portuguese and Swedish and Scottish and American. In some unnamed city that could be any large city anywhere, she has been arrested, during a demonstration, for civil disobedience or for passive resistance or for her political or religious beliefs. An agency of the government (it is never identified as the KGB or the CIA, but it behaves suspiciously like an amalgam of both) arranges to have her incarcerated without a trial, which would attract unfavorable publicity, by sending her for psychiatric “evaluation” to the Laboratory.

Those of us who know Moscow’s infamous Serbsky Institute, by reading Bukovsky or the Medvedevs or the more recent Victor Nekipelov in his brilliant Institute of Fools, will recognize at once that the Laboratory closely resembles the Serbsky. But, lest we think we are actually there, the Laboratory also closely resembles Saint Elizabeth’s in Washington, D.C., and indeed one of the permanent inmates (there are several) of the Laboratory is an aged poet who writes deliberately obscure verses remarkably similar to Ezra Pound’s. The fact that Pound was released from the psychiatric hospital in 1958 should not deter us from making the assumption that this poet is Pound and the hospital is Saint Elizabeth’s. It may actually be not Pound in person but his ghost, of whom there are several in the spectral imaginations of Princess as well as George.

Out of curiosity, I referred to my copy of Russia’s Political Hospitals: The Abuses of Psychiatry in the Soviet Union (published in America in 1977 as Psychiatric Terror: How Soviet Psychiatry Is Used to Suppress Dissent), in which authors Sidney Bloch and Peter Reddaway identify some of the personnel working at the Serbsky. Several of the actual doctors are recognizable here, as George sees them or depicts them from his “neutral” stance as the son of their colleague: Daniil Romanovich Lunts, the chief of Section Four (Political) of the Serbsky, is clearly identifiable, as are Dr. Yakov Lazarevich Landau, his deputy, and Dr. Margarita Felixovna Taltse, another senior psychiatrist. Most remarkable is that George’s mother in the novel, whom he refers to simply as Doctor Mom, is distinguishable as the actual Dr. Svetlana Iosifovna Rudenko, a blonde beauty who actually had, and doted upon, a young son, Dzhordzhi, or Georgy (named fawningly after the Serbsky’s longtime powerful director, Georgy Morozov). Are we to assume that “V. Kelian” is possibly Dzhordzhi Rudenko, grown now into his twenties? Or did Dzhordzhi actually rescue a woman like his Princess and get himself killed in the act?…But I hesitate to give away the tragic ending of this novel.

If these various disguises and pseudonyms were necessary to protect or conceal, however thinly, actual persons, why then did V. Kelian (or George, or Dzhordzhi) choose to identify Dr. Vasily Timofeyevich Bolshakov by his actual name?

For a number of years Dr. Bolshakov has been in the forefront of the elite Serbsky psychiatrists who, by their Party loyalty and their willingness to abuse their profession for political ends, have enjoyed special privileges, inflated salaries, and the right to travel, including to the United States, where Bolshakov has been several times.

V.T. BOLSHAKOV IS THE MOST disagreeable person I have ever encountered between the covers of a book, fiction or nonfiction. In a word, he stinks. But again, George never passes judgment upon him…until the very end, and then the judgment is final, severe, and eternally damning. If George even resents Dr. Bolshakov because the man once seduced and debauched George’s own mother with George as a covert witness, he does not reveal his repugnance. Throughout the book, he is content, if that is the word, merely to chronicle Bolshakov’s long, demonic, crafty campaign to deprive Princess of her sanity.

It is Bolshakov, of course, who “evaluates” Princess for the government agency and writes a report, which George finds in the doctor’s files at the conclusion of the opening chapter discussed above, discovering that Bolshakov has classified her as schizophrenic. (The Serbsky, following the diagnostic system of the notorious Dr. Andrei V. Snezhnevsky, actually does classify all political prisoners as having “sluggish” or “creeping” schizophrenia.) Bolshakov’s own pet diagnosis of his “patients,” especially Princess, is a form of paranoid or delusional schizophrenia in which the patient is incapable of distinguishing truth from fiction.

How many of Bolshakov’s sessions with Princess her Georgie actually eavesdropped upon, or how many he reconstructed from spying in Bolshakov’s files or by simply being told about them by Princess herself, may only be surmised; we do not question his modus operandi, so fascinated are we by his modus vivendi. He captures the intonations and inflections of Bolshakov’s speech, as the doctor talks to Princess, without making Bolshakov sound Russian or American. “How am I to believe you tell the truth?” becomes almost a litany in Bolshakov’s questioning of his victim, Princess. There are endless variations: “Did you actually do that?” and “How can you be sure that it happened the way you think it did?” and “Aren’t you simply trying to get me to see something that never existed?” and, always, the falling back on that one word: “Is this really true?”

For a man obsessed with truth, or pretending to be, Bolshakov has almost no awareness of the hideousness of the truth of his own existence. He has abjured his own mother, caused the death of his own sister, and dishonored some of his best professors during graduate school. He is a compulsive chronic masturbator, even after “normal” satisfaction from the great variety of women he seduces or coerces with threats, punishments, drugs. To Princess and his other patients, he freely administers sulfazine and atropine, two drugs whose effectiveness in psychiatry has long been disproved, but two drugs that cause considerable chemical discomfort and even derangement. (Sulfazine in particular, a form of sulphur suspended in peach oil, does nothing for the “patient” other than create disorientation and severe headaches.) When Princess’s spirit continues to hold up under the regimen of abusive drug treatment, Bolshakov permits her to be subjected to tortures that are not chemical but physical, wracking her with stretchings and bruisings and even a form of Chinese water torture. And then of course there is his most diabolical torture: under pretext of “talk therapy” that he persuades her is for the benefit of “helping” whatever imperfections in her psyche have resulted in her predilection for youths, he submits her to what is essentially a “conveyor belt” of nonstop interrogation, an insidious campaign of questioning designed to invalidate her trust in “reality.”

In his observation and description of the grotesque punishments that Princess must endure, George himself breaks, becoming, in his choice of words and images, a surrealist.

SURREALISM AS A MODE OF representation—or misrepresentation—in literature as well as in the visual arts has as its fundamental limitation its being private, personal, even hermetic. One man’s dream is another man’s nightmare. Or, to put it differently, one man’s worst nightmare becomes a ludicrous farce to another man. Jung to the contrary, there is no collective unconscious that can interpret or even appreciate the illogical, anachronistic, asyntactical phenomena that well up from the depths of the soul and are consciously rearranged to form a “truth” or “reality” that can be communicated to another person.

V. Kelian knows this and has wisely chosen not to become cutely Kafkaesque when there are so many easy temptations for doing so, in a work of this nature, this setting, this cast of characters, and this exploration of themes. Young George’s slow and subtle descent—or ascent—into a kind of madness of his own is not, we realize with a shock of recognition, a flight into inaccessibility but rather a voyage into the familiar if puzzling terrors and suspicions we all of us have known at the passage from childhood into adulthood. George’s “loss of innocence” (concurrent with his loss of virginity) takes the form of his realization that the scenes of horror he is witnessing in the Laboratory are for him a symbolic albeit brutal indoctrination into puberty. The “rites” are of observation, not participation, and the only way he can communicate that observation to the reader is with language verging on the irrational, even poetic, with images that are magnificent in their strangeness and extravagance. One almost regrets the coming of the inevitable time when George, through the love of Princess, regains his prosaic rationality.

An instructive contrast has to be made between George’s narration and the most famous first-person boy’s voice in fiction, his that begins, “You don’t know about me, without you have read a book…” Georgie and Huck might like each other, or at least understand and appreciate each other. Georgie would consider Huck self-consciously and deliberately rustic, uncouth, and unlettered. Huck would think that Georgie is prematurely wise, somewhat cocky, and maybe a little too spoiled by his mother’s devotion. Probably the two boys would pick a fight and bloody each other’s noses…but neither would be victor. Each would greatly envy the other’s situation in life, the one’s chance to explore the Mississippi, the other’s chance to explore the way that people treat and mistreat each other in an institution. Perhaps, if only Huck could accompany Georgie when he runs away from home, from the Laboratory, and sets out on an epic journey across—again, is it Russia? or is it America?—if only Huck could be with George when George journeys a far distance to find the prison camp to which his beloved Princess has been removed, and to attempt to rescue her there-from, then perhaps…But again I hesitate to give away the ending, even by suggesting ways that Mark Twain could have handled it better.

At least, when Princess is shipped out to the prison camp, she is escaping, for a while, from her tormentor, Bolshakov. (My first reading of these chapters led me to suspect that her prison camp may have been either the “strict regime” women’s zones at Bereznyaki or Orel, but then I deduced from certain clues—descriptions of the bleak Bashkir landscape, primarily—that it may have been the notorious Ishimbay, the most terrible of all Russia’s camps for women. Still, as far as the reader might be concerned, it could be simply Fort Worth or Frontera or any of the women’s “correctional institutions” in America.) Bolshakov, having failed to seduce her, having failed with all his arsenal of physical, chemical, and mental weapons to drive her out of her mind, having failed (worst of all for him, as far as his obligations to the System are concerned) to convert her dissent and extract any recantation or apology from her, can only send her off to a prison camp where she will be subjected to a variety of abuses of which not even he is capable.

There are parallels, if I may draw them without maligning my own profession, between the psychiatrist and the book reviewer. Both are supposed to be intelligent if not intellectual persons of uncommon perspicacity and sufficient understanding of the foibles of mankind to be able to detect a warped psyche or a plot bent out of shape. Both are expected to be dispassionate, tolerant, and open-minded. Both are also expected to be honest, fair, and selfless. The virtues of kindness, sympathy, and fellow-feeling are not requisite, although they are helpful. Both professions place their practitioners in positions of enormous trust, the one from his patient and his patient’s family, the other from his audience of potential readers, not to mention the author himself.

The chief comparison is that both the psychiatrist and the book reviewer wield great power, the power to create as well as the power to destroy. The reputation of a book is as fragile, as malleable, as the spirit of a patient. These powers can be corrupted and abused. At its most recent meeting or congress, in Honolulu, the World Psychiatric Association, with a jaundiced eye upon the abuses of the profession in the Soviet Union, adopted the so-called “Declaration of Hawaii,” amounting to a Hippocratic oath for psychiatrists. (The actual Dr. Bolshakov, incidentally, was in the Soviet delegation to this congress, and even had the audacity to deliver a paper, “Methods of Inducing Reality Acceptance into Mythomania.”) Article Number Seven of the Declaration reads, “The psychiatrist must never use the possibilities of the profession for maltreatment of individuals or groups and should be concerned never to let inappropriate personal desires, feelings, or prejudices interfere with the treatment.”

Those words could so easily be paraphrased, “The book reviewer must never use the possibilities of the profession for maltreatment of authors and should be concerned never to let inappropriate personal desires, feelings, or prejudices interfere with the review.”

In Georgie Boy, Bolshakov as psychiatrist, in the end, is like a book reviewer who, having done everything he could to destroy the book’s chances, must even visit the marketplace to ensure that the book is not displayed in bookstores, or, if it is, that its jacket is torn, its boards broken, its pages crumpled.

LET ME MAKE A BOLD hint to America’s filmmakers, who seem to be running out of good ideas these days: the last fifty pages of Georgie Boy, if translated to the screen, could make a cinematic adventure of the highest order…even without Huck. Georgie travels alone, without money (because his mother neither gives him an allowance nor permits him to earn anything), across a thousand miles of country (it could be Russia, but the filmmakers will show us chunks of Kentucky, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas) to reach an impregnable, formidable fortress of a prison where his girlfriend sits, her head shaved, in a cell of solitary confinement, having abandoned all hope.

Hot on his heels, as the filmmakers say (and show), comes the team of two crazy shrinks, the evil Dr. Bolshakov and the flighty “Doctor Mom,” who suspected Georgie’s destination when he disappeared from the Laboratory. Georgie has a considerable head start on them but is on foot when he isn’t successful hitchhiking. The two shrinks drive a car. There is considerable suspense: Will they catch up with him before he reaches the prison?

I will spoil neither the book reader’s nor the moviegoer’s pleasure by revealing how Georgie gets inside the prison. I will not even reveal what the filmmakers may choose to ignore: that Georgie is no longer merely a lad of twelve; two years have passed and he is pushing fifteen now. The tense, harrowing climax of the book loses no credibility through our doubts that a young boy can pull off such a stunt. He is not so young anymore…and he does not pull it entirely off.

For me, the book’s moment of truth, if not its actual climax, is the ultimate confrontation between the just-arrived pair Bolshakov/Doctor Mom and Georgie, in which the youth totally humiliates the both of them. It is the most satisfying “just deserts” I have ever encountered in literature, and I do not intend to give away one moment of its pleasure by quoting from any of it.

Throughout the book’s final chapter, Georgie’s articulate narrative voice, never boasting or vainglorious, the same voice that earlier “lapses” into surrealistic wordplay and apparent babble, becomes increasingly musical. There is a distinct tone and timbre to it that, if I am not mistaken in my own “listening” to it, derives straight from the popular First Piano Concerto of Tchaikovsky, or at least strongly reminds this listener of the elegiac, haunting moods of it, which seem to blaze a trail through an uncharted pastoral woodland.

The reader caught up in the very emotional music of the book’s words may be puzzled, if not disappointed, to discover that the book does not end. The music stops, the last page is blank, the last sentence has no period on the end of it—but the book does not end.

HAVING ALREADY DIGRESSED, in this essay, into the nature of surrealism and the parallels between psychiatry and book reviewing, may I be permitted at the end a digression on endings? Any ending is sad (unless we are impatient to have done with a bad book) because, while we have spent the entire course of the book enjoying our privilege of actively participating in the creation of scenes and characters and even establishing the pace or time frame, we now find ourselves totally helpless to make the story continue. Given even the best imagination and inventiveness, we cannot visualize anything beyond “The End.” It may be argued that even in the hypothetical happy ending, wherein the hero and heroine “live happily ever after,” the hero and heroine are suddenly and certainly dead, as far as our access to them is concerned. Why then should they not literally die at the end of every story?

But when any time-factored work of art (including those works of visual art that require a certain amount of looking time properly to see them) comes to its inevitable conclusion, should we think of it, or of ourselves in relation to it, as dead? We can repeat our experience of it, we can bring it “alive” again and again, but we can never prevent, deter, or alter its ultimate demise. That demise is final.

Consider, as V. Kelian surely must have done, that none of the stories we experience in our nightly dreams ever has an “ending.” We may wake up, or we may switch to another story, but we never end a story in a dream. “Every exit is an entry somewhere else,” as a character declares in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

V. Kelian miraculously does not end Georgie Boy. Certainly, he, or his character in the title role, is killed. (We do not even wonder how this narrative could have come to have been written if he were dead.) Certainly his voice stops, or permanently falters. But he is not dead. Just how this is achieved I leave to be joyfully discovered by the reader impatient to put down my review and rush out to buy a copy of this remarkable, incredibly beautiful first novel.

20

I

There were two immediate results of that lovely review. The first, coming within days, was that an influential director of the Book-of-the-Month Club, which had already passed up an opportunity to select Georgie Boy when it was still in manuscript, happened to read the review and was so taken by it that he brought strong pressure upon his organization to reconsider and to rush the novel into immediate adoption as an alternate selection for the month of June. This required a special printing of the volume (an edition somewhat more cheaply mass produced than Publisher Z’s)—a printing that, as it turned out, had to be doubled, tripled, and infinitely multiplied after the membership read their copies of the Book-of-the-Month Club News, with a review of my novel quoting all of the other good reviews up to that point and making it look like the sensation of the season.

I was visiting Sharon in her newly restored residence in Stick Around, the house that had been her grandmother’s general store and post office, by coincidence on the day the local telephone company was installing her phone; Sharon and I were staring at the instrument, one of the “old-fashioned” ordinary black plastic telephones with a dial rather than buttons, and Sharon remarked, “I wonder who will be the first to call,” and the phone rang at that instant, the first call not for her but for me: I had given to Liz Blaustein Sharon’s name and address, where I could be reached “in an emergency,” although I wasn’t expecting anything.

“Are you sitting down?” Liz asked. I wasn’t, but that didn’t deter her, and she told me about the BOMC selection, and also the second bit of good news generated by Clive Henry’s wonderful words: a major British publisher, who like the BOMC had already once rejected the novel, had been influenced to change his mind and was paying an advance for British rights that was small but, more importantly, might lead other European publishers to consider or reconsider the novel.

Then, in rather quick succession, the “biggies” that Wölfflin had wanted began to appear. Time, Newsweek, and even U.S. News and World Report, the latter reviewing not so much the novel itself as its possible repercussions in foreign affairs: “Soviet Psychiatric House-cleaning Is in Order” was the title of their piece. Psychology Today had an essay-review under the title “What Motivates the Sadist?”

A belated but lengthy and clever review in the New Yorker, by John Updike, seemed to be more interested in my pen name than in the novel itself and went to great lengths to speculate about similarities between V. Kelian and V. Sirin (as the early Nabokov disguised himself) as well as B. Traven (as the mysterious Hal Groves or Traven Torsvan called himself, he who wrote The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.) But Updike took it for granted that Kelian, like Sirin and Traven, was male.

Book Digest ran a review of the NYRB review: a story about Clive Henry, the “thoughtful, wry, attentive” professor at Columbia University who had written the “brilliant” review for the New York Review of Books and had “dared” to compare the profession of book reviewing to that of psychiatry, both subject to abuses and corruption. Sharon pointed out to me that the photograph of Clive Henry accompanying the article made him look exactly like her old lover Larry Brace, and I agreed that the resemblance was indeed striking. I was tempted to write Clive Henry a fan letter but decided that authors ought not praise their own critics.

Liz Blaustein called again. “How do you feel about television?” she asked. Both “Good Morning, America,” and the “Today” show had made firm offers for appearances, ten-minute minimum, and they were ready to fly me to New York or L.A., whichever I preferred. “I’ll have to get back to you on that,” I replied, having picked up a few phrases of the polite jargon of the trade, and I called my editor, Wölfflin, and asked, “How do I feel about television?”

“You’re beautiful,” Wölfflin said, “but I’ll have to get back to you on that.” And Wölfflin called a day later to inform me that “our people have talked to their people,” and our people had concluded that while television appearances would certainly boost sales, it would be better if I preserved the “mystery” of my identity. The public should not know that V. Kelian was a woman.

This meant that I had to decline not only all of the requests, and they began to multiply, to appear on television, but the urgent appeals from People magazine and US magazine for photo interviews. The more I (or rather Liz) refused the invitations, the more intense and aggressive they became. The so-called Sunday supplements, Parade and U.S.A. Weekend, ran articles with titles like “Who Is V. Kelian?” and “Mysterious Young Best-selling Writer Guards His Identity,” but their discussions of the book itself denounced it for its pornography…which of course greatly helped sales.

The unpleasant New York Times Book Review had the duty of reporting Georgie Boy’s steady climb, week by week, up the exalted ladder of its Best-Seller List. Within two months of Clive Henry’s review, my novel was firmly lodged in the top position on the list, where it would remain for over a year.

I moved into a suite of rooms in the Halfmoon Hotel, where I could have three meals a day in the Crystal Room when I didn’t feel like walking to one of Arcaty’s fine little eateries. Morris the cat immediately decided that he wanted to move in with me, or at least spend more of his time with me than elsewhere in the hotel, and one of the first of the many fine things I began to collect for my rooms was a wicker cat-cushion-cave for Morris to sleep in. I also began to pick up other things, folk furniture and folk crafts from the Bodarks and other southern highlands: an extensive assortment of baskets woven from white oak splits; a variety of quilts, some of them family heirlooms; and the beginnings of my collection of ladder-back, woven-hickory-seated furniture from Mount Judea, not far from Stick Around. And for my walls, in addition to the hangings of folk “finger weavings” and “wood pretties,” I collected the time-warp and space-warp prints of M.C. Escher before they became fashionable everywhere. Soon my suite was overcrowded with my collections, and I began to think about more spacious quarters, especially after Georgie Boy rights were sold to Bantam for a cool million.

Commentators who have made much of certain similarities between Nabokov’s later lifestyle and V. Kelian’s have overlooked a crucial difference: Nabokov owned few possessions and boasted of being able to move easily from one lodging to another without anything in tow; I have collected so many things during my years at the Halfmoon that it is going to require several haulings with a four-wheel-drive truck to move my belongings from this hotel to my next destination…or else I am fated to remain here for the rest of my life.

How did Ingraham know I was living at the Halfmoon? Perhaps he guessed. At any rate, that was where he addressed his letter to me. The letter was ostensibly congratulatory. He was only assuming, he said, that Georgie Boy was the same novel that he had known and encouraged as Geordie Lad back in Pittsburgh and that he had “provided” me a place to finish. If I wanted to keep my identity a secret, he assured me, he would not brag to any of his Fateville friends that he had known me “back when” or that he had actually helped in the production of that runaway best-seller. He himself, he reminded me, had “pursued the bitch goddess, Success,” for all of his long writing career, but “never got within sniffing distance of her body odor, even.” So he was glad, and vicariously thrilled, that she had smiled upon me.

The real reason for his letter, it turned out, was that he, with the help of his wife, Kay, had finished six chapters of a nonfiction book about ghost towns. The book was quasi-autobiographical; in it he compared six episodes of his own life to the beginning, rise, and decline of the towns. He had not yet reached the Pittsburgh episode and rushed to assure me that he did not intend to capitalize upon his friendship with me or to reveal my identity. He might not even mention me at all. Anyway, what he really wanted to ask me was, would I consider using my “considerable influence” with Publisher Z in order to find an editor interested in his work?

Grateful as I was to Ingraham for all he’d done for me, I thought that was rather presumptuous of him, and I replied, You have confused me with the notorious V. Kelian, the male author of the best-seller Georgie Boy. Have you read the book? I knew that Ingraham, given his reading habits, or rather nonreading habits, had probably not purchased the book, let alone read it.

A month or so after that, I received a picture postcard of the quaint square in downtown Fateville, on the back of which he had written, I am reading Georgie Boy. Have you read anything of mine? Touché, old Ingraham.

It was a poor season for business at the Halfmoon; the motels on the highway were siphoning off the tourist trade, and there were occasions when I had the Crystal Room to myself at breakfast or lunch. The management was even considering closing down the building for the winter. I would be without a place to live, and, much as I appreciated an offer from Sharon to move in with her in Stick Around, I really preferred the advantages, such as they were, of my town life in Arcaty.

Then Trevor Kola, the illustrious Hollywood filmmaker, bought the movie rights to Georgie Boy for, as it was reported, “a very high six figures,” making it possible for me to lease the entire north wing of the top floor of the Halfmoon, along with the penthouse that rose two flights above it, and I had a delightful winter, supervising the conversion of that floor and penthouse into one spacious triplex apartment, complete with a vast futuristic kitchen wherein I could use the latest microchip appliances and fixtures to prepare one of my Svanetian chicken dishes, khenagi or tsitsila shkimerulat, and two rooms devoted entirely to a huge walk-in closet wherein I could hang my burgeoning wardrobe, flanking a bathroom with pool-size sunken tub and Jacuzzi (requiring the lowering of the ceiling in the servant’s bedroom directly below it), and a sauna-cum-shower that would easily accommodate a party. What fun I had equipping my music room! The speakers alone, Hartley Concertmasters, cost me over five thousand dollars, and I spent at least that much on a record collection.

There was also (why am I using the past tense? There is. I see it from where I pen—or pencil—these words) a chess nook, a special room without the windows that distract one with the gorgeous view of the hills surrounding Arcaty, devoted to a special chess table with a Bombay inlaid mother-of-pearl chessboard, upon which I placed an eighteenth-century Dieppe bone-carved chess set, found for me by my dealer-friend Lennie Lewin of the Esoterica Gallery on Spring Street.

It was in that chess nook that I first played, and played with, young Travis Coe, at a time in his life when he was, if my reader can believe this, almost totally unknown.

II

In those days before he ever had a lesson in diction, he pronounced his name “Tray-viss,” as in B. Traven, and I, knowing no better, came to pronounce it that way too. The facts of his origins are all too familiar to readers of movie magazines and Sunday supplements: He was a foundling, of sorts, born in the mountain fastnesses west of Stick Around, in a still-primitive area of the rural Bodarks where, as he put it, “the Coes is so thick their dogs caint tell ’em apart,” his mother a Coe girl of thirteen who was first cousin to her inseminator, a Coe not much older than she—the two of them keeping him only long enough to name him, and then leaving him on the cabin doorstep of a spinster aunt, Fannie Coe, who grudgingly but dutifully raised him from infancy, teaching him the language and the ways of the deepest backwoods, to the age of twelve, when he ran away from home to see the sights of the nearest “city,” actually just the large town I have called “Harriman.” Trying to find his way home after discovering that Harriman had hardly been worth the trouble, he got confused on the highway and took the westerly instead of the southerly direction, which led him in due course to Arcata Springs, where he began living hand-to-mouth, artfully dodging the truant officers and welfare officers who couldn’t get him to stand still long enough to be fingerprinted, let alone placed in a foster home and returned to school.

His formal education had ended with the fourth grade of the consolidated school to which he’d ridden a yellow school bus for four years from Aunt Fannie’s cabin. Of the American “three r’s,” he was terrible in ’rithmetic, could scarcely ’rite his own name, but was, somehow, excellent in reading. And that was how I met him.

One chill morning in February I’d walked down the hill to the Arcata Springs Public Library, that small limestone edifice (with a pair of Doric columns and a frieze) donated to the town by the philanthropic cousin of my old spook acquaintance Lawren. I was searching for a book, John Joseph Matthews’s Wah’kon-tah, which was crucial to the research on the Osage Indians that I was contemplating for my as-yet-uncommenced second novel—I knew I could not rest on my laurels much longer, or allow V. Kelian to rest on his, but I had vacillated for some time between trying to write a novel with a Svanetian setting, which might not be very popular in English-speaking countries, or indulging my longtime fascination with the American Indian to write something about my adopted country.

The librarian informed me that Wah’kon-tah had been checked out. When I protested, she, casting a glance toward the front door, told me that the library had a policy of never revealing the identity of one borrower to another, but that she could tell me that the book would probably be back “very shortly” because the borrower, who had just taken it that morning, was a “very fast” reader. For the price of a postcard, I could leave my name and address, and they would notify me as soon as the book was returned. When I gave my address as the Halfmoon, the librarian said, “Oh, you are just passing through?”

“No,” I said, “I live at the Halfmoon,” and I resisted the impulse to call her attention to the copy of Georgie Boy that was propped up on the counter under a sign that said, THIS WEEK’S NO. 1 BESTSELLER.

Disappointed at leaving without Wah’kon-tah, I was astonished to discover, sitting on the front parapet at the top of the library’s steep stairsteps, precariously high above Spring Street, busily absorbed in reading that very book, the boy who was destined to enter my life and heart. In the best tradition of contemporary confessional literature by and about the famous in American culture, I can now reveal that it was Travis Coe to whom I was referring in that recent Paris Review interview (see below: the audacious question was, “Just as Monsieur Humbert was genuinely in love with his Lolita, or Dolores, haven’t you ever found yourself similarly in love with one of your boys?” and I replied, “Only one”).

He moved his lips as he read, and his lips were a blur. They were full but not broad. His yellow hair was not combed; perhaps it had not been combed recently, nor trimmed in quite some time. The morning sun was warming up the day, and the burgeoning freckles on his cheeks were like little sunbeams, but it was still cold February, and his jacket was inches too short for his freckled arms and couldn’t be zipped up the front, so that his dirty, frayed plaid flannel shirt was exposed. His shoes, or sneakers, were woeful, and there was a gaping hole in the knee of one his trousers…This was a year or so before the national fad for wearing blue jeans full of deliberate holes. But his freckled face, although it was still bowed over the book, was washed and clean and surpassingly lovely, and I had a great urge to get a better look at it, to say something that would make him look up at me.

“Would you rather believe in Wah’kon-tah than in God?” I asked. To the Osages, the name means something like “Mysterious Great Spirit.”

For a long moment he did not look up, and when he did, he glanced first at me, quickly, then to the left and to the right of him to see if there was anybody else I might be addressing. At length he said, scratching his head with one hand and laying a finger of the other hand on his chest, “Me?” and when I nodded, he said, “I didn’t hear ye.” I repeated my question, and instead of answering it he asked me, “Air ye a hooky cop?”

I thought perhaps it was an Osage Indian word. “Hoog’kee-kop? What’s that?”

“Air ye aimin to git me back to the schoolhouse?”

I think I understood, then, that he was truant and was mistaking me for a truant officer. “Why, no, I was just planning to read Wah’kon-tah myself, but you beat me to it.” He scratched his head again, then closed the book and held it out to me. I would not take it. “No, no,” I said. “You go ahead and read it, and I’ll just check it out when you return it to the library.” He reopened the book and made a pretense of resuming his reading of it, but he was clearly uncomfortable and continued scratching his head, waiting for me to go away. I still could scarcely believe that a boy just on the edge of puberty would be reading a thick, heavy volume on the Osage Indians, even if Matthews was something of a popularizer. It was almost as if this kid and myself were the only two persons in the world with any interest in the Osages, and here we were together in the same town where once those Indians had roamed and bathed and made love. I couldn’t let him go out of my sight.

“Could I buy you something to drink?” I offered. “A Coke or something?”

He looked up at me again, and his eyes narrowed. He retarded the hand that was scratching his head. “The last lady tried to buy me a Coke,” he declared, “she also tried to get me to go back to the schoolhouse.”

“I swear to you that I’m not a hooky cop or whatever. I’d just like to buy you something to drink…and perhaps talk about Wah’kon-tah.”

He studied me. The hand on his head dropped to his lap. “Would you also give me a dollar?”

I studied him, pondering his question for a moment until I realized that he was—what’s the expression?—he was panhandling. “Sure,” I said, and I opened my purse and took out not a dollar but a ten, and offered it to him. His narrowed eyes opened greatly at the sight of it, and he took it quickly, as if afraid I might have second thoughts or expect him to make change. He stood up, closing the book and holding it at his side.

We walked together—and he was almost as tall as I—down Spring Street to one of the cafes near the New Orleans Hotel, which took its name from all the cast iron on its front. He ordered not a Coke but a cup of coffee and then asked me, “Could I also get me a doughnut?”

“Have a dozen doughnuts, if you want,” I said. He ordered and ate four doughnuts and had three cups of coffee, to my one. Afterward, when I lit my cigarette, he looked at me so expectantly that I offered him one too, and he took it eagerly. We were the only people in the room except for the waitress, and if she frowned upon my giving a cigarette to a kid, that was her problem, as they say. “What’s your name?” I asked him. “Tray-vis,” he said. “What’s your’n?”

“You may call me Kat,” I told him.

He resumed scratching his head. “Like in kitty-kat?” he asked.

I nodded and asked, “Do you live in Arcaty?” He nodded. “Where?” I asked. “Near here?”

He gave his head an encompassing toss in a noncommittal direction. “Oh, jist hither and yon,” he said. “Whereabouts do you live at?”

“Do you know the Halfmoon?” I asked.

“Why, shore,” he said, and tossed his head in a definite direction. “Up yonder on the mountain. I figgered ye was a tourister. You don’t sound like ye come from this part of the country.”

“I live at the Halfmoon,” I told him. “Permanently.”

He gave me a quizzical look and once more scratched his head. “Is that a fack, now? Do you own the place?”

“No, I just have a bunch of rooms there, on the top floor and penthouse.”

“A whole bunch, huh? What do ye do for yore money? Or didje just inherit it or some’pn?”

I laughed. “How do you know I’ve got so much?”

“You jist gave me a big chunk of it, didn’t ye?” he grinned. “And you jist have the look of a lady who’s loaded.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I’m a writer, and I wrote a book that made a lot of money.”

“You don’t mean to tell me,” he said, with genuine awe, and his fingers burrowed into his scalp once more. “What’s the name of it? Could be I’ve done read it myself.”

I debated whether to tell him. I was warming to him by the minute and fantasizing the “project” I could make of him, and I knew that eventually, if not this very night, he would find out the title of my book. So why not tell him now? Because I was still committed to preserving the secrecy that surrounded my nom de plume. But curiosity got the better of me: could it possibly be that this uncouth but not unlettered child of the backwoods had actually at least heard of my novel? “Do you read fiction?” I asked him.

“You mean whopper tales?” he asked. “Yeah, that’s my favorite kind of book. Made-up stories. Novels.”

“Did you ever hear of a novel called Georgie Boy?”

“Sure, I heared of it,” he declared. “Matter a fact, I even seen it a-settin there on the counter in the lie-berry. Matter a fact, I even tried to check it out, but the lie-berrian said it wasn’t fitten for children, though she orter know I aint exactly no child no more.”

“Well, I wrote it,” I said.

He shook his head. “Unt-uh. That book was wrote by a feller name of V. Kelian. I don’t know what the V is fer. Maybe Virgil.”

“Vladimirovna,” I pronounced. “It’s my middle name.”

“What-all kind of middle name is that?” he wanted to know.

“Russian,” I said. “It means ‘daughter of Walter.’”

“You’re a Com’nist?” he wondered.

I shook my head. “I’m neither Communist nor Russian. I came from a beautiful country called Georgia, which the Russians conquered.”

“I never been east of the Mississippi,” he said, “but I heared tell of Georgia.”

“Not that Georgia. Mine was a European country in the Caucasus Mountains.”

“That’s the one I mean,” he said. “Where that Com’nist boss name of Joe Stalin come from. I read all about it.”

“You read an awful lot,” I observed.

“Ain’t much else to do,” he declared sadly. “Won’t nobody give me a job of work, on account of I’m too young.”

“What work could you do?” I asked.

“Jist anything, near ’bouts,” he said proudly. “I don’t reckon I’m old enough to write books, like you do, not yet anyhow. But I could do near ’bouts anything else.”

“All right,” I said, smiling, “I could offer you a job as my houseboy.”

His eyes made that squint again, in disbelief, and I began to wonder if he kept scratching his head out of genuine befuddlement or if perhaps he had some skin itch. “Air ye a-funnin me?” he asked. I thought about his verb and decided it meant something like “making fun of.” I shook my head, sincerely. “What-all does a houseboy have to do?” he asked.

I counted off some random things on my ten fingers. “Could you feed my cat? Bring up the newspaper and the mail? Dust the furniture? Run the bath? Help in the kitchen?” To each of these he nodded. “Could you polish my shoes? Carry packages home from shopping trips? Return books to the library for me? Check a few out?” He nodded. I had just one finger left. “Could you rub my back?”

“Why, shore,” he said. Then he grinned and narrowed those eyes once more. “You want me to sleep with you, too? Or have you already got somebody that does that?”

My turn to narrow my eyes and grin. “Are you experienced in such work?”

“I never been nobody’s houseboy before,” he declared. “But if you got the money, I could do anything you pay me for.”

“Would you like to see my rooms?”

“Why not?” he said. “Let’s go.” He stood up.

“What about your parents? Do you want to let them know where you’re going?”

“Parents?” He snorted a kind of sardonic laugh. “My momma wasn’t much older than me when I was born, and I aint seen her since. I saw my daddy, once, from a distance, when somebody pointed him out to me, and one look was all I could stand.”

“So who do you live with?” I asked.

“You,” he said.

III

Vicariously I was able to inspect my new twelve-room triplex apartment, through the awestruck eyes of Travis Coe. He revealed to me that the classmates he’d once had in the fourth grade had called him Coelumbus (shortened eventually to just Lum), and it seemed to me that he was looking at my rooms with the wonder and astonishment and, yes, fulfillment with which Christopher Columbus must have first laid eyes on the New World. Because when he’d left home, left his Aunt Fannie’s cabin and the nineteenth-century world of the Bodarks behind him, and set out on the journey that would take him eventually to stardom, he was setting out, as Columbus had, to discover a passage to a fabled world of riches that he had only read and heard about and that he scarcely believed he would ever find.

He was so absorbed with my rooms he forgot to scratch his head. He would point at a door and ask, “Who lives in there?” and when I would explain that that was simply one more of my rooms, he would shake his head, and then he would point at a stairway and ask, “Who lives up there?” and when I took him up to the second level and he found another stairway leading to the top level and he asked again, “So who lives up there?” and I said my own bedroom was up there he asked, “You mean you got all three of these floors all to yourself!”

“And you,” I said.

Even though my library (on the first level) was not yet stocked with books, it seemed to be the room that most fascinated my new companion (“I never even heared tell of nobody havin a whole lieberry room all to theirself”), and I was charmed when he decided to contribute to the stocking of the room by placing his copy of Wah’kon-tah in the middle of an empty stretch of walnut shelf and declaring, “There! Now we both can use it.”

It was in the library that Travis met Morris. Whether Travis had an indifference to the concept of pets in general (not realizing that he himself was about to become one), or whether Morris simply had an instinctive dislike for young boys, the kid and the cat never would hit it off together.

After the library, he was most captivated by my personal rooms in the penthouse’s top level. He simply could not believe the sunken bathtub. “Why, there’s swimmin’ holes up on Thomas Creek aint near as big as that!” he exclaimed. And although I was tempted to offer on the spot to let him take a skinny-dip in it and try out its gushing Jacuzzi whirlpools, I was constrained to point out that his own room below, in the servant’s quarters, had its own bathtub-with-shower, amply sizable for a thorough dip if not a swim. He found the fact of having his own quarters (on the main level with a splendid northward view) incredible. When he stood on the threshold of his bedroom, unable to move, unable to say anything, unable even to scratch his head, I suggested I might leave him alone while I looked at the morning’s mail, and he was able, at last, to sigh and say, “I do believe I done died and come up here to Heaven.” And he grinned at me and asked, “And wasn’t I too young to die, anyhow?”

Later, when room service brought up our lunch, I attempted to give him his first instructions in how to be a waiter. He had had enough experience with Arcaty’s cafes to know what waitresses do, and a waiter was simply a waitress in pants. He did an admirable job of keeping a fresh linen napkin draped over his crooked arm. He had some difficulty on his first attempt at using a corkscrew, but he got the hang of it and managed, by holding the bottle between his legs, to get the cork out, and he was very quick to understand my explanation of why he should proffer me the cork to sniff and then pour my wineglass only a taste pending my approval.

All that was lacking was suitable attire for my waiter/houseboy. Arcaty didn’t have a real department store, or even a men’s shop, as such, but there were some specialty shops on Spring Street that carried some clothing and shoes he could wear, and before the afternoon was over we had assembled a fairly decent wardrobe for him, although nothing really fit him well because of his skinniness and his height.

On the way home I asked if he didn’t have any belongings, anywhere, that he would want to bring with him to the Halfmoon. “It’ll take me just a secont,” he said, and disappeared up some alley off Spring Street and was gone for more than a second, more like five minutes, while I stood and waited for him, having dreadful thoughts that he had changed his mind and had disappeared for good.

But eventually he returned to me, bringing a little red bandanna (“snotrag,” he inelegantly called it) into which he had wrapped all his former earthly possessions, having kept the bundle stashed away in the crevice of a rock wall off Spring Street.

Back at our lodgings, he revealed the contents of the bandanna: a frayed toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, an extra pair of socks, a broken black comb with teeth missing, some kind of shiny rock, a creased black-and-white photo of a homely young girl presumed to be his mother, a fishing lure, two nickels, three lumps of hard candy, four bottle caps from Dr. Pepper and Grapette, an arrowhead, a much-chewed pencil, a feather, a blue hair ribbon, a school report card with bad grades except in reading, some rubber bands and lengths of string, and an eight-times folded page from Holiday magazine depicting a pastoral valley of the Bodarks.

I suggested that before serving our dinner he might want to run up for a shower and change clothes.

“How come my privy’s a two-holer?” he wanted to know, after his shower.

I didn’t understand him. “I’m sorry?” I said.

“There’s two toilets side by side in my bathroom,” he pointed out. “Only somebody took the seat offn one of ’em.”

“That one,” I said, “isn’t a toilet. It’s a bidet. It’s for washing, not elimination.”

“Washing what?” he wanted to know.

“Your bottom,” I said.

He blushed. “I never heared tell of no sech a thang in all my life,” he said. And it seemed I could hear the distant echo of the accents of his Aunt Fannie in his words.

At dinner he was neatly dressed. When he’d finished serving me, once again, as I’d done at lunch, I invited him to sit across from me and eat his own dinner (and sample the wine, too, if he desired, and he did), although I explained that, as a houseboy, he wouldn’t always be invited to join me at meals. He giggled and remarked, “Back up home, in the old days, the womenfolks used to have to wait till the men was all done eatin before they could set at the table theirselfs. You’re turnin it around, aint ye?”

“Right,” I said. “In Svanetia, where I came from, the same custom prevailed, in olden times. The women never ate until the men had finished, but stood behind the men’s chairs, waiting and starving.”

“Tell me everthing about Svanetia,” he requested, and I was pleased and flattered that he’d ask, but I didn’t know where to begin. He prompted, “Does everbody got them bee-days in their house?”

“No, I never saw a bidet in Svanetia. I never saw one until I got to Paris. In Svanetia, they have privies that are just wooden shacks built around deep holes in the ground, out away from the houses, quite similar to the outhouses in Stick Around.”

His face lit up, and his mouth dropped open. “Do you know Stick Around?”

“I lived there while I wrote most of my novel, Georgie Boy.”

He resumed scratching his head.

IV

Why did it take me so long to investigate the real reason that Travis kept scratching his head? Quite possibly I knew from the beginning but was not willing to confirm my suspicion. Later that first night I reached the point—or rather, the two of us reached the point—of easiness, familiarity, and closeness where I felt I had to confirm my suspicion, even if it cost me repugnance toward this ideal youth.

But getting him to let me have a close examination of his scalp was almost as difficult as persuading a shy boy to take off his pants. I had to use subterfuge: It was easy enough to entice him into sitting at the grand checkerboard table in the chess nook and playing with the large ivory and ebony pieces (I let him have white for his maiden try). He was genuinely eager to learn the rudiments of the game. He had never even seen a chess set before, but he had read about the game in several books, including a biography of Bobby Fischer that had enthralled him. He “misdoubted,” he said, that he would be able to make a match for me “for a good long spell,” but that first night he tried his best to learn the basic rules and concepts, although the unusual license given to the movements of knights was very difficult for him to grasp, and under pretext of needing to guide his placement of his knight, I came around to his side of the table and bent over him. From long experience, I was able to “read” the board from his side as easily as from mine, and we continued the game that way, with me behind him, sometimes resting one hand on his shoulder while reaching out with the other hand to show him where and how to move his knight, or to move one of my own pieces in response.

The hand I laid on his shoulder became restless and curious: I let it slip down inside his shirt, over his chest, which I stroked. When my fingertip touched his nipple, he shuddered, shivered, lightly gasped. I ran my fingertip circularly around that nipple, then shifted to the other nipple, which was already swollen. I spoke quietly into his ear, “Does this bother you?”

His voice dropped a register to reply hoarsely, “Naw, that feels right good, but I aint gonna be able to concentrate on the next place my horsey wants to go.”

I misunderstood, for a while, that what he meant by “horsey” was simply his knight. I unbuttoned his shirt so that I could slip my hand farther down the front of him. While doing so, however, my face rested against the top of his head, and my eyes were startled to discover in his hair a number of the nits of lice.

Excusing myself to go to the bathroom, I privately phoned a still-open local pharmacy, inquired about the best medications for lice, and had an assortment of solutions and soaps and salves sent up to the Halfmoon’s desk, from where Bob the porter would bring them up to my floor. When I resumed playing chess with Travis, I returned to my own side of the board, and I concluded in a few moves our second game, checkmating him more savagely than I’d intended.

“Wooo, you creamed me!” he said, and I needed a moment to determine which of the slang meanings of that verb he intended: that I’d simply beaten him badly. Then he studied me quizzically and said, “It’s okay if you wanter feel me. Why did you stop?”

I was spared replying by the porter’s knock at the door, which I answered, taking the package from the pharmacy and tipping Bob a dollar.

“Who was that?” he asked, as I returned from answering the porter’s knock.

“Do you like chess so far?” I asked. “Tomorrow we will play several games. But now, dear, I would like to ask you to take this special soap and wash your hair very thoroughly with it, and then I will put some of this stuff on it.”

He blushed scarlet and hung his head. “Just don’t call me ‘dear,’ okay?” was all he could say. But he reached out and took the package of soap and headed for his quarters.

I called after him, “You can just wear your new bathrobe.”

And when he returned to me later, his wet hair plastered to his head and his whole young body smelling of the medicated soap, he was wearing only the bathrobe, a fancy velour of emerald green that complemented and complimented his red freckles, and on his cute feet a new pair of what he called “flip-flops,” made of rubber.

But alluring as he was, whatever powerful attraction I had for him that night was canceled by the thought of his lice. I arranged him sitting on the floor with his back to me, his body between my legs, while I applied the solution and then spent several minutes combing it into his hair, each stroke of the comb bringing out a dozen or so of the nits.

Having him between my legs like that aroused me greatly, but whatever lust I was feeling for him was spoiled by the unpleasant task of grooming him.

It was just as well I didn’t feel inclined to seduce him that night. Looking back, I think I came eventually to appreciate how gradual our relationship was, how my seduction of him, if that was what it was, did not occur rashly and hastily. That first night, when I’d finished applying the medicine to his head and combing his hair, after he’d dutifully asked if there was anything he could get for me or do for me, and I’d declined his offer to brush my hair (for fear I’d catch a few of the nits off his hands), he went off to bed and put out his light, but with the door to his quarters ajar, at my request, in case there was anything I needed to have my houseboy do in the middle of the night.

Much later, after I’d had my vodka nightcap and was doing some reading in Sam Clemens, I heard him crying. It seemed so uncharacteristic of him that I had to listen for a good while before I convinced myself that indeed the sounds were of a twelve-year-old boy crying.

I got up and went in unto him, and I sat beside him and rested my hand on top of his head as if my touch itself could cure him. “What’s the matter, Tray-vis?” I asked softly.

“I guess I been lousy all my life,” he said. And then, intelligent enough to catch the double meaning of the adjective, he made a kind of chuckling laugh and said, “I mean, infested with louses.”

“Lice,” I gently corrected him. “But we’re going to get rid of them. Wait and see if we don’t.”

He sniffled. “Still and all, you won’t never want me to sleep with you.”

“Do you want to sleep with me?”

“I need for you to like me,” he said. “I wanter do whatever you want me to, just so’s you’ll always like me.”

“I like you very much, Tray-vis,” I assured him. “Your lice don’t bother me. And I don’t ever want you to feel you have to sleep with me.”

“But I want to,” he declared.

And oh! the way he said that, sincerely and with feeling, gave me a powerful urge to take him into my bed despite his lice. I knew that if I did, I’d have to wash and rewash the sheets, but that wasn’t really the problem. There was something about the intensity of his wish that made me ask, paraphrasing my earlier question to him, “Have you ever slept with a girl?”

It is too bad that my verbal modesty prevented me from coming right out and asking him if he’d ever had sex with a female before. When he said, “No, I aint,” he was truthfully declaring that he had never drifted off to sleep in the company of a female.

21

I

So he did not sleep with me that night. Nor the next. According to my journal, Travis Coe, whose bed hopping in Hollywood has become legendary, did not enter my bed until his tenth night under my roof. It took nearly that long for him to banish the lice from his hair.

We developed some daily routines. Each morning, the alarm clock in his room would rouse him at 7:00; he would shower, apply his dose of hair medicine, dress, open a can of 9-Lives for Morris (of whom he was grudgingly accepting, although the cat did not return the feeling), run down to the desk to get the morning’s copy of the Gazette, the one decent daily published in the entire state, and a bouquet of fresh flowers left by the local florist, then chat (and possibly flirt) with Lurline, the cute desk clerk who had replaced Sharon and who, despite being a staunch Jehovah’s Witness, “tolerated” my employment of Travis because she was under orders from the management to “do whatever that lady wants.” He was back in my kitchen by 7:45.

Travis had volunteered to prepare breakfast, and it took him only a few mornings to learn how many seconds to leave the egg cooker running, and how many seconds the toaster required, and the exact amount of mocha Java to scoop into the Mr. Coffee machine.

At 8:00 on the dot, he would turn on the Harman Kardon system, flooding all three floors of the apartment with something by Beethoven, a quartet or a sonata, the Appassionata, perhaps, then bring up to my bedroom, and present me with, a bed tray upon which were the breakfast, the flowers, and the newspaper. He would return at 8:30 to collect the dishes and ask if I needed anything further, then he would run my bath; it took a good half hour for the enormous sunken tub to fill with water and bubbles.

Once I was in my “soak,” as he called it, he would be free to do what he liked, usually curling up on his own sofa with a book—Wah’kon-tah, which took him only two mornings to finish, and then, with my permission, Georgie Boy, which took him three or four. After my bath (and I must confess that I had discovered quickly how easily the vigorous jets of water coming out of the Jacuzzi were capable of arousing me, so that I had to restrain myself from summoning my houseboy to get into the water with me), I went to work: In lieu of any genuinely creative employment (for a good second-book idea still eluded me), I was busily attempting to read and correct the proofs of the French edition of my novel, Le Garçon Georges. I’d had a few years of French in college and had used it much during my visit to my aunt and namesake in Paris, and I thought I was capable, with the help of a Cassell’s French Dictionary purchased at the Gazebo and some real or imagined promptings from the spirit of Daniel Lyam Montross, of spotting a number of misrenderings and malentendus in Claude Voleur’s generally excellent translation, which in a few more months would become the number-one best-seller in France.

After lunch (I refused Travis’s request to let him prepare it himself, not because I mistrusted his abilities but because in this off-season the Halfmoon’s kitchen needed some excuse for staying open), we would digest our meals together in the chess nook, where I would introduce him to openings, the Ruy Lopez and the Benko Gambit particularly, and I would resist the temptation further to hover behind his back and feel up his chest.

Then we would go for a walk. The early March weather was often sunny, almost balmy, and while nothing was blooming other than tulips and daffodils I was able to predict, in our rambles along the woodland paths on the slopes of Halfmoon Mountain, the places where the first mushrooms would appear in April. “Just wait and see,” I would say to him. “Right there will spring up a cluster of Secotium agaricoides next month. It looks like what you call ‘puffball,’ but it has a fleshy central stem like other mushrooms, just concealed.” He said he would come back here next month and see if I was wrong.

But mostly our hikes took us not off into forest footpaths but down among the man-built erections of Arcaty: There are fifty-four miles of limestone retaining walls, built without mortar, lining the sidewalks of the streets, as well as the back streets and alleys, which spill and twist all over the knolls and ravines of that precipitous village (such is the meandering of the town’s steep streets that none of them ever intersect). Walking between the looming blocks of limestone (Travis and I were the only pedestrians) gave us a snug, protected feeling, almost as if our walkways were ramparted. Behind the retaining walls, usually, are the quaint Victorian gingerbread cottages and mansions that are the town’s major tourist attraction, since the springs themselves are no longer potable or even functional—but we would visit them too: Grotto Spring and Cave Spring, with their picturesque limestone formations; and the springs of Spring Street, beginning with the dramatic Halfmoon Spring itself, dry but enshrouded in a pergola-pagoda-gazebo within the crescent-shaped limestone ledge that gave the name of its shape to the spring and thus to the hotel; followed just down the street by Harington Spring, with its benches for resting; and Sweet (or Sweetheart) Spring, surrounded and surmounted by the steep climbing stairs.

The “shortcut” to get from one street to another in Arcaty is often not the conventional sidewalk but a steep flight of steps, of native limestone, or of old poured cement, or of iron or even of wood: stairs plunging and turning up and down the embankments of limestone, often flanked by steep cement gutters for storm drainage, and often, or always, flanked by iron or steel handrails. Soon after my arrival in Arcaty, I recognized these labyrinths of staircases as the earthly embodiment of those seen continually in my old familiar dreams of climbing and descending an endless sequence of stone steps, concrete steps, iron steps, and wooden steps, staircases that led up or down to significant places whose significance had always eluded me, and, once I’d seen the mazes of inclines in reality, I stopped dreaming about them. Now Travis and I spent a lot of time going up and down the great variety of stairways that link the pathways of the town. Although I had lived in Arcaty for over two years and had done much steep walking there, Travis seemed more familiar than I with the routes or destinations, if any, of these steps. One of these stairways, almost hidden beside a shop where Main Street meets Spring Street, led us up to the grotto or cavern wherein were the remains of an old rock house purportedly built by the Osage Indians but actually erected by the white man who displaced them: Dr. Alvah Jackson, the discoverer of Halfmoon Spring and its magic properties. The rock house is open to the elements, uninhabited, secluded; and I was somehow reminded, climbing up to it, of going with Kenny Elmore up to his rooftop astronomical observatory. I would have enjoyed using the rock house as a symbolic site for taking Travis’s virginity…except that on the March afternoon we visited it the sunless grotto was chilly and even damp, and Travis, having finished Wah’kon-tah, wanted to talk about the “spirit” of the Osages that he sensed in the grotto. We talked a lot and never touched.

Back at our penthouse after these long hikes, we would take turns using the sauna. Travis had enough difficulty accepting the sight of the sweat pouring from his own body without being required, or permitted, to watch it pouring from mine. Only after we’d showered and changed into fresh clothes would we see each other again.

And then was the “empty” part of the late afternoon, before supper. “Would you like to have a television set for your room?” I asked him. “If you want to watch TV, just say so, and I’ll get you a big color screen.”

He thought for a long moment before answering, “Naw, I reckon I’ve got along purty good without one this long, I don’t want to pick up a hankerin’ fer it.”

So I would read and correct another chapter of Le Garçon Georges while he flipped through one of the several glossy magazines that arrived regularly in the mail. Sometimes Morris would saunter up to be stroked by Travis or myself, and for a time Morris liked to sit in Travis’s lap; but after the novelty of Travis wore off, Morris resumed his usual feline superciliousness.

Then a young man from the Halfmoon’s kitchen would bring up supper; Travis would drape his arm with a fresh linen napkin, uncork the wine, serve the meal, and, as often as not, be invited to join me in the eating and drinking.

II

This routine was broken on the afternoon that Travis, instead of going with me on my daily hike, heeded my request to get himself a haircut. With my help and the drugstore’s chemicals, the last louse and nit had disappeared from his hair, which, I suggested, needed trimming; I was uncertain of my ability to do the job myself, so I sent him off to the barbershop. After my hike, I used the post-sauna empty time to start a special supper I’d planned to replace the hotel’s fare: mtsvadi, skewered lamb, the tastiest of all Georgian meats. Traditionally, the roasting of the meat over coals was always done by men, who were also responsible for preparing the fire and getting the coals just right, and throughout my exile from Svanetia I had been tortured by the memory of how much the very aroma of their activities had caused my mouth to water. My kitchen was equipped with a top-of-the-line Jenn-Aire, which had an elaborate grill with grill-rocks element, a suitable substitute for the requisite coals of hardwood and grapevine branches, and easily regulated to the correct temperature, but I had not yet had a good chance, or a good recipe, to try on it.

When Travis came home from his haircut (and a shopping errand for me, to find some cherry tomatoes to skewer beside the lamb chunks), he found me hastily trying to impale the lamb chunks on a couple of shampuri, authentic but wicked daggers imported from Georgia by my friend Lennie Lewin of the Esoterica Gallery. Travis, first asking me what I was doing and being told, offered to do it for me. And while he was doing it, alternating skewering the cherry tomatoes he’d found, it occurred to me to see if I could teach him to do the Svanetian men’s work of actually supervising the grill and cooking the meat. Since he was so eager to learn the work of my kitchen, he took to the task with alacrity. But he sniffed and asked, “What-all kind of meat is this-a-here, anyhow?” and when I told him it was lamb he asked, “You mean a baby sheep?” Many people in the rural Bodarks, where pork or chicken are the common meats, have never sampled lamb, and this was Travis’s first encounter with it. But after his first wary bite of a chunk of it straight from the shampuri, he mmmed and declared, “Anybody who ain’t never et this stuff don’t have no idee what they’re missing.”

Our mtsvadi was served with sliced cucumbers, a Svanetian shoti’s puri bread I’d baked and frozen some weeks earlier and now served thawed and hot, and a bottle of the best Gevrey-Chambertin that the local liquor store carried. Before the evening was over, my houseboy would be required to uncork a second bottle of it.

Nor had he ever eaten by candlelight before. He had eaten by the light of kerosene lamps (“coal oil,” he called it) but tall, thin tapers were a new sight for him, and eight of them, in two silver candelabra, were sufficient light for us.

Midway through the elegant, luscious meal Travis, having finished his reading of Georgie Boy, abruptly asked me if this food was the kind that Dzhordzha and his Princess used to talk wistfully about the possibility of having (Georgie Boy, pp. 187–191 et seq.), a possibility that never ever became a reality, and, thinking of it, I began to weep, more for joy at having finally realized the meal than for sadness over the fact that it was Travis, not Dzhordzha, who was sharing it with me.

“Hey!” Travis said, solicitously. “What’s the matter? Did I say the wrong thing? Am I using the wrong fork? Did you spot another nit still in my hair?”

I brushed away my tears. “No,” I said. “I was just remembering a time when I was young.”

“You’re still young,” he observed, refilling the wineglasses for both of us. “I could blink my eyes and play like you wasn’t a bit older’n me.”

“Blink your eyes,” I requested.

And that was how we began the motif of the evening and night, which was not that I magically became twelve again but that both of us were without age, or, more accurately, that neither of us was bound to any actual years of life: neither was he older nor I younger, but each of us freed from time and from all the constraints of life except sex: He was clearly very male and I female and the two of us very attracted to each other, very curious about each other, very eager to seek the other’s hidden self. But neither of us knew anything about sex. Both of us wanted to find out, slowly and wonderingly and gently.

I think it was then, that night, that I first realized the truth that would lead me to the answer I gave to the Paris Review interviewer (see below), who asked me bluntly, “Do you know why you are fixated upon twelve-year-old boys?”

Oh, of course Travis and I were intoxicated, but I like to think it was not just the wine or the music that was playing (I asked him if he had any favorites. “I reckon my favorite number must be Hank Williams’s ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,’” he said, “but if you don’t have it, I guess Conway Twitty’s ‘How Far Can We Go’ orter suit me.” But I didn’t have either piece, so instead my Harman Kardon system played some soft things by Gershwin and Rodgers-Hart). When we stood up eventually to leave the table, to move from the formality of the dining room to the comfort of the multicushioned conversation pit, which Travis had quickly christened “the visit hole” although I’d had no visitors yet, it seemed to me that we were the same height, that he had grown, or I shrunk, or both of us, just as we had done with our ages, had transcended whatever measurement of size bound us to the earth. Admiring his neat, masculine haircut and running my fingers through it, I was aware of how long my own hair had grown—to below my shoulders, or, as we would discover very shortly, long enough if hanging in front to frame and caress my bare breasts. And he returned my gesture, running his fingers through my hair—the beginning of a nightlong game of follow-the-leader: anything I’d do to him, he’d do to me; whatever he chose or invented to do to me, I’d do to him.

Before we lowered ourselves to the cushions of the pit, I put Morris out to roam the hotel, although Morris complained at this so much that I wondered if he knew what we were about to do and wanted to stay to watch. Then I flicked a wall switch that began the simultaneous dimming of all the “house lights” and the opening of the curtain on the great skylight that hovered above the pit, so that we were eventually illuminated only by starlight and some moonlight, scarcely enough to reveal us fully one to the other or to deprive us of our imaginations and our fancies: he could have been Islamber in that Svanetian tower, or Dzhordzha in the cell of the Serbsky, or Kenny in the Murphy bed, or all three of them interchangeable with Travis Coe, the backwoods faunlet, who had been dropped here by Anangka, or by angels, or, as I was to learn eventually, by Daniel Lyam Montross himself.

I do not remember, at all, either of us undressing. I do not know what happened to our clothes. It was almost as if, having transcended age and height so easily, we transcended clothing with equal ease, finding ourselves bare beneath the stars in the cushiony pit, our flesh oblivious to whatever chill of February was outside the place, our skins warm and soft and soon touching, his fingers reaching out to find how full my nipples had grown, my fingers discovering that already his groin’s heart had swollen to its fullest size, not man sized but as large as either he or I would ever want.

Did we make any conversation in the conversation pit? Any talk in the visit hole? Possibly, but I don’t recall. It seems he expressed solicitude, or wonder, or a wish, or that he acknowledged a liking, or a request, or reverence, or that I spoke endearments and appreciations, but I think if we used many words at all we used the simple language of discovery, of searching and finding and knowing. Thus I became Travis, and he me.

I blew softly and warmly into his ear, and he shivered with both the tickling and the delight of it, and he couldn’t wait until he had blown into my ear too.

We used our hands, our eyes, our mouths and tongues more than our bodies, at least in the beginning and for a long time through the night. We even used our toes, which was an especially youthful and playful thing to do, my piggies (as he called them) burrowing into the nooks of his nates and neck and armpits, his piggies venturing as scouts into the places he’d later want to poke his little pole. When his biggest piggie brushed against my cheek I seized it between my lips and rolled my tongue around it, and he laughed with surprise and pleasure.

We discovered, for the first time, both of us, a new and delicious sort of touching: of just the tips of our nipples, lightly and teasingly against each other’s, having a playful struggle to position our breasts to make the nipples touch, and then to rotate each nipple around the other. It was wonderful, but my nipples were so much larger than his that we realized this was the only disparity between ourselves, and we turned our attention instead to massaging each other’s chests with our hands and fingers and tongues.

We played so long, without any actual contact of our sexual parts, that eventually he lost his erection. All this time I had been aching to take it into my mouth, but I had hesitated for fear he’d think it perverse or even evil of me.

But while I was licking his stomach wetly, he observed, “You’re shore gittin me all wet, ye may as well tongue me all over.” And he requested, “Come on, lick me all over!” So I did, saving for last his wilted, drooping, shy penis, which I greatly slobbered upon, until it was not only drenched but resurrected. It was fully raised again, taut and proud, tougher than it had ever been and constantly quivering. I knew that it was near to exploding, and the noises he made told me that he knew it was. I assumed that he, like Kenny, had had some previous experience with self-induced orgasm, so it wouldn’t take him completely by surprise. I didn’t want to frighten him. I was tempted to bring him to fulfillment with my hand alone, but both my hands were busy elsewhere, one of them playing with his nipple, the other seeking to find the one entry to his lower body, and then finding it, and rubbing it with a forefinger that slowly but firmly entered it. He sucked in his breath noisily, and then, letting out his breath, let out also his semen, which splashed against my tonsils, as his body bucked and twisted and trembled. I kept my mouth upon his penis until both it and he were still and soft again.

What is it about a boy that leaves him uninterested in sex as soon as he’s had his coming? Since all night long he had been duplicating my acts, my movements, my ventures, I hoped that he’d dare to return the deed I’d done for him. I waited a long while to see if he would do anything more, and when he didn’t, I said, “Now you ought to slobber all over me too.”

He rolled over and nuzzled my neck with his mouth and gave my shoulder one or two licks, but then declared, “Boy, am I guv out! I could jist go right to sleep.”

“Go right ahead,” I said, disappointed. And the way he snuggled into me, holding me, I thought he wanted to get himself comfortable for his snooze, and I resigned myself to simply holding him and perhaps trying to sleep myself.

But sometime not much later in the night he began to wiggle and stir, and said, “You know what I’d keer to do? I’d care for us to go up and jump in that big swimmin hole in yore bathroom and take us a dip.” I told him to put lots of bubbles in it. While we waited the half hour for the tub to fill, we sat naked on the edge of the pool, having another glass of wine.

Then we jumped into the deep tub and became a pair of dolphins and played a long time, and he was surprised to see how he could lift my body in the buoyancy of the water and hold me above him. He adjusted and changed the Jacuzzi whirlpools and he discovered that by standing waist deep in the pool and maneuvering his groin near the nozzle, he could give himself another erection with the jets of warm water. “Wow! I bet I could shoot off again like this!” he observed.

And as I’ve said, I had discovered myself, some weeks earlier, that the Jacuzzi had the power to do something to me that no person could do. The beginning of the water orgasm had been so surprising and intense that I’d been leery of finishing it, but now, watching the Jacuzzi massage my Travis to the point of coming, I couldn’t resist moving to an adjacent nozzle and letting it gush between my legs.

Travis became so absorbed in watching what the water was doing to me that he lost his concentration upon his own arousal. “You’re fixin to turn inside out,” he observed, and I, having never heard that expression before and wondering where he’d picked it up, was charmed by the accuracy of it, for indeed the water jet was manipulating me to the point of unbearable loss of control of my body.

When I felt that I could contain myself no longer, that indeed I might turn inside out, I was moved to see if I could bring about something that had never happened to me before, an orgasm with a boy’s penis inside me. Quickly I turned him away from his water jet, as I turned from mine, and using the water to buoy my body I rose up and straddled my legs around his waist and impaled myself upon him.

“Now this is more like it,” he said, as he hugged me to him, and I took it to mean that this was his first experience with intercourse, the real loss of his virginity.

Oh, I was so close to the edge! My mind brought back to me all the hours I’d had with Islamber, Dzhordzha, Kenny, and Jason, hours of futile and senseless thrusting on their parts, on their parts, which had inevitably ejaculated but left me unreleased and consumed with fears of being frigid. Now dear Travis was not interested so much in thrusting as in bouncing the two of us up and down in the water, and around. We danced. We were both thrilled at how easily he supported my weight in the lightness of the water, with my legs tightly around his waist and his feet alone touching bottom, enough to make us move, to make us skip and spring and drift. The whirlpools seemed to sense our mounting ecstasy and increased their pressure, until the water all around us was boiling and roiling, and we were covered in bubbles. His two hands tightly gripped my buttocks as he bounced, and my two hands clasped his as if to hold on, but then he recalled a turnabout-is-fair-play that he had left unreturned, and he slipped one of his fingers into my rectum, and I slipped one of mine into his, and almost as if those were the two buttons waiting to be pushed, we came off together, simultaneously, neither of us hearing the other’s cries because we were too busy screaming ourselves.

In the profoundest sexual passages of Georgie Boy there is nothing, nothing at all, comparable to the ecstasy of that moment.

And yet, even in the throes of its excruciating intensity, something in my mind kept saying to me, “You’d better enjoy this, because you’ll never have it again.”

There is a poignant line in our collateral text, Lolita, wherein Humbert, in one of his frequent asides or direct addresses to his imagined jurors, declares, “Sensitive gentlewomen of the jury, I was not even her first lover.”

And then he begins the next chapter, “She told me the way she had been debauched.”

III

He told me the way he had been debauched. Not that night (when we were all finished with the Jacuzzi and climbed out of the tub, neither of us had energy enough to do more than stumble into my bedroom, pull back the down-filled satin comforter, and fall together into my queen-sized bed, where we were soon asleep in each other’s arms) but the next morning, when he reverted to his routine of preparing and serving my breakfast, after his trip down to get the flowers and paper and to flirt with Lurline (or to be flirted with by her), and then complied with my request to turn down the Beethoven quartet that would make conversation difficult, and to sit down beside my bed.

Morris also sat, on the windowsill, pretending to keep an eye on the birds while actually observing Travis carefully.

When I had finished my breakfast, I gave Travis a fond but shy glance and said, “So. How did you like all of that?” My curiosity matched that of a novelist awaiting his first review.

“All of which?” he wanted to know.

“Well, everything last night, but especially what we did in the Jacuzzi.”

He nonchalantly remarked, “That sure beats a bed of straw all to smithereens.”

“Oh?” I said, taken aback. “Which bed of straw? Have you done it on a bed of straw?”

“Yeah, and it aint near as much fun,” he said.

“With whom?” I asked. “You told me you’d never slept with a girl.”

“Naw, I never slept with her. But we done it.”

“Who was she?” I kept on. “Tell me.”

Travis Coe asked for and received permission to get himself a cup of coffee, and while he was in the kitchen I prepared myself nervously for his confession, wondering at myself and asking myself if I would be able to tolerate the confession. My apprehension at my own intolerance grew steadily as he, during the drinking of his coffee, told me the story. The previous summer, his aunt had taken him on one of their frequent Sunday afternoon visits to a kinsman’s house, where, as was the custom of those country people (not unlike a Svanetian custom that was observed, however, on Saturday rather than Sunday afternoons), the grown-ups spent the whole afternoon, following a large feast of fried chicken and many desserts, socializing at leisure, the womenfolk gossiping busily in one part of the house while the men congregated on the porch or in the yard, and the children, of all ages, were left to their own devices…which devices were inventive enough to come up with some variation on the universally popular game of seeking.

Travis welcomed the chance to get away from the reading that usually filled his Sunday afternoons, and he was an “old hand” at the full repertoire of hiding games. His playmates here included a number of his cousins and neighbors, all of them of the same social class, rural poor, without any mixture of the children of the outsiders (ex-hippies and other subculture arty types). Some of the players were as young as eight or nine; those younger than that were really not clever enough to play the particular game they chose, but there were players as old as fifteen or even sixteen who had grown up playing it.

“Didje ever play I-draw-a-snake-upon-yore-back?” Travis asked me, and when I asked him how it was played and he told me the basics of it, I remarked that it was like a variation on the basic hide-and-seek and struck me as remarkably similar to games that I had known in my childhood in Svanetia, usually variations on ligwebupgosh, as the universal game was known there (it translates roughly as “finding-the-secreted”).

The essence of the variation is that it increases the “foreplay” (if I may be forgiven) of the basic hide-and-seek: whoever is “It” must turn his back on the others and bury his face in his arm against a tree while the leader slithers his finger down It’s back, intoning, “I draw a snake upon your back. Who’s gonna put in the eye?” and then a volunteer steps forward and pokes It in the back, “putting in the eye.” It must then turn around and attempt to guess who among the other players has poked him.

He is not told, yet, if his guess is correct. He must first set a task for the other to perform, ideally a difficult, time-consuming task. Once the task is suggested (such as climbing a tree to its top and back down, or running around the house twelve times, or running down to the creek and bringing back a live crawdad), the identity of the poker, the eye-putter, is revealed. If It has guessed him or her correctly, then that person must perform the task, while all the others run and hide (and from that point on, the game reverts to conventional hide-and-seek).

But if It has missed the guess, then It must perform the task himself or herself while the others run and hide.

After the counting-out rhyme-chant of “Eeny, meeny, miny, mo,” etc., a fourteen-year-old girl named Denise McWalter (!) was designated as It. After the snake had been drawn and “dotted” on her back, she guessed the poker to be her best friend, one Amy Murrison, and then she teasingly assigned as the task to be performed the deflowering of Travis Coe. “Take him to the bushes” was the expression. There was much giggling and joking about the task, and some of the older boys protested that they hadn’t been selected instead. “I’m three years older than Lum and I aint never done it yet myself,” one lad complained.

As it turned out, Denise’s guess of Amy was wrong, and thus she herself had to carry out the task, which, Travis surmised eventually, was what she had been hoping for all along.

“It won’t take but a minute,” Denise kept saying to him as she led him not into the bushes but out behind the barn and then through one of its rear doors, into a stall floored with straw.

In the conventional playing of the game, the task assigned should take only long enough for all the others to run and find a good place to conceal themselves. But long after everyone else had hidden and someone kept crying, “All hid, all hid,” Denise and Travis did not return. It took much more than a minute. The others eventually gave up on them and selected a new It and resumed playing without them.

Three things in Travis’s memory of that episode remained strongest in his mind, all three of them part of his education about females: One was his first sight of Denise’s pubic hair. He had just begun to grow the first peach-fuzz of hair around his own genitals and wasn’t sure it was normal for himself, and he had no inkling that girls had hirsute groins. Denise, who didn’t at all mind removing her jeans and her panties, surprised him not just with the swelling of her hips and the thinness of her naked waist but with her dense, thick, dark pubic hair, which did not frighten him so much as arouse his compassion, because he assumed, but dared not inquire, that something in that growth was abnormal and atavistic. For months afterward he puzzled about it to the point of obsession, until he discovered that I too had the same luxuriant mass of hair down there.

A second thing that would not leave his memory of the experience was his discovery that girls are capable of an intensity of feeling analogous to that which happens to the boy when he ejaculates. Girls don’t exactly ejaculate but they do, to use Denise’s expression, “start falling apart.”

“There now,” Denise had said to him, once she had guided him into her. “Now you aint a virgin no more. How’s it feel?” (And what most inflamed me with jealousy was her privilege of being able to ask that question.)

He was uncomfortably aware of the texture of her pubic hair pressing against his groin, but that awareness was almost overwhelmed by the sensation of his penis adrift within the moist chamber. “Okay, I guess,” he managed to allow. “How’s it feel to you?” He solicitously wondered if the hairy growth was painful.

“Super,” she said, and cooed, then groaned and began moving, tossing her hips. This was his third surprise, for, although like any country kid he’d had plenty of opportunity to watch the mating of animals, from barnyard fowl to enormously hung horses, he had never seen the female of any species devote any energy of her own to the ritual. Absolute passivity was the norm, and here again he suspected that Denise must have something wrong with her, that she was bucking and heaving as if she thought she was supposed to do all the work. He urgently tried to subdue her movements by the velocity and intensity of his own, but this only served to increase her ardor, until she was gasping and crying, “I’m gonna turn inside out!” Her warning slowed him only for a moment of wonder, because he felt as if he were turning inside out himself and wanted to complete the process, and tried hard, and did.

“Ohhhhh!” Denise sighed loudly as she let go, falling apart and turning inside out, and I involuntarily found myself sighing Otttt! in my Svanetian throat as I listened to Travis finish the story.

IV

For the longest time after he finished and I sighed my sigh, I was unable to say anything more, consumed as I was with jealousy. I had never felt this emotion before, not with Islamber or Dzhordzha or Kenny or any of the several others, all of whom had lost their virginity with me. My depression and anger over the thought of Denise as my rival, nay, as my predecessor in the indoctrination of Travis into the mysteries, made me ask myself the question that the Paris Review’s Barbara Phillips would ask, “Do you honestly know why it is so important to you that your boy be a virgin?”

To which I answered, simply, “If he is not, it is as if the novelist discovers that someone else has already told his story. And perhaps done it better.”

I think I must have gone into a kind of sulk or funk that lasted for most of the rest of the morning. I did not do any work on Le Garçon Georges that day.

“Did I mess up, or something?” Travis asked at lunch. “Have I done went and made some fool mistake?” I shook my head, but morosely, and he went on, “How come you’re so standoffish, all a suddent?”

“Last night,” I said, “throughout it, I was under the impression that you and I were doing all those things for the very first time.”

“Huh?” he said. “You mean you never did it when you were a kid?”

“Not with you,” I sighed, and I could not stifle a sob.

“Huh?” he said again. “When you was a kid I wasn’t even born.” This struck me almost as a repudiation of the sweetness of his earlier “I could blink my eyes and play like you wasn’t a bit older’n me,”

“But last night,” I complained, “last night I was trying very hard to pretend that we were doing it for the very first time, together.”

“Shoot, most of that stuff we did last night I never even thought of doing with Denise. She never thought of it. Golly Moses fishhooks, I never even knew there was such things to do! Not with no splishin and splashin and sploshin and all!”

I managed to smile lamely and brush away a tear. “Still, you had intercourse with her. Did you do it again?”

“Well, yeah,” he faltered, as if reluctant to get himself in any deeper. “There was a good few other Sunday afternoons, but then she had this boyfriend, see, and Bobby Joe found out about it, and he’s maybe five years older and bigger’n me, and he said he’d break ever bone in my body. That was jist one of the reasons I left home.”

“How many times altogether did you do it with Denise?” It was like I was a novelist masochistically checking the library to see how many other novels told the same story I’d thought was my original invention.

He tried to remember and came up with a guess. “Oh, if you don’t count a couple of times we had to stop because we heard somebody a-comin, maybe eleven or twelve, all told.”

He was breaking my heart. I narrowed my eyes at him, matching his crafty squint, and said, “That day we first met, when I was about to hire you as my houseboy, I asked you if you’d had any sexual experience, and you said you hadn’t.”

“You ast me if I’d ever slept with a gal, dammit, and I said no I aint, and that’s the gospel truth.”

“But you fucked her!” I cried, speaking the English verb for the first time in my life. “You fucked her, and you were only twelve years old!”

“Heck, I’m still only twelve,” he pointed out, “and you fucked me, and vice uh versey.”

I could say nothing more, retreating once again into my sulking silence. I realized that he was hopelessly, to borrow another expression of his people, “used goods”: he was pawed over, secondhand. I could never feel the joy of having ushered him into the first experience of sex, as the novelist wants the joy of introducing his reader to a unique story. The novelist cannot say, “Pretend you’ve never heard this before.” The novelist cannot even say, “Stop me if you’ve heard this one.”

All that the novelist can say is, “Okay. That’s it. Good-bye, Travis. I wish for you much happiness. I wish for you that you will stay out of trouble, perhaps go back to school, be a good boy.” It was not until after I heard myself speaking the words that I realized I’d said the same thing to Kenny Elmore.

“Huh?” he said.

“Leave,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t use you anymore.” I stood up and fetched my purse and took out my wallet and gave him five twenties: a hundred dollars. “Here,” I said. “And you may take all of your new clothes and shoes with you.”

He narrowed his eyes at me for one last time. Then he left a dependent clause dangling: “If that’s the way you feel about it.” He gathered up his things. He had a final request: “Could you see your way to letting me keep a copy of Georgie Boy?”

“I thought you’d finished it,” I said.

“I need to read it again,” he declared. So I gave him a copy of my book. I even wrote something on the flyleaf, nothing special, Very Best Wishes to Travis, Kat, something like that.

And he left me. All he left behind, I discovered later, was his copy of Wah’kon-tah. But it wasn’t his. After I read it and discovered how much I didn’t know about the Osages, I’d have to return it for him to the library.

22

I

For at least a whole day after he was gone I cried. Not even the arrival in the day’s mail of the proofs of Schorschi, ein Knabe, the German edition of my novel, could console me or distract me from my grief. That grief, I was quick to realize, was whimpered not over his leaving but over his prior loss of virginity, over my missed chance for the privilege of being first in his history.

Not as an act of retaliation against my rival but as a rite of exorcism, I began to create Denise McWalter, as I once had created her namesake Cathlin McWalter, as I kept on creating Ekaterina; I gave Denise an appearance and a personality and even a history: a drunken father divorced from an abusive, foul-mouthed, unfeminine mother, an infancy and childhood in a squalid mobile home, a keen mind squandered upon television soap operas and movie magazines, an ennui more acute and restless than that of her few girlfriends, a precocious sexuality that had her chronically playing with herself from the age of seven until she was deflowered by Bobby Joe at the age of ten, a totally unsatisfactory five-year romance with Bobby Joe punctuated and relieved by one summer’s search for and finding of an “ideal” boyfriend two years her junior in the form of an unspoiled Travis, whom she proceeded to spoil.

Loneliness, lust, and self-doubt are the three key ingredients to a climate for creative activity, as I told the Paris Review’s Barbara Phillips, and the weeks following Travis’s departure from the Halfmoon were like a spawning of those three elements to prepare the spores in the leaf litter of my life for the mushrooming of the many fictions that sprang up out of my imagination that spring, beginning with the much-anthologized short story “I Draw a Snake upon Your Back,” the first of the several pieces in what would become my second published book, not a second novel but the collection The Names of Seeking Games.

Travis had not been gone three days when I sat myself down at my desk and began writing the story, not in Georgian but in English—or, more accurately, I wrote the first page in my familiar, comfortable Georgian but was reminded thereby of how I’d had tirelessly to translate Georgie Boy from the Georgian with the “help” of Daniel Lyam Montross and his old unabridged dictionary, which still remained at my elbow; and, opening it, I felt that his spirit was with me again. To test it, to see if he was “still there,” I translated that first page into English on the spot, having only a little difficulty finding one word I wanted, altruism; then, having found it and replaced the Georgian equivalent, I crumpled and tossed the Georgian original page and resolved thenceforward to do all my writing in the same uncomfortable but expressive style with which I essay these memoirs.

“Thanks, Dan,” I said aloud, the first words I’d spoken since I’d bade Travis Coe farewell. Morris, more accustomed to the silence he’d enjoyed since I stopped crying, jerked his head up from his nap and stared at me. “I wasn’t talking to you, Morris Cat,” I said. But he didn’t return his cheek to his paws: he continued to stare deeply into my eyes, almost as if he had never seen me before…or, I think, as if I had never seen him before and was just now, in the desperation of my loneliness, recognizing him for who he was. Could a “spirit” such as Daniel Lyam Montross, I wondered, take possession of the body of an animal? Would a spirit want to inhabit a living creature such as an old cat more comfortably than an inanimate object like an unabridged dictionary? “Or maybe I was talking to you,” I said to Morris. “Are you really Dan, Morris?”

Any owner of cats knows that they are indifferent to human speech. Some of the less intelligent cats will appear to respond to their names by coming when called (truly intelligent cats never respond in any way to human speech), but the baby talk with which many humans address their cats (the person who asks “Does snuzzums wanta eat brekky now?” should realize that the cat’s answer of “Now!” is just a reflex mewing) will cause only an aggravated tail twitch or ear lowering in the more stupid cats and will produce no response whatever in bright cats.

So I was not surprised that Morris’s cool, leonine face only regarded me dispassionately and impersonally, even insouciantly, albeit with a glimmer in his slanted eyes that could only have been a wise human’s. But then…then, I swear, he reached out with a paw and plopped it down on the opened page of the unabridged dictionary where I had been looking up altruism. He left his paw on the page long enough for me to peer closely to see the word he was indicating, his foreclaw resting upon it: always. Then, with the faintest trace of a smile (or did I just imagine the smile?), he removed his paw.

“Always, Dan?” I asked. “Are you saying, Morris, that you are always Dan?” But he betrayed not a twitch of any expression or response, just that profound but inaccessible depth of his eyes. “You know,” I went on, feeling not at all silly, “I’ve suspected for a long time that you really do exist, Dan, but this is the only attempt you’ve made to confirm it. Would you kindly, if you are Dan, Morris, just nod your head? Just once? Just make the slightest little nod?”

But of course he would not, and I was left with only that always, which could have been purely an accident of the placement of his paw. Later, as I resumed writing my short story, I opened the dictionary to the correct page and asked Morris/Dan, “What is the backwoods f-word I want for a girl like Denise McWalter who’s flirtatious, fast, and frisky?” I waited and silently prayed that my cat would drop his paw upon feisty but his only response to my continued talking was self-conscious licking of his paw and washing himself with it.

“All right, Dan,” I said at length, “be that way. But I know you’re there.”

I wrote six or seven pages of the story “I Draw a Snake upon Your Back,” conscious that Morris had not returned to his slumber, or that although he feigned his customary napping posture he was keeping one eye slightly open and upon me. It was perhaps my sense of his Muselike presence or inspiration, if not his actual help, that made the beginning of the story so enticing and promising, what dear friend Larry Brace would much later comment upon in his piece “Poetic Structure in the Prose of V. Kelian’s ‘I Draw A Snake upon Your Back,’” published in Studies in Contemporary Fiction, when he pointed out that the entire first section of the story is a kind of verbal foreplay matching the foreplay of the game. How surprised Larry would be when I told him that I’d written that part “under the influence” of Daniel Lyam Montross, whose life and work had come to obsess Larry totally at that point of his career.

But Morris was only so much fun, and seven pages, as I told Barbara Phillips, was more than a day’s work. Later that day I was seized with a strong urge to get out of the Halfmoon for a few days, perhaps get back to Stick Around, visit Dan’s grave and put some flowers on it, and—why not admit it?—see if I couldn’t find the local girl named Denise McWalter, talk to her, and compare her actual self with the girl I was creating in the story, as well as verify the traces of any of the McWalter family lineage that I had once envisioned for Cathlin.

I called Sharon and asked her if she could come and get me. Oh, she’d have loved to, she said, but the thing was, she’d sold Cam, her decrepit Chevrolet, and was trying to see if she couldn’t, in the process of simplifying her life, do without an automobile entirely. “Matter of fact, I got the idea from you,” Sharon said. “After all, you’ve managed to get along without a car, even now that you could own a Rolls or a Ferrari.”

“I just never learned how to drive,” I said into the phone, staring at Morris, whose expression suddenly somehow reminded me that once upon a time I’d been required to drive Ingraham’s Blazer across the high bridge over the Mississippi River into St. Louis. As I’ve indicated, I suspected, even then, that Daniel Lyam Montross had “taken possession” of me during those hectic moments.

“There are driving schools,” Sharon suggested. “Aren’t there any in the Yellow Pages?”

No, there was no driving school in Arcata Springs, nor in Harriman, nor in Fateville. I called the local Ford dealer and said I’d like to buy their most expensive vehicle but I didn’t know how to drive and wondered if they could help me. I was told that the nearest driving school was in Springfield, Missouri, a hundred miles off, and I was given their number to call, a Thompson’s A-1 Driving Academy. I called and asked if they would be willing to send an instructor that far, for whatever number of lessons would be required for someone without any experience.

“It will cost you a good bit extry,” they told me. How soon could we start? I asked.

The next morning there arrived at the Halfmoon a bright yellow vehicle with two steering wheels and on its roof a marquee that warned, DRIVER’S EDUCATION, to other motorists, letting them know that a neophyte was doing dumb things. The instructor was a young man, about my own age, who sat with me in the parking lot of the Halfmoon for a long talk before we started out. He gave me a manual that I would be required to read, but, because of my insistence that time was short, I could have my first lesson behind the wheel, without benefit of reading all the fundamentals of vehicular operation, maintenance, and safety. “Have you ever driven a car before, at all?” he asked.

“I once drove a Blazer over the Mississippi Interstate bridge that leads into St. Louis,” I proudly declared.

“Really?” he said. “Well, then, I guess you know the difference between the brake pedal and the gas pedal.”

I thought I did, but I wasn’t sure. The back streets of steep Arcaty are not the best place to learn driving. Coming from mostly flat Springfield, the instructor himself had never seen streets so precipitous, and before the afternoon was over I had thoroughly terrified him. He was visibly trembling when the day’s session ended, and I tipped him fifty dollars for all his trouble and dismay and fright.

He agreed to come back the following day, but he didn’t. When I phoned to complain, they sent out a different instructor, a woman, who said she wouldn’t “go out” with me unless I knew the fundamentals first. I’d had time to read the manual more than once, and at her questioning I was able to satisfy her that I knew how to use the parking brake to start off from an inclined position, and how to downshift an automatic drive to low, and how to pump failed brakes. Still, we wound up with the front half of the car teetering over a retaining wall high above Leatherwood Creek, and saved ourselves by climbing into the back seat and out the back doors, and had to have a wrecker come to drag the car away from the precipice.

The manager himself (or was he “principal” or “dean”?) of the academy came for my third and subsequent lessons, possibly enticed by the news of the tips I was giving his employees, or simply fearful for their safety. He asked me to call him Jim. Jim and his wife, he said, visited Arcata for a weekend every June, and he was familiar with its treacherous, tortuous roadways, and he knew when to rest his hands upon the second steering wheel on the passenger’s side.

Over the next three weeks, Jim returned to the Halfmoon for a full afternoon eleven more times, and I completed the course with only one accident, when my concentration wavered as I was rounding a curve and thought I spotted Travis up ahead and ran into a ditch—but without any injury to either of us or serious damage to the training car.

If that was Travis, it was the only glimpse I’d had of him since evicting him from the Halfmoon.

II

Upon my completion of the driving course, Jim told me it was customary for the instructor to accompany the pupil for his driver’s license examination, but the state law required that the driver be tested in his or her own vehicle. I needed to purchase a vehicle, and asked Jim what he would recommend, especially for the rough back roads of the Bodarks. He suggested a Jeep. He offered, at the conclusion of my last lesson, to drive me to Springfield, where there was a Jeep dealer, as well as a number of other dealers, “in case you decide you want something different,” he said.

As it turned out, I did want something different, something that cost twice as much as the finest Jeep. I saw her in a Springfield dealer’s window and fell in love with her, and Jim assured me she was certainly a respectable vehicle, albeit an expensive one. A forest green Range Rover. I called her Silvia, “of the silvan wood or forest,” and she almost replaced Morris in my affections. Equipped as she was, she would get only eleven miles to the gallon of gas, and driving her was almost like driving a bus rather than a car, but she was “loaded with extras” and would go any where.

Jim rode with me in Silvia and gave me some tips on the special handling of her. Even the state trooper in Harriman who gave me my driver’s test (which I handily passed) was impressed with Silvia. (“You’ve got yourself a dandy set of wheels here, lady,” he said.) With my license in my purse, instead of returning immediately to Arcaty, I set out for Stick Around…but got only as far as the village of Parthenon before I realized that my having passed the intensive course in driver education and having passed the state driver’s examination did not in any way qualify me for finding my way around. Jim had taught me nothing about map reading, or map acquiring, or even asking for directions. (Nowadays, eight-year-old Silvia, still going strong, has in her rear compartment a complete set of U.S. Geological Survey topographic survey maps, 7.5-minute series quadrangles for the entire Bodark region, but when Silvia was new she didn’t even have a state highway map in her glove compartment.)

I got badly lost. On all of my many previous trips to Stick Around, I’d been driven by someone else, beginning with Ingraham, who, I now recalled, had become lost himself on that first attempt to find the place and had been required to maneuver his Blazer, four-wheel driven but vastly inferior to Silvia, on some terrible logging trails before finding his way out of the woods. Now I tried to spot any familiar landmarks, anything that I might have noticed when someone else was driving me. Being your own driver gives you a totally different view of the world.

One rough road I followed for what seemed like four or five miles south of Parthenon came to a dead end in the yard of a backwoods hovel, a squalid derelict of an old house, which appeared inhabited, at least by dogs: there were a dozen of them in the yard, and they surrounded Silvia, barking fiercely at her and even scratching her with their forepaws. I was tempted to ask directions of the owners, but I didn’t dare get out of Silvia, nor did I want to subject her to any more claw marks, so I quickly reversed and drove away from there and retraced the road to its first westward turning, which led eventually into a logging trail that began, in time, to seem to me like the path on which Ingraham and I had been lost on that first trip to Stick Around. This trail, which obviously hadn’t been used for years, meandered up hill and down vale all over the countryside, like the sledge paths of my homeland’s Mount Layla, and as I marveled at Silvia’s ability to handle the steepest incline and the muddiest bog with dispatch, I began to have a fantasy of someday taking her back home to Lisedi.

But Silvia’s ability to handle the roughest terrain bred overconfidence in me, and I steered her up into a defile that was little more than the dry bed of a plunging gully, full of boulders that not even she could negotiate. Silvia lost her footing for the first time (and one of the last times) in her life, slipped, and dropped one of her rear wheels into a fissure where it had no purchase, scraping her undercarriage up on top of a rocky ledge. The drive of the front wheels, with all their power, could not pull that rear wheel out of its hole.

I got out and surveyed the situation, which appeared discouraging indeed. I opened the owner’s manual, searching for a chapter called “How to Get Out of Impossible Situations,” but there was none. I may have been miles from the nearest house, and the sneakers on my feet were not meant for hiking. Late afternoon was coming on, reminding me of that first trip with Ingraham—and indeed it was almost exactly four years since that trip.

I was surrounded by second-or third-growth forest, the trees not really enormous but dense, thick, unmanaged; the configuration of the woodland reminded me of the uplands east of Stick Around, and I realized I couldn’t be too far from that glade where there was a lone grave and headstone for Daniel Lyam Montross.

“Help me, Dan!” I called aloud, desperate and forlorn. Then I realized that if indeed Dan had taken up incarnation in the person of Morris Cat, he was seventy miles away at that moment, snoozing comfortably on the cushions of my conversation pit.

…Or maybe he was capable of manifesting his spirit wherever I happened to be. There was no wind blowing through the woods at that moment, not even any breeze, and yet the pages of the owner’s manual that I held in my hands began to flutter as if being rapidly blown or flipped by an unseen hand, until they abruptly stopped turning and remained open at a page upon which was, Location and Operation of the Winch. I knew that I was being led to read that page, although I hadn’t the faintest idea what a “winch” was. My course in driver’s education had included nothing on the use of the winch, but diagrams in the manual showed me how it was embedded in the front bumper and how to release it…but not what to do with the hook once it was released.

Dan must have been guiding me, because I don’t see how I could have thought of this myself: By looping the hook around a sturdy tree higher up the slope and hooking it back onto its cable, and then pushing the proper button on the dash, I could slowly but surely hoist Silvia out of her hole.

“Thanks again, Dan,” I said aloud as I drove on. I was careful not to overtax Silvia’s abilities thereafter, and I got us back onto a trail that even had the impress of recent tire tracks on it and led eventually to a dirt road that seemed to have been at least graded and maintained. I followed that road for miles, with dark coming on, until I reached a blacktop highway. I knew there were no blacktops within any distance of Stick Around, but I followed the highway until I came to a sign, DEER, which referred not to any animals crossing the road but to the village of that name, where there was a lone store-and-service-station. I stopped and obtained, for two dollars, a state highway map that did not have Stick Around on it but did have Deer—in the extreme southern part of the county, twenty miles or so from Jasper, the county seat. “Could you tell me how to get to Stick Around?” I asked the woman who was running the store.

“Not this time of night,” she replied, leaving me to wonder whether she meant that she wouldn’t be able to give me directions at this time of night, or that I wouldn’t be able to find it at night.

So, by a circuitous route on the meandering highways of the Bodarks, I returned that night to Arcaty, getting home just in time for bed.

“Well, Morris—or Dan, as the case may be,” I said to the cat, who didn’t seem any more glad to see me than he usually was—that is to say, was more or less indifferent—“I’ve done some seeking today, and not much finding, and I think I’m ready to do a bunch of short stories.”

III

Most of that spring I spent seeking. Silvia took me, every day, up and down the back streets of Arcaty. My new routine would begin after breakfast in the Crystal Room, where I would usually be the only diner until the tourist season resumed in May, and then I would stop at the desk, ask Lurline for my mail or messages (she was always perfunctorily courteous but diffident, and I wondered how much she had disapproved of the time Travis had spent with me); then I would announce to her, “I’m going for a little spin,” and go to the parking lot where I’d left Silvia, and I would take my lovely Range Rover for an hour or at least half an hour of exploring all the streets of Halfmoon Mountain, East Mountain, the village proper, the lower reaches of Leatherwood Creek, and the highway. Silvia and I became a familiar sight to the permanent residents of Arcaty.

Of course I was looking for Travis. In the beginning I was not even able to admit it to myself, but eventually, when I found myself fabricating imaginary conversations in which I apologized to him and invited him to return to his job as my houseboy, I realized that the sole reason for my having acquired Silvia in the first place, for having learned how to drive, was to search for him, to be more mobile for the quest. Did I detect a smirk on Lurline’s mouth when I returned disheartened to the Halfmoon? More than once I was tempted to ask her if she might have any idea where he might have gone.

Finally, on one of my search excursions out of town, I found Stick Around. Or rather I arranged for help in finding it: I called Sharon and received a rather complicated but detailed description of the various forks in the road, which ones to take, what landmarks to watch for, how to know where I was, etc.; and, just to be safe, I acquired the first of the topographic survey maps in my eventually vast collection, the Murray Quadrangle, a study of which showed me how I’d taken one single wrong turning after the time Silvia had been stuck on Henderson Mountain, where I’d been only a couple of miles from Stick Around without knowing it.

I’d been looking forward to spending a week in Stick Around, visiting with Sharon, with Lara Burns, with Diana Stoving and Day Whittacker, and, it being the morel season again, the fourth anniversary of my first week in Stick Around, I wanted to do some woods roaming in search of morels. But after what was only my first night at Sharon’s, I realized that what I really wanted to hunt for was not morels but Denise McWalter…and possibly Fannie Coe, Travis’s aunt and adoptive parent. It occurred to me that Travis might have returned home. “Do you know anybody named McWalter?” I asked Sharon. But she did not. “What about Coe?” I asked. “Are there any Coes around here?”

“Stick Around used to be full of Coes,” she said. “But I think the ones that are still anywhere near here are up beyond Sidehill, a small community to the west. Vernon could tell you.”

So at my first opportunity I drove Silvia up into the hills west of Stick Around and stopped to chat with Vernon Ingledew, who drew me a map: a detailed rendering of the various forks in the road, which ones to take, what landmarks to watch for, how to know where I was in my search for Sidehill and the Coe country. He marked with a black X the most remote holler beyond Sidehill, with a crude trail leading up into it. “That’s where you’ll find Fannie Coe’s cabin. Along with Gran’s place,” he said, meaning Lara Burns’s dogtrot, “it’s one of the few log cabins of the Bodarks still inhabited.”

I found it. My heart was beating rapidly as I pulled into the yard. There was not a pack of dogs but only one dog, an ancient sheepdog too tired to bark. I had my words ready for Travis, in case he appeared. But he did not. I got out and knocked, and a woman opened the door. She was not nearly as old as I had expected her to be. Perhaps early thirties, not much older than myself, but she had lived a hard life, a frugal life, and obviously a spinster’s life, because she was “homely as sin,” as Travis had described her. I felt silly asking, “Are you Fannie Coe?” when it was obvious she was. She nodded, and I told her my name was Kat Kelly and—I had worked this out in advance—I was from the Bodarks Regional Children’s Welfare Division and I would like to ask a few questions about Travis Coe.

“He don’t live here no more,” she said. “I aint seed him since last fall.”

I knew that she was truthful. “Do you know anyone named Denise McWalter?”

“What’s she got to do with it?” Fannie Coe wanted to know.

“She might know where he is,” I said, “if you could just tell me where to find her.”

As it turned out, the real Denise McWalter did not live in a mobile home, as I had already written in “I Draw a Snake upon Your Back,” nor were her parents divorced or nearly as bad as I’d pictured them in the story, nor was Denise herself anything at all like my heroine, and her father had no family resemblance to the Clan McWalter that I had once conceived and described. Perhaps writers ought to be spared meeting any of their characters. Denise McWalter was a pleasant, polite, well-groomed, and fairly intelligent girl of fifteen who lived in a conventional and modest ranch-style house on the main highway above Sidehill. Her parents boasted that she was doing very well in school, especially in math and science, although she was making “only a ‘B’” in English.

What could I say to her? First there was the problem of privacy: I didn’t want to talk to her in the presence of her parents. Her father, who was a self-employed electrician, expressed a great interest in my Silvia, and I allowed him to take the Range Rover for a drive, and then I asked Denise if she’d like to ride with me for a little while, and thus I was able to get her away from her parents for not more than an hour, during which I told her I was “investigating” Travis Coe for a state agency and wanted to ask her some questions about him.

“What’s he done went and done now?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “The question is, What had he already went and done when you knew him?”

“Nothing,” she said. “He was pretty cool and sharp for his age, and he had a real mouth on him, but he never got on anybody’s shit list…except Bobby Joe’s.”

“How did he get on Bobby Joe’s shit list?” I asked.

“Bobby Joe is real jealous,” she said. “I mean, he gets just crazy with jealousy if some other dude even looks at me.”

“What did Travis do with you?”

The question made her blush, but she recovered and protested, “My gosh, ma’am, he was two whole years younger than me!”

“I know,” I said, trying hard to conceal my own jealousy. Then I requested, “Tell me about the time you played I-draw-a-snake-upon-your-back.”

When she was able to close her mouth after her gasp, she said, “Well, for crying out loud, somebody must have already told you everything we done!”

“Yes, somebody did,” I said. “But I want to hear your side of the story.”

When she finished narrating as chastely and colorlessly as she could the story of her “carrying on” with Travis, I had only one more question: “Would you tell me the names of the other games you played?”

And afterward, instead of going back to Stick Around, I returned to Arcaty, where the next morning I finished my short story “I Draw a Snake upon Your Back,” and Joni Lynn Miller typed it up, and I sent it off to Liz Blaustein, who sold it shortly thereafter to Playboy, the same magazine that had inflamed my first American lover, Kenny Elmore.

Denise McWalter deserves almost as much credit as Travis for having provided the inspiration for the work that would keep me busy the rest of that year, the writing of the stories that would constitute my collection The Names of Seeking Games, including also “Come-to-Coventry,” “Man-Hunting,” “Kiss-Chase,” “Relievo,” “Gee,” “Tin-Can-Tommy,” “Whip,” “Sardines,” “Buzz-Off” (the second-most-anthologized story), “Hunt the Keg,” and of course “Hide-and-Seek,” as well as the three stories that were not the names of games but of cries therein: “All In, All In,” “Ready or Not, Here I Come” and the collection’s concluding piece, “All Hid, All Hid,” which Shannon Ravenel called “the best American short story of the eighties.”

IV

Once I thought I saw Travis, and it was not with Silvia’s help. Having Silvia and her all-terrain mobility sometimes left me feeling lazy and flabby for having abandoned my regular habit of hiking up and down the myriad mazes of Arcaty’s stairsteps. So I made a conscientious decision to leave Silvia in the parking lot while, at least once a day, I went off on foot to explore the town.

Directly below the Halfmoon on the east slope of Halfmoon Mountain is Saint Elizabeth’s Catholic Church, famous because years before it had been featured in “Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not” as the only church in the world that one enters through the top of the belltower, owing to the steepness of the slope. But despite this ballyhoo, one does not actually descend the belltower to gain entrance to the church; rather, one walks down a long, gentle ramp affording a view of the church and of, directly below the ramp’s parapet, the rooftop of the rectory, upon which tourists cast their spare change, like throwing coins into a wishing well. At any given time the rooftop is covered with perhaps fifty dollars in quarters, dimes, and nickels. The distance from the parapet to the rooftop is at least ten or twelve feet. Approaching it one morning, I discerned that somehow a boy, whom I took to be Travis, had leapt across this distance, landed on the roof, and was busy collecting the coins when I came along; and, spotting him, I called out, “Tray-vis!”

He disappeared instantly over the other slope of the roof, perhaps dropping to the ground from its far eaves. I ran down the ramp and attempted to find him, exploring the cramped grounds of Saint Elizabeth’s, but he had disappeared. I knew at least this much: he had not left Arcaty, and he had apparently used up the hundred dollars I’d given him and was reduced to stealing change from the roof of the rectory. My heart ached anew for him, and I lost the rest of the day by redoubling my efforts to find him.

My seeking of Travis was more intense than any of the searches in any of the seeking games of my stories, although, as in each of those stories, there was a moment or two or three during which the quarry was spotted, as if to prove its existence, as if to tantalize the hunter with the elusiveness of the quarry, as if to give the game, the game of life, its zest. I became convinced, in time, that Travis was still a dweller in Arcaty, and my search for him continued long enough for me to forgive him entirely for his no longer being a virgin, and to want desperately to know him again, in all the meanings of know. The novelist who overcomes the chagrin he feels because the story has already been told by someone else can be content to make the hand-me-down story fetching, alluring, even unique.

But my springtime mornings in the tower of my Halfmoon penthouse were not spent brooding over Travis. Liz continued to send me galley proofs or finished copies of foreign editions of my books, and although I did not know the languages I appreciated seeing Georgie Boy translated into Swedish, Portuguese, Greek, Polish, and Serbian. I was especially thrilled to see the vertical columns of characters in the Japanese. Wistfully I told myself, If only it were possible to have a Georgiy Malchik…but I knew that my book would appear in Russian, if at all, only in samizdat: typewritten or handwritten pages of a hasty translation circulated endlessly from one eager reader to another, virgin readers all, but readers who would appreciate the experiences of the heroine and readily identify with her. I had no way of knowing that at that very moment a secretly printed edition of Georgiy Malchik was being pirated in Leningrad to replace the customary typewritten samizdat with thousands of softcover copies, one of which would find its way almost immediately into the outraged hands of Bolshakov himself.

There were two other distractions that spring, one pleasant, the other not. The disagreeable interruption came in the form of a letter from my old mentor Ingraham, who was still trying unsuccessfully, he said, to find a publisher for the nonfiction book he was writing about ghost towns. Let us not be coy, he said. I have heard rumors from some of my Arcaty acquaintances that you have taken over most of the top floor of the Halfmoon, something you couldn’t have done unless you are indeed V. Kelian, as I have suspected all along. I will not dwell upon how envious I am of your enormous success (I spend enough time in the privacy of my own resentful dignity dwelling upon the good luck of other writers). I did truly enjoy reading Georgie Boy, possibly the only novel I’ve been able to finish in many a year, and I think you deserve every accolade that comes your way.

I have not published a book in almost a decade. The failure of my last novel continues to puzzle its editor long after he has withdrawn from the crazy business of publishing. It doesn’t puzzle me so much as it intensifies my burning desire to write something that cannot be ignored by the fickle public of readers.

But my ghost town project, which conceivably could do for these destitute villages what James Agee did for destitute people in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, continues to make its rounds of ever-lesser publishing houses without finding anyone who likes it, and even my so-called agent presumably has abandoned me.

I do not wish to appear to be calling in a debt, but if you feel any gratitude whatsoever for the help I gave you in the early stages of writing Georgie Boy, I beseech you, I beg you, please put in a good word for me to your editor.

By coincidence, I had just finished arranging the collected hardback volumes of Ingraham’s novels on a shelf in my library, and in the process had dipped into his last-published novel, that awkwardly titled The Archaic Bulwarks of the Bodarks, a comic history of Stick Around that had been dismissed as a “spoof” (a word the great John Barth in turn dismissed as sounding like “imperfectly suppressed flatulence”) by many reviewers when it appeared in 1975. To my surprise, Ingraham had made no attempt to disguise or pseudonymize the Ingledew name and had even, toward the end, mentioned Sharon, Vernon, et al., by their actual names. But I’d read enough to convince myself that he was a good writer, as undeserving of his neglect as I was perhaps undeserving of my fame, and I did, as he hoped, feel some thankfulness and obligation toward him.

So I took the trouble to write, rather than call, Wölfflin on his behalf, with the result that Publisher Z became Ingraham’s publisher and, two years later, brought out his ghost town nonfiction, to the same scant reviews and general disregard that his fiction had suffered. It was widely remaindered.

The one good diversion that spring came after a phone call from Liz Blaustein informing me that Trevor Kola the Hollywood filmmaker was getting ready to plan the shooting of Georgie Boy and that Kola was very eager to have my views on how the film should go. Kola, Liz told me, had been exceptionally faithful to all the novels he had converted to movies, and he wanted to do everything he could to make this great best-seller into a box-office smash. But of course Liz could not put me directly in touch with him without violating the agreement that my identity and my sex be kept secret. Would I, she asked, be willing to write a letter, signed by V. Kelian, that she could forward to him? Perhaps with a treatment?

“What is a ‘treatment’?” I asked.

“Just a few pages to help the development,” she said. “Just write a kind of short form of the story line.”

“How many pages?”

“Twenty or so. Not more than fifty. Be sure to write it in the present tense.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s the way it’s done. It helps you visualize the picture: ‘George wants Princess. Princess wants George but doesn’t want to get pregnant. George must find rubbers. George steals rubbers from Bolshakov.’ Et cetera. Get the idea?”

“I think,” I said, and I began at once to write a treatment of the story, only mildly disturbed at having to drop everything else in order to work on it. It was easier for me to expound upon general principles for converting the novel to the screen than to write the specifics of abbreviating its story from the twelve or fourteen hours required to read it to the two hours allotted for watching it, even in the present tense, but I amazed myself by finishing the job within a week and writing a long covering letter to Mr. Kola from V. Kelian.

The result was, Liz laughingly told me, that the great Trevor Kola was insisting that he should meet and talk with V. Kelian, “on Kelian’s own turf,” if need be. “Wouldn’t you rather just fly out to the coast?” Liz asked me.

“In drag?” I said. I had, I confess, been giving many of my idle thoughts to the contingency of having to meet or talk directly with Kola and wondering how, if need be, it could be arranged without giving away my identity. It had not occurred to me that he would want to come to the Bodarks in search of V. Kelian.

Liz sighed. “I’m thinking,” she said, and there was a long moment of silence on the line. Then she said, “Hey. How about if you took a boyfriend with you and pretended to Kola that you were the interpreter for the boyfriend, Kelian, who can’t speak English?”

My mind quickly examined and rejected the few males I knew: Ingraham, Day Whittacker, Vernon Ingledew, Jim the manager of the driving school, Lenny Lewin of the Esoterica Gallery (tempting but too old), Bob the porter of the Halfmoon, and even Larry Brace. “What boyfriend?” I said to Liz. “My only boyfriend is, as I told you, a twelve-year-old hillbilly named Travis Coe, and he hasn’t been around for some time now.”

Liz sighed again, and again there was a long silence on the line while both of us were wracking our brains. Then she said, “Well, I suppose I’ll just have to tell him that the mysterious V. Kelian refuses to have any contact with anybody…”

“Wait,” I said. “Yes, tell him that, but tell him that if he wants to come to the Halfmoon, even if Mr. Kelian refuses to see him in person, I’ll be glad, as Mr. Kelian’s secretary and lover, to ‘relay’ the discussion to him.”

Silence from Liz for a long moment, and then she said, “Brilliant.” “Tell him that I’ll meet his plane at Fateville, the nearest airport, and drive him the fifty miles to Arcaty. When he knows his flight, he should call the Halfmoon’s desk and leave a message for ‘Kat.’”

Thereafter it became part of my routine to stop by the desk at least twice a day and ask Lurline, “Any messages?”

“Nope,” Lurline said, day after day. I was beginning to wonder if the very busy Trevor Kola had found another “property” that was more bankable than my novel, or if he had been disappointed to learn that V. Kelian was residing in the unknown and inaccessible Bodarks, not on Park Avenue in New York or some exotic hideaway in Costa Rica.

One day when I asked Lurline if there were any messages, she said, “Yep. It’s this. You oughta take Travis back. He’s hopeless wicked and caint be saved. You might as well finish up the job of ruining him.”

“What?” I said. “Who’s that message from?”

“Me,” she said.

23

I

Travis Coe’s return to the Halfmoon delighted and comforted me so much that I forgot about Trevor Kola…Or, rather, I continued to think about Trevor Kola only long enough to wonder at that similarity in the sounds of their names: Travis Coe, Trevor Kola (a similarity that would eventually grab journalists, who in turn would make allusions to cocaine, Travis’s and Trevor’s apparent substance of choice, or to the beverage “Coe-Kola.”) After a tearful exchange of apologies (and, later, I would shamelessly use Travis’s words verbatim, but without the Bodarks accent, in the so-called “Apology for Waywardness” section of the popular story “All Out Come in Free”), I took Travis to the Plaza restaurant for dinner, and then, both of us drunk with wine and lust and the excitement of reunion, we spent much of the rest of the evening in my Jacuzzi until, exhausted by our erotomaniacal acrobatics in the hot water, we tumbled into bed for a long private talk, during which he told me all about his experience with Lurline.

Of course Lurline (whose last name I never learned) is the “Lucille Renwick” of my prizewinning story “All Hid, All Hid,” and, as Larry Brace has shown in his essay “Formidable Heroines in the Shorter Fiction of V. Kelian” (Studies in Modern Literature), she was “only a little like the typical Kelian heroine, who has the sort of innocence that God also protects in fools and drunks.” Lurline was ultraconservatively religious, and although I do not identify her membership specifically as with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, I give enough hints to make the affiliation unmistakable. She was required to give a tithe of her Halfmoon salary to her church and to spend time equal to a tenth of her working hours each week out on the streets, ringing doorbells and attempting to sell tracts and convert unbelievers. Travis was the only unbeliever that she had succeeded in converting, but only to the extent of helping her in the work of selling tracts.

She had taken him in when I evicted him. Twenty-two years old and a native of Arcaty, although both her parents had “moved on” in different directions, primarily westward, she had an apartment on Ojo Street, just a short distance from the Halfmoon, and it was there that Travis had been staying since I threw him out.

As anyone who has followed his rise to stardom is all too aware, Travis Coe has always been an opportunist, willing to do anything in order to survive and succeed. (I am reminded of what he said to me in our first meeting: “If you got the money, I could do anything you pay me for.”) In order to have a roof over his head, Lurline’s roof, he was willing to go along with her desire to convert him to her faith, to correct him (he stopped smoking cigarettes in her presence), and even, in the beginning, to banish from his mind and loins whatever lustful itches he might have acquired from Denise and Ekaterina. But gradually, inexorably, he insinuated himself into her bed, against her will but not against her pleasure. I have freely utilized their relationship in those two stories of the Seeking Games collection.

“She never did mind just plain ole fuckin,” Travis explained. “Matter a fact, she got herself a real hankerin fer it. But she just didn’t like to do all them other things you taught me. She wouldn’t even let me touch her butthole.”

Taking Travis back, I had the satisfaction that the novelist feels when she realizes that although her story is secondhand, twice told, she is giving it twists and fillips that no other novelist would have imagined. Travis came to love Silvia and confessed that he’d seen me driving her around town and was dying to go for a ride in her. I took him, and even, eventually, in deserted places, let him try his hand at the wheel.

Lurline remained on polite terms, if not cordial terms, with me and even with Travis, who continued to flirt with her each morning when he went down to get the daily flowers and paper. One morning he returned with a slip of paper in Lurline’s childish scrawl: You got a call. A Mr. Kola says pick him up at the F ’ville airport at 2:00.

“Now, listen, Travis,” I said, “Here’s what I want you to do…” and I presented him with an elegant white three-piece suit, of the sort that Tom Wolfe was beginning to wear in those days, and a white straw hat, dark glasses, a wig, and a mustache. I told him to stay in my tower bedroom and not show himself to our guest until I asked him.

Then I drove alone in Silvia to Fateville’s Drake Field to pick up the famous director. He deplaned from a commuter prop craft out of Dallas, and I was able to recognize him from pictures I’d seen in newspapers and magazines: a big man, bushy black hair and heavy eyebrows, and a look (not wholly intentional, I learned) of holding in suspicion or contempt everything that came within his purview. The hills surrounding Drake Field were in the full lush greenery of late springtime, and the air was the fragrant Bodarks ozone that is found nowhere else on earth, but he sniffed it as if it came from a sewage plant, and he looked around disdainfully at his surroundings until his eyes came to rest on me, and he gave me a look as if sizing me up for the casting couch and finding me not worthy of it.

He was not alone. I don’t know what I had expected, but I had planned to have him to myself for the duration of his stay in the Bodarks. He had two women with him, both of them younger than I, and he introduced them only as “Gladys” and “Jay,” the former plain enough and efficient enough to be, as indeed she was, merely his hired assistant; the latter, I am sorry to say, I failed to recognize as none other than Jesslyn Fry, whose several movies I had not seen. (Since coming to America, I had scarcely been to any films at all, except for those blue movies that I saw in Pittsburgh with Ingraham.)

My failure to recognize her caused a moment of embarrassment on the drive to Arcaty, when in response to her conversational question, “How long have you known Kelian, Kat?” I replied, “A very long time. How long have you known Kola, Jay?”

“He did my last picture, of course,” she said.

I turned to him. “Oh, do you paint, on the side?” I asked. And when after a moment’s puzzlement all three of them laughed, I thought to correct myself: “Or take photographs?”

“Yeah, photographs, Dollface,” he said. “Lots of photographs.” When the three of them had finished sniggering, I said to Jay, “I think I understand. You’re an actress in motion pictures.” I felt myself blushing for my ignorance.

Jay looked out the window and spoke to the Bodarks landscape. “It is so refreshing to discover someone who doesn’t know me and therefore doesn’t fawn all over me.” Then she turned back to me. “I suppose you’ve read Georgie Boy yourself.” It was not a question but an observation, and when I nodded, she asked, “Do you think Kelian could see me as Princess?”

Of course Jesslyn Fry is a blonde and is famous for a look of tender innocence that far surpasses my own or whatever fragility the reader perceives in Princess. Jesslyn does not resemble me, except for her large, ingenuous, curious eyes and a certain delicacy in the structure of her cheekbones and jaw. I will never forget the moment, in Silvia en route to Arcaty, passing through some hamlet called Hindsville, when the woman who had been Princess and who had written Princess’s story sized up the woman who was destined to win an Academy Award for playing Princess in a motion picture and said, “Probably not. But I ought to make something clear. Mr. Kelian may not see you, period. He is extremely shy. I am under strict instructions not to let you into his presence.”

“I understand that, Dollface,” Trevor Kola put in, as if he truly did. “Still, we ought to be able to work it out so that if we don’t see him, he can take a good look at Jay and let me know if she fits the part.”

We worked it out. Once in my (or Kelian’s) penthouse triplex apartment, which I think visibly impressed even Kola himself, I showed the three of them to their rooms, each to a separate one, taxing my limit of three guest rooms, and then assembled them in or around my conversation pit and, acting as servant myself, poured them the drinks of their choice (Kola had only Perrier, Gladys wanted a beer, and Jesslyn Fry drank a Scotch and soda). Morris, whose long tenure at the Halfmoon left him if not affable at least approachable by any stranger, decided he did not like one or more of the three and, after hissing at Kola, disappeared for the duration of their stay.

The sounds of someone walking the floor overhead were distinctly audible. “Mr. Kelian knows you are here,” I announced. “And he hopes you are very comfortable and that you enjoy your stay in the fabulous Bodarks. His first question to you is, Have any of you been in the Bodarks before?”

“I’ve been in the boondocks but not the Bodarks,” Kola said, and guffawed at his own wordplay, and thereafter he would always refer to my adopted part of the country as the Boondocks. He moved to the picture window, and looked out, and sized up the sweeping view, until his eye fell upon the enormous statue. “Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed. “What is that?”

“Jesus Christ,” I answered. “It’s called the Christ of the Bodarks and it was erected by a fundamentalist bigot named Smith.”

“What is he standing in?” Kola asked. “You can’t see him from the knees down.”

“It is just poorly proportioned, I suppose,” I said. “Mr. Kelian once observed that it looked more like some kind of Bodarkadian Kewpie doll.”

“What’s a Kewpie doll?” Kola wanted to know, so I showed him one from my collection.

Neither I nor Travis had been prepared to serve dinner. I considered taking them to the Plaza, or even Bubba’s Barbecue, but decided, for the first evening at least (and I had no idea at that point how long they intended to stay), to take them downstairs to the Crystal Room, where the menu was suitably diverse and the atmosphere, with great chandeliers and enormous windows providing the glass that gave the dining hall its name, more elegant than the rest of the hotel, which, Kola had observed, was “down at the heel.”

The Crystal Room was not crowded; the few other guests scrutinized us as we were seated, and a woman came over with her menu and handed it to Jesslyn.

Jesslyn waved it away. “No, just bring me your best steak, very rare,” she said.

“No, no, no,” the woman said. “I don’t work here. I just wonder if I could get your autograph.”

Jesslyn borrowed a pen from Kola and autographed the woman’s menu. Later, two other women, a man, and a couple of teenagers would appear at our table, requesting Jesslyn’s autograph on assorted scraps of paper if not their menus. I, who had never been asked for my autograph, felt somewhat curious if not envious about how it felt to receive the homage, if that was what it was.

One guest who did not approach our table but remained at his own table in the darkest corner of the large room was a small, thin man in an elegant white three-piece suit and white straw hat, wearing dark eyeglasses above a bushy mustache; he was dining alone on a cheeseburger. I faulted myself for not having told him to order something less adolescent than a cheeseburger.

I looked at Kola, Jesslyn Fry, and Gladys, each in their turn, and said, sotto voce, “Please do not look now, but Mr. Kelian is sitting over there.” Kola, Jesslyn Fry, and Gladys each looked nervously at one another, as if waiting to see who would have the honor of being the first to turn slowly, inconspicuously, and cast a covert glance across the room. As if by unspoken agreement among them, this honor or duty fell upon Gladys, who coughed and very, very slowly turned her head, took a good look, dropped her mouth open, and slowly turned her head back to her boss.

“Well?” Kola said peremptorily to her. He had not dared to turn his own head.

“He’s young,” Gladys announced. “I think. And he looks quite mysterious.”

Kola announced, “I think I’ll take a peek.” And he very slowly turned his own head until he could see the figure on the opposite side of the room. He took a quick look, blinked involuntarily, and returned his gaze to us. “Yes,” he said, as if confirming not his assistant’s estimate but his own unformulated one. Then he whispered to me, “If he’s so shy, why is he eating in public like this?”

“He wished, as you suggested, to have a look at her.” I inclined my head toward Jesslyn Fry.

Jay asked, “Do you think he’d be offended if I just, sort of, maybe sauntered over there so he could have a closer look?”

“No need for that,” I said. “V. Kelian can see you very clearly.” And indeed V. Kelian could.

“What does the V stand for, by the way?” Kola asked.

“It’s like the S in ‘Harry S Truman,’” I said.

Jay asked, “What did the S in ‘Harry S Truman’ stand for?”

“Nothing,” Kola said to her. “It was just there because he needed a middle initial. He didn’t have a middle name.” Then Kola asked me, “Didn’t Truman come from these Boondocks?”

“Not these,” I said. “He came from a part of Missouri about two hundred miles north of here.”

“I can’t help noticing, Dollface,” he said, “that you have an unusual accent. You’re not American, are you?”

“I haven’t been naturalized,” I declared. “Not yet.”

“So where are you from?”

“Svanetia,” I said.

“Phoenicia?” he said. “Didn’t the Phoenicians invent astronomy or the alphabet or something like that?”

“Svanetia.” I pronounced it as clearly as I could.

“Where’s that?”

“The Caucasus Mountains.”

The mildly interested but blank look he gave me, matched by the looks of Gladys and Jesslyn, told me that none of them knew where the Caucasus Mountains were.

“Is that where Kelian is from too?” Kola asked.

I glanced across the room at Travis, who was finishing his cheeseburger and making a rather hammy acting job of wiping his big mustache delicately with his linen handkerchief. “No, he’s from the Bodarks…or the Boondocks,” I said, with a smile to acknowledge Kola’s nicknaming them.

“Answer me this, if you will,” Kola said. “Is he really Georgie? Was his mother a shrink?”

My smile shaded into a mysterious grin. “Who can say?”

Abruptly both Kola and his beautiful star illuminated their faces with expressions of dawning realization. Jay tried to speak, but Kola waved her silent while he asked me his next question: “So he really didn’t get killed in the end, did he?” And without waiting for my reply, he continued, “Because one of the main things I need to discuss with him is that. I don’t want my picture downbeat. I don’t want Georgie to die in the end of my picture.”

“It’s your picture,” I said. “Nobody has to die in one’s own picture.”

Jay was allowed to speak. “Don’t you get it?” she asked Kola, tugging on his arm like a child trying to get her father’s attention. “It just hit me. Don’t you get it? Not only is that Georgie sitting right over there, but this is Princess sitting right here.” And although it is rude to point, she pointed her finger within touching distance of my nose.

Kola’s mouth fell open. “Dollface, is that true?”

“Would you mind,” I requested, “calling me something other than Dollface?”

II

Kola and Gladys stayed several nights. Jesslyn Fry had to be back on the coast the next day for a guest appearance on something called “Johnny Carson,” and she took a taxicab back to the Fateville airport. Before she left, having unsuccessfully dropped a number of hints that she would truly appreciate a moment alone with V. Kelian, she said to Kola, in my presence, “Trev, you’re an Oh Tour, aren’t you? You don’t have to have his say-so to cast me.”

“Yeah, baby, I’m a real Oh Tour, but this property won’t play if the man doesn’t think you’re Princess.” I would hear Kola’s mention of Oh Tour several more times before it occurred to me he was saying auteur, and I would not find the cinematic meaning of that “author” in Daniel Lyam Montross’s dictionary. “Listen, Dolph-Kat,” he said to me (the first of several times he’d address me that way before I realized he was starting to call me Dollface and interrupting himself halfway through the first name to substitute the latter), “Jay’s gotta catch a plane. Could you go ask your boyfriend what he truly thinks of her?”

I already knew what my boyfriend thought of her. Late the night before, after my guests had retired to their rooms (I had expected Kola to sleep with Jay and/or Gladys but apparently he had not). Travis climbed into my bed and began to babble. “Don’t ye know who that is? That’s Jesslyn Fry, and she’s a real movie star! And she’s sleepin right downstairs!”

I told Travis I was beginning to get the impression that she was somebody very important. I asked him if he’d seen any of her movies, and he was able to name at least three of them that he’d seen. “Is she really good?” I asked him. He said she was terrific. Then I asked him, “Does she at all resemble the mental image you received of Princess when you were reading Georgie Boy?”

He had to think about that for a while. And then, bless his heart, he said, “Not as much as you do, I reckon. But I doubt you could play Princess in a movie, now, could you?”

I could not. And we both laughed over that.

To Kola I said, “Mr. Kelian wishes me to tell you that he considers Miss Fry perfectly acceptable for the role.”

Jay threw her arms around me and gave me a big hug. “Oh, thank you!” she said. “Tell him I’ve never wanted a part more than this one! Tell him I’ll make him proud of me! Tell him I love him!”

“I will,” I said, and she kissed me, and that was the last time I saw Jesslyn Fry until she was dragged by two attendants down the hall of the Laboratory in the second scene of the film Georgie Boy.

After Jay left, Kola and I settled down to the first of several working sessions on the treatment that I (or Kelian) had written. “Let’s take a meeting,” Kola would say, and Gladys would sit at his elbow writing meticulous notes on a yellow legal pad. Kola would point out something in the treatment, raise a challenge, and send me upstairs into the penthouse to confer with “Kelian” and then report back to Kola on Kelian’s opinion. In order to appear to have spent some time conferring with Kelian, I would make a game of actually talking with Travis, who was enjoying himself sprawled out on my bed reading a Jackie Collins novel, Sinner. “Kola wants Bolshakov to be heavy,” I told Travis. “But the real Bolshakov is bony, scrawny, skinny like a scarecrow.”

“He seemed like a fat slob to me,” Travis said, so I returned to Kola to tell him that it was all right to make Bolshakov fat.

Kola laughed. “No, I’ve already cast Sert Reichert in that part, and he’s anything but fat.”

“But you said you wanted him to be heavy…?”

“The heavy,” Kola said. “‘Heavy’ as in the bad guy, the villain.”

“Oh.” Often in these “story conferences” I did not understand the language that Kola and Gladys used in the terminology of motion pictures. Listening to them speak to each other was like sitting in a dentist’s chair eavesdropping on a technical conversation between the dentist and his hygienist. I had no inkling of the meanings of dolly, gag, jump cut, pre-production, day player, crane, match cut, on spec, second unit, two-shot, swish pan, wipe, or even the ubiquitous zoom.

Kola would say something like, “For the teaser I want a rack focus on Princess in her cell with Georgie watching her play with herself.” Gladys would dutifully write this down, and then Kola would condescendingly explain to me that teaser refers to the opening sequences of the movie before the titles and credits or beneath them, and rack focus means changing the camera’s focus from one person to another within the same shot. I would go upstairs and trade places with Travis and act this out with him, and he would do a remarkable job of pretending to be Georgie outside the door of my cell spying on me while I simulated masturbation.

“Yeah!” Travis would exclaim, with his eyes getting as wide as Georgie’s would have been. “He wants the whole show to open with me getting bug-eyed like this.”

I had no inkling, then, that the “me” he was calling himself as stand-in for Georgie would become so literally Travis Coe.

I would go back downstairs to Kola and announce, “V. thinks it will play.” Kola would smack his lips in satisfaction and say to Gladys, “Flag that, then.”

Gladys and I, by the way, became good friends during the course of the visit. She was an uncommonly intelligent woman, indispensable to Kola, very efficient and devoted, and she was genuinely interested in learning from me the customs of Svanetia, the character of the Svanetian landscape, and even some Svanetian recipes, which she intended to try when she got back to L.A.

I had only one uncomfortable moment with Gladys, when, as we were sitting alone together in the chess nook (we had time to relax with a few games, and she was not a bad player), she remarked, “You know, this is your apartment, isn’t it? Not Kelian’s.”

“What makes you say that?” I asked, taken aback.

“Everything in it,” she said, sweeping her arms, “is womanly.”

All I could say was, “Kelian likes it that way.”

The “story conference” went on for three working days, scene by scene, and I was beginning to have much fun, acting out with Travis the various possibilities of shooting; and for his part he took to it like a duck to water—or, to use his own expression, “This here movie play-like is easy as shootin fish in a rain barrel.”

It was clear that Kola intended to “Americanize” the film in every way he could. He had already contracted to use an old Victorian warehouse in San Francisco as the Laboratory, and to use a California woman’s penal institution, Frontera, for the “establishing shots” and some of the interiors of the concluding prison-camp portion. From what I could gather, there would be nothing in the movie to indicate that its scenes or people had derived from Soviet Russia.

The only serious disagreement Kola had with Kelian was over the matter of some scenes toward the end when Bolshakov and Georgie’s mother are driving one car in pursuit of the car that Georgie has stolen. “But Georgie was on foot!” I protested on behalf of Kelian. “In the book, he steals a prison truck at the very end, but he never steals a car to get to the prison.”

“Yeah, Dolph-Kat, I know,” Kola admitted, almost as if some power greater than himself was bossing him around, “but we’ve got to have a car chase to keep the front office happy.”

“A car chase?”

“Everybody does it, babe,” Kola said.

Few experiences in my life have moved me as much as the morning, the last morning of Kola’s visit, when Travis and I were in my bedroom, converted in our imaginations into the yard of the prison camp, acting out the last meeting between Princess and Georgie. Kola had hinted to me that the film should follow the novel very closely in that part of the movie, and he had asked me at breakfast, “Do you think Kelian would mind if we used the book’s dialogue between Princess and Georgie, word for word, in the last shots?”

I said I was sure he would be flattered but I would run up and ask him anyway, and I jumped at the chance to “try out” with Travis that excruciatingly poignant scene that would leave millions of moviegoers fumbling for their hankies or Kleenex.

It was easy for Travis and me to hold our separate copies of the “script,” in the form of the just-off-the-press paperback editions of Georgie Boy, which Bantam would soon leave in special display boxes in every supermarket, drugstore, and bookstore in America.

Travis threw his heart into the climactic scene and seemed to be speaking his lines more than reading them, and even his Bodarks accent seemed to vanish. The tears that he and I shed were genuine. I was seized and wracked by an emotion of much greater power than anything I had actually experienced with Dzhordzha: Art is, after all, more real than life.

And the emotional intensity of such art is greater than the most profound sexual pleasure. I would rather have done that with Travis than any of the Jacuzzi acrobatics we actually had done. But I knew that I could never do it again. So perhaps there was another truth: Great art happens only once.

The moment came for Georgie to reach out and hold Princess for the last time. He, Travis-who-had-become-Georgie, had dropped his copy of the paperback and didn’t need it, and he gave me an indescribable look of longing—of having searched so hard to find me and, having found me, of being about to lose me forevermore.

And then his sweet freckled face and his haunted eyes were transformed by an expression of fear that wasn’t in the script at all. Or, I realized, it was not craven fear so much as astonishment, discovery.

I realized that Georgie was no longer looking at Princess but at something beyond her. And I couldn’t resist turning to see what it was. It was not Bolshakov but Trevor Kola, standing at the top of the stairs that led to my aerie.

He had obviously been there for a while. His arms were folded over one another and he was leaning against the wall in a posture of relaxation and contemplation, and he wore the trace of a smile, as if he’d been listening to the whole scene.

Almost automatically he said, but in a gentle voice, “Cut. Print. Perfect.” And he walked up to us, gave me a hug and a kiss on my cheek, and then shook hands with Travis and threw an arm over his shoulders and said to him, “Kid, that was almost on the button. But this is a full shot and we need to see you do something with your body, like maybe shiver a little more, okay?”

“Yes, sir,” Travis Coe said.

And then Kola said to me, “How do you manage to keep him forever twelve?”

III

Kola and Gladys had become steadily and inexorably aware, he confessed, that I was Kelian. But he would never, he swore, reveal my secret to anyone. He apologized profusely for any incivilities or rudenesses he may have committed while he was still under the impression that I was “only Kelian’s bimbo.” He would not even tell Jay, when he saw her again next month, that I was actually not only Princess but also Kelian. It was a secret that only he and Gladys would know, and I could be sure that Gladys would never breathe a word of it to anyone, either.

Kola told me a little story about his “old friend” the director John Huston: how, when they were getting ready to begin shooting The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Huston went down to Mexico looking for the author, B. Traven, but could find only a mysterious recluse who called himself Hal Croves and pretended to be a “go-between” for Traven. Like Kola had done with me, Huston had spent several days in Croves’s company, discussing the script and planning the film, before convincing himself that Croves actually was Traven. But to the day of his death, Huston always insisted that Croves was not Traven. He insisted this to the press and Traven’s biographers and anyone else, except a few of Huston’s closest friends…including Kola.

“So,” Kola said to me, “Huston hired Croves to be a technical consultant during the shooting of the picture and kept his identity as Traven a secret during production. I’m prepared to make it worth your while to come out to the coast, Kat.”

I had thought about it even before Kola made the offer, and I had already reached my decision: “Thank you, but I have much work to do here.”

“Your next book?” Kola asked, and when I nodded he requested, “Give me an option on it.”

“It’s a collection of short stories,” I said. “You couldn’t film it.”

“Wanna bet?” he said…And indeed, two years later Trevor Kola made the famous and wonderful box-office hit out of an expansion of one of my stories, All Hid, All Hid (also starring Travis Coe).

For now, there was the problem of how Kola could, as he put it, “wrest” Travis away from me. In the presence of the wide-eyed, open-mouthed boy, Kola explained that he had already arranged with several talent agencies to conduct a major search next month for the boy actor to play Georgie, and Kola was obligated to have a look at two dozen twelve-and thirteen-year-old finalists for the part, but if I could “spare” Travis for a few days, Kola would fly him out to the coast and give him an equal chance to compete with the other kids, most of whom, of course, had several years of professional training in acting.

“He’s raw,” Kola said of Travis in the boy’s presence. “He doesn’t know his ass from his elbow about the profession, and we’ll have the devil’s own time cleaning up his diction. But he’s a natural. He looks like Georgie. He thinks like Georgie. I believe the kid thinks he is Georgie, don’t you, kid?”

“Yes, sir,” Travis said again, which seemed to be the only words he knew to speak in the presence of Kola.

Kola’s final request, before I took him and Gladys back to the airport, was to “see some real hillbillies.” Travis, Kola said, was a “juvenile hick” but not a “real hillbilly.” I tried to explain to Kola that the stereotyped image of rustic mountaineers had disappeared from the American scene forty years earlier, but I agreed to take them in Silvia, he and Gladys in the backseat and Travis sitting up front, out to the wilds of Stick Around country. Travis was willing to point out the cabin where he had grown up, the sight of which brought a tear to Gladys’s eye and even a lump to Kola’s throat, but Travis did not want to tarry. The old sheepdog I’d seen on my previous visit bestirred himself at the sight or scent of Travis, and Travis reached a hand through the car’s window to pat the dog and say “Howdy, ole Prince,” but then he said to me, “Let’s git on out of here,” just as Aunt Fannie emerged from the cabin to see what I was doing back at her place, and he turned his head so she couldn’t see his face. Whatever guilt he felt for not stopping to say hello to the woman who’d raised him (“Now, she did kind of look like a hillbilly,” Kola observed) was no greater than my own guilt for not pausing to introduce these people to Sharon, or Lara Burns, or Day and Diana Whittacker, some of whom may have recognized Silvia and wondered why I was not stopping. The only place I did visit, giving Silvia a workout on the mountainside, was the grave of Daniel Lyam Montross. Kola read the headstone and asked, “What’s your connection with him?”

I didn’t know how else to explain it than to say, “He was my mentor and lover.”

Kola glanced again at the headstone. “But it says he died in 1953. You weren’t even born then.”

“I was born when he died, in fact,” I said. And then I echoed a remark of Kola’s: “But I keep him forever twelve, as a kind of phantom fiancé.”

Travis rode with us to the Fateville airport and said good-bye to Kola, who promised to stay in touch by phone and arrange Travis’s flight to the coast the following month. “Work on your voice,” were Kola’s last words to Travis.

Then I took Travis shopping in the best places in Fateville, to find a new wardrobe and luggage for his upcoming journey to Hollywood.

The boy was in a trance for days, trying without luck to imagine the adventure that awaited him and finding himself unable to stop thinking and talking about it. He couldn’t function as my houseboy any longer. Strange to relate, Morris refused to have anything further to do with Travis. Morris would not even eat food that Travis opened and served for him. So I had to resume feeding Morris myself, as well as handling all the other chores that Travis neglected. The only thing Travis was still good for, I discovered, was our sexual sport in the Jacuzzi and in bed.

Did he truly understand that he was going to abandon me? Did he realize that I would feel a greater loss when he left for Hollywood than I had when he left to live with Lurline?

Yes, he did. One day, the week before he was scheduled to fly out of the Bodarks, he was gone all day, without explanation, and when he returned in the late afternoon he had another twelve-year-old boy with him.

IV

Although I was touched at his solicitude and consideration, I was shocked at his frank realism bordering on cynicism. The other boy stood bashfully with his hands in his pockets, his face openmouthed, gawking at my apartment. When I drew Travis into another room to protest, he whispered urgently, “But he aint never done it afore!” as if that somehow would make the boy more appealing to me.

“‘He hasn’t ever done it before,’” I corrected him, mindful of Kola’s concern for his diction.

“What I said. I don’t think he even knows how to play with hisself. You’ll have to learn him how.”

“Travis,” I said. “Oh, Travis.” In spite of myself, I was becoming fascinated by the idea. The other boy was not unattractive; he was simply far behind Travis in handsomeness and charm. “Where did you find him?”

“Huh?” Travis said. “Never mind where I found him. This town is full of ’em. Do you want him or not?”

“If I took him,” I pointed out, “don’t you understand what that would make you? A pimp!”

“What’s a pimp?” he asked.

“A panderer!” I said.

“What’s a panderer?” he asked.

“A procurer!” I said. “I don’t suppose your vast reading has ever exposed you to the concept? It’s a person who obtains another person to offer to a third party for sexual intrigues or prostitution.” I remembered that Bolshakov had an obsession with prostitutes and spent most of his spare time simply watching them on the street, a form of silent pimping.

“What’s wrong with that?” he wanted to know.

I wondered how to explain. If he didn’t instantly grasp the corrupt, mercenary exploitation of pandering, his innocence was greater than I’d given him credit for. With some sarcasm, I asked, “Do you plan to watch?”

“Naw, not unless you want me to,” he said.

The other boy, whose name was Billy, had supper with us, during which most of the talk concerned Travis’s rather boastful account of how he was going to be flying to Hollywood soon. Billy did not want any wine; that is, he had never had any before and was “afraid to start,” although Travis assured him it was “real good stuff and will loosen ye up.” After supper, Travis took the remainder of the bottle of wine and retreated to his quarters, which I had recently furnished with a large-screen color television, at his request, so he could observe and imitate “real actors.”

When Travis was gone, I asked the boy, “Do your parents know where you are?”

“No,” he said in his tiny soft voice, “but they don’t care. I just told Mom I was staying over at a friend’s.”

“What did Travis tell you was the reason for bringing you here?”

“He said you wanted me to get in your swimming pool with you without any clothes on.”

“It’s just a large tub, not a swimming pool,” I said. “But would you like to do that?”

“Sounds like fun,” he said.

Billy proved to be even more of a water sprite than Travis had been. Not as skinny as Travis, but still with a thoroughly undeveloped body, a body waiting to be shown all the pleasures of which the flesh is capable, Billy became a merman to my mermaid, a nixie to my nix, a Gandharva to my Apsaras, a Limnaiad to my Naiad, a kelpie to my undine. We spent so much time in my oversized Jacuzzi that the skin of our fingertips puckered. And he was truly a virgin. For me, that was as if I were the novelist who, after some minor works, suddenly thinks of a totally original story, a story that nobody has ever heard before, a story that will seize and entertain and edify anyone who reads it.

A week later Billy rode with us to the Fateville airport to send Travis off to Hollywood, and the two boys exchanged parting words:

“You lucky dog,” Billy said to Travis.

“Naw, you’re the real lucky one,” Travis said. “Now you’ve got her all to yourself.”

“See you in the moom pitchers,” Billy said.

“You shore will,” Travis said.

The next time we saw Travis, Billy and I sitting together in the Razorback Cinema in Fateville; Travis’s wide-eyed, innocent face was with Jesslyn Fry’s in a shifting rack focus of the teaser beneath the credit AND INTRODUCING TRAVIS COE.

Billy’s education had progressed by that time, so that he knew better than the character of Georgie what Princess was doing to herself.

24

I

Morris at eighteen is arthritic and slow, and the vet tells me I ought not expect him to live much longer, but I have come to anticipate that he may survive me. He still roams the hotel, still makes himself freely available to guests—as if he has begun to take seriously the title of General Manager bestowed upon him. Our actual, human general manager is the fourth or fifth—I’ve lost count—we’ve had since I’ve been here, and the ownership of the Halfmoon has changed hands thrice during the nine years of my tenure. The current owner, an outfit called Historic Hotels, seeking to enhance business, is having tonight a much-advertised séance for our resident quartet of ghosts and is shamelessly capitalizing upon the success a few years ago of my off-Broadway play Hotel Mezzaluna, in which those ghosts converse and interact among themselves: a Swedish carpenter who died in the construction of the hotel, a college girl who jumped from a balcony when it was Mezzaluna College in the 1920s, a woman cancer patient from the days in the 1930s when it was the quack Dr. Baker’s Mezzaluna Hospital, and the mysterious “frockcoated gentleman” whose murder provides the play’s plot. Dear Trevor tried so desperately to convert Hotel Mezzaluna to the screen, the fourth of my works to be filmed by him and to star Travis (who at twenty-one played—badly, I thought—the ghost Sigbjorn, the Swedish carpenter); Trev was hampered by the essential staginess and lack of action in the play, as well as by competition with other recent and better spook movies, most notably Ghost and Dead Again. Trev was also stymied by the refusal of the Halfmoon’s then-management to let him actually shoot the film here, and he was required to use a hotel in Eureka, California, that bore no resemblance to the Halfmoon. I am told the film is still available on videotape, but I would just as soon not have its mangled apings of the stage play continuing to circulate and helping draw a sell-out audience for tonight’s séance, which I’ve agreed to attend only as a favor to Jackie Randel, the Halfmoon’s current sales manager, a native Bodarks lady to whom I’m indebted for several kindnesses. I have a feeling that I may even enjoy myself, having never attended a séance before and having little expectation that “Veronica,” the imported British medium, will actually contact the four ghosts, not one of whom has ever manifested itself (herself, himself) to me during my many years here. But how can a dignified, proper séance be conducted in a crowded ballroom—or rather, dining room, the Crystal Room itself—with an audience of several hundred curious but skeptical snoops, many of whom, I suspect, will be here not to see the ghosts but to see the unmasked V. Kelian in his newly revealed identity as an aging but still-glamorous Svanetian princess?

When I appeared a few months ago on the cover of Vanity Fair with those words, V. KELIAN EXPOSED, it was almost as if one of my lives had already ended. At the time I began writing these memoirs, at Wölfflin’s urging, I had no idea that I would find myself in the position, as I am now, of having to skim over eight years of my life that I had intended to cover in detail, and it is no consolation that Nabokov himself in the prototype, Speak, Memory, skims over more years than that and commences his last chapter with that atypically clumsy sentence “They are passing, posthaste, posthaste, the gliding years—,” although it is from him rather than from Ingraham that I slip into the comfort of this present tense. Indeed, the passing years, those not covered by this chronicle, seem illusory or illusive in the engrams of my recollection, mostly happy though they were, confirming my belief that truly memorable experiences are always unpleasant ones: I can recall that far-distant time in Pittsburgh with much greater clarity than I could tell my attentive reader just what happened to me this past winter.

It is April again, and as I approach my fortieth birthday I find myself actually anticipating the pure poshlost of tonight’s séance because it may divert me for one evening from my essential loneliness, a condition the general human nature of which I have explored so thoroughly in my recent fictions, last year’s best-selling novel Original Flavor and my in-press novel to appear next month, Earthstar (which has taken its title from the strange and lonely mushroom Geastrum), as well as the moderately popular nonfiction book Dawn of the Osage, in which I essayed to speculate upon the essential loneliness of the aboriginal inhabitants of these Bodarks. Tomorrow afternoon I’m going to grant an interview, rather belatedly it seems, to Paris Review for their continuing series “The Art of Fiction,” and I’ve already told their Barbara Phillips that I’d much rather talk not about my writing habits and such as that but about the condition of loneliness, which, more than lust and self-doubt, is the essential state for successful writing. If the publication of Louder, Engram! brings to the Halfmoon a passel of persons seeking to ameliorate my condition, they shall be disappointed not simply because I prefer to cultivate my loneliness but because, as I am about to reveal, I will not be here when this book appears.

After the initial onslaught of fan mail following the publication of Georgie Boy eight years ago, adoring letters sent to V. Kelian in care of the publisher and forwarded by Publisher Z to me, I asked Dori Weintraub, their publicity person, to cease forwarding the mail, or, better yet, to selectively forward only the more interesting letters, a policy that has spared me much unnecessary reading over the years (and for which I herewith apologize to any reader who expected a personal reply from V. Kelian). But as soon as that candid Vanity Fair piece appeared a few months ago and the “news” of my “predilection” for young boys found its way into the popular press and the supermarket tabloids, Dori’s selection of “the more interesting letters” got out of control: I began to receive actual “propositions” from a variety of bright, horny, and possibly corrupt twelve-year-olds in various parts of the country, many of them enclosing their photographs (with a few adorable nude studies) and offering to come visit me “wherever your Mezzaluna Hotel happens to be.” Worse, I had letters from older men pretending to be twelve. Still worse, I began to receive a number of letters, some of them quite intelligent and almost persuasive, from older men who were convinced that their charms and their interests would “rescue” me from my “paraphilia” (as three of them put it) if only I would give them a chance to visit me at “your enchanted Mezzaluna, wherever it happens to be.” To all of these charming offers, I have been constrained to answer with the same printed postcard I’ve been sending out for years:

V. Kelian deeply appreciates your interest and enthusiasm but asks you to respect a sense of privacy that can admit of no contact with the “actual world.”

Which is not strictly true. I have permitted myself, these five years since Billy’s death, to continue certain habits of contact: Travis Coe phones me occasionally, usually to talk about his latest film or affair with one or another of the stars or starlets of the fantastic “actual world” of entertainment, and two years ago he flew me to his ranch in Wyoming because he wanted to see if the Wind River Mountains would make me homesick for Svanetia (they did). Travis is one of only four people with my unlisted phone number, the other three being Sharon, Liz, and Trev. Sharon has been for the past five years the wife of Larry Brace, and they live rather happily ever after in that lovely old building of Stick Around that once was Lara Burns’s house and store and post office, just down the road a ways from the dogtrot log cabin where, yes, Lara Burns herself still lives and still has her populous A Cat Arena. Sharon and Larry have converted the actual post-office boxes of the old abandoned post office into the ornate headboard of their waterbed—an idea they picked up from Ingraham, who sleeps with his Kay beneath a similar set of postoffice boxes taken from Limestone, a town south of Stick Around, in the same county. Ingraham’s whimsical novel The Termites of Stick Around, a fable or allegory that played fast and loose with certain actual experiences of Sharon and Larry before their marriage, almost sold well, for an Ingraham novel, and I understand he has commenced his novel about Vernon’s gubernatorial campaign. Vernon Ingledew was too distracted by his political ambitions, or his philosophical studies, or a metaphysical combination of both, to notice that his tenant of the old Jacob Ingledew house, Larry Brace, was, in the depths of alcoholism and struggle with a difficult literary analysis of Daniel Lyam Montross, allowing the house to go to ruin and even contributing to its demise during his bouts of drunkenness by firing his pistol at the termites he imagined were infesting it (a situation adroitly rendered in Ingraham’s fable).

The house actually is not termite ridden, I’ve been assured by the team of restorationists who are busy expensively resuscitating the old place to the original condition in which Governor Jacob Ingledew erected it. Vernon alone knows the identity of the new owner of the house, who bought what’s left of it from him for if not a song, a promise not to sing. I have told no one of my intention to move shortly from the Halfmoon, and Wölfflin (Wölfflin’s successor) is under strict instructions to excise this paragraph from my memoirs in the event that I actually do move into the Ingledew house, which was once Stick Around’s modest hotel and thus is but one generic remove from the hotel in which I’ve spent the last decade, although I don’t expect to have the services and amenities there that I’ve enjoyed here. I expect, if all goes well, to move everything from my triplex, including Morris, if he’s willing (and if he’s not, he’ll let me know), into the old house as soon as the head restorationist, Clifford Stone, gives me the go-ahead, perhaps this month or early next, and to live there alone forevermore, without servants, without guests, without a houseboy. I may thus come to resemble in my old age the woman who inhabited it for all the years of her old age until her death, the woman whom, Ingraham keeps assuring us, we cannot name.

I see that I a moment ago struck through Wölfflin’s name, and I should attempt to explain, since, although Wölfflin will no longer be my editor when this work is readied for publication, I owe it to Wölfflin that this work exists at all. My readers know that I am not a vain person, that I have always hidden behind my anonymity or the pseudonymity of V. Kelian without regard for personal fame or adulation. Dear Pete Tchaikovsky, whose somewhat soupy First Piano Concerto continues to give me orgasms despite its bathos, once predicted that people would try to penetrate the intimate world of his feelings and thoughts, “everything that all my life I have so carefully hidden from the touch of the crowd.” When Wölfflin first proposed the writing of this memoir, I objected strenuously on three counts: one, that like Tchaikovsky I want to keep myself hidden from the touch of the crowd; two, that I lack the requisite self-regard or self-promotion to pull off an autobiographical work (I still subscribe to Ingraham’s distinction between penises and neckties); and three, as I expressed it in a very simple but crucial question to Wölfflin:

“But what if Bolshakov himself should read my memoir and thus come to know my present whereabouts?”

“We can handle that,” Wölfflin assured me. “We’ll simply not publish your memoir until after you’ve finally and safely gone home to Svanetia.”

All these years, I’d made no secret to my intimates, even Billy (of whom I inquired shortly before his tragic death of his possible interest in accompanying me), that I wanted to go home. After I wrote Lamshged; or, The Shady Side of the Mountain, the collection of short stories with a Svanetian setting, I was so overcome with homesickness and toska that I actually bought an airplane ticket to Tbilisi and applied for a passport, but I was informed by the State Department that it was not advisable I return there at that particular time, especially in view of my having just been naturalized as an American citizen.

Then, when to the astonishment of the world the entire Soviet Union came crumbling down around Gorbachev’s heels, my old friend and comrade-in-arms Zviady Gamsakhurdia rose to power in my native Georgia and personally wrote to me, in care of my publishers, calling me—or V. Kelian—a Georgian national literary hero and inviting me to return triumphantly to the land of my birth and see it freed at last from communism. Late last year, I actually closed up my triplex temporarily, arranged for Morris to return to his at-large feeding and roaming within the Halfmoon, and flew to New York to meet my Kennedy connection with a flight to Tbilisi via Athens, when the news came in that dear Zviady was in trouble: a junta of his Georgian opponents, accusing him of behaving like a dictator and jailing his critics—ironically, the same treatment he and I had suffered as critics of the Communist regime—had seized control from him in a civil war that left over a hundred Georgians dead. I waited to see if those loyal to Zviady might eventually win out, but they did not, and from New York I spoke to Zviady himself by telephone at his temporary exile in Armenia and was advised that it would be dangerous for me to return.

Thwarted and unhappy, I decided that as long as I was in New York, I might as well pay a visit to Liz and to Wölfflin, my agent and my editor. But my editor, I discovered, was in the hospital, recovering from a “nervous breakdown.” I visited Wölfflin there anyway and learned the distressing reason for my editor’s problems.

“I was hoping I wouldn’t have to tell you about it,” Wölfflin said, “but since you’re here, I can’t avoid it. Please don’t blame yourself.”

It seems that just a short time before, Wölfflin, returning from an editorial conference, was accosted in the private office by a man brandishing a heavy pistol, a Beretta automatic with a silencer screwed into its barrel. From the descriptions of the man that occur throughout Georgie Boy, Wölfflin recognized him as the original Dr. V.T. Bolshakov, and told the man as much, and advised him to put away his weapon or face possible arrest and imprisonment.

The man laughed (“Insanely, I thought,” Wölfflin told me) and shook his head, saying, “No, I intend to become as hard to find as your Kati/Kelian has been all these years. Nobody will find me. I can no longer work in the Soviet Union. There is no Soviet Union. I can no longer attend psychiatric conferences anywhere. Everywhere I have gone these past seven years, people have asked me if I am Bolshakov. Ha! How would you like it if everywhere you went people asked you if you were Wölfflin and, when you admitted that you were, heaped scorn and contumely upon you?”

“Is that why you are waving that pistol at me?” Wölfflin wanted to know.

“No, I am waving the pistol at you because you are going to tell me where Yekaterina Vladimirovna has been hiding all these years. I am waving the pistol at you to let you know that I shall kill you if you do not.”

“She no longer goes by that name,” Wölfflin confessed.

“Of course not!” Bolshakov yelled. “Any fool knows that she is V. Kelian. Any fool knows that V. Kelian’s lively stage entertainment, Hotel Mezzaluna, which I myself had occasion to sit through here in New York a few years ago, takes place in an enchanted but decaying resort hotel on a mountaintop somewhere. You are going to tell me where that mountaintop is located.”

“And you intend to kill her?” Wölfflin asked. “Is that your objective?”

“Not at once,” Bolshakov said. “No, I shall permit her to live a short time longer, long enough to listen to me. I have some things to tell her about what she has done to me.”

“I should think that she has a very good idea of what she has done to you,” Wölfflin said.

Bolshakov screamed, “AND SO DOES THE REST OF THE WORLD!”

(“And he began trembling so much,” my editor told me, “that I knew he couldn’t hold the gun steady enough to shoot me with it. Which is why I reached for the button to summon Security.” Wölfflin pulled aside the top of the hospital gown to reveal to me the bandaged shoulder. “He shot at me four times and missed the first three. Then he held the gun to my forehead.”)

“TELL ME THE LOCATION OF THE REAL HOTEL MEZZALUNA!” Bolshakov demanded.

Wölfflin realized the inevitability of either telling him or dying. But at that moment the editor’s secretary, having detected the popping of the pistol despite its silencer, stuck her head in the door, screamed, and immediately ran to alert the building’s Security, and a guard chased Bolshakov down five flights of steps to the street, where he disappeared into the traffic of lower Fifth Avenue.

“Thank you so much for not telling him,” I said to Wölfflin. “And I am so sorry that the terrible experience has done this to you.” I indicated the hospital bed.

“He’ll find you, Kat,” Wölfflin warned me. “If you can’t go home to Svanetia, you’d better get out of the ‘Mezzaluna.’ It won’t take a cryptographer to discover that Mezzaluna means ‘Halfmoon’ in Italian.”

Now, as I write these words, as if the meaning is dawning even upon him, Morris, my cat, abruptly perks his head up, as if he has heard something, or as if he knows something. The larger portion of his life he sleeps away, upon his favorite cushion beneath the painting I acquired at a Sotheby’s auction some years ago, Rene Magritte’s Chateau de Croissant, which depicts a castle floating in the air beneath a crescent moon, the castle almost a hybrid of the architecture of the Halfmoon and that of my native Svanetian towers. Now Morris, more impetuously than is his custom, rises up from his nap, looks around himself as if he’s discovering his surroundings for the first time and finding them unfamiliar, then leaps down from his cushion and trots hastily to the stairs leading down from my aerie/study. His arthritis seems to have disappeared.

I consult the clock, which hangs beneath another favorite painting, William McNamara’s Leaping Rock, an enormous watercolor depicting a landscape of Stick Around with a prominent geological feature, a bluff overhanging Swains Creek Valley. The clock informs me that this is not the customary time that Morris goes downstairs for his feeding. (I interrupt my writing here and go down to my kitchen and discover that indeed he is not dining at his dish but has apparently exited the apartment through his Cat-Port in my door.)

This simple detail of my daily life seems so fraught with portent that I cannot return to the writing of this memoir but rather, after reflecting upon the place where I left off (Wölfflin recently retired, for good, from publishing, and I, having expected for so many years that Bolshakov could show up at any minute, long ago gave up expecting to be surprised by him) and deciding to call it a day, I leave my writing desk, expecting to pick up tomorrow morning with a report on tonight’s séance, and prepare to leave the apartment, first selecting and donning my disguise, so sentimentally similar to that of Cathlin McWalter in Pittsburgh: red wig, huge hat, sunglasses, much jewelry. Then I lock my apartment and go downstairs, and farther downstairs, not taking the elevator, because I need the exercise, to the lobby, where I begin my incognito search for Morris.

In the lobby, among other guests, there is a woman who looks almost like myself: huge floppy hat, red hair (or wig), dark sunglasses. As women will, we cast arch looks at each other, as if comparing jewelry, much of which we both are wearing.

Then I turn and approach Jackie Randel, the sales manager. “Pssst, Jackie, it’s me, Kat,” I say to her, and I give her a moment to recognize me in the shades and flaming hair. “Have you seen Morris?”

“Why, yes,” she says, whispering in her Bodarks voice, so as not to give me away to anyone else in the lobby. She points. “As a matter of fact, he just jumped up on the mantel over there. I’ve never seen him do that before.”

And there sits Morris, perched precariously on the narrow marble mantelpiece that trims the long-unused free-standing fireplace in the Halfmoon’s lobby. I move to him. I am unable to discern any omen or portent in his behavior, beyond the originality of it. “Morris,” I say, “what are you doing up there?” Of course he does not answer, and I wonder if he can recognize me in my disguise. He does, however, from his perch above my eye level, look deeply into my sunglass-hidden eyes, and I recall again how there have been times I’ve suspected him of being “inhabited” by some spirit, perhaps even Dan Montross’s.

And then he stretches himself upward with unaccustomed agility and raises his paw and places it briefly upon the marble slab impaneled above the mantelpiece, where the Halfmoon’s original builder had engraved some homely verses in ornate Victorian letters. This builder, one Powell Clayton, an ex-governor of the state, who in fact had succeeded Jacob Ingledew as governor during the period of Reconstruction after the Civil War, had supposedly composed these lines himself:

Although upon a summer day,

You’ll lightly turn from me away,

When autumn leaves are scattered wide,

You’ll often linger by my side.

But when the snow the earth doth cover,

Then you will be my ardent lover.

II

All my years in the Halfmoon, I have been aware of the existence of this inscription but have scarcely bothered to read it before, and I am not able to convince myself now that Morris wants me to read it. If he does, what does he want me to think the verses mean?…Is he trying to predict our future together in Stick Around? Is he telling me, for example, that come some winter and a snow, he will cease being Morris the feline and magically turn into the twelve-year-old Danny Montross? Or is he making some distant echo or allusion to those lines of “Danny Boy”—But I’ll come back, when summer’s in the meadow, or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow…?

“Excuse me again, Jackie,” I say, “but would you happen to know the circumstances or significance of those verses carved over the mantel?”

She looks at me as if to question how the significance could have escaped someone intelligent “Don’t you see?” she says. “It’s just the fireplace talking. What do you call it? Pathetic fallacy? The fireplace is just telling the guests that they will appreciate it most during the wintertime.”

“Oh,” I say, abashed that I didn’t catch it. I laugh lightly in embarrassment and remark, “But the fireplace hasn’t been operative for many years.”

“Neither has Morris,” she observes. “But both seem to be trying to tell you something.”

I wander down the end of the lobby to the Crystal Room, where people are arranging the tables and chairs in a crescent facing the podium in preparation for tonight’s séance. Morris follows me, having leapt down after his futile attempt to communicate with me by means of a long, cold fireplace’s cold marble inscription. A photographer, by the looks of him not a local man or tourist but one of those national paparrazzi who have been camping out at the Halfmoon in hopes of shooting me, gives me a second glance, as if to attempt to penetrate my disguise, and I leave quickly in order to avoid another of those situations that had me flipping the bird in the pages of a recent Time magazine.

I stroll outside, Morris continuing to follow me—and all cat owners know that cats do not follow people as dogs do; it is one of the main differences between canine and feline. Silvia, my Range Rover, rests, long unused these past months of her eighth year, in the Halfmoon’s parking lot alongside a red-white-and-blue van from Fateville’s Channel 7 television station. I am tempted to take Silvia and flee to Stick Around to observe the progress on my house, to watch Clifford Stone and his restorationists make love to it with their scrapers, their sandpaper, their paint remover, and their fancy wallpapering equipment. But I cannot leave Arcaty.

It is a beautiful day. Although sunny, almost balmy, it is not quite warm enough to bring the Halfmoon’s guests out to the swimming pool, which is ready for the season but not occupied; the lifeguard’s high chair is empty, as empty as it was on that damp November day so many years gone when Billy came out here to fall or jump into this water. Powerlessly I am drawn to the pool’s side, and Morris does not stop until his foreclaws have come to grip the pool’s edge. My attention is diverted from the awful water and the memory of what happened there by the uncustomary presence beside me of this old peculiar yellow cat whom my novelist’s imagination keeps trying to turn into Dan.

My novelist’s imagination killed Billy but did it veritably, not imaginatively. One time, I thoughtlessly blurted to him that he was not the equal of Travis Coe, that he was like a novel reader who couldn’t understand what he was reading and therefore couldn’t be deeply moved by it (although the analogy may have been lost on him: Billy never read anything, not even magazines). Not once in the year and a half of our relationship did he ever seem to experience the face-wrenching, shoulder-quivering, buttock-lunging ejaculations that Travis had. Billy was docile, polite, eager to please, and industrious to a fault, compared with Travis’s laziness, but Billy seemed always only mildly aroused or impassioned by our lovemaking, as if he were…I hesitate to continue the analogy, but there it is: as if he were the reader of novels who is never caught up in them, who can never suspend disbelief, who is too timid or jaded or leery to surrender himself to the pleasure.

When Billy was already turned fourteen and the novelty of his companionship as well as the charm of his physical attractiveness were both evaporating, I told him of my plan to visit my native Svanetia (of which I had regaled him with many stories, often trying out on him those that I would publish in Lamshged; or, The Shady Side of the Mountain) and I gave him a choice: He could either go with me on the trip, or we would end our relationship.

“I’ll have to ask my mother,” he said. I was taken aback, because during the time I had known him he had rarely mentioned either of his parents; indeed, he had no father, as I was to learn when it was his mother’s “boyfriend” who came to the Halfmoon to claim the body after the inquest. Billy did have a house, or cottage, on one of the most craggy precipices of Halfmoon Mountain, and I had picked him up there in Silvia several times, but I had never even seen, let alone met, his mother. She was, I gathered, a busy woman who took little interest in Billy’s whereabouts and often permitted him to “stay over with a friend,” his common excuse for spending the night with me.

“You’re not going to tell her about me?” I said to him in response.

“Oh, she sorta knows, anyhow,” he said.

I pestered him for an explanation of just what his mother knew, and he was able to reassure me that his mother didn’t know about our sexual relationship but knew that Billy often visited a “rich lady on the top floor of the Halfmoon who gave spending money in return for errands and other stuff.”

All he had to do, he said, was tell his mother that the rich lady wanted him to take a trip to Europe with her for a couple of weeks or so. “She’d be glad to get rid of me for a while,” he said to me, of his mother.

But that may have been too much as far as the woman was concerned, because she wouldn’t consent to the notion, and Billy was heartbroken, for he truly had been building up his anticipation of flying to Georgia and Svanetia. I couldn’t console him, and I mistakenly thought that the best thing to do, as I had done with Travis, was to “pay him off”—more handsomely than the severance pay I’d given Travis, by three times the amount.

He stared at the money offering with disdain. “Don’t you want me anymore?” he asked. “Don’t you want to see me again when you get back from Svanetia?”

“I’m going to be awfully busy when I get back,” I declared. “I’m going to write a stage play about the four ghosts who inhabit the Halfmoon.”

“I could help,” he offered. “I could play like I was one of the ghosts and say some stuff.”

I smiled, touched at the offer and the thought, but I said, “Billy, I wish for you much happiness. I wish for you that you will stay out of trouble, perhaps go back to school, be a good boy.”

He screwed up his face. “Haven’t I been a good boy?” he whined. “Haven’t I sorta made you happy?”

The county coroner was never able to determine conclusively that Billy had deliberately drowned himself in this swimming pool. It was highly possible, the Halfmoon’s management suggested, that he had slipped on the wet tiles (it had been raining) and fallen in. I stare down at this water, and I speak aloud to the old cat who is also staring at it. “Morris, it wasn’t an accident, was it?”

Morris slowly turns his old head and looks up at me. “Noo,” he says. It could be simply a feline utterance, but it strikes me more as the way a Bodarks man would render a negative.

“I’m going on down the hill a ways,” I tell him. “You go on back inside, if you want.” Like my apartment door itself, the large French doors on the east side of the Halfmoon’s lobby have a Cat-Port cut into the bottom pane of glass, expressly for Morris’s convenience, with even steps, like a stile, leading up and down for his arthritic egress and ingress. Morris could easily go back to the lobby and the adulation of the hotel’s guests, if he wanted, or he could return to the apartment. But he doesn’t want. He wants to follow me.

Cat owners know that even those cats who uncustomarily do follow their masters for brief stretches will not stray far beyond the known delimits of their domestic domain. No cat wants to leave the boundaries of its known world, and I am certain that Morris, in the entire course of his life, except for the few occasions I’d taken him (reluctantly and complainingly on his part) for a ride in Silvia, has never been beyond the property line of the Halfmoon.

“Go home, Morris!” I snap at him as he continues to follow me down the steep slope that drops off the eastern side of the Halfmoon’s front yard. But he will neither turn nor slow his determined dogging (or unwonted catting) of my heels.

The descent of a spiderweb of stone steps, concrete steps, iron steps, and wooden steps takes us, in time, to the significant place where the newly restored Victorian gazebo marks Halfmoon Spring; it’s a copper-pagoda-roofed gingerbread Gothic structure that has been one of my favorite resting places on my hikes. It is within easy sight of the Arcata Springs Public Library, where I first laid eyes on Travis and where there are now three whole shelves of my books in their domestic and foreign editions, donated by the author in grateful recognition of all the research I’ve done in that old building.

I sit in the gazebo. Morris sits on the bench beside me, but far enough away that he can look up into my eyes without getting a crick in his neck. “Well, Morris,” I say. “You have wandered a long way from home. What have you got to say for yourself, dear cat?”

“It is time, dear Kat,” he says, “that you face the real reason Billy drowned himself.” It is the sort of thing I might say to myself, and thus I am reluctant to believe, at first, that he has actually spoken. He certainly has not moved his lips. He doesn’t have lips. But the words, I convince myself, came from his mouth.

The suggestion itself appalls me so much that I find it difficult to reflect upon this strange circumstance of his speaking not in mews and ows and mees and noos but in human speech. “I am a tired and frightened woman approaching middle age,” I declare, “and I refuse to allow myself to believe that my loneliness is making me hear you speak to me.”

“You’re certainly frightened,” he says, “and this hike has tired you. But you are a good sight short of even approaching middle age. And it isn’t your loneliness that lets you hear me. It’s my impatience. Do you think I’ve had it easy, being silent all these years?”

I laugh, but nervously. “Hush, Morris,” I say. “I refuse to believe that you are talking. It won’t wash, not even in one of my novels.”

“This isn’t your novel,” he says.

“Oh?” I say. Then, “No, you’re right, it isn’t a novel, it’s a memoir.”

“At the moment, it isn’t even your memoir. You aren’t writing, are you? Didn’t you set aside your pencil to follow me downstairs?”

“Then who is writing this?”

“I am,” he says.

“In my voice? In this present tense, in my first person?”

“Keep your person, sweet Kat. You won’t have it much longer.”

I shudder at this suggestion of an approaching ending. Endings are hideous. In the writing of each of my books, the ending has gone too fast and too painfully for me, like…like Billy’s premature and weak ejaculations. “Morris,” I say, addressing him thus because I am not going to admit, even to myself in my deluded state, that this cat is actually Dan, “why don’t you tell me why Billy killed himself?”

A tourist couple strolling on Spring Street pause and turn to stare briefly at me. Are they wondering at this weird “local character” with red hair and dark shades talking to herself? Or can they actually hear the talking cat?

The talking cat says to me, “You tried to get Billy to do something that you could never ask of Islamber, Dzhordzha, or Kenny, and that even Travis could bring himself to do only once.”

The cat’s reminder brings back the recent voice of Travis, mature, without a trace of his old Bodark accent, who, when I teasingly reminisced on the telephone about that one rare occasion, jokingly declared, “And look at me now! The chicks call me the best ‘face man’ in Hollywood!”

“Are you going to lecture me with analogies,” I ask Morris, “on how the novelist demands the oral gratification of all his readers?”

The cat grins. “No,” he says, “make yourself comfortable and I’m going to tell you a story.”

III

Ekaterina you were, and you were not at all. You were from a land far away, once upon a time and upon no time at all, where stories always begin, “There was, and there was not at all…,” as if to confute truth or affirm invention, in celebration of the imagination’s freedom to transcend the stubborn facts of “reality”: you were, and still are, Ekaterina: all of this is real, and not a word of it is true: you escaped the clutches of a sadist named Bolshakov (a real name) who could not separate truth from fiction, and you came to America…

All afternoon the cat talks. There are a few more pedestrians on the sidewalk of Spring Street who pause to observe this woman listening—or appearing to listen—to an old yellow cat who does not move his lips, who in fact doesn’t even have any lips, just that cute bowed dimple beneath his harelip.

The cat tells me his story of my story: my coming to America, my months in Pittsburgh, Knox Ogden, Kenny, Ingraham. I have told this story in more objective form, with little reference to any “ghosts,” in Chapters Fifteen and Sixteen of this memoir, and I invite my reader to refer to it. I am enchanted with the cat’s fanciful conception of Daniel Lyam Montross as a sort of ghost-with-a-resume, and I am so intent on the story that I scarcely notice that among the scant traffic on Spring Street there is an old gray Jeep that has passed me more than once.

I become convinced it is indeed the cat, not my wild imagination, when Morris tells me things about Pittsburgh that I did not know: for example, why did Kenny never ask, as both Travis and Billy were to do, to see me undress? The answer, Morris/Dan tells me, and I’m sorry you’ve had to wait this long to learn the particulars from me, was simply that he did not need to ask. And then he tells me about that peephole that Kenny had in the broom closet—spying upon me! I am blushing, but I am also eager to hear the rest of this cat’s story, and even more eager to get back to my writing desk and revise certain parts of this memoir. I’ll do it first thing tomorrow…But no, the woman from Paris Review is coming to interview me.

It is near on to suppertime when Morris says, Dusk was fallen. The long day was over. My bag of tricks was empty, but I had you here…almost. You needed time to think about it, but both I. and I were confident you’d stay, because, you see, you had absolutely nowhere else to go.

Riding down to the yellow house in I.’s Blazer, going off to meet his friends, who would become your friends too, you informed him, “I love the little serendipities of life, but this coincidence I like best: in Svanetian, Lisedi, the name of the town I came from, means ‘to remain, to stay more, to stick around.’”

I wait. The cat appears to have quit talking. A little girl, broken away from her strolling parents on the sidewalk, rushes into the gazebo, stares down at the trickle of Halfmoon Spring, shuts her eyes, and throws a penny into the water. “I hope your wish comes true,” I say to her, and she smiles bashfully and runs back to her parents, who walk on. The old gray Jeep passes me slowly once again, and I try to detect its driver, to see if he could by any chance be Bolshakov, but he is not driving slowly enough for me to have a good look at him. I return my gaze to my cat and wait. Morris says nothing. Finally, I decide that his story is concluded, and I remark, “That was lovely. Truly. I have only a few questions. First, if indeed you are Dan Montross, or his spirit, why did you leave the Bodarks to journey all that way through time and space to Pittsburgh in search of me? Or was I just the accidental subject of your attentions and affections?”

Morris says nothing.

“Can’t answer that one, huh?” I challenge him. “Then tell me this: Have you obliterated Anangka? Are you in full control of my destiny now?”

The cat, who was so loquacious all afternoon, has become mute. But do I detect a slight shaking of his head? Cats do not shake their heads. They toss them, or vigorously nod them when they’re washing themselves, but they don’t shake them.

“Did you,” I ask of the cat, with a mounting sense of futility, “arrange for Ingraham to enter the story simply in order to bring me here to the Bodarks?”

Cats are self-conscious creatures, and if you talk to one intensely enough, he will begin licking himself in embarrassment. This is what Morris now does, although the nodding of his head as he does so could be an affirmative answer to my question.

“How do you suppose Ingraham would feel,” I demand, “if he knew that his whole purpose in life was simply to bring me to the Bodarks? Answer me that. Or has the cat got your tongue?”

But the cat has his own tongue, and he will not respond.

“Morris,” I upbraid him. “At least tell me what you meant by pointing to that inscription over the fireplace earlier today, that business about being my ardent lover ‘when the snow the earth doth cover.’” When my continued questions draw no further response from the old cat, I ask in desperation, “If you are Dan, what do you want of me?” And when he doesn’t answer, I entreat, “Are you waiting for me to join you in the ‘spirit world’? Do you want me to die?”

The old gray Jeep has now come to a stop beside a parking meter across the street, and a tall man exits from it and places a coin in the parking meter, then crosses the street to the gazebo, glances at Morris, and says to me, “Is that you, Ekaterina? Are you reduced, in your dotage, to talking to cats?”

IV

I haven’t seen him for years. It is Ingraham. I am a bit put out by his question and his feeble but mocking laughter. “Ot!” I say, “or Och, as the case may be.” He appears not to hear me. I make a sign language, a pantomime of wishing to write something, and he hands me his ballpoint and a few of his note cards. I write, What are you doing here?

“I heard about the séance they’re having tonight,” he says, “and I thought I’d like to go. I’ve never been to a séance before. Are you going?”

I nod and write, I’ve never been to one either. And I’m scared.

“Oh, I shouldn’t think there’s anything to be afraid of,” he says.

Not about the séance itself. I don’t think any of the Halfmoon’s—or the Mezzaluna’s—ghosts will actually he conjured. If they were, I’d be as delighted to meet them as I would have been to meet Lawren Carnegie or Knox Ogden or Dan Montross when we were in Pittsburgh.

He is patient while I write, as if he really has nothing better to do. He reads the card twice, frowning, then asks, “How do you know that Dan Montross—or his ghost—was in Pittsburgh?”

I smile and write, He told me. I am tempted to write for him the whole story just as I’ve heard it from Morris, if for no other reason than to convince him that Morris has been talking to me, but I am afraid that Ingraham might steal the story and appropriate it for some future fiction of his, beating me to it.

“So,” he says, “in your dotage you talk to both your cat and the ghost of Montross.”

Or maybe they are the same, I write. Ingraham stares at my cat, then hesitantly reaches out and attempts to stroke Morris’s back. Morris shies away from his touch. My cat gives me one more look, as if a final look, and then, despite the arthritis that has often left him almost unable to drag himself from floor to floor of the Halfmoon, he bounds out of the gazebo and scampers up the hill toward home. I smile at a memory and write, The last time you took notice of Morris was when we were leaving the Halfmoon after that BOW convention—when you were still pretending that I was Cathlin McWalter—and when I said good-bye to Morris and told him I’d be back, you said, “How come you can talk to the damned cat, but not to me?”

“Was that”—he gestures in the direction Morris has disappeared—“the same cat? He must be ancient.”

In finger language I count eighteen, for Morris’s years.

We reminisce, Ingraham and I, about that long-ago springtime of my first coming to the Bodarks. I refresh his memory of the wonderful speech he gave to the bow, equating the genuine writer’s addiction with the genuine drinker’s addiction, the precepts of which often came back to me during my struggles to become a writer. Ingraham says that he no longer drinks at all these days—“Except a glass of wine on special occasions. And I think I’ve become dull and uninteresting. I’m not any fun anymore.”

We make idle chitchat about our current lives, our current projects: I fill a card or two with a synopsis of Dawn of the Osage, pointing out that perhaps it is a kind of prehistory of the Stick Around country, and thus an ultimate fulfillment of Ingraham’s old wish that I write about Stick Around, which, as it turns out, he himself has resumed doing in full force, even to the extent of writing about some of the Osages who were there when the white men, the first Ingledews, arrived. Ingraham and I, two craftsmen trading shop talk as the afternoon wanes, exchange information and observations on the customs and beliefs of the Osages. I consider inviting him up to see my Halfmoon digs, which he has never seen. I consider inviting him to have supper there with me. Finally, choosing my words carefully, upon a fresh new card, I do, and when he expresses delight in his acceptance, I write, What can I fix you for supper? I am mindful of using fix in the colloquial, Bodarkadian sense.

He removes from the pocket of his windbreaker some sheets of paper, unfolds them, consults them. “Let’s see,” he says, and begins quoting: “…that lovely suite of rooms on the top floor of the Moonbeam Hotel, with my own futuristic kitchen, where I could whip up one of those chicken dishes that grace the pages of Cathlin’s Quick Chick Cookbook…”

I recognize what he is reading; two hours or so earlier this afternoon my cat Morris quoted the entire document to me as part of his narrative of my life in Pittsburgh. You still have my obituary! I write.

“No, this is only a Xerox. The original I have donated to Special Collections at the university, along with a few other souvenirs of my association with the famous V. Kelian. Well, could your futuristic kitchen perhaps handle a Svanetian version of chicken and dumplings?”

I laugh and write, I’ll try.

He hands the sheets of paper to me, as if making me a present of them. “Notice the date, if you will,” he suggests.

During Morris’s quoting of the document, I already noticed the date, April 24, 2021, and I have already for one sweet moment sighed and reflected to myself, Well, at least I have almost thirty more years to live. But when Morris (or Dan, if you please) quoted my obituary back to me, I had observed that today, April 22, is just the day before the day of the month I’m supposed to die, and that has not helped my frame of mind. As if reading my thoughts, Ingraham observes, “There are so many things in your obituary that ‘came true.’ The Moonbeam is the Halfmoon, of course. And you do have a twelve-year-old houseboy, I presume.”

I shake my head. Not anymore, I scribble, not for the last five years.

“Do you mean he’s seventeen now?”

No, I mean I haven’t had a servant for five years.

“Despite your enormous wealth?” he asks, and I feel the question is rhetorical and deserves no answer. “Well, do you still drink too much vodka? Do you take twelve-mile hikes each day? Are you writing a book about the mushrooms of the Bodarks?”

To each of these questions I shake my head. Don’t try to frighten me further, I write. There is much in this obituary that was purely fanciful and will not come true.

“I notice you’re not even smoking anymore,” he observes. “Are you by any chance writing a memoir called Louder, Engram!?”

As I was when Morris quoted it, I am amazed that I actually used that title in that long-ago imaginary obituary, and I scan the pages he has given me, in search of it, and sure enough, there it is: So who are the suspects? I’m a writer, after all, and I can’t give away endings, and this isn’t the ending. You haven’t heard the last of me. But my devoted readers who are familiar with my memoirs, Louder, Engram! will recall that I spent some years in my early twenties incarcerated…

“And how about this?” Ingraham’s long finger points to another place in the obituary, where I wrote, Do you think I might have been done in by some person driven mad by envy of my riches? (Even Professor Ingraham himself?) Then why didn’t he or she murder me thirty-five years ago, when my first novel, Geordie Lad, catapulted me to fame?

I hold out my hand for a fresh card upon which to write, and he gives it to me, and I write, If you are going to kill me, why didn’t you do it when Georgie Boy was such a success?

“I was tempted, then,” he says, smiling, “but this obituary made me a suspect, didn’t it?”

I scribble hurriedly, Let’s not joke, dear friend and mentor. Often these days I am overcome with a premonition of an early death.

His long finger slides down the page I hold in my hand until it comes to the penultimate paragraph: I’m not going to tell you, yet, who killed me. But I can say this much: Bolshakov is actually at large. He is out there, even in the vicinity of the Moonbeam Hotel…

“He is, isn’t he?” Ingraham says, and I wonder how he knows. When I nod, Ingraham’s face softens in sympathy or concern and he says, “I shouldn’t be showing you this document at a time like this, if you are preoccupied with an early death. But your last three books, I couldn’t help noticing, have an obsession with death.”

Oh? I write. Have you read my last three books?

“I have read everything you have written, dear Kat,” he confesses. “Even your stories in Playboy.”

I am greatly flattered, especially in view of his disinclination to read anything that has been printed. And I confess, on a new card, Then it won’t bother me to admit that I’ve read everything of yours, even the termite novel and your latest, Oratorio in the Arboretum.

“Which came out the same season as your Original Flavor but sold a fraction of the copies yours did,” he observes with a covetous leer. “That title of yours, by the way, I took to be an allusion to your return to the ‘flavor’ of Georgie Boy after your experimentation with so many different flavors. And also a return to your exploration of the ways that death is transcended.”

Yes, I write, admitting it, I stopped just short of stealing your device of using the future tense in the end. I was dying to use the future tense, but that it is your own personal device, with which you have ended all your books.

“I am happy you noticed,” he says, making a slight bow. “But that shouldn’t have stopped you. I don’t own the patent on the future tense.”

But the reader would know I purloined it from you.

“What reader?” he demands. “Your millions of readers have never heard of me. If you use the future tense, probably any reader of any of my books would think I purloined it from you.”

All right, then. I will use the future tense.

“You will,” he concedes.

Then here we are together, I write, using the present tense for the last time, in the Halfmoon Spring gazebo, one of my favorite places in Arcaty, just a stone’s throw from the public library, and probably we are sitting at the same spot where once sat Osage Indians. Perhaps someday the town fathers of Arcaty will affix a bronze plaque to this bench: HERE SAT INGRAHAM AND V. KELIAN TALKING ABOUT DEATH AND INDIANS AND THE WRITING OF NOVELS.

Ingraham will read this and laugh, but then he will say, “Allow me to make a minor correction in tense. The plaque will read: HERE WILL SIT V. KELIAN AND INGRAHAM FOREVER TALK? ING ABOUT DEATH AND INDIANS AND THE WRITING OF NOVELS.”

“That will do,” I will say aloud, and he will hear me. “And that way, neither of us will ever die.”

25

I

Ingraham will also sit beside me in the Crystal Room during the séance, which, true to the stuff of memoirs rather than novels, will not be even noteworthy, let alone suspenseful or climactic. I will wish myself able to report that it was uncomfortably fraught with peril or surprise or at least revelation, but in fact I will be reminded that the last time Ingraham and I sat together in this room was the day of his speech to bow comparing drinking and writing, which was much more entertaining than this séance will have been. Veronica, the medium, will seem almost drunk herself, but we will determine that it is some sort of self-induced trance, not intoxication, and I will comment on a card to Ingraham that perhaps there is not only a link between drinking and writing but also a link between the truly creative state and the state of spiritualistic trance: the writer summons entities who materialize from the Other Side of imagination and become temporary “presences.”

But no ghosts will walk. Or even, although we will be invited by Veronica to listen carefully, talk. The audience of perhaps three hundred crowding the Crystal Room will observe an expectant silence for a half hour’s worth of Veronica’s “trance talk,” her lubricious attempt to contact her “guide,” or spirit from the Other Side, and, when that fails, her attempt to turn the meeting over to her “control,” the spirit on the Other Side apparently in charge of granting permissions to the departed souls who wish to make contact with us the living. After a while, when nothing extraordinary occurs and the audience begins to grow restless, Veronica will mumble an excuse to the effect that there may be “hostile, disbelieving” persons present who have been preventing the contact from taking place. (I will reflect, and even attempt to remark on a card to Ingraham, that since I have been using the future tense, which gives the user considerable control over events, I have been unconsciously preventing anything significant from happening. Ingraham will read my card with a wry smile; he will think carefully about that, and he will whisper to me, “That will very well conceivably be the case.”)

There will be only one incident worth reporting. Toward the end, Morris will wander into the Crystal Room, as he will often have done throughout his long life, and he will glance around him as if to wonder why there are people packing the place wall-to-wall, and then he will saunter slowly, hampered by his arthritis, toward the podium where Veronica sits. I will find that my breathing has stopped in anticipation, because I will have convinced myself by this time that Morris indeed is inhabited by some presence from the Other Side. Veronica will glance down at him with obvious discomfiture; spiritualists are always uneasy in the presence of cats. He will stare up at her for a long moment, with that penetrating, solemn, all-wise gaze that most cats possess to some degree and Morris possesses in abundance. I will strain my ears to catch any repetition of the sounds that Morris made to me all that afternoon. But he will be as mute as ever. Then he will turn his gaze from her to me and will seem to look at me sadly, or with longing. He will then exit slowly through the door to the kitchen. The audience, either amused by the presence of a pet at a serious séance or convinced that Morris was the only materialization during the event, will laugh, and the laughter will signal the end of the session.

Afterward, the photographers, the television cameramen, the reporters will surround me and Ingraham, and they will insist I confess my identity. But I will not. “This is a far cry from the Mezzaluna, don’t you think?” one of them will pester, but I will shrug my shoulders, and I will take Ingraham’s arm and lead him quickly out of the Crystal Room, with the media people in hot pursuit, and when we reach the elevator Ingraham will have the sense and the heft to bar any of them from getting on with us.

At my door, Ingraham will give me a quick, light kiss on the cheek and he will say, “I’d better hit the road, to get back to Fateville.”

I will have a card ready for him, which I will already have written while in the Crystal Room: Do Did you by any chance see anybody in here the Crystal Room who resembled Bolshakov?

“I’m sorry,” Ingraham will say, “but unfortunately my mental image of Bolshakov has been contaminated by having seen the movie of Georgie Boy more than once. Bolshakov to me no longer resembles the Bolshakov of the book, or the man I met briefly in Pittsburgh, or even that innocent Dr. MacLean we met that one morning in the Crystal Room, but rather the actor Sert Reichert, with his sinister eyes, the evil widow’s peak in his slicked-down hairline, and his nasty leer. Did Bolshakov look anything at all like Sert Reichert?”

I will shake my head. Then I will seize Ingraham by both his arms as if to draw him to me, and I will exaggerate the movements of my lips the better for him to read them: “Stay with me!”

“Pardon?” He will not have heard me.

Since he will not be able to hear me anyway, I will feel free to babble whatever comes into my head: “Spend the night with me! Sleep with me if you wish! Nestle your grown man’s tallywhacker into the folds of my little girl’s gillyclicker that has never had a grown man before!”

He will offer me his ballpoint and cards. “Could you write any of this down?”

I will shake my head, and I will go on babbling. “When you were twelve you lusted after grown women and it has haunted all of your books! Let us pretend for one night that you are twelve again! I will take away your virginity!”

“I’m sorry, Kat. Why are you doing this? You know I can’t hear a word you’re saying.”

“Read my lips! I cannot be alone tonight! It has been years since last I had a boy! Be a boy again for me tonight! Let me undress you! Let me show you what to do with your thingie!”

Even if he hasn’t caught a word, he will have sensed the distress and the longing and the loneliness in my tone, and he will usher me through my door and will close the door behind us. “I think you may be needing a stiff one,” he will say.

“Yes! Yes! Let me make it stiff for us!”

But he will be at my bar, mixing drinks. That kind of stiffness: straight vodka for me and, despite his having been on the wagon for many years, an uncustomary bourbon for himself. “Look what you’re doing to me,” he will observe, offering a toast. “But cheers anyhow.”

I will gulp my vodka and, emboldened, will write on a card, You have always wanted me, haven’t you?

Reading it, he will smile. “Of course I have.”

I will write, Do you want me now?

“Don’t tease me, Kat. You know you can’t violate your own predilections.”

I could try! I will write. Anything to get him to stay the night with me.

“I’m a married man,” he will say, “not one of your boys.”

I will sigh. I will think, and I will think, and I will think, desperately trying for some way to get him to stay. I will write, Okay, if we are fated never to be lovers, then we must be sister and brother, and you must swear brotherhood. We must have the Svanetian ceremony of sworn kinship.

He will glance at his watch. “How long will this take?”

A little while, I will write, and I will calculate how long I will be able to keep him with the ceremony. I will need several cards to explain the ceremony to him: it is really very simple, but it is solemn; it requires the pledging of oaths to each other, and, most importantly, it requires that we mingle our blood: we must make tiny cuts in the little fingers of our right hands and hold those cuts together tightly while our blood mingles and we say our words.

“I’m an old hand at pricking my little finger,” he will say, “because as a diabetic I have to monitor my blood sugar regularly. But I don’t know about mingling our blood. Have you been tested for HIV? I don’t want to die of AIDS.”

I have had no sex for five years! I will write, and I will finish off my glass and add, Except what I can give myself!

We will swear brotherhood and sisterhood, there in my conversation pit, performing the simple ceremony, using a single-edged razor blade, mingling our blood, taking the vows. “That wasn’t so bad,” he will observe when we have finished and are wrapping little Band-Aids on our pinkies.

I will write, Now we are brother and sister. We must always be willing to receive each other at any time. I must be willing to lend you money whenever you need it, in whatever amount. I must never cheat you, nor deceive you. If either one of us dies, the other must either arrange the funeral or speak the obsequies. I want you to bury me at Stick Around.

He will be taken aback. “But the Stick Around cemetery is strictly for natives. Not even Eli Willard is buried there. Not even Daniel Lyam Montross is buried there.”

I don’t need the cemetery, I will write. Bury me in the woods near mushrooms, near Daniel, anywhere. You must promise. Promise me.

He will laugh, but nervously. “You’ll probably outlive me. But if you don’t, I’ll see to it you get yourself buried at Stick Around.” As an afterthought, he’ll add, “Do you still want to have us play Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto?”

I will be charmed that he has remembered. But it was, after all, in my obituary. I will nod my head. Then, at a loss for a way of keeping him longer, especially because he has not been inclined to refill his drink, I will lead him and his unfinished drink to the chess nook and show him my superlative Bombay inlaid mother-of-pearl chess table, with its Dieppe pieces in position, waiting but thoroughly covered with the dust of years, the years that have gone since last Billy and I attempted to play there.

“A game, huh?” Ingraham will say. He will glance at his watch once more and say, “I really shouldn’t, but I can’t resist.” He will sit himself down there at the black side, although I will have been prepared to offer him the white side.

We will play. I will be badly out of practice; and his practice, he will explain, will have been limited to playing his own computer, a program called Chessmaster 2100, a sort of masturbation. He has not played a human for years. But the computer will have kept his sense of the game alive, whereas my own will have atrophied. Aloud, because he will not be able to hear me anyway, I will curse myself for my mistakes: castling too soon, forcing him to kill off both our queens. Steadily he will take my pawns, leaving me at a material disadvantage, and then he will have two horses to my one. Thinking of these horses, I will remember the old Bodark custom of ride-and-tie, and how Ingraham and I once upon a time did it. I will realize that I am doomed on this board. Neither of us will drink much; his one glass of bourbon, my one of vodka, will get us through the game.

But the game will drag on. I will be glad for that, in a way. It will keep him with me. I will be able to see where the game is leading: into a stalemate, if I am not careful. I will be able to see where the night is going: into my bed, if I can arrange it and steel myself. I will be able—for I will be controlling the future tense, will I not?—to know what will inevitably happen to prevent me from ever knowing the experience of sex with a grown man: the ultimate, inexorable, foregone arrival of the Visitor.

We will find ourselves with equal pieces: each having one rook, one bishop, one knight. Steadily we will remove these from each other until I am left with a bishop, he with a rook, which is trying to protect a pawn seeking queendom, but futilely, because of my bishop’s aim on her. Ingraham will look at his watch yet again. “I’m really going to catch hell from my wife,” he will say. We will be in the seventy-third move of our endgame.

I will resign myself (not resigning the game, which is almost stalemated) to Ingraham’s eventual departure. The future tense will be able to keep him for only so long. I will be tempted to ask for his cards and to write upon them a final message of some sort, a proper word of thanks, perhaps, a good-bye, a farewell, a reminder of our responsibilities to each other in sworn brotherhood, some acceptable ending for him, who hates endings and cannot write them.

But at the moment I will begin to write upon the card, the long-expected knock will come at my door. At the instant of the sound, the firm, determined rapping. I will know who it is. Instead of writing what I will have intended on the card, I will write, There is someone at the door. I know it is Bolshakov.

Ingraham will jerk his head around nervously, as if attempting to hear the sound of the knocking. “How do you know?” he will ask, as if suspecting me of having arranged it. In a way, I will reflect, I will have arranged it, for I will have been handling the future tense, will I have not?

All these years, of course, I have been expecting him.

“Well, let me get it,” he will offer boldly. “It may just be some drunk tourist or a reporter.”

He will go to the door. Afraid, I will not follow, but I will know that Ingraham cannot handle any conversation with Bolshakov. I will have to do that myself. I will listen. I will hear the two men’s voices. I will not hear their words. Ingraham’s voice will raise in both volume and pitch, as if he is arguing with the man.

The man will be armed, of course. When I see dear Ingraham walking backward, coming back into the room one step behind the other, I will know that a Beretta automatic with a long silencer screwed into its barrel is aiming at his stomach. I will see the silencer moving laterally past the door, and then the Beretta itself, and then the hand holding it. And then the trench coat.

II

“Na Bodarks udivitelno khorosho, Yekaterina,” he will say to me in Russian, as if making pleasant conversation: “It is wonderful in the Bodarks.” “Chudnaya gostinitsa” (“A wonderful hotel”). He will look around himself as if admiring my apartment, and he will seem almost unmindful of the weapon he will be brandishing, and he will go on making chitchat, pleasantries about the setting, the weather, the spring night. Although I have told myself a thousand times that he will appear one day, I will still find that I am not totally prepared for it: my adrenaline will be roaring, my heart thumping against my breast, my head reeling. He has aged, I will notice: his hair will be much grayer, his face not quite so babyish, his shoulders stooped. Even his trench coat, I will observe, will no longer be the neat, clean thing he always wore; it will distinctly remind me of the grungy trench coat Ingraham himself once wore: seedy, grimy, threadbare, a complete lack of neatness that Bolshakov should never bring himself to permit.

It will have been years since last I heard Russian, and, though it is a language that I know by heart, I will refuse to speak it. In English, I will ask him kindly to speak English.

He will incline his head toward Ingraham and say, still in Russian, “I do not wish to be understood.”

“He can’t understand you anyway,” I will point out, in English. “He’s deaf.”

My mentor and my tormentor will stare at each other, the former defiantly, warily, and contemptuously, the latter with careful observation; and then the latter will address the former, speaking English for the first time: “Ah, yes. I did not recognize you. The professor from Pittsburgh. He of the bodark plates. Do you know how long it took me to figure out the reference of Bodark?”

“If you want him to know what you’re saying, you’re going to have to write it down,” I will tell him.

“I don’t want him to know what I’m saying. I do not care. But I want him to observe what I am going to do.” He will snap open the physician’s gladstone bag that he is carrying, and he will bring out of it a length of rope or strong cord. Carefully, keeping his weapon trained upon Ingraham and me, he will seize one of the ladder-backed Mount Judea folk chairs that are placed against my foyer walls, and he will set it up facing my conversation pit, and he will say to Ingraham, “Please sit,” and he will gesture for him to be seated in the chair. Ingraham will not comply, perhaps because he hasn’t heard. Our adversary will demonstrate the pistol and its silencer, popping off a round that will puncture my precious Magritte painting, leaving a hole in the crescent moon. Ingraham, who as an art historian will have, earlier this evening, expressed enormous admiration for that painting, will wince as if he himself has been shot, and he will glare at the intruder with loathing. “SIT!” he will be told again, loudly enough for him to hear. He will sit, and Bolshakov will bind his hands behind him to the slats of the chair.

The chair will face the conversation pit. “Now, Yekaterina,” he will say, “you will make yourself comfortable upon those cushions, first removing all of your garments.”

I will shake my head. “You may as well shoot me now,” I will tell him. “I do not intend to participate in whatever diabolical ‘foreplay’ you have contrived to amuse yourself before the killing.”

He will laugh, or he will make that sound all too painfully familiar to me, as if something were caught in his throat while he is making an effort at expressing mirth or sadistic glee. “You seem to have prepared yourself for your punishment,” he will remark. “You seem to have expected that my retribution would catch up with you.” He will open the gladstone bag again and draw out a prepared hypodermic syringe. “But I assure you that the ‘foreplay’ I have in mind for you will not only stimulate your novelist’s insatiable lust for the outlandish, the fantastic, but it will also, after all these years, prepare you to accept yourself as you really are before the moment of your death. Let me have your arm.”

“Shoot me!” I will snap at him. “Not with the needle! With the gun! Kill me and get it over with!”

“This mild drug”—he will hold up the hand with the needle—“will only remove some of your inhibitions. It will not knock you out, nor even”—that demoniac coughing chuckle again—“nor even make you my slave. Your arm.” And he will seize my arm and jab in the needle before I can hit him. Before his face feels the full brunt of the backhanded slap that I will throw at him, he will have injected the contents of the syringe into my arm. “There!” he will exclaim, stepping back from me and rubbing the smart from the slap I have given him on his face. “That didn’t hurt either of us. Now why don’t you accept my suggestion and make yourself comfortable? Please remove everything you are wearing.” Whatever the drug he will have given me, it will quickly be taking effect. I will no longer have the will to struggle against him. “Melancholy man!” I will whine at him. “You are the personification of evil!” But I will find myself unbuttoning my dress and stepping out of it. I will find myself divesting myself of all my garments, just as he will have bade me, until I am standing revealed bare to both men. I will be able to detect in the gaze of Ingraham, who has never seen me naked before, a certain admiration for my body, an art historian’s appreciation of classical nudity.

“No,” Bolshakov will say. “Despite how you tried so desperately to render me in your novel, I am not evil. You should have allowed your readers to see me neither as an evil man nor as a genius, but as someone who for all my prejudices was simply trying to do my best but who happened—in your case—to be wrong.” Once again the man will fish around in his bulging doctor’s kit and he will bring out, this time, an artificial penis, a convincingly lifelike instrument of flesh-colored rubber attached to cloth straps. He will lay his pistol aside on a cushion of the conversation pit, substituting his focus from one erect device to the other, and I will no longer have the will or the inclination even to think about attempting to seize the pistol and turn it on him. I will only wonder, momentarily, if Bolshakov’s sinister career as a psychiatrist and flagrant womanizer has left him impotent, and if he will be required to use this dildo in order to rape me. “Now I intend an experiment,” he will intone didactically, not unmindful of his captive audience, Ingraham, “to demonstrate that one of my theories, at least, was correct. You will recall how I attempted so unsuccessfully, as part of your therapy, to help you understand that in reality, as opposed to the unreality or surreality of your fabricated world, you are only a little girl wanting to grow up and acquire a penis. Remember how I tried to use the matryoshka dolls to show you? You are that smallest, innermost of the diminishing dolls, the little girl, wanting to break outward and assume the form of the boy doll. I cannot give you the form and shape of the boy, but I am going to give you the possession of this penis.”

He will affix the penis to my groin, attaching the straps behind my buttocks. Despite the numbing of the drug he will have given me, I will find myself enormously amused by the sight of the erect “member” that I will have acquired. Or will it not be amusement so much as delight? Will I discover that I want this prick?

“Now,” he will say, slowly unfastening the belt of his trousers, “here comes the part that you will like most. I am sure that in your most intense and private fantasies, over the years, you have dwelt often upon this daydream, and now you can do it! You are going to fuck me. You are going to penetrate me with your penis to your full and complete satisfaction, and perhaps even mine, if I am successful in pretending for your sake that I am female. And then, once you have finished fucking me, you are going to fuck your friend, the professor there.”

While Bolshakov is undressing himself, I will glance at Ingraham, who of course will have no awareness of these things that Bolshakov has been saying and so will not understand what he will soon be required to watch and eventually to do. But Ingraham will know that something awful or incredible is about to happen, and he will look at me sadly, or with longing. I will recognize or recall the look: it will be the very same look that was the last look I had from my cat and friend, Morris.

Almost as if my thought of him will make him materialize again (and I will, after all, be exerting, despite the drug, continued control of the future tense), Morris will enter through his Cat-Port. The aged and feeble cat will stand there surveying this strange scene: the two men in his mistress’s apartment, the one man bound to a chair, the other stepping out of boxer shorts patterned with red hearts. Bolshakov, if he will have noticed the cat at all, will pay him no mind. Morris will stand for only another moment, appearing to study the scene, and then he will exit, in the direction of the music room.

The naked Bolshakov will stretch himself out supine upon the cushions of the conversation pit, hiking up his knees and holding out his arms to me. “I am yours, dear boy,” he will say to me. “Or would you rather have me turn over on my stomach?”

Mingled in my mind with powerlessness to disobey him will still be caginess, craft: perhaps if I obey him and follow through on this perverted charade, he will be sufficiently diverted not to notice that I am reaching for the pistol lying upon the near cushion. But then I will marvel at this conflict in myself: Would I rather use the penis than the pistol upon him? I will attempt to examine this conflict, to think about it.

“Wait,” he will say. “I have forgotten something.” He will again go to his doctor’s bag and will bring out a tube of lubricating jelly, and he will smear it almost lovingly upon my penis, as if the penis is indeed part of me. “Now,” he will say, lying back down. “Quickly. Fuck me!” I will tell myself that it is the drug, not my own will, that is making me do his bidding. I will find myself between his legs, attempting to insert the artificial penis. He will have to guide me with his hand.

At the moment of my entrance, the apartment will flood with the booming baritone of long-dead Nelson Eddy:

Ah! sweet mystery of life, at last I’ve found thee!

Whence will come this song? I will recall that I indeed possess in my vast collection of music an old 33? lp of the Victor Herbert operetta Naughty Marietta, but I would have been hard pressed to locate the album myself in the cabinets filled with records and compact discs. How could Morris possibly have found it, dragged it out, placed it upon the turntable, and started the machine running? Or will there have been some human other than we three in the apartment? My mind will be momentarily stunned out of its drugged submission.

Even Ingraham, deaf though he is, will recognize the music, and he will lend his atrocious off-key accompaniment to the lyrics of the unknown Rida Johnson Young:

Ah! I know at last the secret of it all!

All the longing, seeking, striving, waiting, yearning…

“What is this?!” Bolshakov will demand, staring at Ingraham as if Ingraham were lip-synching Nelson Eddy’s dulcet tones. “SILENCE!” Bolshakov will yell at Ingraham, and then, realizing that Ingraham cannot be producing the full orchestral accompaniment in waltz time, he will hastily withdraw his rectum from my dildo and scramble to his feet, picking up his pistol. “Who turned on the music?!” he will demand of me.

The burning hopes, the joy and idle tears that

fall…!

“Sometimes it just comes on by itself,” I will tell him. “Would you like to see my music system?” I will make the suggestion in hopes that in the acceptance of it Bolshakov will allow me to discover for myself if indeed it is a rheumatoid tomcat who has turned on the music system.

Ingraham, despite whatever fear and anxiety he himself will be feeling (and surely Bolshakov will intend to shoot him ultimately as well), will go on attempting unsuccessfully to harmonize his terrible bass with the great baritone:

For ’tis love, and love alone, the world is seeking!

Ingraham’s customarily dour face will be so jubilant that I will think that perhaps Ingraham, in the face of his mortality, has finally himself at last penetrated the sweet mystery of life, whatever that is.

Both naked, Bolshakov and I will step into the music room, where we will find, as I will have expected, that no cat has placed any record upon the Ortofon’s turntable. Indeed, there will be no record on the turntable, nor any sign that the amplifier is actually turned on, nor any actual electronic activity at all in the Harman Kardon mechanisms of the room. But out of the corner of my eye I will notice an old yellow feline dragging himself stealthily out of the room, toward the chair in which Ingraham is bound. And still the music will wash over us:

’Tis the answer, ’tis the end and all of living!

For it is love alone that rules for aye!

Sadly, Bolshakov will remark, “The same appalling sounds came from my automobile’s radio when I was attempting, those years long gone, to follow you out of Pittsburgh.”

“There are ghosts in this hotel, you know,” I will comment.

“Yes, I suffered to sit through your Mezzaluna,” he will say, “but there was no ghostly music in your play.” He will pause to admire my elaborate Harman Kardon stereophonic system and to run his hands over the walnut wood cabinets of the components. “If we must have musical accompaniment for our lovemaking, let us have something that we can listen to.”

I will be aware that in the other room, the cat is standing on its hind legs behind Ingraham’s chair, attempting to reach the cords that bind Ingraham’s hands. “What would you like?” I will ask him. “My collection is enormous.”

“How about Ravel’s Bolero?” he will request.

A trite suggestion, but I will put it on for him, deliberately dawdling while searching for it, finding it, and putting it on the turntable, in order to give Morris more time to do whatever it is that he will be trying to do.

Then, as the exotic, pounding strains of the Bolero succeed in drowning out the Victor Herbert, Bolshakov and I will return to the conversation pit to pick up where we have left off. Morris will no longer be anywhere around. I will wonder if he has given up whatever attempt he will have been making to free Ingraham.

Bolshakov, taking notice of haggard Ingraham, will request of me, “Tell him, on one of your cards, to watch carefully what you are about to do to me, because his turn will come next.”

I will perhaps be playing my last card to Ingraham, which will say, He really wants to get fucked, and he thinks that I will fuck you next. Has Morris freed four hands? Simply nod your head if he has. I will hold this card so that Ingraham can read it, and he will smile and give his head the slightest nod.

Then Bolshakov will lay aside his pistol once more and recline in expectation of my mounting him.

I will mount him.

Oh, there will have been so many times when Travis or Billy, no less than Islamber or Dzhordzha or Kenny or one of the many others, lay supine beneath me while I rode upon him from above. But it will have been, always, them inside of me. Now it will be me inside of him.

And my only profound regret will be that perhaps I shall never live to describe the whole experience, even in the future tense.

But the American master of the future tense, Ingraham, will have left the chair where he was bound and will be heading for the cushion where lies the pistol of Bolshakov.

He will reach the pistol, and he will seize it!

Beloved Ingraham, my sworn brother, will point the pistol at Bolshakov and say, “All right, this disgusting spectacle has continued long enough.”

“I tied you!” Bolshakov will screech. “How did you get loose?”

One time Ingraham confessed to me that often when he cannot hear someone he successfully guesses what among the infinite possibilities the person has actually spoken. This will be one of those times. “Nelson Eddy untied me,” Ingraham will say. “Now get up and put on your clothes. Kat, you phone for the police—or the sheriff or whoever this town has.”

Bolshakov will utter a string of Russian obscenities, but he will rise up and reach for his trousers. He will make as if to step his feet into them but will then—as I gasp in foreknowledge of his intention—toss the trousers into Ingraham’s face, momentarily blocking his vision, and then he will lunge at Ingraham and seize with both hands the hand holding the gun and will attempt to twist the weapon from Ingraham’s grasp. The gun will go off. The two men will wrestle for possession of it, and I will find myself in my kitchen, desperately searching for some weapon: a knife or a bludgeon—for the drug may have left me submissive but it will not have rendered me incapable of thinking of aggressive maneuvers.

Ingraham and Bolshakov will be on the floor together, embracing in almost a parody of sex but fighting over possession of the pistol. I will find myself standing over them with a copper teakettle, the only thing I will have been able to think of as a weapon. I will be swinging the teakettle by its handle, waiting for a chance to bean Bolshakov with it. But the two men will be shifting position so rapidly in their struggle that I will not be able to get a good aim at Bolshakov’s skull, and I will fear hitting Ingraham instead by mistake.

The contest between the two men will not be exactly equal: Ingraham, fifty-seven years of age, will be the bigger, the heavier, ostensibly the stronger; but scrawny Bolshakov will have had, as a former KGB operative, annual training sessions in physical combat and the martial arts, and he will, alas, be in much better condition than Ingraham. I will fault myself for not having phoned for help immediately, but I will tell myself there has been no time.

There will be no time, and before I will have been able to intercede in any way, my tormentor will overpower my mentor and will regain possession of the weapon, with which Bolshakov will assassinate Ingraham at close range, firing three shots into his breast.

I will scream and hope that help will come.

“Drop your silly teakettle, Yekaterina,” Bolshakov will say, standing over the blood-spurting body of the Bard of the Bodarks. He will point the weapon at me. Panting desperately for breath, he will gasp, “Now it appears that I am going to have to shoot you also, without having consummated our relationship as I had intended.” He will aim the pistol in the direction of my heart, and he will conclude, “Oh, there was so much I wanted to say to you first! There was so much that you needed to know! But now it is too late! Take with you to hell the eternal memory of how your fictions destroyed my life!”

At the instant he pulls the trigger, from somewhere in the air—the top of a highboy, the top of a door frame—a ball of yellow fur will drop down on Bolshakov’s head, and sharp claws will pierce both sides of Bolshakov’s neck, and Bolshakov will scream in pain as he feels his jugular punctured, and his fired shot will enter the ceiling. With his free hand he will swat frantically at the cat clinging to his neck, but Morris, with incredible strength, will sink his claws even deeper into Bolshakov’s neck, and Bolshakov will fall to his knees, and I will bring the teakettle crashing down atop his head, careful to avoid hitting the cat too. Morris will release him and scamper away. I will hit Bolshakov again with the teakettle. And again. I will be tempted to pick up the pistol and shoot him with it, but I will realize that I am not capable of killing, even without the drug.

I will find myself standing dazed with a hideously battered teakettle in my hand, its bottom and sides mashed and dented by Bolshakov’s skull. Bolshakov will be totally unconscious. Ingraham will still retain the last vestige of his consciousness: his eyes glazed and rolling heavenward, his hand clutching his breast as if to stop the pouring out of his life’s blood. I will drop down and kneel beside him. He will be beyond medical help.

He will attempt to focus his eyes upon me and will utter a word, which I will not be able to hear. I will incline my ear to his mouth. “Louder, Ingraham,” I will beg.

He will repeat himself, the one word audible: “Sister.”

I will rest my cheek against his cheek, and I will begin weeping. “Brother,” I will say.

He will close his tortured eyes, but he will not be quite dead. He will say one thing more: “Bury me in the woods of Stick Around.”

“Stick around,” I will say, and only afterward, after they have taken his body away, will I realize that I will not have simply confirmed his final two words but will have spoken them as a futile entreaty, as futile as the entreaty that the namer of the town originally made.

III

The rest—and I will have to plagiarize in my haste—will be a little flattish and faded. After the officers have come and done all of their business—the sheriff ’s officers first, who will manacle and revive the assassin, handling him roughly, restoring him to consciousness enough so that I can spit in his face and hear his final words to me, “Aha, Yekaterina! That was your substitute for the semen you could not give me!”—after the sheriff himself has questioned me about what transpired and why—after the sheriff ’s photographer has snapped the body from all angles—after the coroner’s men have taken it away—and after, finally, the wicked drug Bolshakov gave me has worn off, leaving me…I will almost write, myself again, but I shall never be myself again, nor shall I ever write again—leaving me too wakeful to get through the long night, I will haul out my bottle of Stolichnaya and I will sit for a long time beside the telephone, wanting to call Sharon or somebody, even Travis, perhaps (it will still be before midnight on the coast, whereas Sharon will have been in bed asleep beside her Larry for a long time now). I will sit, continually refilling my glass with vodka, and at last my cat, my savior, will reappear, and I will decide to talk to him.

The next morning, this morning, late, approaching noon, the first thing I will remember will be that I have an appointment today to be interviewed by the Paris Review. I will be tempted to phone to cancel the appointment. But probably the interviewer will already be on her way, arriving at any minute.

The second thing I will remember—and I will be mindful that I am deliberately not remembering what will have happened in this apartment the night before—will be the dreamlike conversation I will have had with Morris. It will seem that for some time I will have thanked him for having saved my life but will have received no word of acknowledgment from him in return. It will seem that I will have consumed, even for me, an inordinate amount of vodka, and that I will have begun to pour out to Morris my feelings for Ingraham, the depths of my sadness, my sense of responsibility, my sense of guilt: If I had not persuaded him to stick around the night before he might very well still have been living even as I will be speaking. It will seem that Morris has listened patiently, sympathetically, mournfully, but has said nothing in reply.

I will not be able to recall if the words I eventually hear from Morris are actually spoken by him or are only dreamt by me in whatever semblance of sleep I will finally attain. Will I actually succeed in sleeping? The state of shock in which I will have remained will not keep me continually awake so much as the fear that the preview of death that every sleep actually is will terrify me too much to allow myself to enter it. Will Morris know of my terror of sleep’s preparation for dying? It will seem to me that he will ultimately begin to speak, lecturing me about the differences between sleep and death, the one’s uncontrolled plunge into disjointed events, the other’s beautifully orchestrated travel through the harmony of time; the one’s fitful sense of being subjected to puzzling phenomena, the other’s excellent knowing of the final union of personal will and cosmic purpose. It will seem that Morris will have reminded me of his—or of Dan’s (or will they not be the same?)—earlier commentary about the error in my obituary: The condition of death is not an isolation or a loneliness but their antithesis, like a “surprise birthday party, only with, if you can possibly imagine it, the entire departed population of earth in attendance. The lifeless are free to pick and choose which of those billions they may communicate with, but all of them are there, almost like a multitude of angels dancing on the head of a pin. So death, angel, is unimaginably not solitary but social.”

“Did you call me ‘angel’ last night?” I will ask Morris. “Or early this morning?” But he will only commence washing himself in that way that self-conscious cats respond to spoken questions.

I will pour myself a slug of vodka, preparing myself for the interview. I will tell myself that I ought to eat something, but I will have no appetite. My phone will ring, and I will rush to it, hoping it’s somebody social: Sharon or Travis or Liz. It will be somebody social: Jackie Randel, downstairs, letting me know that there are many media people on the phone and in the lobby, trying to get information about the previous night’s event, trying to get permission to interview me. Strangely, I will think that she is referring to the séance, for I will still not be permitting myself to remember the other event. Chatting with her on the phone, I will finish off my glass and refill it.

“Please don’t let anyone come up here,” I will request of her. “Except the person from Paris Review. That has nothing to do with last night.”

“The Paris Review person is here,” Jackie will inform me, “and has been here for an hour, waiting with the others.”

“Well, send her up,” I will acquiesce. “Tell her to knock two shorts and a long, so I’ll know it’s her.”

Waiting, I will stand at my window, and I will realize how uninteresting the view has become. A panorama from a peak loses its show through habit. The view falls away but so does the thrill. A summit leads only down. Not even that jumbo chunk of poshlost, Christ with his cement arms outstretched, can uplift me. I’ve got a long way to descend.

Somewhere out there, eastward, lies Stick Around, and I will find myself forced to think at last of my murdered mentor and his final wish, and I will realize that I will have to go, soon, to that village to attend his funeral and add my rock to the cairn that marks his hillside grave.

Thinking of cairms, I will picture Svanetia and the royal graveyard beside Saint George’s church at Etseri, where I ought to be buried among my kin, although most real Svanetians seem to have preferred being buried in isolated cairns on the mountainsides. Death may be social and unimaginably gregarious, as Dan suggests, but our remains can only be interred in absolute solitude.

It will occur to me that Ingraham must have been fated to meet me and swear brotherhood so that I could honor his final request. Who fated him? Is Anangka still with me?

“Anangka?” I will call aloud, and I will address her in my native tongue: “Im, imte, imetchu, Anangka?”

But of course there will be no answer.

And yet, having spoken my own language again for the first time in ages, I will suddenly be seized with an idea, an ambition: to write a great Americanization of the Georgian epic, Rustavelli’s Knight in the Tiger’s Skin. I will set it in the Bodarks, in the history of Stick Around, in tribute to Ingraham, and I will call it The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, since the old Bodarkers called their mountain lion a panther.

Whatever, a feline. “Morris!” I will call out for him. “I’ve got a new book idea!”

And I will think of stopping, right after Ingraham’s funeral, at Lara Burns’s cabin, to visit her A Cat Arena and to sit and

The last manuscript page from V. Kelian’s Louder, Engram.

V. Kelian

the ART of FICTION

cxxxviii

V. Kelian is the pseudonym of Ekaterina Vladimirovna Dadeshkeliani, who was born on May 27, 1953, at Lisedi, a remote village in the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia. Her father, Vladimir Alexandrovich Dadeshkeliani, would have been the ruling prince of Svanetia had not that principality, along with all of Georgia, been communized by the Soviet Union in 1922. Kelian would have become ruling princess if she had chosen to return to Svanetia after it regained its sovereignty following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the restoration of Georgian independence.

She majored in botany at Tbilisi University and received the equivalent of a doctorate in mycology at the University of Leningrad. A distinguished mycologist, she has published a number of scientific papers on mushrooms and is the discoverer of the rare Bodarks species Mutinus ekaterinus, which is named after her.

While teaching botany at her alma mater in Tbilisi in 1976, she was arrested at a human rights protest along with several other Georgian dissidents, including Zviad Ghamsakhurdia (who later became president of independent Georgia). She spent three years in detention in Soviet Russia, both at Moscow’s Serbsky Psychiatric Institute and at the strict regime prison for women in Ishimbay. Her experiences formed the basis for her first novel, Georgie Boy, which she began writing while teaching at the University of Pittsburgh and which became an international success, both critical and financial, selling millions of copies in both hardcover and paperback worldwide. The triumph of this book and of the movie version of it, filmed by Trevor Kola (the first film of the noted actor Travis Coe), made it possible for Vladimirovna to lease and refurbish the top floors of an ancient Bodarks resort hotel, which became the setting for her stage play, The Hotel Mezzaluna.

Her other works include two collections of short stories, The Names of Seeking Games and Lamshged; or, The Shady Side of the Mountain, the former set in the Bodarks, the latter the only one of her books with a Svanetian setting. Her novel Original Flavor was also a best-seller, and the review of it was a Time magazine cover story. Her major nonfiction study of American Indians, Dawn of the Osage, was a critical but not a popular success. Posthumously will be published her last novel, Earthstar, and an unfinished memoir, Louder, Engram!

She died on Svanetian Saint George’s Day, the death day of Shakespeare and Cervantes, and the birthday of her idol, Nabokov, and was buried on a hillside in a remote area of the Bodarks.

The interview was conducted in less than favorable circumstances: only the night before, a dear friend of Kelian’s had been murdered in her spacious triplex apartment on the top floors of one wing of the fortresslike Halfmoon Hotel, atop a mountain in Arcata Springs, where she had lived and worked for the past decade. The staff of the hotel had made a token gesture of tidying up after the incident, but there were still bloodstains all over the carpet. Kelian, a stunningly beautiful woman who spoke softly, with only a trace of an accent that somehow seemed more Bodarkadian than Svanetian, suggested that the interview ought to be conducted in her library, which had not been disturbed or bloodied during the foul play.

Noting the interviewer’s allergy to cats, Kelian graciously removed her pet, a male tabby of marmalade color and many years, and latched the door to the animal’s Cat-Port so that he could not return during the course of the interview, which took place over the duration of the afternoon. Unlike many interviews in this series, the transcription is taken directly from the tape, without any editing by the subject.

INTERVIEWER

Is this a bad time for you? I could return another day.

V. KELIAN

We may as well get it over with. Do you mind if I drink?

INTERVIEWER

Not at all. Do you mind if I ask you some questions about last night’s crime?

KELIAN

I’d really rather you didn’t. It has no bearing on my work.

INTERVIEWER

But wasn’t the victim a fellow novelist?

KELIAN

Of such minor regard that he once confessed to me he had long ago despaired of being asked to do a Paris Review interview himself.

INTERVIEWER

Indeed. But he was your teacher and mentor, was he not? Wasn’t he responsible for bringing you to the Bodarks so many years ago?

KELIAN

Oh? You knew him, then?

INTERVIEWER

Most of us in the Bodarks at least know of him.

KELIAN

You are from the Bodarks? I did not know that.

INTERVIEWER

Yes. Like yourself, I originated elsewhere but chose this part of the country for its…But forgive me, I am anticipating your answers. One of my first questions for you is, What made you choose the Bodarks? I should think these hills do not really resemble your native Svanetia, which is extremely mountainous and rugged.

KELIAN

The resemblance is more spiritual than topographic. I came here as part of an accident of destiny. All of my life I have been aware of being guided—sometimes commanded—by forces or fates outside my own control.

INTERVIEWER

One might argue that your books themselves were thus composed not wholly by yourself but by those fates or forces?

KELIAN

No, my books are the only things in my life over which I have exercised absolute control. That is why I write, perhaps why any novelist writes: to have some sense of being in charge, of being capable, of being complete master of one’s own vessel.

INTERVIEWER

And yet, in the history of your well-known paraphilia for twelve-year-old boys, did you not consider yourself in utter control of those youths as well?

KELIAN

Shall we not delve into my personal life?

INTERVIEWER

How can you separate your personal life from your fiction, when your fiction is replete with the manifestation of that paraphilia?

KELIAN

My fiction is invented and belongs to the public. My life is real and belongs to myself.

INTERVIEWER

Your critics have charged that all of your books are romans à clef, that you are incapable of concocting a purely imaginative plot or a character who is not closely based upon someone you’ve known.

KELIAN

Ha! So the characters in Hotel Mezzaluna are real, are they? A bunch of ghosts?

INTERVIEWER

I was going to ask you about that. Isn’t it true that even your four “ghosts” in that “play for voices” are taken directly from actual historical ghosts who have been seen or heard by actual persons in this actual hotel?

KELIAN

If you’d attended the séance that was held here last night, you would’ve discovered that those ghosts do not exist, or at least they will not manifest themselves.

INTERVIEWER

I did attend the séance, and I saw you there with your friend, the late, lamented novelist. Have you considered any connection between that séance, which is defined as “a sitting for summoning spirits,” and the sudden appearance of a long-departed spirit from your past, the Bolshakov person who was arrested for the murder?

KELIAN

Say, what is this? I thought you were supposed to be asking me questions about my working habits and what I write with and what hours I keep. I don’t mind revealing that I make a monthly pilgrimage to the local Wal-Mart, where I stock up with, among other things, several packages of common Number Two lead pencils, which I do not sharpen endlessly, like Hemingway, but prefer writing with dulled, upon Wal-Mart’s yellow legal pads of the long variety. I rise fairly early each morning, around seven o’clock, with a wake-up call from the desk…although this morning I was understandably permitted to sleep late, or to try to. After a sauna and shower—I no longer use my Jacuzzi, out of negative sentimental reasons—I usually breakfast downstairs in the Crystal Room, varying my menu from cereal one day to poached eggs with bacon the next…although this morning, understandably, I did not breakfast at all and in fact have had not had lunch either. Would you care for a bite?

INTERVIEWER

No, thank you, I’ve eaten. But don’t let me stop you from eating something.

KELIAN

I’m not hungry, but if you don’t mind I’ll refill my drink…Now, would you like to ask me something about what advice I have for the young writer or whether I read my critics or what talismans I use to conjure up the magic of my art?

INTERVIEWER

Your great obligations to Nabokov are obvious, by your own admission, and I’m sure you’ve noticed how your life is sort of an inversion of his most famous novel, although there is not that much similarity between yourself and the notorious double Humbert. But just as Monsieur Humbert was genuinely in love with his Lolita, or Dolores, haven’t you ever found yourself similarly in love with one of your boys?

KELIAN (after a long pause of thinking)

Only one.

INTERVIEWER

Dzhordzha himself? Islamber? Kenny? Or perhaps Jason, Travis, Billy…?

KELIAN

How did you know of all those boys? I didn’t mention all of them in that Vanity Fair piece, did I?

INTERVIEWER

I have prepared myself very thoroughly for this interview. Do you mind telling me which one it was?

KELIAN

If you must know, Travis.

INTERVIEWER

Why him more than Billy?

KELIAN

Intelligence, for one thing. You are going to ask me, now or later, to spell out for you the metaphor of the hebephiliac’s seduction of the innocent, virginal youth as akin to the novelist’s seduction of the innocent, virginal reader, a theme that I have been attempting with limited success to explore in my work-in-progress, my memoir, Louder, Engram!—its very title a shameless allusion to Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. I am not at all confident that I shall finish the book, which has often struck me as a dreadful exercise in self-indulgence. But I have been asking myself many questions about the relationship between my lust for virginal boys and my obsession with, shall we say, virginal readers.

INTERVIEWER

Do you honestly know why it is so important to you that your boy be a virgin?

KELIAN

If he is not, it is as if the novelist discovers that someone else has already told his story. And perhaps done it better. Do you know, since you like to refer to my critics, that Pryce-Smythe wrote of my Original Flavor, “I feel after reading this book as if my celibacy has been ended by a master seducer.”

INTERVIEWER

You must be particularly gratified that so many of your short stories have been published in such magazines as Playboy, where, undoubtedly, they fell into the hands of ardent young masturbators.

KELIAN

What can I say? Yes, I am. I would even confess that I have often fantasized the image of some adorable twelve-year-old lad behind the locked door of his bathroom, teaching himself how to masturbate after reading a story of mine.

INTERVIEWER

But do you think it likely he would be using your story in preference to the full-color photographs, the gatefolds?

KELIAN

A moment ago I spoke of intelligence as my reason for having loved Travis. The intelligent twelve-year-old has the wisdom both to want the seduction and to appreciate every nuance of it. The intelligent twelve-year-old is not going to be irrationally disturbed or corrupted by the initiation into sex. The intelligent boy would actually prefer the mental imagery of the story to the raw visual imagery of the cheesecake photograph.

INTERVIEWER

So you are saying that Billy was stupid?

KELIAN

If you must seize upon that particular boy, he had a number of problems, of which lack of intelligence was only one.

INTERVIEWER

You claim that you try to improve upon reality, or escape from actuality in your fictions. If you were inventing yourself as a character in a novel about, let us say, a famous novelist living in an old resort hotel in the Bodarks, wouldn’t you select for the character an avocation less obvious than mushrooming? I mean, after all, the idea that mushrooms remind you of young boys’ penises…

KELIAN

Quite frankly I have never met a mushroom the equal of a boy’s urgent thing. Nor eaten one. But yes, you are right: If I wrote a novel about myself, I’d make my avocation—or my vocation, since after all I do think of writing as my avocation—the playing of the piano.

INTERVIEWER

Your fondness for concerti is well known. You have even been known to express the hope that Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto will be played at your funeral.

KELIAN

Did I say that publicly? Well, yes, in lieu of any spoken obsequies, I’d love to have that unabashedly romantic concerto played at my funeral. It can say more about me than any words.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think often about your funeral?

KELIAN

You do not know how close I came to being killed myself last night. I have a sense that my death could occur at any moment. But no, I don’t expect a full symphony orchestra with a famous pianist to gather in my honor at Stick Around and play that concerto. An old phonograph will do. The last interviewer who asked me that question then suggested that it would be more appropriate if I arranged to have my ashes shipped home to Svanetia and flung to the winds from the top of Mount Layla. A touching idea, surely, but not one in keeping with my attachment to the Bodarks.

INTERVIEWER

Just why are you so attached to the Bodarks?

KELIAN

Have you ever heard of Daniel Lyam Montross?

INTERVIEWER

The name is only vaguely familiar.

KELIAN

Too bad. He deserves to be much better known. I am going to write an idyll about him one of these days. And as I say, I consider myself an idyllist, not a novelist. I should explain that I have never “met” Dan Montross myself—he died before I was born, barely—and yet he has been the single most important person in my life.

INTERVIEWER

More important than any of your boys?

KELIAN

I will return in a minute, after opening a new bottle of vodka…There now. Where were we? Yes, all the boys were only diversions: playmates in the games of love and life. Dan has been more than that, and, just as Christians believe that their savior has promised them eternal life, I believe that Dan has promised me immortality in the elegiac but bucolic woodlands of the Bodarks. I don’t suppose, however, that this is the sort of thing that all the aspiring writers who read these Paris Review interviews really want to hear, is it?

INTERVIEWER

No, they’d rather not hear your plans for the afterlife. They’d rather vicariously experience how you deal with the delicious disadvantages of your present fame.

KELIAN

Fame? “I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.”

INTERVIEWER

Do I detect quotes around that statement?

KELIAN

You don’t recognize it? Those were Nabokov’s famous last words to the Paris Review.

INTERVIEWER

Oh, yes.

KELIAN

Say, are you really from the Paris Review?

INTERVIEWER

Of course.

KELIAN

Would you mind if I asked to see some credentials?

INTERVIEWER

Credentials? What can I show you? I don’t have a membership card or anything like that.

KELIAN

A letter of authorization? Anything?

INTERVIEWER

Well, what about this?

KELIAN

Christ, that is a pistol. Put it back in your purse.

INTERVIEWER

Not until I’ve used it for the purpose I intended.

KELIAN

Which is…?

INTERVIEWER

Why, to kill you, of course. By your own admission, you’ve seen this coming. You expected me.

KELIAN

Who are you?

INTERVIEWER

My name is Barbara Phillips. Doesn’t the name Phillips mean anything to you?

KELIAN

It’s a very common name. Have I ever met you before? Did you send me a manuscript to read? Phillips? I get an awful lot of unwelcome manuscripts in the mail, as if somehow I had the power to make them publishable, which they aren’t. I’m sorry if I didn’t respond to your manuscript.

INTERVIEWER

I am a writer, yes, but you haven’t read anything of mine or been sent anything of mine to read. I have spent too much of my adult life trying to be a writer, often to the neglect of everything else. Especially to the neglect of my son, William.

KELIAN

Getting published is often simply a matter of lucky breaks and of knowing the right people. I could help you find a sympathetic editor for your stuff, if you’d let me.

INTERVIEWER

You really don’t notice anything outside yourself, do you? Now you are even getting drunk, so that you can’t fully appreciate why you are being shot.

KELIAN

I am getting drunk because I had a terrifying experience last night, and now you are trying to give me another one. I think one horror is enough for one day. Unless this is still night…and you are simply one of my nightmares. I have noticed, by the way, that this appears to be more or less in the present tense, whereas I had distinctly shifted into the future tense in what I was creating.

INTERVIEWER

I ought to be your worst nightmare. But I am sure it never even occurred to you that I existed. Did you ever even think to ask Billy if his mother had any suspicion of what he was doing with you?

KELIAN

You—? You are Billy’s mother?

INTERVIEWER

It never occurred to you that he had one, did it?

KELIAN

No. I mean, yes, certainly. We often spoke of you. But he assured me that you didn’t care what he was doing.

INTERVIEWER

I didn’t, at least not at the time he was first being debauched by you. And then, later, when I did find out about it, my reaction was not shock, or even a proper mother’s protectiveness, but rather a novelist’s curiosity. I thought I could convert the story of you and Billy into a novel.

KELIAN

Did you?

INTERVIEWER

I tried. For three years I tried, but then my novelist’s curiosity was utterly obliterated by my grief as a failed parent. I have been unable to feel anything but guilt. No, I’ll correct that: guilt and anger. Over my abject failure as a good mother and over your ruining of my son.

KELIAN

Do you hear that desperate caterwauling? My cat wants in. Do you mind if I let my cat in?

INTERVIEWER

Let’s not disturb the poor thing with the sight of our gory bodies.

KELIAN

Our bodies?

INTERVIEWER

Yes, don’t you understand? I am going to kill you for your indecency, and then I am going to kill myself for my negligence.

KELIAN

Your tape recorder is still running. Do I have time for some last words?

INTERVIEWER

I’m afraid not. Haven’t you said enough?

—Barbara Phillips

Afterword By Clive Henry

On a Book Entitled

Louder, Engram!

Did Ekaterina actually die? When I accepted the invitation from her publisher to edit these memoirs, it was with the clear understanding that I would not be able to communicate with the author. At the time of her supposed assassination, I was in Paris researching a project involving the medical profession’s habits of prevarication, which had consumed me for so long that I had not even been aware of Vanity Fair’s exposé of the true identity of V. Kelian.

Thus, whatever surprise I may have felt at the news of her death was overmatched by my astonishment at the discovery of the identity of V. Kelian, whose first novel I reviewed so warmly in the pages of The New York Review of Books and whose subsequent books I consumed (and reviewed) with almost equal admiration. Indeed, my immediate reaction to her death was to search for a copy of that first novel and reread it in light of the knowledge that its author was female. In Paris, I could find only a used paperback of Le Garçon Georges, but that sufficed to satisfy my rethinking of the novel and my arrière-pensée that Ekaterina’s achievement in having identified so thoroughly with a twelve-year-old boy was not so much the result of having lived through an actual affair of the kind Georgie Boy depicts as it was a triumph of the empathetic imagination. For the longest time, I could only believe that Ekaterina simply wanted to imagine that she had been murdered.

I was still in Paris, putting the finishing touches on my book Why Doctors Lie when that autumn’s now-notorious issue of Paris Review appeared, with the sensational interview of “V. Kelian” wherein the interviewer performs the actual killing that many interviewers can only hope to perform symbolically. (That literary quarterly, by the way, despite its title, is not published in Paris and actually has nothing to do with that city, wherein sheer coincidence alone happened to find me at the time the issue came out.) The decision to append that Paris Review interview to the present volume was one for which I assume sole responsibility, feeling that it makes a kind of necessary coda to the essentially unfinished story of Ekaterina’s life. I have, however, felt constrained to omit the note by the Paris Review editors in which they rather coyly and disingenuously apologize for having commissioned Barbara Phillips to do the interview without knowing that she had an exceptional ax to grind or crime to commit. (“Of the one hundred and thirty-seven distinguished authors interviewed in these pages over the years, not one had ever been literally murdered.”)

The substance of the interview itself, when first I read it, did not greatly interest me; only one item captivated my attention: the mention of the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto, which I had, in my review of Georgie Boy, guessed—correctly, it would seem—had mightily influenced the life and prose of the writer. I became seized with a simple wish to find out if that music had actually been played during Ekaterina’s funeral…if any sort of services had actually been held…if Ekaterina had actually died.

But I was also somewhat uneasy about the italicized prefatory remarks to the interview, which, assuming Barbara Phillips was their author, must have been written after the supposed interview and shootings took place, but could not have been written by Barbara Phillips if she had killed herself after killing Ekaterina. Could they have? I wrote to the editors of Paris Review to clarify this point but thus far have received no reply. The newspapers did say of the tragedy that it was a homicide-suicide by Barbara Phillips.

My obsession to learn the truth was fueled and consummated through a stroke of fate that left me forever afterward a believer in Anangka, as Ekaterina was wont to render the Greek personification of Fate, sweet Ananke (the word means “necessity” in Greek): My university forwarded to me a letter from her publisher inviting me to read, evaluate, edit, and if need be annotate the manuscript of Louder, Engram! The invitation had been prompted by some references within the manuscript to myself, including, I was abashed to discover, Ekaterina’s wish to include the entire text of my original review of Georgie Boy. (Despite my insistence on its removal from these pages—no quirk of false modesty on my part—I have been persuaded to let the review stand uncut.)

As soon as my work on the doctor book permitted, I began a close, attentive, indeed enthralled reading of Ekaterina’s uncompleted autobiography in holograph photocopy. I armed myself with a stack of books too numerous to bibliograph here—but I ought to mention three: Douglas W. Freshfield’s two-volume Exploration of the Caucasus (London and New York: Edward Arnold, 1896), with, despite its age, excellent photogravures by Vittorio Sella of the Suanetian (sic) landscape and people; Clive Phillipps-Wolley’s quaint but condescending two-volume Savage Svânetia (London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1883), with some amazing wood engravings; and, of our own century, Alexander Kuznetzov’s Look Down, Svanetia (as its title would translate from Russian; Moscow: Molodaya Gvardeya, 1971) with amateurish but candid snapshot photos. My leisure hours were filled with an honest attempt to read Rustavelli’s Knight in the Tiger’s Skin and the various books by David Marshall Lang on Georgian history and culture. In one of those bookstalls on a Left Bank quai, Anangka led me to a yellowed issue of the American monthly National Geographic (July 1942), which contains an article, “Roaming Russia’s Caucasus,” by Rolf Singer, who discusses Svanetia (pp. 96 ff.) and gives proof, if any were needed, that its ex-ruler was one “Prince Dadish Kiliani,” as Singer spells it, thinking Dadish the given name; I was able to determine that he was referring to our Ekaterina’s great-uncle.

Finished with my first reading of Ekaterina’s manuscript, I was embarrassingly slow to ask myself the question that has already occurred to the intelligent reader of this memoir: How could Ekaterina have referred to the interview as a fait accompli in several earlier parts of her story? (Cf. pp. 264, 283, 292, and 296). In other words, if she actually died at the conclusion of the interview, how could she have referred back to the interview in the past tense in at least five earlier parts of the manuscript? Even given her flagrant toying and frolicking with time and grammatical tenses (an indulgent habit she picked up from her mentor “Ingraham”), wherein we are often lost in time between past and future, there is simply no way that she could have anticipated what happened to her during Barbara Phillips’s interview…unless she was planning it as part of the work of art’s creative structure.

(Incidentally, in the history of American fiction there was a very minor writer, a dime-novelist named Prentiss Ingraham [1843–1904], who wrote over six hundred novels, two hundred of which were devoted to William “Buffalo Bill” Cody; but the “Ingraham” of Ekaterina can scarcely be considered even to allude to the actual writer Prentiss Ingraham.)

When I returned to this country last summer (my sabbatical was ended and I had fall classes coming up), I had time only for a very hurried trip, my first, to the “Bodarks,” that lost secret heart of America. My ultimate goal was to find some concrete evidence, such as a tombstone, to prove that Ekaterina no longer exists. But I also wanted to see with my own eyes the “Halfmoon Hotel” in charming “Arcata Springs.” In fact, I spent a couple of nights in that limestone mountaintop lodge…and no ghosts walked. Through the unflagging courtesy of Jackie Randel (one of several people whose actual names Ekaterina does not conceal in her memoir), I was permitted to tour the late novelist’s spacious suite of rooms on the hotel’s top floors. The rooms are still awaiting a new tenant. There are the faintest ghosts of bloodstains on the carpet, but Jackie Randel herself was not certain whether the blood donor was Ekaterina, Barbara Phillips, “Ingraham,” Bolshakov…or all four. I asked her if she had herself seen Ekaterina’s dead body. She confessed to a certain squeamishness that had kept her outside the door while the officers, coroner, et al. were within.

While I was viewing that penthouse with its stark confrontation by the gauche cement giant Christ of the Bodarks, I was gently accosted, or simply examined, by a slow, heavy yellow cat, whom I recognized at once and without much surprise. Morris, of course! Approaching twenty years of age, he was still the “General Manager” of the hotel, according to Jackie Randel. He was still the favorite of guests, who were asked not to fondle him because of his advanced arthritis. So I did not pick him up. But I returned his scrutiny of me sufficiently to convince myself that he was no longer—if he had ever been—inhabited by the spirit of Daniel Lyam Montross. Ekaterina really did possess, I need not tell the reader of this memoir, a fantastic imagination.

But she often in her memoir is starkly truthful without embellishment, embroidery, or deception. As but one example, she does not exaggerate her own difficulties in reaching that mountain-locked, mysterious Arcadian ghost village that she, out of deference to her mentor “Ingraham,” has chosen to call here “Stick Around.” I had rented a self-drive car at the “Fateville” airport, which easily got me to “Arcata Springs” with time en route to admire the same scenery she had shown to the great Trevor Kola. But that car, a small Avis Chrysler, was not able to get me to Stick Around. Although I’d taken the trouble to reread the manuscript with special notice of the descriptions of the route southward from the still-living village of “Acropolis” (as she disguises it early on) or Parthenon (as it is actually called, and as she calls it toward the end, dropping her disguises), I became, as she had done, as “Ingraham” himself had done, hopelessly lost. After two hours of driving, or attempting to drive, that small Chrysler into the most nearly impassable byroads, I gave up, found a farmhouse where I inquired directions, and was informed that I was “way off.” The owners of the farmhouse, knew, however, the Ingledews, and they offered me their phone and the number of Sharon Ingledew Brace. Her husband, Lawrence Brace, answered and offered to drive over and get me in a vehicle that I recognized, as soon as I saw her, as Silvia, who, Brace said, Ekaterina had bequeathed to him. He became, for the rest of my brief stay in Bodarkadia, my invaluable escort, and his generous assistance made the balance of my visit worthwhile. I am very grateful.

Subsequently, Lawrence Brace presented me with a copy of the still-unfinished typescript of the critical study he has been preparing for seven years, provisionally called Benedictions and Maledictions: The Life and Work of Daniel Lyam Montross, which, when it is published, may shed additional light on the mysterious relationship that existed between Ekaterina and the dead poet whom she never met.

During the brief tour that Larry (in Silvia) gave me of what little remains of the village of “Stick Around,” not even a conventional ghost town of the sort one pictures in western mining operations or cowboy sagas, I was especially cognizant of the restoration that had recently been performed on the verandahed two-story Victorian that had been the Governor Jacob Ingledew House and later the little village’s one sleepy hotel. I asked Larry to stop. I asked him who lived there now. No one, he said, although he himself had lived there for a couple of years before he married Sharon. But obviously, I pointed out, somebody has fixed it up carefully. Who owns it? I asked. Vernon Ingledew, Larry informed me. A line of Ekaterina’s text came back to me: Vernon alone knows the identity of the new owner of the house, who bought what’s left of it from him for, if not a song, a promise not to sing. Where can I find him? I asked. Larry replied, with a condescending smile for my ignorance, “In the governor’s mansion, of course.” I studied the house carefully but in vain for any signs that its occupant, if it was occupied, might be a woman. I asked if I could go in, but Larry told me Vernon had the only key. “Is there anything else you’d like to see?” he asked, and I replied that I’d hoped to be shown Ekaterina’s final resting place.

Larry drove me up the mountain as far as Silvia could reach. Then we walked for perhaps a quarter of a mile through weeds and woods in the late-afternoon heat of August, I carrying in my arms a green-wax-paper-wrapped bundle of three dozen red roses that I had purchased at a florist’s in “Harriman” in good faith, having persuaded myself, at that point, that I conceivably might come to believe that Ekaterina was dead. We came to a sloping forest glade in a grove of red cedars where there was a single tombstone.

“That’s Montross,” Larry said, gazing upon the lone memorial with the sad affection of a scholar who has devoted seven years of his life to one man’s story. There was no tombstone for Ekaterina.

“Where is hers?” I asked.

He pointed toward the deep woods. “Farther along,” he said. He said, or rather, asked rhetorically, “Don’t you know that she really had no claim to be buried beside him?”

We went deeper into the woods up the mountain, and came in time to, sure enough, a modest marble marker beside a cairn of stones, freshly stacked. Bodark people are not buried beneath cairns; Svanetians are. The small tombstone bore the engraved letters of her name, dates, and the simple inscription, nobody has to die in THE END OF ONE’S OWN PICTURE, which, I realized after only a moment’s thought, was a direct quotation from Ekaterina, spoken to Trevor Kola when she was attempting to reassure him that there was nothing wrong with keeping Georgie alive in the end of the film Georgie Boy.

Smiling, I asked Larry, “Who chose to put these words on the stone?”

“Why, she did, of course,” he replied. And then he, noticing the way I was looking around as if searching for something or someone, asked, “What are you looking for?”

“Where is ‘Ingraham’?”

Larry gestured, sweeping his arm as if to encompass all the woods, or all the world. “Oh, he’s buried much farther up the mountain, in a remote glen by a waterfall. I’ve never been there myself, so I couldn’t take you to it.”

“Ah yes,” I said, and said nothing more. I unwrapped my three dozen red roses and arranged them carefully upon Ekaterina’s cairn. Red roses are of course the expression of love, and Larry understood without my telling him the essential reason for my love, which, I hope, has found its way into the heart of every male reader of her memoir: We want to believe, all of us men, that we are grown-up and manly, but the simple, sometimes embarrassing truth is that none of us have ever stopped being twelve years old.

I am always twelve. And Ekaterina always lives. You who want to believe that Ekaterina did not die, forgive me my tears, and join in them.

It has been my privilege, and my pleasure, to prepare this work for publication. My job has not been an unmitigated joy: I had to fight with Ekaterina’s publisher to preserve her desired title, which they felt was too allusive and punning (and they proposed such alternatives as Princess with a Pen or Good-bye to the Old World or the direct and colorless My Story: The Life of V. Kelian). I had to resist their determined efforts to remove all of her references to the whole vast and sometimes corrupt machinery of the “publishing world.” Their argument that this was “inside stuff” of little interest to the general reader struck me as transparently self-protective and overly sensitive. My obligation has been to be as faithful as possible to the spirit of Ekaterina…wherever it is.

My private sufferings, the insect pests that reminded me that not only death but ticks too are in Bodarkadia, should not be anybody’s concern, but I cite them as part of the price of bringing this task to completion: My legs were covered with chigger bites before I could leave “Stick Around,” and I lost the first two weeks of the fall semester bedridden with Lyme disease, the ravages of the bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi infested in me by the bite of a tiny tick who was waiting for me in the woods or weeds near Ekaterina’s grave or that of—I think of the punning irony of his middle name—Daniel Lyam Montross.

In the silence of the forest that hot, still August afternoon (there was not a mushroom anywhere in sight), with dusk falling and Larry urging that we should start back, I sought to catch any sound of the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto, any portion of the strains of the elegiac, haunting mood of that musical trail through an uncharted pastoral woodland. Larry mentioned that indeed the burial of Ekaterina had included the playing, on a portable battery-operated phonograph, of the RCA Victor record of Van Cliburn performing that work for the piano, with orchestra. I had been mildly disappointed to discover that the concluding pages of Louder, Engram!, unlike the magnificent finale of Georgie Boy, were not written in prose that paralleled the Tchaikovsky concerto. Or, if they were, I realized, I had better try again to “hear” them. There are no orgasms in the end of this work…unless, as Montross expresses it himself on the last page of his Dream of a Small but Unlost Town, the supreme orgasm, unknown and unimagined by us still living, is the moment of death. “I’m singing the short song of my last instant’s ecstasy.”

Frivolity and ecstasy are the twin poles between which we humans play, said Huizinga in his Homo Ludens, “Playful Man,” and the elusive Tchaikovsky I was trying so hard to hear in that moment at Ekaterina’s grave was not “playing,” but it was there as certainly as Ekaterina herself was, and I realized that perhaps I could hear at least some of those snatches of the old folk tunes and popular waltzes rearranged for the keyboard and orchestra that had left poor Peter Ilyich open to charges of plagiarism as surely as Yekaterina Vladimirovna will be open, with this book, to charges of having borrowed too freely from Nabokov and from “Ingraham” and from who-knows-what hoards of Georgian and Svanetian folklore, ritual, and custom. I began to understand something very important about Ekaterina’s favorite music as well as Ekaterina’s final book: Both have as their true subject not frivolity, not ecstasy, not the yearnings and seekings, the losings and findings, of the human spirit, but art itself. “Art is, after all, more real than life,” said V. Kelian. The Tchaikovsky is about music, about the making of music, about the possibilities and the limitations of the piano in relation to the other instruments of the orchestra; it is, to use the jargon of contemporary criticism, “self-referential,” “self-conscious,” or “self-reflexive” music. It is involuted around itself.

And so, of course, is Louder, Engram! It exists to remind us that our Ekaterina was, she certainly was, and she was not at all.

For Larry Vonalt

All lies and fantasy, but true as God’s gospel.

—Vance Randolph on The Architecture of the

Arkansas Ozarks, in his Ozark Folklore, Volume II

To him the men of Stay More are still gods.

—Martha Duffy on Lightning Bug in Time

Give a cock to Asclepius.

—Socrates, last words

Contents

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Chapter six

Chapter seven

Chapter eight

Chapter nine

Chapter ten

Chapter eleven

Chapter one

Good of you to drop by again. Pull you up a chair, sit on your fist, and lean back on your thumb—but I see you’re already seated. Can you hear me? I may mispronounce a few words, and the way I pronounce others may strike you as mispronunciation. I’ve had all of my teeth taken out, not like the old codger who could boast, “I never had no trouble with my teeth. They just rotted out naturally.” What with my missing choppers and the stroke I had a while back, not to mention my chronic stammer, it’s a wonder I can still hear myself talk. Yes, I may misunderstand myself now and again. So don’t hesitate to ask me to try to repeat myself if you don’t catch it the first time. Now if you’ll be so kind as to reach down beneath my cot and feel around, you’ll find a near-full bottle of Chivas Regal, the last of a whole case of the stuff that Gershon Legman—you know the great bawdy bibliophile?—arranged to have sent to me last Christmas. Fetch it up here and we’ll have us a snort. I’m a badly backslid alcoholic, you know. But I can tell you, I don’t never consume more than a half a pint a day. I’m not one of these fellers who just can’t stop once he gets started. I was sorry I couldn’t offer you a shot or two when you came to visit me last, that winter I was in the VA hospital—when was it? two years ago?—but the VA people are really tight-assed and by the book, unlike these here rest homes where they look the other way or pretend the janitor’s broom didn’t mean to knock over your bottles a-cleaning under the bed. But that visit you paid me to the Veterans hospital, you must’ve already had a lot to drink, a whole bladderful: I haven’t forgot how you went outside on the hospital grounds and there in a snowbank took out your tool and urinated the letters V-A-N-C-E into the snow. I couldn’t see it, but a nurse told me about it; she told as how that hard January cold kept the snow on the ground for weeks more, and those letters stayed there, yellow on white! You know, there’s been some talk, probably just a joke, about the University is going to build me a monument and put up a statue in front of Old Main: a heap of white marble imitating a snowbank, with a bronze figure of me a-hunching over it with one hand aiming my tool. But back to that VA visit, before you went out and pissed my name in the snow, you told me your dad had just passed on, and you said to me, “Vance, I’ve just lost my actual father, so you’d better get yourself well, because if I was to lose my spiritual father too, it would just finish me off.” And you recall what I said to that? All I could think of at the time to say to that, choked up as I was? All I could say was, “Bless you, my boy, I aint about to cash in, just yet.”

But I’ve thought a lot about that. Me, who never had a son, who never fathered a child, leastways not that I know of. There’s not much I can give you in return for those kind words. This here scotch won’t even repay you for that splendid review you wrote of Pissing in the Snow for the local underground paper. I won’t pretend that anything I could say, running on at the mouth the way I do, could scratch your back the way you’ve scratched mine. No. But I’ve thought a lot about it, and I’ve decided that one little thing I could do for you would be to confess to you that I’ve actually been to your Stay More myself, once, a long time ago, and I could tell you the story about it, if you’d care to hear it. Might be you could even make a novel out of it, for it concerns your Doc Swain, God rest his soul. I haven’t told anybody this, not even Herb Halpert, my diligent annotator, but Doc Swain is the model, or simply the source, for “Doc Holton,” who appears in so many of my folktale collections, particularly Sticks in the Knapsack and The Devil’s Pretty Daughter, to name just two. I reckon you know, though you hardly gave a clue in those novels of yours in which he briefly, all too briefly appears, that Doc Swain was quite the raconteur! He believed in the power of laughter to help the healing processes, and he rarely visited a patient—and I suppose you know, or ought to, that in those days he always went to the patients instead of having them come to him—he rarely visited a patient without telling a good joke or a real funny story, which helped many a nervous patient to relax and feel good enough to start getting well. Why, I myself was present once during a difficult childbirth, what they call a breech delivery I believe, when Doc Swain told the mother such a hilarious yarn that her shudders of laughter helped expel the baby! But I’m getting ahead of my story, which begins not with Doc Swain but with myself and how I happened to find myself in Stay More in the first place.

Mary Celestia hasn’t heard this story herself, have you, Mary? No, all these years she’s been obliged to hear me rambling on, sometimes just a-talking to myself, sometimes telling her stories, sometimes just arguing the damn fool things that show up on TV or in the papers. She just sits there sweetly on her own cot, or lays on it, and she doesn’t interrupt me except when I’ve got my facts badly wrong, as occasionally I do. She’s blind now, you know, so I have to describe to her what’s showing up on the TV or what the papers say, and I have to read her mail to her. Hers is not the blindness of Homer or Milton—though she could tell you some tales of her own—but of Tiresias, who accidentally gazed upon the naked beauty of wisdom and lost his eyes for it, but had the power of soothsaying in recompense. Oh yes, Mary Celestia could tell you everything that’s going to happen. She could even tell me, if I asked her, how much longer she and I will have to live in this miserable little room before we move on, or pass on, or whatever. Mary. Mary Celestia! Now listen, love, I’m a-fixin to tell a story to this clever novelist, and you aint never heard it afore yourself! It is a story about myself when I was about this gentleman’s age, about half of what I am now, long before you met me, but I’ve told you how I was one for drinking all the time in those days, and I wasn’t too happily married to Marie, my first wife, and used ever excuse I could think of to get away from her. This is the story of how I got away from her one summer and wandered around the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, looking for the wildest parts of the country where progress was still unknown and I might find and collect some rare old folkways and stories and superstitions and sayings that I hadn’t never heard before. This is the story of how I come to find myself in a lost, lost place called Stay More, which happens to be the name of the village that this gentleman has written so much about. But this is mainly the story of a strange, remarkable backcountry physician named Colvin Swain, and how he come to hide his heart from the world, but finally revealed it to me. I ought to have written this into a book myself, but now it’s too late for that. So, Mary, listen in, if you’ve a mind to, but some of it aint pretty, at all, and some of it may make you think I’m just sawing off a bunch of whoppers to see if I still know how to lie convincingly, but I swear, if there’s any lies in this story, I didn’t make ’em up myself.

Now son, maybe you should just shut that door. People are a-hollerin too goddamn loud out there. Don’t you hear ’em? No, I reckon you caint. Some old bat is screeching, as she constantly does, “MEDICINE! MEDICINE! MEDICINE!” It’s the only word she knows. And there’s this feller a-going, “It’s time! It’s time!” When me and Mary Celestia first moved in, I thought he was just trying to answer the old lady that it was time for their medicine, to quiet her down, but he doesn’t even know she’s there. Later I opined he was just complaining that his supper was late, or something, but I honestly don’t know what he thinks it’s time for. He makes such a racket, we can’t help but get to wishing it was time for him to pass away. And there’s this real old lady in her wheelchair, older’n me, and she’s always screaming, “Tell me another’n, Grampaw! Tell me another’n, Grampaw!” as if she was still six years old wanting a bedtime story. You’d think some of these people belong in the loony bin, not just a common old rest home. And there’s this real witch out there, I’m told she has Tourette’s syndrome, who’s uttering obscenities that would shame a sailor. I wish you could hear it. If you could hear it, you’d realize what I long ago did: the nastiest language loses all its power once it gets frequent. But the loudest mouth belongs to this old gent who keeps saying, again and again, “About that time, six white horses flew over.” Did you ever hear that expression? It’s what smart-alecky kids used to say if they didn’t believe something you’re saying. I met the old cuss once, when he wheeled his chair right into this room and looked me in the eye and said, “About that time, six white horses flew over,” and if I hadn’t already heard him hollering it a hundred times in the hall I would have thought he was making a personal accusation about my untruthfulness. I raised my cane over his head to get him to back off, and I said, “Yes, and all six of ’em bombed you with their turds.” He gave me a look like he’d actually been hit with a horse turd, and he got out.

So just push that door to, if you will. I declare, the one big advantage, if it may be called that, of being confined to this godforsaken stinking pesthole is that it makes me appreciate that I may be sick and crippled, and I may be eighty-six years old, and I may be poor, but goddamn it I aint yet senile, nor about to be, and there’s lots of old folks much worse off than me. When I was just a young man, going off to graduate school, my I.Q. measured out at 180, by God, and I don’t honestly believe it has shrunk at all since then. And as I think you’re about to discover, I can still tell a story.

This here tale begins in the summer of that year, whatever year it was—I’ve got a bad head for dates—let’s say I was about the same age you are now, and you’re what?—forty-two or forty-three?—so figure it out if you want to take the trouble to add up from my birthdate in 1892. The year don’t matter. The national situation don’t even matter, because even though we were smack dab in the middle of what we’ve been told was the Depression, folks in the Ozarks was so poor to begin with that they scarcely noticed. No, that’s not right, because poverty’s so relative. A better way to put it is that folks in the Ozarks still had everything they needed to subsist and endure, and they didn’t want for nothing. So they didn’t even know that people elsewhere all over the country was suffering from want.

It was a summer I couldn’t make up my fool mind just what to do with myself, devoting my energies either to finishing up a novel that I’d been fooling around with, or else, if I made up my mind I couldn’t write fiction, to a book that I’d had in the back of my mind for years, which I aimed to call Recreational Sex in the Plant Kingdom. Did you ever know there was such a thing? Plants are like people—why shouldn’t they be?—they “get together” oftentimes not just for propagation but for the sheer pleasure of it. But even Haldeman-Julius, the publisher for whom I’d written so many popular Little Blue Books, a nickel apiece, wouldn’t touch a book on that subject. So finally I decided just to continue thenceforward the work in which I had been engaged for a dozen years: the sympathetic seeking out and collecting of folklore, trying to record it before it was all gone, as it seemed in constant danger of going. But I was not—I kept saying, and I’m still saying—I was not a folklorist, whatever the fuck that is, possibly an academically trained pedant with a Pee-Aitch-Dee and a patronizing attitude toward the backward bucolics of the hinterlands. I wasn’t getting paid much for the hard work I did, but I never earned a penny as a folklorist. These here modern-day folklorists don’t even study folklore anyhow; they call it “folkloristics” to make it sound even more academically respectable, and they fill up their fancy journals with words like “paradigm” and “parameter,” which I’ve got just a vague notion of the meaning of, and they talk about “etics” and “emics,” which I don’t know what the shit they’re saying. I have never had anything to do with the folklorists. All right, Mary. Miss Mary Celestia wishes to remind me, and inform you, that she herself was, until her retirement, the University’s only professor of folklore. So all right, I married a folklorist, and I’ve known a whole bunch of ’em, I’ve met the great ones, I’ve corresponded with and talked with the likes of Stith Thompson and Archer Taylor and Richard Dorson and George Corson, and I’ve even developed friendships with some of them: there’s a young Ph.D. of folklore over at the University, name of Robert Cochran, who replaced Mary, and who comes in to see us from time to time and tells me he’s working on my biography, and then of course there’s Rayna Green, a brave and sweet girl who annotated and introduced my Pissing in the Snow. No, there are several bona fide “folklorists” that I can not only tolerate but admire. But don’t never call me one! Call me a collector, or call me an antiquarian, or just call me a shiftless bum who never had nothing better to do than mingle with and observe the forgotten cordwood folks of the hollers and hills.

I knew that the gods of the mountains are not the gods of the towns. And I knew that the young people of the mountains, given half a chance, would choose to ape their city cousins and abandon the old ways of their heritage, including enchantment with stories and tales. Television was just a distant fantasy, but radio was coming in, and talking motion pictures were being shown in the country villages as competition, if not replacement, for the old storytelling tradition. Along with it, movies and radio were attempting to establish new standards of “correct” English that would soon leave the Ozark hillfolk trying to mouth a homogenized “acceptable” English as it was spoken elsewhere in the country, and they would start discarding the old Chaucerian and Shakespearean and Spencerian language that had been in their safekeeping for generations, and they would lose completely what traditional memory they still had of the actual stories told by Chaucer and Shakespeare and Spencer.

I wanted to find the most inaccessible parts of the Ozarks, cabins on ridges at the end of crude trails, and talk to the oldest of the old-timers among those lost and forgotten people, and I wanted to write down what they had to remember. I wanted to befriend old shut-ins, and interview granny women and yarb doctors and old horse traders. I wanted to shack up with berry pickers under the ledges, and sit on the porch of a gristmill while the corn was a-grinding, and around the fire of the still while the corn was a-making, and listen to the stories told around midnight campfires on the stream banks and high ridges while fishing or coon hunting. I wanted to kick up my heels at square dances and play parties and other backwoods frolics, and write down the words the caller spoke and the tunes the fiddlers played. I wanted to sit in brush arbors under the boiling sun and listen to the preachers exhort the sinners to their salvation. I wanted to loaf on the courthouse steps and the steps of crossroad country stores and listen, and listen, and listen!

I wanted, in short, to make my most concentrated investigation of the distinctions between mundane “reality” and magical if untrue story. Without planning it or knowing it in advance, I would also be collecting material for one of my major books, We Always Lie to Strangers, on the distinction between exaggerations meant to deceive and to entertain.

So I went. I ought to have told Marie what I was planning to do, but I didn’t. I just up and went. I left her a letter, apologizing for sneaking off before daybreak, and making it clear that my intentions were no different from that sort that had allowed her to say to her friends on several occasions, “Oh, Vance has just hit the road again, to see what he can see.” You recall that old folk tune, “The bear went over the mountain, to see what he could see”? In fact, I had spent most of the decade of the twenties, perhaps secretly driven by the coming of the Jazz Age, living hand-to-mouth in my rambles all over the Ozarks. This time I had a little money, and I was leaving Marie more than she needed for groceries and such. The year before I had been invited to put in a stint as a screenwriter in Hollywood—just like Fitzgerald and Faulkner and all the rest—and they had paid me a couple hundred dollars a week for nearly three months before they discovered that I couldn’t write movies. That was the best money, the most money, I had ever earned.

Except for a sizable wad of cash, I was traveling light. I had everything I needed in a canvas knapsack, including plenty of scraps of thin newsprint, on which I would jot down my recordings of stories and jokes and old sayings and odd words and their meanings, and superstitions and whatever else I needed to collect and record. I had one change of clothes in the knapsack, and the clothes on my back, which I had carefully selected to make me look as much like a hillman as possible: a well-worn chambray shirt, frayed and faded denim pants, scuffed brogues on my feet, and on my head a crushed, floppy, sweat-stained black felt fedora. I had debated with myself whether to wear a felt hat or a straw, and had decided the latter might make me look like a farmer, which I wasn’t.

Even in such old clothes, I cut quite a figure in those days, if I say so myself. You wouldn’t guess it to look at me now, but I was a handsome man in my forties. I had a neat, nearly a dapper, mustache, not as full as I wear now nor as gray but dark, and in contrast to this shiny smooth dome, which looks like I’m a-clearing ground for a new face, I had a full head of dark hair, just beginning to thin. During my ephemeral stay in Hollywood, I had more than once been mistaken for a movie star.

Much of my traveling was by shank’s mare—on foot, but I got plenty of rides too—by wagon, by occasional auto, sometimes by truck or other conveyance, and thus I gravitated toward the remotest part of the Ozarks, that selfsame Newton County which has been the private purlieu of your fictions. As soon as I crossed the county line, I began to lose track of time, which I suppose was my intention anyhow. I spent the nights in a variety of accommodations: in the crudest, dirtiest log cabin, sleeping with a whole family of twelve in one room; in the “guest room” of a rather prosperous valley farmer whose wife came perilously close to sharing my bed; in an abandoned house that must surely have been inhabited by ghosts, who kept me awake most of the night; in a barn, on the straw, not once but twice; in the shelter of a moonshine distillery, whose owner and I both passed out sampling the product and slept on the hard ground; and in a house of sorts in the mouth of a cave, three of its four sides the natural rock of the cave.

Everywhere I went I was warmly received and invited to stay, and sometimes almost forcibly prevented from leaving. My business, to anyone who inquired, was simply that I was wandering the countryside, a vagabond in search of adventure and occasional work—and I had occasional work, being put to good service helping out around the farm or the house. Often I earned my keep. I was a good woodchopper. I was a good hay-mower. I could hoe a patch of corn with the best of them…although my hands, unaccustomed to manual labor, easily blistered and became quite raw, but I dared not ask for a pair of gloves, lest my hosts suspect that I was not the native hillman I was pretending to be.

One of the finest storytellers I encountered not only had a repertoire of the very best old folktales as imaginatively reconstructed or retold by herself but also was a fantastic teller of “local history.” She was an old woman, a fortune-teller, name of Cassie Whitter, and she lived in a dogtrot cabin on a mountaintop in the most isolated spot I ever reached in all my travels. I sought her out on the advice of some of her distant neighbors, who assured me that the old lady could not only accurately predict my future, or tell me the location of anything I had lost, but could “keep ye up all night long with stories, ever one of ’em true.” I had heard several references to the “Widder Whitter,” an utterance which sounded like a birdcall, before I figured out that the first part was merely a title of honor: she had been widowed for many years. Climbing the steep and rugged trail to her place, hardly more than a pig’s path, I felt such a fatigue and malaise, which couldn’t be blamed on the arduous trek, that I wondered if I was coming down with something.

She received me hospitably, and sensed that I was not well, and, as was the custom everywhere I went, insisted, no, demanded that I spend the night. After I drank the coffee she gave me, she took my empty cup and studied the coffee grounds clinging to its sides, and “read” my fortune from those dregs, in the manner of other fortune-tellers reading tea leaves. The things she predicted would happen to me actually did happen to me eventually—in fact so many of her predictions did come true that I was convinced that all the stories she told me as “truth” must also have been true. Among her predictions, for example, was that I would spend all my later years in a nursing home, a concept of an institution that was unknown to me at that time and could not possibly have been known to her, and I thought her notion of it was a form of madness. I truly suspected that she was a little loony, and possibly even dangerous, and that is why, when I began to get honestly sick during the night, my first thought was that she might have poisoned me. She had fed me a dish I recognized because I’d had it elsewhere among those people—stewed squirrel with new potatoes and poke greens—it was very tasty, but after she had put me up for the night in “t’other house,” that is, the opposite wing of the two-pen dogtrot cabin in which she lived, I grew desperately ill, and despite the warm June night, I had severe chills that shook me so violently I needed extra quilts, but the shaking served to distract me from a very severe headache and an even more severe backache. Several times during the night I had to get up and go out to “the brush.” I had diarrhea, and used up several precious sheets of the newsprint I packed for keeping notes. At dawn of that sleepless night my nose began to bleed, and I lost more newsprint trying to stanch it.

When the Widder Whitter discovered my condition, she offered to bring me my breakfast in bed, but I had no appetite whatsoever. She put her hand on my brow for a moment and declared, “Wal, I may be able to read yore future, but I caint tell what ails ye in the present. We need Doc Swain, if he didn’t live so blamed fur away. Too fur for me to fetch ’im. Why, he could fix ye up in nothing flat. Doc Swain could jist take one look at ye, and tell what ye needed to do to git well. He could…”

Sick as I was, and enfeebled, I did not realize that Cassie Whitter had begun to tell me the long, long story of Doc Colvin Swain of Stay More. It is the story that I am going to be telling to you, for as long as it takes me. It is the story that I heard again in part from various people I interviewed in Stay More itself. It is the story that, finally, Doc Swain himself was going to confirm to my satisfaction before I was done with him. Probably no one told me the story better than Cassie Whitter, but I could not appreciate it, nor even listen closely, those days and nights of desperate illness while she seemed to drone on and on. In fact, it was horribly tantalizing, listening to the exploits and the cures of this fantastic country doctor when I needed him so frantically myself. But I had the presence of mind to realize that the story she was telling me was so important, so fabulous, that I had better make some notes to jog my memory of it, and while I was so sick I could scarcely hold a pencil, I managed to write down a kind of outline of the story as Cassie was telling it to me. So I was sacrificing half of my newsprint as wipes for my diarrhea, and the other half was going to summarize Doc Swain’s story, and sometimes I couldn’t tell the difference!

One other thing I realized: being a woman, Cassie Whitter out of verbal modesty was censoring a great deal of Doc’s story; she was obviously omitting or euphemizing the sexual parts of it, and if I wanted to learn those, I’d have to search them out from somebody else.

Nor did she reach, in her telling of the story, the crucial part, concerning his “affair” with a beautiful young girl. That most dramatic part of the story, which I would have to learn primarily from Doc himself, had just commenced when my illness became so severe that she was prompted to abandon the story and announce, “I had best see if I caint fetch Gram Dinsmore fer ye, or else you’re not long fer this world.” Then she disappeared, for the better part of the day, as I grew progressively sicker and felt hopeless that I was alone without anybody handy to help me. Late in the afternoon she finally returned with another woman, older even than she, who carried a bundle, an assortment of some things tied up in what looked like a gingham dish towel. Gram Dinsmore, I was told, was a “yarb doctor,” and she proceeded to prod and poke me while asking various questions about me and my condition. How old was I? On what day of what month at what hour of day was I born? Through which nostril had my nose bled, and at what hour of the day? “Have you got the flux?” she asked.

“Flux?” said I.

“Yessir, are yore bowels loose and runny?” she inquired. When I admitted that I did indeed have diarrhea, she asked several embarrassing questions about the composition and color of the excretion. Then she opened her bundle and took out a small sheaf of green leaves, which she gave to the Widder Whitter, asking her to brew it up into a tea. She explained to me that it was simply ragweed, and the ragweed tea would cure me of the flux, but the flux, she said, was just a symptom of something far more serious, and she wanted me to take a strong dose of some oozy concoction she kept in a quart Mason jar. When I refused to take it until I knew what it contained, she recited the few ingredients, primarily the boiled-down residue of the inner bark of the slippery elm tree, Ulmus fulva. She gave me a tablespoon full of it, and it was nippy but not unpleasant. She forbade me to eat any solid food, and told me to drink lots of the ragweed tea, then she asked me for a dime, but I protested I ought to pay her much more than that.

“Jist let me borry a dime iffen ye got one,” she said, and I gave her a dime and she inspected it closely and declared, “Hit aint shiny enough.” I searched my pocket for a shinier dime, but had none. She gave the dime to the Widder Whitter. “Could ye rench this in some vinegar and lye soap?” And when this was done, she took the now-shiny dime and inserted it between my upper lip and teeth, and declared, “Now thet thar will stop yore nose from a-bleedin.”

And sure enough it did. I wish I could report that her other prescriptions healed my afflictions as quickly as that dime cured me of nosebleed, but no. Gram Dinsmore accepted from me a half-dollar for her services, but left without telling me what her diagnosis had been, and my diarrhea and chills continued unabated despite my regular consumption of the slippery elm ooze and the ragweed tea. The Widder Whitter attempted to resume telling Doc Swain’s story, on the threshold of the appearance of the young heroine, but I could not listen attentively. Finally I interrupted her in desperation, “Just how fur away does this Doc Swain live?”

“He lives all the way over to Stay More,” she said. “That’s six mile at least.”

“Miz Whitter,” I said, “you’ve done gone and predicted I’ll most likely spend my old age in a home under the care of nurses, so that means I aint about to up and die of what’s ailin me right now. But if you can read the near future jist as good as the far future, can you tell me how long I’m gonna be sick and how I’m gonna get well? How long am I gonna have to stay here?”

“Yo’re welcome to stay here, long as you like,” she said. “And I can finish tellin ye Doc Swain’s story.”

“Well, yes, and I’m obliged,” I said, “but can you tell me how long before I get well enough to travel again? At least the six miles to Stay More so’s I could see Doc Swain myself?”

“Drink up yore ragweed tea,” she told me, and I drank it, and she took the cup and peered closely at the small bits of ragweed clinging to the sides. “Hhmmm,” she hummed, more than once, and I began to understand that perhaps she was as adept at reading tea leaves as reading coffee grounds. At length, she said, “How about that? It’s Doc Swain hisself who’s a-comin to fetch ye and take ye to Stay More and fix ye all up, and cure the ailments of yore soul while he’s at it!”

So. We come at last to our hero, the main character of her story, and of mine. You’ve been patient to sit through this long preface. Okay, here he is: one afternoon during my second week at Cassie Whitter’s, the door opened, and in walks this man who is the everlovin epitome of the old-time country doctor! Black bag and all! Steel-rimmed spectacles and all! Christ A-mighty, he was so much right out of a Norman Rockwell cover that I knew I was having a delirious hallucination (although that wouldn’t come until a week later): that I had just invented him in my desperate need, out of my urgent fancy, that I was just wishing he was there.

“Why, howdy, Doc!” the Widder Whitter said to him in surprise, as if I was inventing also her confirmation of his reality. “I was jist a-talkin about ye. How’d ye know we’ve got a customer fer ye?”

“Gram Dinsmore tole me,” the man declared, setting down his bag and opening it and taking out his stethoscope. I suddenly realized that in her long story about him, Cassie Whitter had made no attempt to describe his appearance. Was that in order to universalize him, to let him represent all physicians? He was not tall, and inclined to stockiness, and I guessed he was about fifty, maybe midfifties, about right for a skilled, well-practiced physician. I don’t think Norman Rockwell could have given him a better face: as kind and benign as you could hope for, and even a little handsome. The only missing touch was that he was not wearing a doctor’s coat and vest: he was not even wearing a necktie: he was not even wearing a white shirt. I can’t honestly recall what he was wearing; I just remember that although it was not at all professional, he still somehow looked very proper and official.

The Widder Whitter was chuckling. “Now what’d she go and do thet fer? Aint you her rival?”

The man laughed. “Yeah, and we was both up at Elbert Sizemore’s place this mornin, a-tryin to cure him of a bad case of the hives, me with my magnesium sulfate and her with her maple-leaf tea. I had a little fun, askin her if her tea was made from rock maple or soft maple, and shore enough she’d used the soft, and I tole her that rock always beats soft when it comes to hives.” The doctor paused to pick from his eyes some tears of laughter. “That shore did frost her gizzard! But anyhow, when we got done a-fussin around with ole Elbert, Gram tole me about this here feller here, said he most likely was ailin with something that was ‘beyond her powers,’ is the way she put it, ‘beyond her powers.’ Never heared her admit that of ary a case before. She tole me what she thought it mought be, but I’ll jist have to see fer myself.” All the time that he was speaking these words, the doctor was doing things to me: running a thermometer into my mouth, placing his stethoscope on my chest and back, squeezing my stomach and my sides, and peering into my ears, my nose, my mouth. At length he pulled up my shirt, inspected my stomach carefully, then let my shirt fall and said, “I don’t reckon I’ve met ye afore. I’m Doc Swain,” and offered me his hand.

“I’m Doc Randolph,” I said, shaking his hand. In those days everybody around Pineville called me “Doc” just as a nickname, which had nothing to do with medicine nor with the Pee-Aitch-Dee that I’d never succeeded in finishing, but was just a common Ozark nickname for a gambler. So I added, “But it’s jist what they call me, it aint but a nickname.”

“Please to meet ye, Doc,” he said. “You don’t live here-abouts, do ye?”

“Nope, jist a-passin through.”

“Wal, you shore caint pass on through if we jist leave ye a-layin here. It’s too fur and a hard climb for a old man like me to come up here ever day and see you. And besides you couldn’t afford my rates of twenty-five cents a mile for the distance I’d have to travel. So I need to git you down whar I can give ye a blood test, and keep a eye on ye.”

“What seems to be wrong with me?” I asked.

“I caint be a hunerd percent certain, jist yet. I don’t believe it’s malaria, but it could be meningitis, or trichinosis, or abdominal Hodgkin’s disease, or several other things. Whatever it is, it’s serious. Gram Dinsmore thought it mought be typhoid, and that’s what she prescribed fer ye, although she gave ye one thing to loosen yore bowels and another’n to stop ’em up!” Doc Swain laughed. “The way I learnt it, if the slippery elm bark is peeled upwards, it’ll make ye puke, but if it’s peeled down’ards it’ll give ye the flux. She must’ve peeled it the wrong way!” He laughed again, then grew serious. “But do ye reckon ye could git up, and me and Cassie will help ye down the mountain to whar I had to leave my auto?”

So with no small expenditure of effort and finesse, the doctor and the Widder Whitter supported me between them as we made our way slowly and carefully down the steep trail from the widow’s cabin. The doctor had to carry his bag in one hand and the Widder Whitter had to carry my cumbersome knapsack in one of hers, and the three of us had to stop whenever we came to a fallen log and sit on it for a moment to rest. Going downhill in my condition in that manner was a worse ordeal for me than any uphill hike I’d ever made. It seemed it took hours to reach the place where the trail met a graveled road, and the doctor’s car was parked. Through the mental fog that was settling down on me, I tried to thank the widow for her hospitality and tolerance of my infirmity and her help and her food and her…but she put her fingers on my lips to hush me. “Come back and see me again when you git to feelin better,” she said. “I never did finish tellin ye that amazin story. But maybe ye can git the ole hoss to tell you the rest of it hisself!”

As we drove off, the doctor glanced at me and asked, as if he knew the answer, “What ole hoss? What amazin story?”

“It seems that there womarn knows yore entire life,” I observed. “And she’s been a-tellin me most of it.”

Doc coughed. “Wal, heck, Doc, I aint so sure she knows the past as well as she knows the future. Didje git yore fortune tole?”

“Yeah, I reckon I did, Doc,” I allowed. “But it was kind of strange.” I didn’t feel much like talking, but maybe I could just let him do all of it. So I asked, “Does she really know the future?”

“Myself, I’ve never permitted her to mess around with my fortune,” he declared. “She seems to know such fantastic tales about my past, I don’t want to know my future. Tell ye the honest truth, if half of what she told ye about me was true, my past has done already had enough problems to last me plumb through the rest of my future!” I managed to join in his laughter over this. He went on, “So I couldn’t tell ye if she knows my future, but she’s either an awful good guesser or got some special knowledge of Fate, because she’s never been known to be wrong in one of her readings. And I know fer a fack that she’s ’specially good at tellin whar lost things is at—she can locate strayed animals and anything else that’s been misplaced.” Then, as the car—a Model A Touring Sedan considerably dented and dusted—bucked and jerked down the terrible road off the mountain, the doctor, speaking loudly over the noise of the car’s rattling and bumping, told me the story of how the Widder Whitter had once located a dog the doctor had lost, or rather had had stolen. “I had me this great big ole hound, named Galen—after the olden-time Greek physician, you know?”—he cast me a glance to see if I did indeed know, and there must have been something in my smile which told him that I did—“and one day ole Galen turned up missin, and was gone more’n a week before somebody suggested it wouldn’t do no harm for me to ask the Widder Whitter to tell me if he was lost for good, or dead some’ers, or what, so I hiked up to her place and tole Cassie what I come fer, and she started in a-conjurin around with some little sticks and buttons and what-all, and talked a lot of damn foolishment, but finally she says my dawg is tied up in a corncrib over to Spunkwater, some miles due east of my place in Stay More, and she even described the feller who stole ’im, and I knew right off it was ole Bib Ledbetter, who’d been bearin a grudge again me ever since I’d treated him fer syphilis and he’d wanted me to tell his old lady it was jist measles, but I’d had to warn her not to lay with him, and she’d done guessed that he’d been cheatin on her. Wal sir, I drove on over to Bib’s place, and shore enough thar was my dawg Galen, big as life and twice as natural! Ole Ledbetter claimed he’d jist seen a stray dawg around the last couple of days, and didn’t pay it no mind. He says some of the childern must of shut him up in the corncrib, maybe. So I couldn’t prove nothing, and didn’t try to argue with Bib—I jist took my dawg and drove him home. But there aint no doubt in my mind that I’d of never got Galen back if it hadn’t been fer Cassie Whitter. So maybe we’d best not dismiss anything the widder says.”

I managed a smile at his story, but I couldn’t make any comment. Eventually he coughed again, and cast me a sharp look, and asked, “Did she tell you about that time she predicted the future for a gal named Tenny?”

I tried to remember. “I think she was just getting around to that part of your story. Wasn’t Tenny your wife?”

“Maybe not legally,” he said, and did not elaborate, so I left it at that. The bouncing of the car was hell on my stomach, and after another mile of the rugged highway I searched for something to say just to keep my mind off my miseries. “Have you ever heared tell of a ‘nursin home’?” I asked him. And when he pondered a moment before shaking his head, I told him that Cassie Whitter had predicted I’d spend my last days in a nursing home.

He meditated on that prophecy for a while longer before declaring, “Wal, it sounds to me like yore last days won’t befall ye fer a many and a many a year to come. Forty year from now, maybe they’ll conjure up some kind of house whar ole folks jist go to be took keer of in their feebleness and senility. A house filled with nurses.”

Once we hit a rut so deep that my stomach got the better of me, and I frantically signaled for him to stop so I could open the door and puke into the road. He watched me with interest and sympathy and expressed regret that he couldn’t give me anything on the spot to help. “We’ll be home directly,” he said.

My condition was such that I could not appreciate how close we might have been to our destination, nor could I even absorb the gorgeous scenery en route. To this day I have hardly any memory of how we got into Stay More. Sometimes in my dreams I seem to have relived that route, and caught glimpses of strange turnings in the road, streams forded, mountains rising up to enclose me or hug me, but I couldn’t have mapped the route to save my soul, and much later I would realize that there was no way I could escape from Stay More, because I had no idea how I’d got there.

Haven’t you remarked on this phenomenon in your novels? You’ve made it clear that Stay More is not simply remote and hard to get to, if not inaccessible, but that it’s even harder to escape than it is to find.

Late in the afternoon we came to a clearing at the top of a hill affording a broad view of the valley below, and the doctor pointed at the small village there, a sleepy, decaying, almost storybook hamlet, and said, “Yonder’s Stay More.”

Are those tears in your eyes? From nostalgia, I trust, not from boredom. What can I tell you about Stay More that you don’t already know?—except perhaps to assure you that although you must have allowed yourself occasionally to doubt its existence except in your novelist’s fantasy, it does indeed exist! Or rather, it did; it doesn’t anymore. You told me in a letter once that you took the name for your “mythical” village right out of the chapter “An Ozark Word List,” in the back of the book I wrote with George Wilson, Down in the Holler: A Gallery of Ozark Folk Speech, wherein I had reprinted an item I’d originally published in a 1926 issue of the journal Dialect Notes:

stay more: v.i. To remain longer. This is a polite expression, used when a guest is preparing to depart. “Don’t be drug off, Jim! Stay more!”

But the simple, wonderful truth, Donald, is that it may be only a common polite expression in the Ozarks, but it is also the name given in the first half of the nineteenth century to a burgeoning community of hillfolk in Newton County, and while it may no longer exist, it most certainly did exist that summer of which I am telling you! My own name for my own mythical village, whenever I had recourse to mention it in my various collections, or in my book of stories, From an Ozark Holler, was “Durgenville,” which I fabricated from the word for an awkward, uncouth hillman, “durgen.” That’s a hard “g.” I can assure you that nobody ever named any actual Ozark village Durgenville. But I can also assure you that somebody, even if it was, as rumored, an Indian, did indeed name the village of which we are speaking Stay More.

Although the village had begun to decay, its essential architecture was still intact: there was a schoolhouse, a pair of doctor’s offices, a sawmill and a wagon-bow factory, an inoperative but still impressive gristmill, and a couple of general stores. Doc Swain pulled up at the lone gasoline pump beside one of the stores, a large, three-story mercantile with a faded sign over it, INGLEDEW’S GEN. STORE, and in one of its grimy plate-glass windows a pasteboard sign, POST OFFICE, STAY MORE, ARK. The store appeared to be in operation but had no customers at the moment. The gasoline pump was one of those old tall, slender types where you pump the gas up into a glass cylinder before gravity lets it down into your tank. Doc said, “’Scuse me, but I’d best fill up now, or it’ll slip my mind, and I’ll find myself called out in the middle a the night without any gas.” While he was filling his tank, the storekeeper came out onto the porch, a white-haired but still-handsome old gent, and they exchanged greetings, “Howdy, Doc,” and “Howdy, Willis.” Doc Swain tried to pay for the gas, but Willis waved the money away, saying, “I still owe you, Doc, and probably forever will.”

Driving on, Doc pointed out the towering gristmill behind the general store. “Been shut down fer some years.” He pointed to the opposite side of the road. “But that’s still runnin, sort of.” There was a small hotel, or rather actually a large house, two stories, three front doors, which had a little HOTEL sign over its entrance. We passed an abandoned house next to it before Doc turned the car into his own yard, before a modest cottage with a sign out front, C. U SWAIN, M.D. DOCTOR OF HUMAN MEDICINE. The house’s porch was practically right on the road, and what yard there was clung to both sides of the building and was littered with free-ranging chickens. As Doc got out of the car, he was greeted by a large, slobbering, black-spotted hound dog, and, ruffling the dog’s neck, he said to me, “This here’s Galen, not the one I was tellin ye about, not the original Galen, who, come to think of it, wasn’t the original Galen hisself. No, this here’s Galen Four or Galen Five, I forget which.” Then the doctor directed my attention to a house across the road, where another shingle was posted on a stake: J.M. PLOWRIGHT, M.D. FAMILY MEDICINE. “There’s my competition,” Doc said, “jist in case ye need a secont opinion. But I was you, I’d shore hope I don’t.” Then he pointed at two more buildings: next to his house was an abandoned shop, flat-roofed, constructed of stonemasonry. “That there used to be the money-bank,” he said. “Got robbed back in twenty-two. Remind me to tell ye the story.” Then he pointed again, one last time, at a building up the road, across another branch road from the bank, which was not abandoned but had wagons parked in front and a couple of horses tethered at its post. “Stay More ’pears to be still big enough to support two physicians, more or less, and it’s also big enough to support two general stores. That’un there is run by the nicest gal ye’d ever hope to meet, name of Latha Bourne.”

Doc Swain helped me rise up out of the car and climb the porch and into the front room of his house. “This is what passes for my office,” he said, indicating the room, which indeed looked professional enough and equipped enough to be a rural doctor’s clinic. He supported me onward to an adjoining room containing a narrow bed, a bedside table, and a player piano. The walls and ceiling were covered with tongue-and-groove boards painted a not unpleasant shade of tan. “And this here is what will jist have to pass for my hoss-pittle,” he said. “Let’s jist plunk ourselfs down right here,” and he helped me down onto the bed, which had a mattress stuffed with goose down and was infinitely comfortable. In my condition, which seemed to be growing worse despite the prospect of medical attention, I was grateful for any little thing that eased my pain.

“Now, Doc, I’d better go feed my livestock and milk the cow,” Doc Swain declared, “unless there’s anything else I can do fer ye right now.”

“Doc, you don’t suppose,” I managed to request, “you could let me have a little drink of somethin?”

“Water? Sody pop? How about milk? You’re gonna have to drink two quarts of milk ever day, but I’ll have to get some from Bess first.” I realized the female he referred to was his cow.

“Somethin hard to ease my misery,” I suggested. “A drap of corn, maybe?”

He smiled his kindly smile. “Wal, I’ll tell ye,” he said. “Gener’ly it wouldn’t make no difference nor do ye no harm, but I’m a-fixin to give ye somethin to he’p ye sleep, and they don’t mix. When ye wake up, I’ll see if I caint let ye have a drap or two of Chism’s Dew, best corn on airth.”

Doc Swain filled a hypodermic syringe and injected me with something that indeed put me into a deep, deep sleep. But when I woke up, it was still daylight. I figured I must not have slept very long, because it had been getting on to suppertime when I’d arrived. I waited for a good while to see if the doctor would check in on me, and then I hollered, “Anybody home?”

Instantly Doc appeared, and said, “Wal, you shore had a good sleep, now didn’t ye? How you feelin?”

“It’s still day,” I observed.

“It’s still day all right,” he agreed. “But it’s midday of the day after I put ye under.” He reached beneath my bed and drew out a thunder mug, or chamber pot. “Use this if ye need it, and I’ll give ye a snort of Chism’s Dew, lessen ye’d keer fer some breakfast first.” He went away while I used the chamber pot, into which I was able only to urinate. He noticed this on his return, and said, “Wal, Gram Dinsmore’s ellum juice seems to be a-wearin off. You aint got the trots no more.” He took my temperature, my blood pressure, and ran me through the routine of assorted palpations and reflex-checking taps with his little silver hammer. “You know, Gram Dinsmore did the right thing, I reckon,” he said. “And even her diagnosis was correct. Blame if ye aint got the typhoid fever. I took some of your blood while you was asleep and ran a test on it. Wal, Gram Dinsmore aint such a bad ole yarb doctor, such as they come. ‘Many an old wife or country woman doth often more good with a few known and common garden herbs than our bombast Physicians with all their prodigious, sumptuous, far-fetched, rare, conjectural medicines.’ That’s what ole Burton writ, in his ’Natomy of Melancholy.” The doctor paused, then fixed me with a keen look. “You know ole Burton, don’t ye?”

Certainly I knew Robert Burton, although, as I was eventually to confess to Doc Swain, I had never managed to read the entire thousand-odd pages of The Anatomy of Melancholy, into which I had first dipped when I was working on my master’s in psychology at Clark University. But at the moment I was rattled: not because it surprised me to discover his familiarity with that seventeenth-century forerunner of Freud, but because he seemed to be casting suspicion upon my disguise as a mere backwoods durgen. It was a disguise of which I was proud, and which I wasn’t ready to drop, and I pretended innocence. “Burton who?” I said.

“Oh, let’s not fool ourselfs, Doc,” he said. And when I continued attempting to maintain my look of ignorance—not very successfully, I suppose—he took one of my hands and turned it over, palm up, and called my attention to the blisters and abrasions on it. “Yore raw paws was the first thing I noticed about ye,” he said. “You aint no simple farmer nor woodsman, now air ye?”

He had me there, but I stubbornly clung to my imposture, and even said some fool thing like “Now what on airth gives ye sech a notion as thet?”

“Wal, Doc, I hate to tell ye,” he said, “but last night while ye was deep asleep, I took the liberty of lookin through yore tote sack, and I seen all them scribblins on all that paper in thar, with my own name mentioned frequent. Main reason I done it was I suspicioned ye might be a revenuer in disguise, and we’ve had some problems lately with them bastards. You shore aint no revenuer, neither, air ye? You wouldn’t be writin down my name, because I aint never distilled any corn myself, nor had any dealins in it. So do ye mind tellin me jist what it is yo’re after, writin my name all over those sheets?”

I decided to cease trying to deceive him. “Okay, Doc, you’ve got me, I reckon,” I said. “I’ve just been a-wanderin around the country, tryin to pick up a good story hither and yon. Those sheets you seen was jist some notes I made on what Cassie Whitter told me about you.”

He studied me quizzically, then smiled. “Kin ye earn a livin jist a-gatherin up folks’ stories like thet?”

I laughed. “Jist barely.”

“How? You aint one of these here novelists, air ye?” He pronounced the word with disparagement, as if he might have had an encounter or two with the products of a novelist.

“Nope,” I said. “I aint published no novels.”

“Do ye write it up fer the newspapers and get paid fer it?”

“I’ve written some books that weren’t fiction,” I declared, “Although I haven’t been paid much for them. Most recently, I wrote a pair of books called The Ozarks: An American Survival of Primitive Society and Ozark Mountain Folks,” I felt pretty strange, telling him my titles, as if I were Roger Tory Peterson trying to tell a bird that I’d written a field guide in which the bird was included. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard of ’em?”

Doc shook his head. “‘Survival of primitive society,’ d’ye say?” he repeated. “I never thought of it thataway, but I ’low as maybe yo’re right. I reckon we’re pretty primitive compared with the rest of the world. I reckon we’re still a-livin the way our forefathers had to live ’cause they didn’t have any better, nor know any better.” Doc Swain produced a demijohn and a pair of glass tumblers, into which he poured a liquid that was not clear and white like conventional moonshine but yellowed as if aged in a cask. He handed me one, and clanked his against mine: “Here’s lookin at ye. See if ye think this here whiskey aint a survival of primitive society.”

It was indeed the best whiskey I’d had in a long, long time, and I told him so. In return, he told me a little about its origin: a family named Chism, living up in the mountains east of Stay More (he had pointed out their house on the trip from Cassie’s), had for generations been producing a superior moonshine which…but what am I doing?—trying to explain “Chism’s Dew” to you, who practically invented the name for it. You’ll just have to stop me whenever I get to telling this story in such a way I forget who I’m talking to. Sometimes I’m inclined to think I’m just talking to gentlepeople in general.

Anyhow, Doc and me had more than one glass apiece, and I told him a little of my background: born in Pittsburg, Kansas; first visited the Ozarks at the age of seven; taught biology at Pittsburg High School after getting my M.A. in psychology at Clark University in Massachusetts; served as a private in the infantry during the World War but got medically discharged without seeing any action; moved after the war to the Ozark village of Pineville up in Missouri and started my first experiments in collecting backwoods lore; interrupted by an attempt to get a legitimate Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Kansas, gave it up, and moved back to Pineville and lived there ever since, except for those months I lived in Hollywood the previous year. I concluded this capsule autobiography by declaring, “Now my throat’s getting sore. Am I talkin too much, or do ye suppose the liquor is causing it?”

“That’s jist part of yore disease,” he said. “But the liquor ought to be he’pin yore appetite. Are you hungry yit?”

Sure enough, my appetite was returning, for the first time in several days. When I acknowledged this, Doc cupped his mouth and called, “Ro-weener!” A woman came into the room, a fortyish woman in a simple flower-print dress tight on her sturdy but shapely frame. She was not a homely woman but she wasn’t exactly pretty. I assumed she was the doctor’s wife, but he introduced us, saying, “This here’s all I’ve got in the way of a nurse, and I can only keep her part-time, but she’s the best there is. She’ll be takin keer of ye most of the time. The thing about typhoid is, recoverin from it depends more on good nursin than on doctorin. Rowener can hep ye a good sight more’n I could do.”

“Right proud to meet ye, Doctor Randolph,” Rowena said, and sized me up, or, since I was still reclining, sized me sideways.

“He aint a doctor doctor,” Doc Swain said to his nurse. “They jist call ’im Doc as a nickname, maybe on account of he’s sort of a perfesser.”

Rowena sniffed. “Have you boys been drinkin?”

Doc Swain coughed. “Wal, uh, I figgered it mought hep his appetite, ye know, and shore enough, he feels like eatin, first time in days. Do ye reckon ye could skeer him up some grub?”

“What about yore appetite?” she said to him, but disappeared and began banging things around in some distant kitchen.

“I’m fixin to mosey over to the store to get my mail,” Doc said. “Wouldje like fer me to send a postcard to yore wife or sweetheart or anybody out thar in the world of society?”

“How long am I gonna be laid up in this bed?” I asked.

“Hard to say,” he said. “Yore spleen is enlarged, and we’ll have to see if it shrinks back to normal. Any day now, you may jist have a touch of delirium or stupor that could last awhile. But iffen ye don’t git complications, like a hemorrhage or perforation, you mought jist be up and about in a week or two.”

I sighed. I debated with myself whether to send a note to Marie, but decided against it. I hadn’t sent her anything since leaving home, and I doubted that she was expecting anything.

I took advantage of my doctor’s absence to examine the contents of his little “hoss-pittle” room, which would be my home for the next week, or more: the few pictures on the wall, a moonlit landscape painted on glass with some kind of garish pigment, a chromolithographed still life of wildflowers, and a glass-enclosed framing of pinned butterflies of various shapes and colors, none of them rare, just chosen and captured for their variety of color. There were stray pieces of furniture: a cedar chest, a rocker with splint-woven seat and back, and a birch washstand with stoneware pitcher and basin. But the dominant piece of furniture was a player piano. Its lid was closed, and dust covered, and the dozen or so rolls that were needed to make it play were stacked atop the piano and also collecting dust. The floor of the room was covered with a cheap Axminster carpet in a floral design, and my bedframe had cast-iron foot-and headboards.

Rowena brought me a tray with a plate of scrambled eggs and toast, and a large glass of milk. She removed my unfinished tumbler of Chism’s Dew. “When ye git done eatin that,” she declared, “I aim to give ye a shave.”

Doc returned from the post office, leafing through his only mail, the local county weekly newspaper and the latest issue of the American Medical Association Bulletin. Then he began opening a large bottle of castor oil and poured into a tumbler a larger amount of it than he had of the Chism’s Dew. “There aint no medicine specific fer typhoid,” he said. “The most I can hope to do is clean out yore system and keep ye comfy ’til yore strength comes back.”

“I’d druther drink coal awl than castor awl,” I declared, truthfully. And then, as if to get under his skin, I said, “Gram Dinsmore’s slippery elm juice would do me a sight more good and be easier to drink.”

“Iffen it was peeled the right way!” he said. “Here, let’s take a big swaller of this.” He held the glass to my lips.

I took a small sip of the thick liquid and tried to swallow, but it was truly awful, and brought back some of the most unpleasant memories of my childhood, when my mother would regularly make me take the stuff, and I had thought that it was some kind of vicious, viscid machine oil for the purpose of lubricating casters, those little wheels under furniture. “What do they make this stuff out of, anyhow?” I said, more rhetorically than because I wanted to know.

“The seeds of a plant called Palma Christi,” he said. “Hit aint but a harmless purge. Hit’s the best thing fer loosenin up yore bowels without aggervatin ’em. Here, let’s have another big swaller,” and he held the glass to my mouth again.

After I got another swallow down, I asked, out of curiosity about his knowledge, “How does the stuff work? What does it do to you?”

“Hit’s got a toxic sustance called ricin in it,” he said, trying not to sound pedantic. “The ricinoleic acid will give yore intestines a fierce peristalsis. I reckon ye know what peristalsis is.” When I nodded, not so much because I really did know as in a kind of surprise at his use of the word, he continued, “Wal, that will liquefy and soften yore stools.”

“But I’ve already got diarrhea!” I protested.

He smiled, and shook his head. “You did have,” he said. “But you don’t, no more. And anyhow, the good thing about castor oil is, it’s also a cure for diarrhea!” He held the glass to my mouth. “Come on here now, my friend. Let’s drink up the rest of this.”

“Couldn’t we mix it with some Chism’s Dew?” I suggested.

“And spoil good whiskey?” he demanded.

So I had to finish off the glass of the stuff and I surprised myself by not vomiting. And I actually got to feeling some better. That, as I recall, was the time that Doc Swain told me the little anecdote, which I would later borrow for my 1965 collection of jests, Hot Springs and Hell, and which you borrowed five years later in your novel Lightning Bug, having your hero Every Dill tell it to your heroine Latha Bourne. I forget just how Every told it, but this was the way I told it: Doc Swain gave an old woman some medicine and he told her, “Keep a close watch, and see what passes.” Next day he came back, and she was feeling a little better. “Did anything out of the ordinary pass?” asked the doctor. “No,” says the old woman, “just a ox team, a load of hay, and two foreigners on horseback.” The doctor just looked at her. “Well,” says he, “it aint no wonder you’re a-feelin better.”

I guffawed despite my bodily aches, and I thought that tale, which I believe actually happened, was one of the most hilarious anecdotes I’d ever heard, and I asked on the spot for my writing materials, so I could copy it down. And afterwards there developed a kind of routine between Doc Swain and me, in which each morning he would ask me, “Did anything out of the ordinary pass?” and I would come back with something like “a mule team hauling logs,” or “a girl rolling a hoop,” or “a shepherd and eighteen sheep.” And he would always wink and say, “Well, it aint no wonder you’re a-feelin better.” And I actually was feeling much better, day by day.

But right now, I’m commencing to feel a mite weary, and too hoarse to talk more, and the nurse is gonna bring our supper in just a little while. Maybe I’d best wait and tell you some more of this tale tomorrow. You will come again tomorrow, won’t you? I haven’t bored you yet, have I?

Chapter two

I thought you’d come back. Tell me if I’m wrong, but you came back not just out of friendship, or politeness, or even a desire to hear what I have to say about your patented exclusive real estate, the world of Stay More, but because I still know, after all these years, how to tell a story, and to tell it in such a way that you can believe it.

But in all truth, if anything did pass in the road, I couldn’t have seen it from where I lay. The world of Stay More surrounded me without my awareness of what, if anything, was going on out there. The one window of my small room afforded a view chiefly of the ruin of the stone bank building just to the north of Doc Swain’s house. Doc told me the story of how the bank was robbed in 1922, when the same Every Dill who…but you know that story and have told it so well yourself. Now the bank had lain empty for over a decade; and its wooden timbers, encased within the rustic stonemasonry, were beginning to decay. The wooden door at the side facing my window had rotted and fallen, but it was only after several days of glancing at the bank that I noticed I could see through the open door to the window on the other side of the interior, and through that window I could discern the front porch of Latha Bourne’s general store, where that woman, whom you have called the demigoddess of your world of Stay More, was often sitting.

It is funny how we all have the habit of not noticing what is visible beyond the immediate vista, how, for example, you can look through that window yonder and see nothing but a bunch of nondescript houses across the way from this nursing home, and you wouldn’t even notice, until I call it to your attention, that the towers of Old Main at the University are rising up in the distance. See? Had you noticed before? Well, I was a little embarrassed at myself, that there had been so many hours, so many days, when I just lay on that bed in that room with nothing to do but stare at the blank stone wall of that bank building without even noticing that I could see through the wall, or rather through that fallen door and the window on the other side, and catch a clear glimpse of people on the porch of Latha’s store over two hundred yards away, including Latha herself.

Shall I describe her for you? You, of all people, who have, by your own declared intention, granted her eternal life? The Latha I first saw was the Latha who existed in the year before you were even born, and whom you never knew. The Latha you fell madly in love with at the age of five-going-on-six was perhaps beginning to discover a gray hair or two in her dark hair, and perhaps was even beginning to thicken at the middle, or to develop wrinkles here and there, or maybe even a skin spot or two, and of course if she already had any of this six years before, I couldn’t have detected it from a distance. All I could tell, from that distance, was that she was most beautiful creature I’d ever seen. And I was overwhelmed with desire for her, to the extent that she became my reason for wanting to recuperate and get out of that bed and go meet her.

Did you know that Doc himself was in love with her? Alas, the story I’m going to keep on telling you as long as you come back to hear it does not really involve Latha Bourne. I wish I could tell you a story about how I finally got out of my bed and went over and met her and we became lovers and lived happily ever after, or at least spent a wild night together. Could you accept that? No, nor could you accept the story of how Doc finally persuaded her to become his lover. Because you are “saving” her for Every Dill. As perhaps she was unknowingly saving herself. So she is not going to be the heroine of this narrative. She is incidental to it, and indeed during the time of which I shall be mainly speaking, she did not live in Stay More at all, but was in a kind of exile, either at the state hospital for the insane in Little Rock or, after Every Dill kidnapped her from that awful place and she subsequently was parted from her rescuer, in Tennessee, trying to find her way home but not succeeding until…but that is another story which you must tell us yourself one of these days, perhaps when you have no other stories to tell or you cannot do a fair job of telling whatever story you’re trying to tell.

Anyway, from my window I could not only see through that bank building and catch a glimpse of Latha in her rocker on the porch of her store but also, at least once a day, Doc Swain himself sitting beside her, talking with her. As I’ll probably have to show you, it was an unrequited love he had for her, or maybe even an unexpressed love.

You’ll have to decide for yourself, when I’m all done telling my story, whether or not Doc Swain even understood what love is. And making that judgment of him, you may also have to make it of me, because I’m not sure, even yet, that I know. Mary Celestia yonder accuses me to my face of not knowing, don’t you, Mary? Yes. Could be that she, like some women, just suffers from the insufficiency of my speaking of it. I don’t tell Mary Celestia every blessed day that I love her. That would turn it into a routine, like eating or breathing or taking a shit. There’s nothing routine about love, and it’s not something we do all the time, or even most of the time. I don’t love Mary every day. Some days it hits me all of a sudden in a way I can’t express that I love her more than anything ever got loved in the history of mankind, but other days I don’t even think about it.

You know, I tried to point out in my folk-speech book, Down in the Holler—sizable parts of which I collected in Stay More that summer—that among the euphemisms and prudish taboos of the Ozarker even the word “love” is considered more or less indecent, and the mountain people seldom use it in its ordinary sense, but nearly always with some degrading or jocular connotation. If a hillman does admit that he loved a woman, he means only that he caressed and embraced her.

And as far as I know, or was ever able to find out, Doc Swain never caressed, nor embraced, nor even touched your Latha Bourne. There was a woman—and also a girl—that Doc Swain had caressed and loved, over ten years and more previously, and this is going to be a story about them.

So I lay there looking through that window, watching Latha’s store porch and watching her and whoever was on the porch talking to her, and whatever fantasies I could fix up in my idle mind involving myself and her or whoever. But that wasn’t all I did, of course. Rowena would bring me my breakfast of scrambled eggs or oatmeal, biscuits or toast, and make sure I drank a whole quart of fresh milk. Then she’d lather my jowls and shave me expertly with a straight razor that she kept keenly stropped, all the while keeping up a running palaver of chitchat. She even contributed to the story of Doc Swain by adding a few anecdotes and more interesting items that she had learned about him.

Then she’d give me what the doctor prescribed as “a Brand bath.” Like my youthful misunderstanding of castor oil as a lubricant for furniture casters, I misunderstood this name to mean that it would permanently brand me, like cattle, but Doc eventually explained it was named after a German doctor named Brand who’d invented it as a therapy for typhoid. It was a lot harder to take than the “enemers” that Rowena also administered. It involved getting into a galvanized tub—I think it was just a sort of oval-shaped trough for watering livestock—and having Rowena dump buckets of fresh well-water over me, cold as a well-digger’s ass. Colder! Colder than a preacher’s balls! ’Scuse me, Mary. That water would make me scream, and then my teeth would start a-chattering, and my fingernails would turn blue. Doc called the Brand bath “a cardiovascular tonic,” but it near about gave me a heart attack. A wonder it didn’t give me pneumonia. But just when I’d got colder than I could stand, Rowena would commence a-rubbing me, like a massage only real hard, on my arms and legs and back and sides and all, until my blue skin had turned red as roses, and then, without drying, I’d get wrapped in an old linen sheet with a double blanket over that and put back to bed. All that rubbing Rowena done, especially around my lower stomach, would give my ole ying-yang a bone, and if I hadn’t been so sick I would’ve begged the gal for a little relief. Mary Celestia, it’s time for your nap, sweetheart, you don’t have to listen to this.

But all of my “commerce” with sweet Rowena was limited mostly to friendly banter, sometimes off-color, and to her answers to occasional questions of mine, for example, Was Doc ever married? “Still is,” Rowena said, and when I tried to get her to elaborate she told me, as if I didn’t know, that there was no such of a thing as divorce in these here parts, and Doc had had a wife a number of years previously, whom he hadn’t seen in many a year, and another wife who died. “But you’ll jist have to git him to tell you his own self about all of that,” Rowena said.

What with all that therapy and attention from Rowena—I don’t know if I was her only patient but she gave me the impression that I was—I was getting better day by day and reaching the point of wanting to get out of bed. “Doc,” I requested one morning, “how about lettin me sit in the rocker ’stead of layin in this bed all day and night?”

“We aint out of the woods yit,” he declared.

I sighed, “Tell me, Doc,” I said with a little exasperation, “how come you always say ‘we’ as if you’re the patient too? ‘Time for our breakfast,’ you’ll say even if you’ve done et. ‘Now let’s take our temperature,’ you’ll say, but you aint takin your own. Yesterday you said, ‘We wanter watch out we don’t git ourselfs a intestinal perforation,’ but there aint a bit of danger that you will ever git one!”

Doc looked a little bit crestfallen. “Wal, don’t ye know, I reckon hit’s jist plain ole empathy,” he observed. “I aint never had a patient that I didn’t feel like everything happenin to them was happenin to me too. Ever baby I’ve delivered was birthed by me. Ever time anybody died I died too.”

There was such a melancholy in his speaking of these words that I softened my annoyance. “Okay, I get the drift. But don’t ‘we’ get pretty goddamned itchy and on edge when ‘we’re’ confined to bed all the time?”

“Yeah, I reckon we do. That’s how come me and Rowener tries to keep ye beguiled.”

I was charmed by his use of that word, which can mean either to cheat, to deceive, or to amuse, to entertain, the latter meaning carrying the connotation of whiling away the hours and diverting one from one’s problems. It set me to pondering how the latter meaning could have grown out of the former, as if the ways we really entertain ourselves involve some kind of deception. A good story beguiles us: by deceiving us it entertains us. Maybe it’s even necessary to make some kind of corollary: a story is successfully delightful in proportion to its deception.

But although Doc Swain had both beguiled and regaled me with quite a lot of anecdotes, jests, and tall tales that I had not heard before, he hadn’t yet got to the stage of telling me real stories, that is, extended narratives with plot development running through beginnings, middles, and endings. And despite my occasional promptings, he had not yet begun to tell me the most important story: his own. “Doc,” I would prompt, trying to get it out of him, “is it true that you were once a basketball coach?”

“Basketball?” he would put me off. “I never knew nothing about basketball.” And, as I would eventually learn, that was quite true: he never knew nothing about basketball. But he had coached it.

Maybe I’m giving the impression that Doc didn’t have anything better to do, when he wasn’t killing time chatting with Latha Bourne on her store porch, than to sit around telling me tales and windies. My picture of him might run counter to the traditional idea of the overworked, underslept physician who had to see a hundred patients a day or night at all hours. In truth, Doc Swain was not the slave of his job…but he was the slave of his research, which he was keeping private. I knew that he spent a great number of hours each day in a back room of the house that he called his “laboratory.” He explained that of course he was his own pathologist, but that wasn’t all he was doing back there in that room. For all I knew, he was creating a monster, like Frankenstein. I can remember a few occasions when Rowena said to me, “Colvin caint see you this mornin”—she never called him “the doctor” or “Doc” or anything but his first name—“on account of he was up all last night hard at work in his laboratory.” Eventually I came right out and asked him what kind of research he was doing, but all he would say was, “Oh, I’ve jist been foolin around with some pathogenic microorganisms, tryin to see if I caint come up with an antibiotic.”

He had very few office calls. Whenever somebody was sick, Doc went to them, at their house. And usually that was only after they had exhausted every other possible means for a cure: home remedies, patent medicines, superstitions, visits from Gram Dinsmore or some other “granny woman.” Doc was just the expedient if nothing else worked.

“I am the last resort,” he declared to me one day, in a kind of self-deprecating way. But there was not only a poignant seriousness to the declaration, there was also a kind of symbolism in it.

And he scarcely made enough income to meet his expenses. He had practically not one cash-paying patient…except me, whenever my time came to settle the bill for my treatment. His patients paid him through a kind of barter. The storekeeper Willis Ingledew gave him free gasoline for his car. Other patients gave him produce from their gardens, or fruit from their orchards, or cordwood from their woodlots, or corn whiskey, or even livestock: pigs and calves and chickens, and a horse. Later, after I became ambulatory, Doc showed me his pantry, crowded with Mason jars of canned fruits and vegetables, blackberry preserves, jams, honey, and molasses, and he showed me the little smokehouse behind his home, where he had hanging a great collection of hams and side meat. “The pay in this line of work aint nothin to mention,” he declared, “but the eatin is sure dandy.”

He was a good doctor, too. My first and most vivid impression of his talent occurred early in my second week there, a morning after my Brand bath when I began feeling worse, after a steady improvement. I wondered if the Brand baths were taxing my system or giving me pneumonia, but they wouldn’t have given me the stomach distress I was feeling.

Doc was customarily easygoing, relaxed, slow moving, and deliberate in everything he did. But that morning he took a good look at me and became suddenly brisk. He popped his thermometer into my mouth and could hardly wait to read it, and when he did, he yelled, “Git the morphine, Rowener!” I began to get dizzy even before he administered the morphine; I was scarcely conscious of his busy movements and what he was doing, and I barely heard him say to Rowena, “He’s a-hemorrhaging.” He worked me over, then said to her, “Fetch me some thromboplastin.”

The last thing I remember of that episode was his telling Rowena to run up to Latha’s and see if she had any ice in her icebox that she could spare, and to fill an ice bag to keep on my stomach. That was, incidentally, my first awareness of Latha’s use of that modern convenience which you would note in your first book about her: that she ordered from Jasper, the county seat and depot for it, an occasional block of ice, manufactured in distant Harrison, the nearest large town. The mail truck brought the ice wrapped in canvas. Latha had the only icebox in Stay More; and a few years afterwards in her general store she would have the only soda-pop cooler in that part of Newton County.

I am not certain that I avoided the delirium that he had predicted might be a sequela of my disease. For a long time I thought it was just a dream, but it could have been a delirious dream. I am reluctant to reveal it, except that it casts some light on what we are going to learn, later on, about Doc Swain’s early career as a physician. Rowena was in the dream too, the player piano was in the dream, in fact there was so much from “life” included in the dream that I did not understand until I “woke” from it that it had all been a dream. It was, frankly, the most vivid, the most real dream I had ever had. I do not remember what Doc said to me, nor I to him. He was holding in his hand that ice bag that he had supposedly obtained from Latha, and he applied it to my stomach and successfully induced the clotting of my blood, so that a transfusion would not be necessary. He then manipulated my abdomen, lay his hands on my chest for a while, and finally put one hand on my head and pronounced me cured. I remember only one thing I said: “Just like that, huh?”

And then I found myself in exactly the same position, in relation to the other two people who had been in the “dream,” except that I understood that I was “awake,” and that whatever I had been experiencing must have been a dream or a delirium. I felt wonderful. I felt, at least, much better than I had in weeks. “I reckon that ice bag worked!” I observed.

“We couldn’t use it,” he said apologetically. “Latha was all out of ice.”

“But didn’t you just put an ice bag on my stomach?” I asked.

He and Rowena exchanged looks. “Nope, I’m sorry,” he said. “But somehow the blood clotted anyway, so I reckon we won’t have to give ye a transfusion after all. I could’ve given ye one from my own arm,” he declared, “since me’n you has got the same blood type, but I’d shore of had to charge ye a good bit extry for that!”

I was sitting up, I was ready to get out of bed, I was all well, but I was puzzled that Doc did not realize what he had done to me. “I must have been just dreaming,” I said, “but whatever it was, you healed me! You appeared to me in the dream and fixed me up just fine!”

He smiled his benevolent smile, and said, “Wal, it’s been a good long while since I did the dream cure on anybody, but if you think that’s what it was, and it worked, then we’re sure enough in good health again.”

“Dream cure?” I said, snared by the possible mythology of it. “Doc, you are just going to have to tell me about the dream cure.”

He let me get out of bed. He invited me into the adjacent room, his office, where there were a pair of comfortable chairs. He pulled out his pocket watch, looked at it, and declared, “Rowener’s taking off in a minute or two.” Then he opened a drawer of his desk and brought out a cigar box which contained, I was surprised and delighted to discover, a few cigars. He handed me one and began unwrapping one himself. Those weren’t nickel cigars, either. Hell, they weren’t even dime cigars, but two-for-a-quarter Antonio y Cleopatras. You know, I can’t hardly ever smoke anymore, mostly on account of consideration for Mary Celestia but also because this nursing home don’t allow smoking in bed and I aint allowed to get out of bed! But there was a time, many and many a year of my earlier days, when I truly appreciated a good cigar.

After Doc lit my cigar for me, and lit his own, and we commenced a-suckin and a-puffin and actin like a pair of pigs who’d got into the corncrib, pretty soon Doc got up again to fetch the demijohn and poured us both a good helping of the Chism’s Dew, saying, “Don’t worry, ole Rowener won’t be back ’til after suppertime.” Then Doc put on his storytelling face. I had learned to recognize it: the slight upturning of the corners of his mouth as if he was getting ready to be amused himself; the twinkle in his eye, the wrinkling of the crow’s-feet at the eye corners. But the gaze in his twinkling eyes was far, far away, and he said, “I aint quite ready to tell you my own story. Not jist yet. I reckon I could do it, by-and-by, but I’d better warm up first on somebody else’s story. I’m a-fixin to tell ye about the first physician of Stay More, who was my paw, and if you can swaller his story, you jist might be ready for mine.”

Then he began. He wound himself up and went all the way back to when his father, Gilbert Alonzo Swain, first arrived in what had become Stay More at the age of two or three. You have already told the beginning of that in your Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks: how the first white settlers of Stay More after Jacob and Noah Ingledew was a family from North Carolina, the widow Lizzie Swain and her thirteen children, the “least’un” being Gilbert, who would later prefer being called by his middle name. You have told how tiny Gilbert played a crucial part in the matchmaking of his oldest sister, Sarah, with Jake Ingledew, thereby starting the Ingledew dynasty. Doc told me all of these stories which I recalled when I read your book, and I learned from him also of the annual visits of the legendary peddler from Connecticut, Eli Willard. I don’t want to bore you with what you already know, so I suppose I’ll begin, myself, with Gilbert’s acquisition of his knife from that peddler. The knife would later serve as his scalpel. Eli Willard sold to each of the Swain sisters a pair of scissors and to each of the Swain brothers a knife, which would fold up to be kept in one’s pocket.

Gilbert did not have a pocket but he became inseparable from his knife, carrying it closed in his hand at all times except when he slept and placed it under his pillow. He noticed there were letters on the knife, and he asked his mother what they meant, and she said they said, “Prince,” so he decided that would be his knife’s name, and sometimes he would even talk to it, saying, “Prince, I have got to find me some way to raise four cents’ cash money to pay for you.”

His brother Murray showed him how to rub Prince on a piece of Arkansas whetstone, which is the best there is, and he always kept Prince sharp enough to slice a hair in two. His brother Virgil tried to show him how to use Prince to play a dumb game called mumble the peg, but he did not like sticking Prince into the earth, which was dirty. He did not mind sticking Prince into things which bled, because blood is not dirty. With Prince he carved up birds and frogs and squirrels, and he got into bad trouble with his mother when he carved up a cat that she cherished. His mother took Prince away from him for two months.

When she finally let him have Prince back, he took Prince and stuck him into the largest snake he could find. The snake writhed and twisted and flopped for a good long spell before it finally died. Gilbert wanted to hang it on the wall of the house, but his mother would not let him, so he took it back to the spot where he killed it and told it, “You can jist lay there and rot, for all I care.” Then he had to scrub his hands with lye soap to get rid of the snake’s blood and stains. Gilbert’s childhood ended not when he learned that death is an escape nor even when he learned that we must confront the meaning of death but when his well-meaning sister Bert tried to teach him what death is like. Elberta did not try to kill him, and what she did was not even meant to hurt him. She did not even understand perhaps that a six-year-old boy was not old enough to feel the kind of death she was contemplating. Many years afterwards he was to ask her, “How come ye didn’t pick Boyd or Frank or Virgil or one of yore other brothers?” and she was to answer only, “They was too big and besides they wasn’t handy.” He assumed she meant that they weren’t sleeping with her, as he was.

Being the “least one,” Gilbert Alonzo had always been required to sleep in the bed that contained all the females of the family, where every night there was usually a right smart of constant whispering and giggling amongst his sisters, which kept him awake and went on until Gilbert’s mother told them to shut up and skedaddle for the Land of Nod. Sometimes Gilbert listened to the sounds of the dark: the snickers and titters and tee-hees, and sometimes he heard a fragment of their whisperings, which had to do with girly stuff that either didn’t interest him or, more than likely, was too tough for him to figure.

Although they had customary places in the bed—Gilbert usually sleeping between his mother and Esther, the youngest girl, who was less than a year older than Gilbert and, being so small, not as encumbered with protruberances as the older girls—the place a body went to sleep in was not necessarily the place a body would wake up in, and sometimes before morning Gilbert would find himself at the opposite side of the bed from his mother, and not be able to remember how he had managed to climb over or roll over or be shoved or lifted over all the sisters.

The night his childhood ended, the night he decided henceforth to “go by” his middle name, Gilbert Alonzo woke perhaps an hour after going to bed to find himself face-to-face with Bert, who was the fleshiest of the sisters, and being so soft, not so troublesome to be face-to-face with, although you usually didn’t get face-to-face until you were in deepest slumber. Bert was awake too, and she commenced whispering into Gilbert’s ear. All he could make out in his grogginess was the question “Does that feel good?” which she would repeat in several variations during the course of the next hour or so. She was doing something that not even his mother had ever done, as far as he could recall. She was holding him by his handle, which had swole. He had never touched his jemmison himself except when he had to go to the bushes with it, and he had been taught that one goes to the bushes for a good reason: because the bushes are private, shielding. Sometimes one of his sisters had to go to the bushes in the middle of the night, but she didn’t actually go outside where the real bushes were, she just squatted down over the slop jar that was kept beneath the bed, and apparently didn’t even have to aim her jemmison, an accomplishment which led Gilbert to the eventual realization that girls don’t even possess jemmisons, and now Bert was taking his hand and making him touch her to confirm that she did not possess a jemmison and asking him, “Does that feel good?” He didn’t know for sure if it felt good or not but it sure felt funny, just a damp crease where a jemmison ought to be. And next thing he knew she was saying, “Let’s us mash our things together and see how that feels,” and they did, and when she asked the next time, “Does that feel good?” he was compelled to speak the only word that he uttered that night: “Some.”

Bert squirmed and shifted her legs and tried to arch her back without knocking the next sleeper out of the bed, and she grabbed him and pulled him and tugged him, and pretty soon he knew that his swole jemmison had been tucked into her. “Don’t that feel good!” she said, but it was not a question. He studied the feeling. It was not quite like sticking Prince inside of something. Prince would slice or tear to get inside. But still it was a kind of insideness. A disappearance. He was only mildly troubled to discover that Bert, and by implication all other girls, had all of that slick tight warm interior space, which his jemmison could not quite fill.

The movements that Bert began making seemed intended to make him fill her better or fill her repeatedly or fill her deeper or fill her faster. Bert was getting so busy that the mattress, which was stuffed with corn shucks, began to utter and grumble. Whoever was sleeping on the other side of Bert was jostled awake and said “Huh?” and then “Who?” and then “Hee,” and then rolled the other way and dropped back into sleep. Bert was making the whole bed shake. It was a wonder she didn’t wake everybody. But then she asked, “Don’t ye feel good enough to die?” and she declared, “I’m a-fixin to die!” and then she gasped and hollered, “I’m a-dyin!” and Alonzo tried to break loose from her but she grabbed his bottom and mashed him even harder against her, and she went on dying for a while and then, to his relief, she quit dying and came alive again, and let him go. He got his jemmison out and backed off from her as far as he could, up against whichever sister was behind him. Bert said, “Wal, I reckon ye aint old enough to die yet.” And she went to sleep.

Five more years went by before Alonzo was able to die himself, and discover why dying was so important to Bert and also to his sisters Octavia and Zenobia, who, once they discovered what Bert had done with Alonzo, had to try it themselves. ’Tavy and Nobe were both older than Bert. Two of the sisters younger than Bert, Nettie and Esther, also wanted to give it a try, but although they managed to do everything with Alonzo that they were supposed to do, with some difficulty because of their virginity, they were not able to die yet. For four years Alonzo was passed around from one sister to another, usually in bed in the dark, but sometimes elsewhere around the place in daylight too. He greatly enjoyed “the funny feeling,” as he called it, the mild sting or buzz or whatever it was that was almost but not quite dying.

Then when he finally did die for the first time, it wasn’t with a sister but a pretty little girl who lived up the creek a ways, name of Mellie Chism. But while this death was the best feeling that he’d ever had, two things troubled him about it: the very fact that Mellie wasn’t any sister of his, and the fact that Mellie herself didn’t die as his sisters so readily did. Studying this problem, he decided that you aren’t supposed to do it with your sister if you want to die, but if you’re a sister you have to do it with your brother if you want to die. Since he wasn’t a sister, it didn’t matter to him whether Mellie died or not, and he went on doing it with her whenever they could sneak off somewheres private together.

For a year all of his deaths were dry deaths. Mellie got right damp and creamy but he never did. A few times at her suggestion because she wanted to see if it might make her die, he had taken a piss while he was inside her. It had felt funny to him and given her a thrill but it didn’t kill either one of them. The time when finally he had his first true wet death he thought at first that he was only pissing again, but it wasn’t. Whatever it was, it stayed inside her.

Alonzo Swain was fourteen years old before he ever saw what his own jism looked like. It happened one time when Mellie took a notion to remove her dress. Alonzo had never seen a girl naked. All his sisters slept in nightdresses that came down to their ankles and besides it was dark, usually, and the few hundred times that he had lain with a sister in the daylight she had kept her day dress on, just raising it to her waist. But one time Mellie and Alonzo were way off in the woods and it was hot July and she suddenly took her dress plumb up off over her head. He already had a very stiff jemmison in anticipation of what they would sooner or later do and because they hadn’t done it in over two months, and now the sight of Mellie without a stitch just caused his mind to run away with him and then his glands ran away with him and before he knew what had happened he was squirting jism all over creation, even hitting Mellie in the face, which for some reason she thought was the funniest thing that had ever happened to her. The stuff had no resemblance to piss. It was much thicker, and white, and runny. Using his hand to wipe it off her face, he asked, “Is this yere what I’ve been a-fillin ye up with all along?”

Even though Mellie never died, she craved to have him fill her up, and he filled her so often he had nothing left for his sisters. When Mellie started getting pooched out in the stomach, Alonzo figured that those Chisms must be eating high off the hog in harvesttime. But the rest of her family stayed as skinny as ever. Then one day he never saw Mellie, and the next day neither, and when he finally did see her, months later, she was holding a baby to her breast.

That was the first of Alonzo’s seven sons. Nobody, perhaps not even Mellie herself, ever really understood that Alonzo was the father of the boy. The boy was given “Chism” as his last name, and, because he had difficulty pronouncing it, so that it came out as “Ism” if anyone asked him what his name was, that is what he was called for the rest of his life. As Ism grew older, he clearly inherited his father’s good looks: the golden blond hair and the broad brow and perfect nose and strong jaw. In fact, Ism was going to be as popular with the ladies as his father was, and, as I’ll have to tell you by-and-by, Ism ended up competing with his father unknowingly for one of the best of the ladies.

Alonzo, as he grew into manhood, was irresistible to females, and before he was eighteen he left both Cora Plowright and Sirena Coe with woodscolts, both boys. In all of Newton County there was only one girl who wouldn’t come a-running the instant Alonzo crooked his finger at her, and that was Lora Dinsmore, who lived out toward Butterchurn Holler on Banty Creek. Lora had made up her mind to stay a virgin, and she didn’t want some boy chasing after her who’d already knocked up three girls, even if he was the handsomest feller in all creation. Maybe because she was so hard to get is why Alonzo Swain made up his mind that he had to have her, or die trying. He lost interest in all other girls, even his sisters. He spent all his time for two years trying to get himself fixed up with Lora. He even promised her he wouldn’t even try to lay with her. Then he promised her he wouldn’t even touch her. Finally he promised her he wouldn’t even try to kiss her. He stopped just short of promising to marry her, and he gave serious consideration to promising that, but he wasn’t the marrying kind.

Lora turned him down flat. She didn’t want anything to do with him. She begged him to leave her alone. “’Lonzo, you jist leave me be!” But she was such a pretty thing, the cutest girl any feller could hope for, and Alonzo spent all his time for two years hoping for her, and doing everything he could to get her to notice him, and trying everything he could to persuade her to step out with him.

When it finally became obvious that she wasn’t going to listen to reason or any kind of cajolery, not even with him down on his knees, he decided he’d just plain and simple have to ravish her against her will. So he commenced laying low for her and watching for a chance to grab her alone. The longer he waited, the hornier he got, and he began to mutter to himself, “If ever I catch that gal, I’ll give her a fucking she won’t never forget, like nobody never had!” And he meant it, too. He was storing up his jism, and he’d give her a gallon of it in one dose.

So then one day he happened to catch up with her along a lonely stretch of the road to Butterchurn Holler, which was only a deer path in those days. She saw him coming, and took out for the woods as fast as she could run. He was gaining on her, and she commenced yelling and begging, but she wasn’t begging him. It was like she was begging for God or somebody to help her.

He finally caught her and flung her down in a patch of butterfly weed. That’s just a kind of milkweed, fit for nothing and even the cows won’t eat it because it tastes bad, but those big orange butterflies, some folks call them monarchs, like to lay their eggs on it and have their caterpillar babies grow up on it. Maybe that’s what gives the butterflies their bad taste, so a bird would think twice before eating another one after getting a taste of one of them. Anyhow, the butterflies were a-hovering over it when Alonzo threw Lora down there.

The way some folks tell this story, those butterflies were going to try to protect Lora, but the truth is more likely that they just sort of distracted Alonzo from what he was doing, maybe they even got in his eyes or leastways tickled the back of his neck as he started taking down his pants and whipping out his jemmison and yanking up her dress. It doesn’t matter, because the butterflies didn’t really have anything whatever to do with what happened next.

Alonzo woke up lying atop a big clump of butterfly weed as if he’d been a-fucking that clump. Lora was nowheres in sight. The back of Alonzo’s head hurt as if he’d been hit with something. He wondered if maybe Lora had conked him with a rock or a big stick, maybe. He got up and pulled up his pants and spent some time looking for Lora, but never could find her. The next day he discovered that he wasn’t the only one looking for her. Couldn’t nobody find her. Sheriff Jim Salmon and a couple of his deputies came out to Stay More, and they took Alonzo and asked him a whole bunch of questions, because it was widely known that he’d set his hat for her. He wouldn’t admit to what he’d done, or tried to do. The sheriff and them looked all over creation, and even dug a few holes looking for a body.

Some years later, about the time of the War, a couple of fellers claimed they’d run into Lora working in a whorehouse down to Little Rock, but it was just a rumor. Nobody ever saw Lora again. Of course Alonzo was very sad, and he realized he probably was really in love with that girl. Sometimes he’d go back up the hillside to that place where the butterfly weed was, and he’d stand there a long time, thinking, and watching the butterflies if they were there, and each summer whenever the butterfly weed burst into bloom, with its bright orange flowers that was almost the same color as the butterfly, Alonzo would have the peculiar notion that Lora had turned into a butterfly weed, or even into a butterfly. But folks were a lot more superstitious in those days, and inclined to have such fanciful ideas.

His sad experience with Lora didn’t stop Alonzo from fooling around, and pretty soon he had got Clara McKinstry with child, the boy Phil, and also had got Samantha Tennison with the child Linus. He even knocked up one of his sisters (it was a wonder it took him so long), Esther, who was so ashamed of the baby that she’d hardly given him a name, Milo, before taking him up the mountain to the deepest woods, where she left him to die, but the baby was discovered by a she-wolf, who suckled him and raised him and taught him…but Milo Swain is another story unto himself and I don’t have time for it.

I don’t have time either to tell of how Alonzo was recruited to join the Rebels during the War by the brazen whore Virdie Boatright, the only woman ever to lay with him so many times that he had not a drop of jism remaining, although the three gallons of it he left in her did not leave her with any babies. I can’t stop to tell the sad story of Delphie Bullen, another girl like Lora who tried her best to keep Alonzo from taking her cherry, and, when she couldn’t escape from him in whatever way Lora had, drowned herself in that spring up on Ledbetter Mountain, which to this day still gives water that aint fit to drink. I’d like to tell you the story of how Alonzo became a bushwhacker during the last part of the War, and in that renegade capacity seduced girls hither and yon wherever he found them, including a sweet young thing named Cassie Sizemore, who, like Lora and Delphie before her, tried to resist him, and did a pretty fair job of keeping him off, until he finally begged just a single kiss, which she let him have, to her undoing. But Cassie Sizemore didn’t get knocked up by Alonzo. She later married Tom Whitter and had a respectable life which lasted until the next war, the First Big One, where Tom was killed, leaving her alone as a widow in their cabin on a mountaintop, which is where I met her as an old lady, that time I had the typhoid and she took care of me until Doc Swain arrived. I had no idea on earth that she’d once been kissed by Doc Swain’s dad, Alonzo, nor did Doc himself know this. But she told me the whole story without mentioning Alonzo Swain by name. I just figured out, from the way she described him, that he was the same feller. And I also figured out that when he kissed her and breathed into her, it gave her the power of telling the future.

No, that story too has to go by the wayside in order for me to get on to the main story, which didn’t take place until many years after the War, when Alonzo was already nigh on to middle age and was restless because the whole business of catching women and filling them with jism and fathering woodscolts was beginning to bore him somewhat, so in his listlessness he took up the study of medicine. Next to Jake Ingledew, who had become governor after the War, Alonzo was the smartest feller in Stay More if not all of Newton County, and folks thought it was a shame he never done anything worthwhile with his brains, he was too pussy-struck to have time for serious matters, or rather he considered the pursuit of women the most serious matter there is. But as he approached middle age and maybe his glands begun to give him a moment’s peace, he decided that the best way to make a living was to study medicine and become Stay More’s first physician, because Stay More kept on growing and getting bigger without one. In fact, the only doctor in that part of Newton County was a feller lived in a kind of cave-house over toward Spunkwater, name of Kie Raney, and Doc Raney was the closest thing to a friend that ’Lonzo Swain had in all this world. Gilbert Alonzo had been so busy all his life a-humping gals that he hadn’t had time for buddies. As he told it to Kie, who’d been able only to dream of having sex with a female, “Women has got three holes but men has got only two, and they aint neither one as good a fit. No offense meant, Hoss, but given my druthers I’d as lief not spend so much time here with you.” But Doc Raney had treated him for blue balls or the clap so many times that he practically lived at Doc Raney’s cave-house the way I was to live at Doc Colvin Swain’s, and both of ’em was bachelors so Alonzo and Doc Raney had spent a good deal of time running around together, hunting in the woods and just a-settin on the creek bank drowning worms, and they were good pals. At least Doc Raney didn’t mind one day when Alonzo said to him, “Hoss, how long would it take fer ye to teach me everthang ye know about this yere doctorin business?”

“Half a year, at least,” Kie Raney said.

“What would ye charge me fer it, or swap with me fer it?” Alonzo asked.

Kie Raney thought about that. He did not answer right off, but a few days later he said. “Wal, ’Lonzo, I’ll tell ye. Next time ye sire a woodscolt, if nobody wants it, you could jist give ’im to me. I aint never gon fine me a womarn, but I’d shore like to have me a kid of my own.”

So Alonzo said that oughtn’t to be no problem because the country was already full of his woodscolts and he’d see if he couldn’t get the next one away from its mother and give it to Kie. And so Kie commenced that day to teach Gilbert Alonzo the solemn study of medicine.

Doc Raney himself had learnt pretty near everything he knew from studying with granny doctors and witches and yarb doctors and such, and experimenting around on his own with all kinds of mixtures of yarbs to find out what they were good for, and it didn’t take Kie too awful long to teach all of that stuff to Alonzo, but Kie had also mastered a big thick book called Home-Study Guide to Materia Medica, Pharmacy, Therapeutics, and Surgical Procedures, and he helped Alonzo spend a few months reading his way through this book, and gave him quizzes on it, to help. Finally he said to Alonzo, “I’ve taught ye all I know, but there aint no teacher near as good as experience, so it’s time ye started practicin. Jist don’t practice in my territory. And don’t fergit that baby you owe me.” Of course that word “practice” has always had two meanings that would seem to be different but they aint. On one hand, it means to do something over and over until you learn how, but it also refers to a doctor’s general line of work. Doc Colvin Swain said to me, “In his practice, a physician never stops practicing,” meaning even when he’s supposed to know what he’s doing, he’s still just trying to learn it.

Alonzo went back home to Stay More to get out of Doc Raney’s territory and set up his own practice. He was Stay More’s first physician, but for the longest time, the only patients he could practice on, apart from the mental defectives who loitered around Ingledew’s store, were older women with imaginary complaints who just wanted Alonzo Swain to visit with them, because he was still the sightliest-lookin feller in Newton County although his golden blond hair was beginning to gray. Some of these women he treated and some of ’em he “treated,” if you know what I mean. Because Alonzo never did lose his rollicking lust for the fair sex.

The last of the seven boys he fathered happened like this. There was a keen-lookin dark-haired gal named Corinna McKinstry, the prettiest of the six daughters of old Vester McKinstry, the horse rancher and squire of Sidehill, some ways west of Stay More. One day Alonzo happened to be out that way, fording a creek on his horse when he spied her a-washing her pretty feet in the stream. The first glimpse of her made his jemmison stand up in the saddle and nearly poke its head above his waistband. She was so pleasant to behold that Alonzo was afraid he’d fall in love with her the way he had loved Lora Dinsmore and thus he might lose her as Lora was forever lost.

Once a year at least Alonzo still visited that little stand of butterfly weed, to pay his respects, or try to figure it all out, or whatever. He didn’t want to force Corinna to turn into a flower clump. So he was real careful with her, and courted her for a long time without trying to spark her or woo her or even touch her; he just talked to her, sweet as he could, and was even sort of like a father to her. He sure was old enough to be her father, him in his late forties at that time and her not yet twenty. And with all them other daughters, old Vester hadn’t paid Corinna much notice, so she was probably real happy to get all that attention from “Lonzie,” as she took to calling him.

Well sir, this went on for a right smart spell of time, months and months, even though it was a good day’s ride from Stay More to Sidehill, because Alonzo was determined to make a conquest of her in his own sweet time. Then the poor girl came down with pleurisy. This is a trouble with the lungs, where the lining of the lungs gets inflamed, and if it isn’t cured it can lead to consumption, or tuberculosis. Alonzo hadn’t ever even touched Corinna, but now he had to massage her chest and strap her chest, which is part of the treatment for pleurisy, and in the process he got a pretty good feel of her breasts, and her nipples were swollen, and he couldn’t tell if she was breathing so hard because he was getting her aroused or because of her lung trouble. Of course this was happening right in her house, in her bedroom, with her mother somewhere in the next room and her father not far away. For a whole week, he came every day to Sidehill to massage her chest and strap it and dose her with creosote and a bit of laudanum which was for her pain but which also seemed to calm down whatever excitement all of that stroking of her titties was causing. But she wasn’t getting any better, and in fact her pleurisy had worsened from dry to wet, meaning it had abscessed and was getting runny.

Alonzo went back over to that cave-house medical school for a “consultation” with his friend and mentor, Doc Kie Raney, saying, “Hoss, ye never taught me how to handle wet pleurisy,” and Kie told him how to use pleurisy root, which is one of the many names given to nothing other than these here big fat roots of the butterfly weed. Now of course the stuff grows all over creation, but Alonzo knew that there was only one patch of it that would suit him, and that was the patch up on the hillside where Lora had disappeared so many years before. So he went back up there and found the place and talked to that butterfly weed, saying, “Lora, sweetheart, I’ve got to dig up your root and use it to heal a pore young gal who’s got pleurisy. You won’t mind, will ye?” He didn’t get any answer, but he went ahead and dug up a clump and took its big root and brewed it into a tea for Corinna McKinstry, and it cured her, or leastways it arrested the disease so that pretty soon she was feeling normal again. One day she smiled and said, “Lonzie, sometimes I wish I was still sick, so’s you would feel my bosoms again the way ye done.”

“Aw, hon,” said Alonzo, “you don’t have to be sick for me to do thet! Would ye like to take a little stroll up to see the butterfly weed that cured ye?” And pretty soon they were heading for the woods, where he showed her the patch of butterfly weed that had included Lora, and still did, for that matter, for he hadn’t dug her all up. Of course he didn’t tell her about Lora, and they lay down beside Lora, and Lora watched them while Alonzo closed his eyes and pretended she was Lora, and got on top and unloaded his jism and got off.

Naturally she had soon stumped her toe, as they used to say of an unmarried girl who has a cake in her oven. She knew what had caused it too, and she tried to get her Lonzie to make it legal, but all he could say was, “Why, chile, I caint be yore man. I’m old enough to be yore paw!” And it looked as if poor Corinna would have to have a woodscolt like all those other girls that Gilbert Alonzo Swain had unloaded his jism into.

Having a woodscolt wasn’t all that uncommon in those days, and it happened even in the best of families. But Corinna had some pretty set ideas about what was right and proper, and she made up her mind that she wasn’t going to have a baby out of wedlock. So she said to him solemnly, “Lonzie, if I caint have ye for my man, I’ll get me a man who looks jist like ye!”

He laughed, because he knew that there wasn’t any feller anywhere as well-favored as he was. So he wasn’t worried that she’d go and take up with some other feller.

But she actually commenced looking around for a likely feller to become her husband. She searched high and low for anybody that favored Lonzie, knowing that as pretty as she was, she shouldn’t have had any problem latching onto him if she found him, so long as he wasn’t already married. She knew if she found him, she’d better not never tell him about the cake in her oven. She knew she’d have to find him soon enough to persuade him that he was the father when the baby came along. She didn’t have an awful lot of time.

And who do you think she latched onto? There was a certain son of Mellie Chism, grown to manhood, who had inherited from his father not only his handsome features but also his conviction that the only purpose of life is chasing women. The one way that Ism was different from his daddy was that whereas Alonzo was a confirmed bachelor, Ism had always believed that once he found the prettiest girl on earth, he would marry her and settle down and stop chasing women.

When Ism and Corinna met, they knew they were made for each other. He looked almost exactly like his daddy, but not quite so much that Corinna would know that Ism actually was the son of her Lonzie. And she was the loveliest creature that Ism had ever beheld, with her hair as black as a crow and her skin fair as a swan. He used all his skills, practiced with dozens of women, to talk her into laying with him, and she only pretended to be hard to get, and pretended to be a virgin, because laying with him was exactly what she wanted. Ism even practiced the same method of fucking as his daddy, quick on and quick off, hard in and limp out, and she should have guessed who he’d inherited that tendency from, but she didn’t. She let him do it to her every day for several weeks, and even pretended like she enjoyed it, even took on each time as if she was having one of those deaths. After a couple of months, she told him that all that fucking had put her in a family way, so they had best think about starting a family, and did he reckon he might see his way to becoming her man? He didn’t need to be asked twice.

So Corinna and Ism got the JP to marry them, just in the nick of time, because she was already swollen out more than Ism could have been held accountable for. When Alonzo found out that Corinna had went and got herself married, he nearly went crazy. He thought of her as his woman, even if he would never have married her himself. He still wanted her, and he hoped that she would go on making herself available to him, because after all he was still the best-looking feller in the country and nobody knew how to titillate her bubbies the way he did. But once she was married, Corinna told her Lonzie that she was a respectable woman and did not intend to sneak around and cheat on her husband, so Lonzie had just better go and find himself another bed partner.

Now Alonzo did not know, and he never knew, that Ism was his own flesh and blood. He never even got a good look at him, or he might have recognized himself in the young man. He just knew that Corinna’s husband, whoever he was, was the lowdown misbegotten suck-egg dog who had stolen away all that good first-rate nookie. Alonzo couldn’t stand this. The more he brooded about it, the more it drove him balmy and boiling. It makes you understand why a simple word like “mad,” which in the old days always meant insane, or deranged by violent emotions, came to mean angry or resentful. Alonzo was foaming at the mouth and pissing puppies.

Ism took to married life like a duck to water, and just as he had planned, he gave up the pursuit of women and settled down to being a good husband. He built a sturdy little cottage for him and Corinna to live in, and to raise the baby in, when it came, and then he took to clerking in a store all the way up to Jasper, to make ends meet and be a good provider. Of course, Ism being gone all day presented an opportunity for Doc Alonzo Swain to drop by that new cottage to visit with Corinna. He leered and told her he was going to be her obstetrician as well as the baby’s pediatrician, and he wanted to make sure everything was okay with the baby in her womb, but even that excuse wouldn’t get him permission to lift her dress and have access to her twitchet, and pretty soon he had a full-blown case of frustration to go along with his madness.

And then it was too late, too far along in the advancing of the pregnancy, for him to lay with her even if he could talk her into it.

Nobody knows just how the fire started that burned down that new cottage. It happened in the middle of the night, the dark of the moon, and there wasn’t any thunderstorm that would allow lightning to be the cause. It could’ve been a coal-oil lamp knocked over, or maybe Ism had got careless with the pipe he smoked, or who knows? maybe it was some kind of spontaneous combustion in the corn-shuck mattress stuffing. But whatever it was, it happened so fast that Ism and Corinna must have both been deep asleep, and a good many folks were said to speculate on that and ask how could a fire have burned the house down before they even noticed it and got away? The sheriff reckoned maybe they were both dead before the fire started, but both bodies was burnt to a crisp and there was no way of finding out if they’d been killed by some means other than the fire. There wasn’t anything at all left of the house or of the newlyweds except a pile of ashes and a few pieces of charred bones.

What must’ve happened, at least according to one or two of the folks who tell this story, and who weren’t even living at that time, was that Alonzo, regardless of whether he started the fire himself or maybe even killed both of them before he started the fire (and nobody ever accused him of it), somehow got into the cottage while it was still a-burning, and found Corinna, whether she was dead yet or not, and took his trusty knife Prince and performed a Caesarian section on her right then and there amidst the flames, and grabbed the baby out of her, and took off. That’s what must’ve happened.

Then, directly or soon after, Alonzo must’ve taken the baby up to that cave-house where Doc Raney had his home and his office, and gave the baby to him, saying, “Here, Hoss, here’s that little misfortune I promised ye.”

I notice you have glanced at your watch, and more than once. I trust you’re just curious about what time of the afternoon it’s getting to be, or perhaps you’ve got an appointment somewhere, or maybe even you’re timing my story to see if I’m pacing it properly, the way a runner gets paced by somebody on the sidelines with a stopwatch. I do hope I’m not boring you, but I’m going to have to call it quits for the day pretty soon anyhow. Dr. Gilbert Alonzo Swain’s story has taken a lot out of me, and I don’t mean it’s taken a lot of effort for me to make it up, because I’ve been telling it to you more or less the way I heard it from various folks, primarily Colvin Swain himself, but also from Cassie Whitter and, in variations, assorted Stay Morons lounging on the store porches of Willis Ingledew and Latha Bourne.

Who named our hero? Well, one story about that is this: Alonzo and Kie sort of did it together. They sat around and studied the problem and studied the baby, who was yelling bloody murder—excuse the expression—the infant was of course very desirous of a lactating teat, which neither of the men could provide. Pretty soon Kie Raney would summon a granny woman accomplice of his, who happened to know a young lady from Spunkwater—her name doesn’t even matter, though it is known—who could wet-nurse the baby for a while until Kie could get ahold of one of them nursing bottles, one of them flasks with a long rubber tube and a rubber nipple on the end of it.

Kie was a learned feller and he wanted to name the baby something with “vin” in it, not for wine but from the Latin vincere for conquer, because Kie hoped that the boy would grow up and become a doctor who could conquer all the ills that the flesh is heir to, maybe even cancer and consumption and the common cold. So Kie wanted to name him Vincent, but Alonzo thought that was too Frenchified and he suggested instead they name him Irvin, but Kie thought that sounded Jewish so he proposed Melvin, but Alonzo thought that was rather unmanly and timid, so he opined they might try out Alvin, but Kie said, “Aw hell, ’Lonzo, that’s even less manly than Melvin.” So they considered Marvin and Kelvin and Gavin and a bunch of others, and finally Alonzo said, “Wal, Hoss, let’s us jist name the boy Steven,” and Kie agreed that was a right manly name, and he dipped his goose feather into ink and wrote it out on the birth certificate, and they studied it and admired it for a while and even called the baby that name a few times, but it suddenly dawned on Kie Raney that the name didn’t really have a “vin” in it unless they had misspelled it, and somehow changing it to “Stevin” didn’t look right. “Shit,” Alonzo said, “we may as well change it to Spavin.” But Hoss Raney knew that “spavin” was a hock-joint disease in horses, and he wasn’t about to afflict the boy with a horse ailment for a name.

They got to babbling, and tried Tomvin and Dickvin and Harvin and Carvin, and Halvin and Gilvin and Colvin, and Alonzo snapped his fingers and said, “That’un’ll do her! Colvin.” Little did either of them know that Colvin is a perfectly good Teutonic name, meaning “black-haired friend,” appropriate since the baby had inherited not his father’s golden hair but his mother’s raven hair.

I like to think that Alonzo instinctively selected Colvin because it had a certain Ozarkian ring to it, a country sound; it seemed appropriate for a black-haired country doctor who would be a friend to everyone and would conquer, if not the common cold and cancer, at least consumption.

They never gave him a real middle name, only an initial, “U.” That wasn’t too uncommon in those days, that a feller would have a middle initial that didn’t mean anything, it was just for looks. Harry S Truman for one. Another example is…

Hark! You can’t hear him, but that old fool out in the hall is yelling, “About that time, six white horses flew over.” He’s been at it for the past hour, and it’s a wonder he hasn’t wakened poor Mary Celestia from her nap. Surely you can hear the sound of his voice even if you can’t hear the words? Well sir, it’s been hard enough for me to remember Alonzo Swain’s story and get it straight and try to rehearse it to you, without listening to him and that blather insinuating that I might as well have flying horses in my story! Have I told you a single blessed thing yet that was impossible, like flying horses? There may be some aspects of Alonzo Swain’s story that really stretch the blanket, but there isn’t anything inconceivable about it, now is there?

Maybe I need Herb or Ernie around to annotate for me. You know how Herbert Halpert, the great academic folklorist and my dear friend, took the trouble to write commentaries on each of the tales and stories in my collections, all of ’em except Sticks in the Knapsack, for which Ernest Baughman supplied the notes, and Hot Springs and Hell, which I annotated myself, because it aint nothing but a joke book, and Pissing in the Snow, which Frank Hoffman annotated because he’s a specialist in dirty tales. But the main purpose of all those notes is to show that likely the story I’m relating, even though I’m telling it exactly as I heard it in the back brush, is just a rehash of some ancient tale that goes all the way back to Chaucer or Boccaccio or even the Bible. Hell, them academic annotators has even got a thing called the Motif Index and another thing called the Aarne-Thompson Index, and they can probably take any story you tell ’em, even if you think you’re a-making it up, and scribble all over it their numbers, like Motif D 420.1.6.7., and Incident VIII in Type 1542, which shows that there aint no such thing as an original story.

So I’d hate to see what the academic annotators would do with Alonzo Swain’s story. They’d probably all shake their heads and say, “About that time, six white horses flew over,” and then they’d say, “This comes out of Hesiod. Or Pindar. Or Homer hisself.”

I’m tired, and I’m gonna let you go.

Chapter three

Oh, I just switched you on. It’s good to see a welcome face again. I’ve discovered a new power lately, although it could just be a sign I’m dying. You know the excruciatingly commonplace observation that when you die your whole life story flashes before your eyes? Well, I don’t know about that, leastways nothing like that has ever happened to me. But here’s what really is happening to me: whenever I don’t like who I’m looking at, I just close my eyes and then reopen them, and it’s like flicking a switch—I get rid of whoever was here. Works, like a charm. Just now I switched you on, after switching off the most obnoxious preacher I hope I ever have to meet. Mary Celestia and I are visited, biweekly on the average, by one or another of the local ministers, Pentecostal Holiness and Assembly of God and Jehovah’s Testicles and Whoever, all shapes and sizes. I don’t suppose anybody at the desk gives them any information about us, letting them know that Mary is a retired full professor of English and Folklore at the University, and I aint so dumb myself even if I look like a bald-headed old citereen in the last throes of Alzheimer’s. A few of these preachers are friendly and almost respectful, but most of ’em patronize us and talk down to us like we were helpless babies. “Have y’all finished your lunchie?” this feller who was just in here asks us. Lunchie, for God’s own sweet sakes! Nearly as bad as the nurse who brings us our brekkie. Or the goddamn attendant who has to come in and change my di-dee because the other attendant who was supposed to bring my bedpan didn’t get here in time and I had to take a shit. Anyhow, this preacher was one of the worst. He sways back and forth in front of Mary and waves his arms in her face because she’s blind, and he hollers at me because I’m a little hard of hearing. “Did y’all have somebodee read the Bible to y’all this weekie? Did y’all get a nice big bitey of the Holy Wordie?” Ooh, lawsy mercy ’pon my soul!

But as I say, I’ve discovered that I can just shut my eyes and make ’em go away. The trouble is, I can’t have any more control over who I’ll see when I reopen my eyes than I could control my bladder or my bowels. Just now I reopened my eyes and there you were, and I’m mighty glad to see you, but this morning I shut my eyes to get rid of Dr. Bittner—remind me sometime to tell you about him, he works over at City Hospital and comes around once a month to check up on us—I closed him out of my consciousness and when I reopened my eyes, flicked that switch, it wasn’t him I was looking at, nor you, but Colvin Swain! I swear. “Lord love a duck, Col!” I exclaimed. “I heared tell you had up and died back around the late fifties, wasn’t it? Some old boy told me you’d got hit by lightnin.”

He smiled his benevolent reassuring smile that was always so good for making his patients feel like they didn’t have any cause at all for feeling bad, and he said, “Wal, Vance, I reckon that’s true enough, as far as it goes. But jist recollect what I told you about how I learnt to cure folks in their dreams. And ask yoreself if you’re not jist dreaming.”

But I knew I was wide awake, and he was just a-sitting there right where you are, plain as you are…unless I’m only dreaming you too, and only you can decide that for yourself. But if you know that you are really there beside my bed and I’m really here, then you’ll just have to believe that he was there too. “Mary Celestia, sweetheart!” I called to her. “Don’t you see this doctor feller here?” And then I remembered that she is blind.

What’s that, Mary? Oh, yes. But this isn’t the doctor, and I wasn’t calling to you again, I was just quoting to him the way I called you this morning. This is my good friend the novelist.

Mary just said she wanted to remind me what she answered this morning, that of course she couldn’t see the man, but she could hear him, and he sure did sound like Doc Swain!

So maybe both of us are in our second childhoods and we deserve to be spoken to like babies.

Babies. How does one properly speak to a baby? Which brings us right back to our story, next installment of it, because I have to ask you now to picture a cave-house on a mountainside near Spunkwater, Arkansas, oh about 1886 or so, and a middle-aged bachelor ex-school-teacher turned self-styled physician and medical preceptor, name of Kie Raney, trying to talk to this baby named Colvin Swain.

If Colvin had grown up in a “normal” household with a “normal” family, especially a mother and all, or even one brother or sister, he would have been nicknamed something like Butch or Spike or Pug, or leastways maybe Collie. But Kie Raney never called him anything but Colvin, always sticking that “vin” on the end of it as if to remind ’em both that he was going to conquer. Sometimes just for emphasis Kie might use his middle initial too, and call him Colvin U, but maybe that sounded like he was saying, “Colvin, you” and as far as Colvin knew he never had a last name. He grew up without a mother and without a last name. Alonzo didn’t want him to use the name Swain and Kie didn’t think it would be right to use the name Raney, since he wasn’t really Kie’s son, just his foster son, so as far as he was concerned his name was just Colvin U, with that middle initial able to stand for anything his fancy might dream up, like Ulysses or Usher or Unthank, although his favorite was Underwood, because that was usually where he was.

From the earliest time that Colvin seemed to be paying attention, maybe around half a year old, Kie always addressed him just as he would an adult, never talking any kind of baby talk to him, and never talking down to him. “Colvin,” he would say, “it would appear that you have done gone and taken a shit on yore blanket and I am a-gorn have to clean it up and git ye a fresh ’un.” Or he would say something like, “Wal, Colvin, don’t ye reckon thet thar bite of oatmeal would sit better on yore stomach than it would on top of yore haid and all over yore face?” He’d sound just like a doctor discussing a patient’s problems, and later, when Colvin would overhear his foster father talking to various patients of his in the same mild, polite tone, he probably understood that that was the way a feller ought to talk to anybody, and that was the beginning of the calm, soothing way of speaking that grown-up Colvin Swain would have with his own patients.

Not even in their games would Kie use anything approximating baby talk or child talk. From earliest memory, Colvin’s favorite amusement was to be bounced on Kie’s knees in that popular little surprise sport called “Ride a little horsie down to town. Whoa, little horsie, don’t fall down.” Only Kie didn’t say it that way; he would call the imaginary animal “a stout steed” or “a prancing stallion” or “a plunging mustang” or “a trotting colt” or “a winged palomino” even if the meter wasn’t trochaic and thus the horse’s bounce was out of rhythm.

Being bounced on Kie’s knee, by the way, was all the holding and cuddling that little Colvin needed, that he might’ve got from a mother if he’d had one. He didn’t need more of it. But Kie would hold and cuddle him if he hurt himself or was afraid of something.

Kie was a talented guitarist and a pretty good singer of old songs, and he sang for his foster son every ballad, ancient and modern, which concerned horses.

Later when Colvin had outgrown the knee-horsie, or rather graduated to being able to ride Kie’s back as Kie got on all fours to become the horse, Kie taught him to recite such things as “Ride a cock horse to Banbury town,” and such old rhymes as:

One white foot, buy a horse;

Two white feet, try a horse;

Three white feet, look well about him;

Four white feet, do without him.

…Or the Ozarkian variant on this last: “Four white feet an’ a white nose, / Take off his hide an’ throw him to the crows.” And later, such things as: “Dear to me is my bonny white steed; / Oft has he helped me at pinch of need.” And even these lines from Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis”:

Round-hoof’d, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long,

Broad breast, full eye, small head and nostril wide,

High crest, short ears, straight legs and passing strong,

Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide:

Look, what a horse should have he did not lack,

Save a proud rider on so proud a back.

And later still, Kie taught him Latin: Tum bene fortis equus reserato carcere currit, Cum quos prœtereat, quosque sequatur, habet, which is from Ovid’s Art of Love and means: “The valiant horse races best, at the barrier’s fall, when he has others to follow and o’erpass,” or, to translate it into the way folks would talk in those parts, “A good horse runs better if he’s got other horses to beat out.” But by that time, Colvin was too old to ride the playlike horse of Kie or even the various broomstick horses that he outgrew one by one. He was ready for his own real horse. When a Spunkwater mule skinner named Felix Amidon got blinded by his own daddy for fooling around with the daddy’s kept woman, Kie went to him and treated him with a combination of large doses of thiamine and the singing of a special magic song in countertenor, which restored his eyesight, and Felix Amidon paid Kie for this cure with a broomtail Indian pony, which Kie presented to Colvin, who named the pony Pegasus but called him Ole Peg. I doubt if Kie ever told him the old tale of how Pegasus sprang from Medusa’s neck when her head was cut off, but possibly he did tell him about how the nine Muses took care of Pegasus and maybe even how Bellerophon tamed him and rode him off to fight the Chimera.

What the knife Prince had been to his daddy at that age and later, the pony Pegasus became for Colvin. He took to riding it all over creation, especially westward to Stay More, which somehow seemed more like a hometown to him than Spunkwater did. Even though he didn’t know it, Stay More was a-swarming with his own kinfolks. He had first cousins and last cousins all over the place. He liked to tie Pegasus at the porch of Isaac Ingledew’s gristmill and sit on the edge of the mill porch with all the other loafers of Stay More. Because his hair was black and his features favored the McKinstry side of his family, nobody suspected that he was another son of Alonzo Swain, who had his doctor’s office on Stay More’s Main Street and sometimes came to the mill to loaf around. Colvin had learned to call him “Uncle ’Lonzo,” because that is what Alonzo had requested that Kie tell the boy he was: not his father, but his uncle. If any of the Stay More boys his own age asked him who he was or where he was from, he would just say he was Colvin and he lived in a cave-house over toward Spunkwater with Doc Kie Raney. He never told anybody that he was Doc Raney’s son. We don’t even know if he believed that himself, but leastways he never gave out that he was Doc Raney’s son; he just said he lived with him, in a cave-house. The other boys were curious to know about that cave-house, what it looked like, how it was built (or rather how the boards and windows and door covered the mouth of the cave to form one wall of a dwelling whose other walls were the natural stone of the cave), and how it felt to live inside of it. When Colvin explained how cool it was in hottest summer and how warm it was in coldest winter, the boys went home to their parents and demanded to know why everybody didn’t live in caves. Most of the parents could only reply, “Beats me,” or, “I don’t have the first idee,” or, “You’ve got me there, boy.”

One day Colvin noticed that the Stay More boys were missing. He waited around the mill porch for them to show up, but they never did. He went over to the Ingledew Store to see if they might be there, but they weren’t. So he went back to the mill and waited some more, until somebody asked him, “How come ye aint in school?” Now the only school he’d ever heard tell of was once when Kie Raney had showed him a school of fish in the creek. So he figured that the other boys were all off a-fishing somewheres. He got back on Ole Peg and rode up and down Banty Creek a ways without finding any boys fishing, so then he rode up and down Swains Creek a ways, and it just so happened that when he come to the Stay More schoolhouse, the boys was all outdoors for recess, and there was a bunch of girls too! Colvin had hardly ever seen a girl. Riding Pegasus all over the countryside, he had sometimes spied a girl standing on the porch of a house or maybe even working in the garden, but he’d never seen one up close. He wanted to talk to one of them, to see if they sounded like human beings.

Colvin got down from his pony and stood there admiring the girls, and admiring the schoolhouse, a handsome structure with a little bell-tower cupola on top of it, and big glass windows, and a couple of twin doors—“bigeminal,” as you say. Colvin went up to one of the boys and asked, “What are y’all up to?” The boy replied, “We’re a-playing Dare Base.” Colvin watched them run around for a while, and then the bell up on the roof went BOMB-DOOM one time, and all the kids quit running around and went into the building, the girls through one door, the boys through the other, with Colvin joining the latter. He found a seat at a desk in the back and sat there watching as a old feller got up and took a piece of white chalk and used it to make some letters on the wall, which was painted black. The letters said GEOGRAPHY, LESSON 6, and STATE CAPITALS, and then the feller turned around and said, “All righty, what’s the state capital of Arkansas?” and some girl held up her hand and the feller said, “You, Sarey,” and the girl said, “Little Rock, Teacher!” And the man said, “Keerect. Missoury?” and somebody said “Jeff City, Teacher.” This went on for some time, with the feller naming all the neighboring states, but then he began to name far-off places, and when he named Virginia nobody knew its capital, except Colvin, who did as he had observed the others doing and held up his hand.

“You thar,” the teacher-feller pointed at him. “I don’t believe I recollect yore name.”

“Colvin, Teacher” he said. “Richmond.”

“Colvin Richmond, huh? I don’t know any Richmonds hereabouts. Are you new to this country?”

“Nossir, I meant Richmond is the capital of Virginia.”

“Is that a fack?” the man said, and consulted his book, and said, “Why, yes indeed, Richmond is the capital of Virginia. What is the capital of North Carolina?”

Nobody else held up their hands, so Colvin said, “Raleigh, Teacher.” His ability to answer apparently amused some of the boys, who began giggling and making remarks among themselves, which appeared to anger the teacher, who took one of the boys, Oren Duckworth, to the front of the room and used a hickory switch to flog him unmercifully. Colvin had never seen anybody flogged before, nor considered that one human might do this thing to another human, so despite his sympathy for Oren he considered this experience more educational than learning the state capitals, which he already knew anyway. And since nobody except Colvin knew that Pierre is the capital of South Dakota and Montpelier is the capital of Vermont, the teacher gave up on Geography and went on to Reading, where it turned out that Colvin was the only one who could read a page of the McGuffey Reader without using his finger as a pointer or screwing up his face and reciting the words in a singsong; to ’Riting, where it appeared that Colvin alone could use script instead of block letters; and to ’Rithmetic, where Colvin was able to do higher sums without counting on his toes.

Then school let out for the day. Colvin had been looking for a chance to talk to some of the girls, especially since he’d already learned from the classroom that they sounded pretty much like any other human being. But before he could approach any of the girls, he was surrounded by a group of the boys, and Oren Duckworth said, “Aint you a big sprout?” Colvin was not sure which of the various buds or shoots of young plants he was referring to, and before he could answer, Oren put both hands on his chest and shoved, throwing Colvin off balance so that he landed on his buttocks, and before he could get up the other boys began kicking him, in his ribs and stomach and even in his face. It was very painful. He tried to cover himself with his arms. “Git on back to yore cave, Smartypants!” Oren said. “Jist crawl on home to yore hole and don’t show yore face around here again!” They allowed him to get up, and he made a dash for Pegasus, leapt atop the pony and took off, but the boys pursued him, throwing rocks, some of which hit both him and his pony, before they could make their getaway. Riding home, he meditated on the irony that in a place called invitingly “Stay More,” he was told imperatively, “Git Out.”

He did not tell Kie Raney about being banished from Stay More, but he told him about the school. “You never told me there was such a place as a school,” he mildly complained, because Kie had tried to tell him about everything under the sun.

“Yeah, I used to run a school myself,” Kie said, and he told about his years as schoolmaster at the Spunkwater school, and how he’d been the preceptor of some kids who grew up to be some of the finest people in this part of the country because he’d tried to make them interested in some subjects that would otherwise have been boring. “Did ye git bored at the Stay More school?” Kie asked him.

Colvin allowed as how he hadn’t particularly enjoyed it, nor learned anything worth knowing, except his two lessons, one as an observer and one as a participant, in the way the human species gets pleasure from inflicting pain on one another. “But I don’t see the point,” he declared, “in a teacher standing in front of a bunch of kids who all face the same way and sit at the same kind of desk and have to learn the same kind of stuff…unless maybe that was my third lesson, if a teacher has fun making learning painful.”

Kie laughed and said he suspected that there was a streak of cruelty in many teachers that was not expressed only in the corporal punishment of the hickory switch but in the pleasure of exposing ignorance and provoking feelings of stupidity and worthlessness. “Don’t ye fret, Colvin,” Kie said, “I won’t let anybody make ye go to school if ye don’t wanter.”

“Suits me,” Colvin said, but then he thought of something, and added, “I reckon all I’d miss would be the chance to git a good look at some of them gals. I don’t never see ary gal hereabouts, and maybe I’ll git to missin ’em.” He pondered this prospect, and then, having been encouraged all his young life to ask any question that he wished to ask of his sage and kind mentor, he asked, “How come gals has got long hair and dresses?”

“There’s always two reasons for everything,” Kie reminded him, “a practical reason and a purty reason. The purty reason is the same as the reason gals gener’ly look sweeter in the face than boys do, and the reason the grown-up gal is the only female in all creation who has swollen bubbies all the time. A gal gits a feller to notice her by all these things: the long hair and the nice dress and sweet face and the shapely bubbies let on that she’s a she, jist in case his weak nose and his weak ears didn’t let him know. That’s the purty reason, and ye know, of course, why it’s necessary for fellers to want gals, to propagate the species like all other critters and livin things. Now the practical reason is this: the long hair keeps the gal’s head temperature more even and reg’lar and helps her think better, and she shore needs to use her wits and her brains to git along in this world; the sweet face makes fellers want to protect it and help her git along in this world; the dress makes it more handy for them to lift it up so’s they can propagate the species, you know? And the swollen bubbies make a nice soft piller fer babies and menfolk alike.”

“Pillow or pillar?” Colvin sought to clarify the pronunciation.

“Both, like I say,” Kie said.

Doc Kie Raney was all the teacher that Colvin ever needed, and there were so many things to teach him that perhaps it was just as well that he wasn’t distracted by long hair, dresses, sweet faces, and bubbies. If Colvin inherited any of Alonzo’s legendary appetite for the pleasures of the flesh, he would not really have an opportunity to express it for years to come.

Man’s first sublimation of the sexual urge was hunting, a necessity, and that is what all sublimations are, if I may use Kie’s theory: there is both a practical reason and an aesthetic reason for everything, and the sexual urge is sublimated, on one hand, the practical hand, to make man hunt, to feed himself, to destroy life in order to nurture life, and on the other hand, the aesthetic one, to make man create: to build, to paint, to compose, to tell stories.

Kie and Colvin spent a lot of time hunting. Although Doc Raney’s patients paid him off with produce and livestock, and Kie never lacked for a larder, he and Colvin had a taste for game, and they’d rather eat a rabbit than a chicken, a deer than a beef, a wild turkey than a tame one, and they were crazy about bear meat. Kie taught Colvin marksmanship not only with a variety of firearms, side arms, and shoulder arms alike, but also with bow and arrow, crossbow, and even, in emulation of the Bluff Dwellers who had lived in their cave before them, the atlatl. Kie spent a great deal of time teaching Colvin about knives: not just the common jackknife like his daddy’s old Prince, but real hunting knives, Bowie knives, carving knives, daggers, frog stickers, and, of course, scalpels, with which Kie taught him the anatomy of everything in creation, animal and plant alike. Once, an indigent, homeless patient of Kie’s died, and Kie brought the cadaver home and used it for months to teach Colvin the anatomy of the human body. Colvin’s keen mind was too fascinated to be frightened or disgusted by the cadaver.

Living in the near-wilderness gave Colvin a better understanding of nature than most physicians could ever learn. Just as Kie and Colvin preferred the wild meat of the forest to the tame meat that Doc Raney’s patients offered in payment, they preferred the wild plants to the produce from the vegetable garden. They foraged not just for the delicious things like muscadines, dewberries, wild blackberries, and walnuts but also poke sallet, lamb’s quarters, dock, and sorrel. As long as Kie had him in the forest teaching him how to tell a possum from a coon or an edible boletus from a deadly amanita, the wise and good doctor thought it was time to begin Colvin’s education in the finding and preparation of medicinal herbs, and even their naming by Latin botanical name, for example Hydrastis canadensis for goldenseal, Digitalis purpurea for foxglove, and Podophyllum peltatum for mandrake. He took especial pains to show Colvin how to find, dig up, and make a tea from the stout taproot of Asclepias tuberosa, called variously silkweed, white root, orange milkweed, wind root, chigger weed, pleurisy root, Indian paintbrush, and, most commonly, butterfly weed. It is tops for curing any of the various diseases that are generally called “lung trouble.” Even when it fails, butterfly weed is still the most powerful placebo known to man. Kie taught Colvin all of the magical incantations that are meant to accompany the administering of each herb, but he pointed out that butterfly weed is the only remedy which doesn’t need a verbal incantation to go with it.

Incantations, Kie had to point out, did not work in veterinary medicine, because animals could not understand our language. Kie made Colvin into an expert veterinarian before allowing him a chance to treat a human being, even including himself. Kie taught him never to kill a snake, especially not a poisonous snake, and most particularly not a particular poisonous snake who has bitten someone, because an essential part of the cure for snakebite, the exact details of which I was never able to pry out of any of my informants, was to find the actual snake who had bitten the victim, do something or the other with it, but release it unharmed afterwards. Colvin himself was bitten once by a deadly copperhead, cured of the bite by Kie with the help of the reptile itself, who, instead of being released, became Colvin’s pet. Colvin called him Drakon and fed him and talked to him, and, for some years, even slept with him. Drakon and Pegasus did not like each other, however, and Colvin had to learn to enjoy the company of one without the other.

When Colvin turned fourteen, and demonstrated to his master’s satisfaction his ability to cure rinderpest in cows, glanders and staggers in horses, bluetongue in sheep, and swine fever in pigs, Kie got out a big book and blew the dust off it, Home-Study Guide to Materia Medica, Pharmacy, Therapeutics, and Surgical Procedures, the same book Kie had used to teach Colvin’s daddy the rudiments of human medicine. Alonzo had required six months to master the book with the help of daily quizzes from Kie; Colvin was able to commit the book to memory in one month. Then, because Kie fortunately had a little cash on hand, from tending a rheumatic widow who couldn’t pay him in produce or livestock and had to use real money, he was able to send off and order such additional books as Boenning’s A Textbook on Practical Anatomy, Buret’s Syphilis in Modern Times, Eisenberg’s Bacteriological Diagnosis, Edinger’s Twelve Lectures on the Structure of the Central Nervous System, and Hare’s Fever: Its Pathology and Treatment. Since these new books contained all kinds of stuff that even Kie himself didn’t know, he and Colvin read them together and quizzed each other on them, and by the time he was fifteen, Colvin was accompanying Kie on his rounds and assisting in surgery and obstetrics. Eager to please, Colvin offered to take over the management of the disorderly office accounts, and began riding Pegasus around to collect the livestock and produce that patients owed. All of this activity brought him occasionally into contact with, or at least in sight of, a female, and he enjoyed this.

Colvin used money he had saved from trapping furs to buy for four dollars his own copy of a big medical dictionary, and when he had stored it in memory within two months, to order for one dollar a year’s subscription to Medical Bulletin: A Monthly Journal of Medicine and Surgery, and for three dollars a year’s subscription to Journal of Laryngology, Rhinology, and Otology, and his faithful perusal of each month’s issue of these magazines made him even more knowledgeable and au courant than Kie himself. It was through these magazines that Colvin discovered two rather astonishing facts about medicine: first, that in order to practice the profession legally, you have to have something called an M.D., and secondly, that the only way you can get an M.D. is by going off somewheres to something called “medical school.” Colvin was appalled. Ever since his brief attendance at the Stay More institution of lower learning, he had had a poor opinion of “school,” and he couldn’t quite understand why it was necessary to sit at a desk facing a teacher in order to learn medicine. His memory of the one afternoon at the Stay More school came back to him, and he tried to conceive of sitting at a desk and raising his hand to name the parts of the gastrointestinal system. If he left one out, would the teacher flog him?

But the more he thought about this business of medical school, the more it bothered him. Finally he asked Kie, “Did you ever go to medical school?”

Kie looked around, from left to right, as if there might be somebody else within earshot, and then he raised his index finger to his lips. “Colvin,” he said, “maybe they’s some fellers down to Little Rock has been to medical school, and maybe you’d even find a doctor or two in Harrison who might at least have walked down the hallways of a medical school, but most Arkansas doctors learnt their trade the same way I’m a-learnin you: they just apprenticed theirselfs to somebody who had already learnt it.”

Colvin tried to forget the matter, to bury it in the back of his too active mind, but over the years it would occasionally creep up on him again. On Colvin’s sixteenth birthday, Kie discovered that there was not one single question he could ask of Colvin, on any medical subject, which he could not answer, not even something like “How do you induce spontaneous remission of cancer?” or “How do you restart a heart which has stopped?” So Kie presented Colvin with that most delightful of all treatises, the fourteenth edition (carefully revised and greatly enlarged) of Dr. D.W. Cathell’s Book on the Physician Himself and Things That Concern His Reputation and Success. Kie declared that he had nothing whatever left to teach Colvin; that the Cathell book would instruct him in all the matters of behavior, conduct, ethics, and other subjects above and beyond the acquired science that he had already learned.

There were tears running down the wise, kind instructor’s face, the first time that Colvin had ever seen him weeping, and Kie wrung his hands, the first time that Colvin had ever seen him wringing. “Son,” Kie said, although he had never called him that before and really didn’t mean it in a paternal so much as a sociable way, “I’m a-gorn have to send ye out into the world, all on yore lonesome. You’ll jist have to set up yore own practice somewheres, anywheres so long as it aint in my territory. There’s jist a few things you’ve got to promise, and I want ye to recite these after me.”

And Kie had Colvin raise his right hand and put the other hand, lacking a Bible, on top of the Cathell book, and repeat after him:

I swear that

1. I’ll be a-thinkin on my ole teacher the exact same way I’d think on my own daddy, and I’ll be a-helpin him out if he ever needs it.

2. I’ll be using everthang I learnt to make folks well, but not never to hurt ’em or wrong ’em.

3. I’ll not never be giving no man nary drug that would harm him even if he baigs me fer it, nor will I never be giving no womarn a abortion even if she baigs me fer it.

4. I’ll not never be a-gorn inter nary a house except to go in thar and heal the sick. I’ll not never go inter nobody’s house to do nothing wrong or seduce some pore gal or feller neither one.

5. I’ll not never be a-blabbin nothing I hear or learn that aint nobody else’s business to them or nobody, so help me ye gods.

When Colvin had finished swearing this oath, Kie said, “Now you go on and git out of here. You are the seventh son of a seventh son, and any durn fool knows what that means: it means you are a doctor in spite of yourself, it means you couldn’t never stop being a doctor even if you tried. And it means you can cure any ailment under the sun; you can heal any complaint that ever was or ever will be.”

Colvin could not budge. He just stood there, with his mouth open, and his own eyes a-watering up like Kie’s, and finally he asked, “Whose seventh son am I the seventh son of?”

“Ole Lizzie Swain’s, rest her soul,” Kie said. And even though he had ordered Colvin off the premises of the cave-house, he relented long enough to tell Colvin the complicated story of how Elizabeth Hansell Swain had come from Cullowhee, North Carolina, with her thirteen children, arriving in Stay More not long after the brothers Jacob and Noah Ingledew had already founded it and named it, and the youngest of her children, her “least’un,” Gilbert, grew into rambunctious manhood impregnating females hither and yon all over the goddamn county, and later opting for his middle name, Alonzo (“I hope ye don’t never choose to be called by yore middle name, U, which sounds like an Englishman pronouncing ‘Hugh’”), under which Alonzo became a doctor after training with Kie—“So you’d best not never practice in his territory neither.”

“Uncle ’Lonzo is my actual paw?!” Colvin asked, dumbfounded. “But how d’ye know I’m his seventh son?”

“Aw, hell, Colvin, he jist might’ve had seventeen sons, fer all I know. And maybe fer all he knows, either. But I’m jist a-tellin the story the way she ort to be told. Now go on and git out of here.” Kie turned his back so that he would not have to watch Colvin leave, because there is a wise and venerable belief, which has both a practical and a pretty reason, that you should never watch anybody go out of sight.

Colvin packed a few of his belongings—his Cathell book and back issues of his medical journals and his clothes, and his copperhead Drakon wrapped in a burlap sack—into the saddlebags of Pegasus, and headed west. His initial intention was to keep going west until he got to California. He had heard many marvelous things about California, what a great land of opportunity it was, and his medical journals had led him to know that it desperately needed some good doctors. Isolated in the cave-house as he had been, Colvin had never heard the legendary Curse of Jacob Ingledew, which doomed any Ozarker who dared venture into California, doomed him into a bad life of ill luck, sickness, poverty, even death.

It was just as well, because the closest Colvin ever got to California, on his journey westward, was the village of Stay More, where, the first evening into his journey, Pegasus came down with what veterinarian Colvin correctly diagnosed as encephalomyelitis. He could have prevented it by immunizing Ole Peg for one season with a chick-embryo vaccine, but he had not, and there was no cure once the virus had taken over. Pegasus died.

Afoot, Colvin was stuck in Stay More…not a bad place to be stuck, come to think of it, in fact the best place on earth to be stuck, but Colvin still remembered too vividly the beating at the schoolhouse and the injunction never to return. That was the third factor giving him pause, the other two being the presence on Main Street not only of the office and clinic of Uncle Alonzo, the man presumed to be his father, but also, directly across the street from it, another office and clinic, that of John Mabrey Plowright, a Stay More native who had done gone and apprenticed himself to an actual M.D. up at Harrison, and after a year’s apprenticeship and perhaps some mail-order lessons from a St. Louis diploma mill, had erected a stake in his front yard with a shingle hanging from it: J.M. PLOWRIGHT, M.D. FAMILY MEDICINE. Colvin stood on Main Street for a while, staring at this shingle, trying to determine how “family medicine” was any different from any other kind, unless possibly it meant as opposed to medicine of individuals who didn’t live in families, and also thinking about the circumstance whereby the population of Stay More had now grown to the point where it could support two physicians—not a bad idea, because it meant the two would keep each other in line, provide healthy competition, offer second opinions, and ideally assist each other in complicated operations, not to mention being “on call” when the other had gone fishing or something.

Then Colvin turned, climbed the steps of the other doctor, knocked, and when the man appeared, said, smiling sweetly, “Howdy, Paw.”

Alonzo said, “Why, howdy there, Col boy,” and then he coughed and inquired, “What didje call me?”

“‘Paw,’ Paw,” Colvin said, like naming the Asimina triloba tree, which was overabundant in the woods and fields of Stay More. “Kie threw me out, Paw. I reckon he’s done already taught me all there is to know about doctoring.”

“Is that a fack, now?” Alonzo said. “You don’t mean to tell me.” He coughed again, and Colvin, detecting that the breath was also bad, realized it wasn’t merely from nervousness or discomfort; his father likely had a bronchiectasis, but damned if Colvin was going to write prescriptions for lipiodol and iodide of potash for a man capable of writing his own. “So where are you off to?” Alonzo asked.

“I was thinkin about Californy,” Colvin admitted. “But my horse broke down. You could either give me another horse, or you could move over and make room for a third doctor in this town.”

“Hellfire, boy, didn’t Kie warn ye to stay out of my territory? He tole me to stay out of his’n, and I don’t aim to let ye practice in mine. I’ve already got all the rivalry I can handle from Jack Plowright across the road yonder.”

“Tum bene fortis equus reserato carcere currit,” Colvin began to recite, because doesn’t any kid want to impress his daddy? “Cum quos prætereat, quosque sequatur, habet.” And when Alonzo failed to look impressed, only annoyed, Colvin offered the translation, “A good horse runs better if he’s got other horses to beat out.”

“I caint afford to give ye a new horse,” Alonzo said. “You’ll jist have to find some other way to git to Californy.”

“That aint what I’m talkin about,” Colvin said. “I’m talkin about maybe you and Jack Plowright both would be better doctors if you had a real thoroughbred to have to run against.”

“Shit on a stick!” Alonzo grew red with anger. “Sonny boy, you aint but a little spadger still wet behind the ears! You caint be more’n what? Fifteen? Sixteen year old? You think anybody would trust their life to you? Hell, you couldn’t even—” Alonzo coughed, gagged, spit up some blood into his handkerchief, and then had another paroxysm of coughing. Colvin was sure it was generalized bronchiectasis, but he wanted to be able to discount emphysema in association with it.

“Dad, what are you a-takin for that there cough?” he asked.

“Jist horehound, and a bit of tea from butterfly weed root,” Alonzo said.

“Could I see yore hand.” Colvin took his father’s hand and checked it for clubbed fingers and hypertrophic osteoarthropathy, apparently negative. “Doctor,” Colvin said respectfully, “if ye don’t mind, I’d like to do a bronchoscopy.”

“Say what?” Alonzo said.

“Doctor, we need to rule out any furrin bodies in yore trachea and bronchi,” Colvin suggested, “if ye could lend me the borry of yore bronchoscope.”

“Aint got ary of them newfangled gadgets,” Alonzo admitted.

“Do ye reckon Jack Plowright might have one?”

“Maybe, but I aint about to ask ’im fer it.”

“Then I’d best do it fer ye, Paw,” Colvin said. “I’ll be right back.” And before his father could stop him, he had gone out and crossed the road and knocked on the other doctor’s door, and when the man answered, the man who would become his lifelong competition and his nemesis, Colvin squared his shoulders and said, “Doctor Plowright, sir, I’m Doctor Colvin Swain, nephew of the good gentleman across the street, who, I’m a-feared, may have contracted dilatation of the bronchi with secondary infection, most likely unilateral bronchiectasis of the lower lobes.”

“Serves that bastard right!” Jack Plowright exclaimed. “Jist what he needs!”

“My bag is missin its Hampton bronchoscope,” Colvin declared. “Could ye see yore way to lendin me the borry of your’n, fer jist a secont?”

“Wal, I don’t rightly know as I’ve got ary,” Doc Plowright said. “What do they look lak?”

Colvin described the instrument and offered to help Doc Plowright search among his apparatus for it, and sure enough, there it was, although it wasn’t the Hampton but the Crowell model, which would do. “I don’t reckon it’s been sterilized, if ye aint never used it?” Colvin asked, and then he said, “Thanks a load. I’ll be back with it lickety-split, afore ye even notice it missin,” and he took the instrument to his father’s and sterilized it, and said, “Doctor, if you’ll be so good as to open wide, and hold real still…” and he performed the bronchoscopy, ruling out foreign obstructions. He borrowed his father’s microscope to examine the sputum and determine which organisms were involved in the infectious process. Then he mixed up a dose of wild cherry syrup with potassium iodide in it, administered a teaspoon to his father, and told him, “Now, Doctor, I’m a-gorn to have to put ye into a position for postural drainage.”

And he showed his father how to hang over the side of the bed with his head on the floor, so that gravity would drain the pus from the dilated bronchi. “How long’ve I gotta stay this way?” Alonzo asked.

“Months, even years maybe,” the young doctor prognosed, and although he did not mean that his father had to stay constantly in that awkward upside-down position, he did honestly mean that his father might have to carry out the procedure every morning and evening for a very long time.

While his father was hanging upside down over the edge of the bed, Colvin took over his routines, borrowed his black bag and his horse, and successfully treated a variety of Stay Morons for a variety of ailments: sigmoid diverticulitis, tetany, mercury poisoning, gout, scurvy, hookworm, whooping cough, asthma, diphtheria, and rabies. Although there was much skepticism among the citizenry over Colvin’s qualifications and credentials, owing largely to his extreme youth, a singular fact of his practice was soon noticed and widely voiced: he never lost a case. Not one of his patients ever failed to be cured, not even those suffering with renal failure, anthrax, snakebite, general paresis, and gunshot wound.

So famous and popular did Colvin become that the only way Doc Jack Plowright could hope to compete with him was by attempting to beat him to the patient. This became literally a horse race in which Doc Plowright would jump atop his nag, Lucifer, and try to reach the patient’s house before Doc Colvin Swain, riding his dad’s sorrel mare, Sadie, could get there. Stay Morons took to pari-mutuel betting on which of the two would win. Lucifer actually was the better animal, and often Doc Plowright arrived first, but just as often he made the wrong diagnosis or prescribed the wrong treatment, so people who sent to the village for a doctor learned to instruct the messenger to be sure and give Doc Swain’s mare Sadie a good drink of coffee mixed with corn whiskey in order to speed her up. Doc Plowright began to hate the younger Doc Swain as much as, or more than, he had ever hated the older Doc Swain, and he would spend the rest of his life dividing his time between his patients and his attempt to sabotage his competition. Indeed, the only way he managed to keep any patients was by charging only half as much as the Swains did, whatever they charged, even if it was produce or livestock. If you had to give one of the Doc Swains a whole hog to get your appendix removed, Doc Plowright would do it for you for only a piglet.

Over the years, Doc Plowright became known as the poor folks’ physician, and the Doc Swains were viewed as limiting their practice to “quality.”

Socially, no such distinctions existed. Socially, Colvin Swain saved the life of Oren Duckworth and thereby earned his right to free mingling with those who had originally driven him away from the Stay More school yard. Oren lost the ability to breathe, and while Doc Plowright treated him for pulmonary disorders and the older Doc Swain attempted to treat him for hemolytic anemia, Colvin’s stethoscope told him that it was congestive heart failure, specifically left ventricular, and taking the patient’s history, deduced that it was associated with syphilitic disease of the aortic valve. Colvin sedated Oren with chloral hydrate, and then he addressed the assembled family: “Do any of y’uns know what foxglove looks lak?” Oren’s sister Dulcie was sent out to gather a quantity of the leaves of the foxglove flower, from which Colvin extracted the glucoside digitalin, and administered it to Oren along with one of Kie’s favorite incantations, with pronounced beneficial results. Oren, recovering, said, “Doc, I shore am sorry fer that time I whupped ye at the schoolhouse.” And Oren’s pretty sister Dulcie walked him to his horse and told him, “If ever you’d like to have a sweetie, I reckon I could step out a time or two.”

But “stepping out,” in Dulcie’s view as well as that of the typical Stay More girl, did not necessarily mean leaving the house. For all of the still-told stories of how the older Doc Swain had cajoled hordes of females into the back brush and the hayloft and even the creek bed, the younger Doc Swain was to discover, when he finally had a spare moment to experiment with courtship, that the best he could hope for was a usually chaperoned situation in which some member of Dulcie’s family was nearby, possibly in the same room, while Colvin and Dulcie attempted to make conversation. They had little to talk about. After discussing the weather and the chances of rain or continued drought, they would attempt to tell the latest joke that they had picked up, but most of Dulcie’s jokes were silly or simple, and most of Colvin’s were somewhat risky, and neither of them laughed at the other’s jokes. Dulcie, having observed that her mother and her mother’s friends loved to discuss their illnesses and physical problems, tried to get Colvin to talk about his patients, but he never forgot Kie’s fifth precept, namely, that the good physician never discloses any information about his patients, so Colvin would not even tell Dulcie who he had been treating, let alone for what. Usually, Colvin and Dulcie sat in silence until it was time for him to go.

“Paw,” Colvin asked Alonzo bluntly one day, “how did ye ever sprunch a gal in the old days?”

“The old days?” Alonzo said indignantly. “Why, I’ll have ye to know that jist last night I shagged Bessie Mae Murrison two times!”

“How d’ye do it? How d’ye talk ’em into it?”

“Aw, I don’t rightly do a whole lot of talkin. There aint that much to talk about. I jist sort of gentle ’em down into a laying position.”

But when Colvin attempted to gentle Dulcie into a horizontal, or even a reclining position, it seemed to ruffle her dignity, and she snapped upright like his very manhood had been snapped upright by the thought of what he was hoping to do.

After many months of an unexciting and uneventful romance, Colvin finally gave himself a strong dose of veronal, a barbituate good for relaxing the inhibitions, and he said, speaking in that same calm, soothing way he addressed all his patients, “Dulcie, honey-bunch sweetums, I sure would like to interduce my membrum virile betwixt yore nymphae.”

“Where is my nimfy?” she inquired, but he had not taken enough veronal to give him the courage to say, let alone to point out.

Dr. Colvin Swain spent a few years palpating the breasts and manipulating the vaginas of many females, but always only in a professional manner that may or may not have gratified the patient but did nothing for his own biological urges. He was ever mindful of Kie’s fourth precept, namely, never to seduce a patient, but Stay More, not to mention adjacent areas of Newton County, was teeming with females who weren’t his patients. He was nineteen years old, and still a virgin, when he blurted to his father one day, “Dad, did you ever commit rape?”

Alonzo tried to recall. “Wal, I reckon it ’pends on how ye’d look at it. Who did you have in mind to do it with?”

“Anybody!” Colvin said. “It’s either got to be a she-person or a sheep!”

“Son, you don’t mean to tell me it’s been that long since you done it last?”

“I aint never done it!”

When he had recovered from his shock, Alonzo Swain began to feel great pity for his son, and to realize it had been a mistake to have raised Colvin in the household of an old bachelor like Kie Raney who never had any women around the place. Forthwith, he arranged for Colvin to meet up with Della Sue Kimber, who lived with her sister Rosa up toward Parthenon. Both sisters had reputations, but it was Della who had not only put out for Alonzo on occasion but had done so in such a way that he knew poor Colvin wouldn’t have to do the talking, or the gentling, or any kind of work whatsoever. “Just don’t tell her you’re my boy,” Alonzo requested. “And I guarantee ye, you shore won’t even need to think about raping her.”

So Colvin went to see Della, who was maybe nine or ten years older than he was, but still right sightly and shapely for a woman of her years and experience. “You git yourself right in here and give me a big kiss!” she hollered, like he was her long-lost boyfriend, and she took him in and held him real tight and gave him such a kiss as would even revivify the jemmison of an old invalid like me, and for a young feller like him he had one on him that could’ve serviced a giraffe. It didn’t need any excitation, but she put her hand right on it and commenced squeezing and rubbing, and said, “My, my, my, let’s us have a little peek at thet thar whopping sockdolager!” and next thing he knew she was unbuckling his belt and taking down his pants, and hollering over her shoulder, “Rosa, there’s enough for both of us!” In nothing flat all three of ’em was naked as jaybirds and they had Colvin spread out on the bed. “You kin go first. You’re oldest,” Della said to Rosa, but Della couldn’t wait herself, and while Rosa commenced climbing atop that flagpole, Della went on kissing him and putting one of his hands onto her twitchet.

Colvin was admiring how white Rosa’s legs were, but then just as she was about to lower herself atop his jemmison, it occurred to him that the whiteness of the legs might be caused by a clot in the outer veins of the thigh, or thrombophlebitis. He ought to get Rosa’s legs elevated onto some pillows, paint them with some ichthyol, put a hot-water bottle over them, maybe even give her a shot of whiskey. “Pardon me, ma’am,” he said in that maddeningly polite physician’s voice of his, just at the instant he was about to lose his virginity, “but I’m afraid you might have phlebitis.” Withdrawing his hand from Della’s groin, he took a sniff of it and then a sharp glance at Della’s twitchet, and declared, “And you, ma’am, it appears you may have caught yourself a case of trichomoniasis. Do you have any itching down there? Or a kind of greenish yeller discharge? It aint nothing too serious, like some of the poxes. Nothing to worry about, but it is catching, you know.”

Colvin was able to clear up Della’s disease in just two weeks with sitz baths and a vaginal application of gentian violet and vinegar. But Rosa’s problem required six weeks of treatment, and he nearly lost her to a pulmonary embolism, since he lacked anticoagulants…but he never lost a case, and he stuck with it, although she had postphlebitic symptoms for quite some time thereafter, and didn’t feel like joining her sister when the time finally came for them to pick up where they’d left off, or been interrupted, in that bed. Della tried to go it alone, but discovered that she somehow was not able to induce that “whopping sockdolager” that had equipped Colvin earlier on. She played with it and even put it in her mouth, but the only excuse Colvin could offer for its refusal to stand up and become useful was that he was possibly working too hard, although he privately surmised that he’d developed some kind of aversion to sticking it into a postvulvovaginitic orifice.

Alonzo Swain, learning of his son’s continuing virginity, told Colvin that he ought to grow some upper lip hair in order to make himself more desirable to women. At twenty, Colvin still looked like a teenager. He was handsome. He was tall and dark. But he looked like a kid. All of the other men of Stay More, without exception, had full mustaches. It was the vogue of the day, perhaps inspired by the nation’s current president, Teddy Roosevelt. Alonzo’s own mustache covered his entire mouth and often got chewed up at mealtimes. And women could not resist him.

So Colvin obeyed his father, and gave up shaying. He tried to be a dutiful son. The two Swain doctors lived together in the house on Main Street, and they had to accommodate each other, as bachelors must. (Since Alonzo did not like Colvin’s snake, Drakon, Colvin did not let Drakon have free run, or free slither, of the house, but kept him confined when Alonzo was around, and only took him out for walks, or slithers, at night. In return, Alonzo agreed to stop using the unsterilized Prince as a scalpel, toenail cleaner, and stirrer of medicine.) Both Swain doctors belonged to the Ingledewville Lodge, No. 642, of the Free and Accepted Masonic Order, and they attended meetings together in a back room of the Ingledew store, and they studied their Masonic texts together, making of Masonry a religion in substitute for any other beliefs they lacked. Like so many physicians, they found it difficult to subscribe to the notion of a Supreme Being, although, as I’ll have to tell you later on, Colvin did finally come to believe in God, in a way. At the age of twenty, however, all he believed in was the gods of medicine. And he believed in the goddesses of the Fair Sex, and kept on hoping to find one that he could do it with.

Alone of the Masons, alone of the men of Stay More, Colvin grew not just a mustache but a full beard, a thick, black, luxuriant, and somewhat curly beard, which indeed made him look like an older man, and a physician, and even a classical physician, or at least a classical American horse-and-buggy (though he did not yet have a buggy) doctor. And he became suddenly exciting to women.

It was Dulcie Duckworth herself, who had given him so much trouble in his efforts to tear off just a little piece, who seemed to be the first to notice his newly acquired virility, although she wasn’t able to determine whether it emanated from his beard or from the snake she observed him playing with, one evening on the porch of the Swain clinic. “Oh, my,” she said. “I shore have missed you, Col hon boy sugar. Oh my oh my. You better jist put down that there sarpint and take a little walk with me.”

By coincidence that was the twenty-first anniversary of the night Alonzo had ripped him from his mother’s womb in that fire. So Colvin lost his minority and his virginity at the same time. Neither is recoverable.

It never rains but it pours, as they say. Feast or famine. Almost as if to make up for all those years he’d done without, he now found himself with more women than he could handle. But just as a drought is often ended by an uncontrollable flood, Colvin’s sexual drought was followed by an uncontrollable flood of his jism. Try as he might, he could not regulate it. It came fast and furiously without warning, as if it were happening to somebody else, not to him. From his lodge brethren in the Masonic Order, he received plenty of advice on the sundry ways to postpone the outpouring of the jism: you can review your financial accounts in your head, you can imagine trying to catch a fly ball during a game of baseball, you can pretend the woman beneath you is actually a revolting witch, you can try to make your mind a total blank, you can drink enough Chism’s Dew to get yourself into a stupor, you can play with yourself beforehand until you shoot off, or you can try smearing any of a number of natural desensitizing substances on your pecker. Colvin tried all of these things, to no avail, and finally decided to ask the one lodge brother who was actually his father, but he chose to do it in a clinical manner. “Doctor, from your considerable experience, what method is best, during the act of coitus, for prolonging excitation in order to intermit the ejaculation?” Alonzo gave him a look as if he had asked what’s the best way to fly to the moon, and then he said, “What in tarnation do ye need to do thet for?” To make the woman happy? Colvin suggested. Alonzo snorted. “Boy, if it takes a gal one minute to chew and swaller a nice big slice of apple pie, she aint gonna feel no better if it takes her fifteen minutes to do it.”

Colvin was twenty-three before he learned how to take fifteen minutes instead of one. And that was with the help of an exceptionally intelligent girl named Piney Coe. It was not a nickname and had no allusion to pining or yearning; she was the youngest of seven sisters all named after trees; anyone pitying her name should have had more compassion for Hickory, Dogwoody, Redbuddy, Persimmony, Chinquapinny, and Sycamoria. They belonged to a very poor family living in hard circumstances on the far side of Ingledew Mountain, and all of them were victims of pellegra, hookworm, impetigo, and scrofula. All of them stank of the asafedtida the mother made them wear around their necks in futile treatment of their various afflictions. Piney was required to consult Doc Plowright (not being able to afford the doctors Swain) for shortness of breath and heart palpitations. Jack Plowright diagnosed an aneurysm, specifically a syphilitic aneurysm, although Piney did not have any of the other symptoms of syphilis nor did she have difficulty swallowing; on the contrary, she was ravenously hungry all the time and would eat anything. He told her that if the heart medicine he gave her didn’t do any good, he might have to cut into her artery. This prospect scared her into crossing the road to seek a second opinion at the Swain clinic, where she critically examined the walls, noting the calendar from a Harrison feed store, the chromolithograph of September Morn, and an embroidery of the words “Patience is the best medicine.” She asked of Colvin Swain, “Why do you charge twice as much as Doc Plowright if you don’t have one of those certificates on the wall?” Colvin pleasantly and politely asked her what sort of certificate she meant. Piney described it: an impressively framed (behind glass) piece of paper which proclaimed that the St. Louis Royal Academy of Physicians and Surgeons had awarded to John Mabrey Plowright the degree of Medicinae Doctor and all rights and privileges pertaining thereto.

“Wal, I don’t know about that piece of paper,” Colvin said, “but I’ll show ye why we charge twice’t as much. Let me see the bottoms of yore feet.” That was no problem because she, like all her family, wore no shoes. And he looked at her feet (whose soles were pimply) and then asked her about her appetite (ravenous) and her stools (black), and he said, “Doc Plowright ort to leastways have given ye some peach-leaf tea ’stead of that heart medicine, because the only thing wrong with yore heart is that its blood is gittin stolen away from it by a bunch of worms in yore duodenum. And if I caint cure ye, you don’t owe me nothin.” He gave her half an ounce of magnesium sulfate, a saline purge, and told her to come back at sunrise the next day without eating breakfast.

Then he crossed the road and told Jack Plowright he was a fool for scaring the daylights out of the poor girl and misdiagnosing her besides. “Did ye plan to cut open her chest to get at her aorta?” he demanded. “If you’d cut her open a foot lower down, you’d find a washpan full of hookworms.” Colvin took the opportunity to examine the diploma on Plowright’s wall. It was impressive, but Colvin had never heard of the St. Louis Royal Academy of Physicians and Surgeons, and he knew that “royal” was supposed to be reserved for things British. “Where’d you get this?” he wanted to know. Jack Plowright said he’d sent off to St. Louis twenty-five dollars in good cash money for it.

Piney Coe came again the next day just as the sun was rising over the top of Dinsmore Mountain, and it was a beautiful day, a lovely day, a most pleasant and fragrant day, and Colvin noticed she wasn’t so bad-looking herself, in fact right admirable, hair as black as his own and a smile as if she knew and understood most of what was wrong with the world. “Tell me exactly what you’re going to do,” she requested, and he described the treatments as he administered them: two 15-grain capsules of thymol, which he had compounded himself from thyme growing in his herb garden, and he would repeat the dose in two hours, followed two hours after that with another dose of magnesium sulfate. Did she want something to read while she waited, or what? “Could we just talk?” she asked, “Or do you have a lot of other patients to see you?”

Colvin and Piney discovered that they got along just fine. In contrast to Dulcie and some other girls he could mention, she never ran out of things to talk with him about. In the course of the weeks it took him to eradicate every last worm and worm’s egg from her duodenum, they became practically best friends, a marvelous circumstance because Colvin had never had a friend before, if you didn’t count Drakon, who couldn’t talk. It even got to the point where, one day when Piney asked, “Don’t doctors themselves ever have any problems?” he broke down and confessed that indeed doctors are human beings like anybody else and they get sick and they have disorders and malfunctions and demons. “Tell me about all of yours,” she requested, so he told her eventually about the evanescent aches or stiffness he felt in some of his ringer joints upon awakening, a possible arthritis—which made her want to hold his hand; his labial frenulum was missing, the tiny band of skin that holds the upper lip to the gum, which made his upper lip rather too full—when he showed her, it made her want to kiss it, so she did, their first; and finally he told her blushingly about his difficulty in the act of sex, explaining that it was not technically ejaculatio praecox, which implies emission before penetration, but rather it had no precise medical term for it, the inability to hold back the ejaculation more than a couple of minutes after penetration. “Aren’t you going to show me?” she requested.

One day, while he was showing her for a second or a third time, she stopped him during the process and said, “Let’s just hold still for a little while,” and she waited until he’d calmed down and stopped breathing so hard before starting up again, and then after a while more she said again, “Let’s just hold still for another minute,” and this went on, several times, until she said, “All right, just keep on going as long as you want,” and he discovered that minute after minute flew by as he kept on a-going, all he wanted, for a right smart little spell, maybe twenty minutes all told, before he finally detonated like a keg of gunpowder.

By-and-by it got to where they were spending just about all their spare time together, and doctors don’t have a whole lot of free time, or they oughtn’t to, if they do. Colvin was beginning to have thoughts about having Piney around the house all the time, and that would sure have suited her.

Then the state of Arkansas passed something called the Turner Law, which said that you had to have a license to practice medicine and the only way you could get a license was to have a diploma. There was a “grandfather clause” in it, which said that if you’d already been practicing for twenty years or more, you were exempt from the new regulations, so Alonzo Swain wasn’t affected by it.

But Colvin had to have a diploma. He asked Jack Plowright for the address of that St. Louis Royal Academy of Physicians and Surgeons, and he sent them his twenty-five dollars, which was a lot of money in those days. They wrote back to say that the rising costs of medical education had necessitated the elevation of the fee to fifty dollars. So he sent them another twenty-five of his hard-earned dollars, but they never answered.

He waited as long as he could stand it, getting madder and madder, and then he decided he’d better just run up there to St. Louis, wherever it was, and get his diploma or his money back, one.

Piney offered to feed Drakon while he was gone.

You can be sure this will be continued.

Chapter four

After you left yesterday, Mary Celestia fussed at me a little bit for the way I’m telling this story. Oh, yes, you can bet she’s listening in. Even when she appears to be nodding off. You’d think she’d be embarrassed by the bawdy elements of my story, but those are her favorite parts! Sometimes when I get into the short rows, as they used to say—that was an old Ozark allusion to the brief interval just preceding the orgasm, derived from plowing in odd-shaped fields, where the last few rows to be plowed are the shortest—in other words, the exact time when Piney knew to make Colvin stop and take a little rest—sometimes when I’m getting into the short rows of telling a story, I’ll glance over at Mary and the woman is practically drooling! Unless it’s just geriatric slobber, or whatever Colvin would have called it.

She tore into me, some, after you left, because of a couple of things. One was, she wouldn’t “buy” that Piney Coe was all that smart. Growing up in a dirt-poor ridge-runner’s shack, Piney would’ve talked the same way as everybody else. Even Colvin, smart as he was, too smart sometimes for his own good, used incorrect grammar and tautological sentences and mangled syntax like any other Ozarker who’s comfortable with that easy, folksy dialect. Hell, I aint always so proper myself. But Mary, she says there’s no way on earth that Piney could’ve talked as much as she did without ever committing a single little mistake in the speaking—or misspeaking—of the King’s English. “Vance,” she says, “you can make her special without making her so all-fired perfect.” All I could do was try to remind her that I’m just showing Piney Coe the exact same way that she was shown to me…and let me tell you, when I’d had enough of Mary’s criticism, I closed my eyes to get shut of her and when I reopened them—did I tell you last time about this talent I’ve discovered I’ve got, or this magic, or this transcendence of mundane reality?—when I reopened my eyes, Mary was gone, and there on that bed sat Piney Coe, real as life and twice as natural! I kid you not, son. Even though I’d not ever seen her before myself, even though she’s been dead for half a century, even though nobody ever showed me a photograph of her or anything, I knew it was her! That sable hair and those bottomless eyes and that cute little mouth that so often began a-beaming at some private knowledge of how funny and wondrous life is showing itself to be, and she was looking at me not as if I was this shrunken, wizened, bedridden old duffer but as if I still was the charming, presentable smoothie that I used to be. You have to believe it was the first time I’d ever seen her. And you have to believe it was love at first sight! But I knew that I could keep her there only as long as I could go without blinking my eyes, so I had to keep ’em open long enough to hear whatever she had to say. Which was, in that sweet and proper voice that Mary’d just been criticizing me for giving her but which she honestly had, to ask me, practically to beg me, to let her become my heroine.

I commenced a-weeping, and it was hard to keep from blinking with tears in my eyes but I kept my eyes open long enough to tell her that I was awfully sorry she couldn’t be the heroine, because that was just the way things was, I was only telling what had been told to me, I didn’t have the power to let her and Doc Colvin U Swain live happily ever after. She got real sad herself then, and I knew I was going to have to blink my eyes or wipe ’em or both, and I had just enough time to say, “But Piney, child, I promise I’ll try to keep ye as long as I can.” Then I had to blink, and she smiled again one last time as if to leave me with the memory forever of that special smile, and she disappeared, and there was Mary again, just Mary.

So. Piney is keeping the home fires burning while Colvin gallivants off to St. Louis to see what he can see. When he went to St. Louis, that time, he might have stayed there. As I’m about to show you, he was urged to stay there. He could’ve become a prosperous St. Louis physician, or had a big-city practice elsewhere. But then of course we wouldn’t have any story, would we?

The Ingledews prepared Colvin for St. Louis. Actually he knew roughly where it was located, up in eastern Missoury, and for several years now he’d been listening to people sing, “Meet me in St. Louis, Louie, meet me at the fair…” Most all of the Ingledews had gone to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, or the St. Louis World’s Fair as it was known, back in 1904, and they still remembered how many thousands upon thousands of people they’d seen, and they warned Colvin that the roads in St. Louis were filled with horse shit from all those strange conveyances called trolleys that carry all those thousands of people constantly to wherever they seemed to want to be going. Colvin discovered the Ingledews were wrong about the horse shit, or, rather, the horses had been replaced by electricity, which now powered the trolley cars. Colvin had never seen electricity before, and, of course, he didn’t actually “see” it now, but he saw all of the things that were being operated on it, like streetcars and street lamps. In fact, Colvin had never seen a street before, which is a kind of tamed road, held hostage by cement sidewalks, a road which doesn’t go anywhere but endlessly crisscrosses other streets at right angles. Beneath the street lamps of St. Louis were streetwalkers, one of whom offered herself to him for three dollars. He discovered more interesting and attractive specimens of life in the St. Louis Zoo, where a whole house was devoted to snakes, which both fascinated him and made him homesick for Drakon.

There were big buildings all over town called “hospitals,” all of them named, like the city itself, after saints: St. Luke’s, St. John’s, St. Mary’s. Of course Colvin knew what a hospital was, from reading his medical journals, but he could not imagine what one was like. Curious, he entered St. Matthew’s and spent an hour wandering around, astonished to discover that all of the doctors were female and they were all dressed identically in striped dresses and little hats. And these lady doctors didn’t seem to be curing anybody; they were just feeding ’em and changing their bedpans and their sheets, and trying to keep ’em comfy. All the patients looked sick. Colvin could tell just by looking at ’em what was wrong with most of ’em, but he didn’t think it was his place to go around telling those lady doctors what ought to be done.

He assumed that the St. Louis Royal Academy of Physicians and Surgeons would be connected to one of these hospitals, if not right next door to it. But the address given him wasn’t a big building at all. It was just a little shop on a side street, not much bigger than you’d find in Jasper, and the sign over the door said AJAX JOB PRINTING. Colvin figured he had the wrong address, but he went in anyway and told the feller, “I’m tryin to find the Royal Academy of Physicians and Surgeons.” The feller gave Colvin a kind of shifty, beady look and asked him why he was trying to find it. Colvin said, “Wal, I ordered me a diploma but it never come.” What was that name? the feller asked, and took his name, and wanted him to spell out what the “U” stood for, and Colvin had to explain it didn’t stand for nothing, so then the feller went over to one of his tables and commenced collecting bits of type which he stuck into this printing press, cranked it up, and let her fly, and then he handed Colvin his diploma.

Despite whatever pride he felt in seeing his name in fancy lettering on a lavish piece of paper which awarded him the degree of Medicinae Doctor, Colvin was just a little disappointed. “Is this all I git for my fifty dollars? Seems like the least ye might do is ask me some questions to see if I know beans about medicine.” Take it or leave it, the man said. So Colvin took it, hoping that it might satisfy the state of Arkansas as far as getting a license went.

But Colvin Swain, as I hope we have seen, was nobody’s fool, and his good conscience bothered him. As long as he had gone to all that trouble to make a journey to St. Louis, he thought he would look into this whole matter of “medical education.” So he went to the trouble to locate and to visit the city’s actual institutions of medical training, the St. Louis University School of Medicine and the Missouri Medical College. Since the former was Catholic and the latter Protestant, he decided to enroll at the latter, not that he was Protestant, but he certainly wasn’t Catholic, and besides, “college” was probably a better place than “school.” But at the Missouri Medical College, the admissions officer was confused in his attempts to determine how and where to obtain Colvin’s high school transcript, so Colvin was passed along to an assistant dean, who spent an hour trying to determine how Colvin expected to be admitted if he’d never been to school, and then passed him along to an associate dean, who received from Colvin a rather frank, extensive biographical sketch of his preceptor, Dr. Kie Raney, which he found most interesting but conceivably irrelevant. At the end of the day, Colvin found himself in the office of the dean, a very wise, kind, and learned gentleman, an M.D. himself, who did not snicker at Colvin, as his assistant and associate had done, but examined Colvin’s diploma and took down the address of the Ajax Job Printing Company, declaring that he would love to see to it that the place was shut down. Then he asked, not with sarcasm as his assistant and associate had done but with genuine politeness and curiosity, “What do you know about medicine?”

“Ask me something,” Colvin suggested.

The dean smiled benignly and started off with a few simple questions, like naming the bones of the chondrocranium of a human embryo and describing the functions of the lymphatics of the thorax, but he discovered these were child’s play to Colvin, so he graduated to more complicated questions, such as microscopic identification of slides of Coccidioides and Neisseria intracellularis, but these too Colvin answered so quickly and effortlessly that the dean began asking him what he would prescribe for prolapsed rectum, hepatitis, and pancreatitis.

The dean began to hand instruments to him and to ask him what they were, and Colvin successfully identified various retractors, curettes, clamps, and forceps, as well as a vaginal speculum, an anal dilator, and a tonsil snare. Then the dean picked up an instrument which Colvin could not recognize, and his heart sank. It looked kind of like an anal dilator but was much too large for that purpose. Instead of handing the instrument to Colvin, however, the dean held it to his own mouth and said, “Henry, could you and Clarence drop whatever you’re doing and come down? I have someone I’d like you to meet.” Soon they were joined by two other fellers, whom the dean introduced to him as the professor of physiology and the professor of pharmacology. “Gentlemen, I’ve ordered supper sent up,” the dean said. “This may take awhile.”

It was nigh on to bedtime before the dean finally dismissed those other fellers. They were all worn out from thinking up questions, and Colvin was getting kind of tired of answering them. “There is one more ordeal I should like to submit you to,” the dean said, “if you could return early in the morning and meet me at the hospital. And may I suggest that you trim your beard?” So Colvin came back the next morning after spending the better part of an hour snipping around at his beard and mustache. They gave him a white smock to wear and a brand new stethoscope. Two dozen other fellers in white smocks and stethoscopes joined them, and not a one of them was a lady doctor like he’d seen in that other hospital. This hospital did contain a lot of those women in their neat uniforms, but Colvin heard a doctor order one of them in a bossy way, “Nurse.” Before long, Colvin had figured out that these women weren’t really doctors but some kind of white slave. Although they were constantly commanded, “Nurse,” not one of them was actually giving suck to the newborn.

The dean-doctor and the other couple dozen doctors took Colvin around to all of the beds on six different floors, and at each one of the beds the dean-doctor would look at him and say, “Well, Doctor?” and wait for Colvin to examine the sick person and say what ought to be done, and maybe even do it. In the course of a long day, Colvin U Swain drew out poisons, killed microbes, corrected deformities, made the lame walk, the blind see, the deaf hear. He come mighty nigh to resurrecting the dead, but the patient, who had an advanced brain tumor, was already clinically dead when Colvin got to him, and although Colvin restored heartbeat, breathing, and other lapsed functions, the patient remained alive only long enough to say, “No, thanks, Doc,” before resuming final demise. Colvin was upset and apologetic, because he had never lost a patient before, but the dean-doctor explained that the patient had actually been dead for three days and they were simply curious to see if Colvin would concur in that diagnosis.

“You were wrong,” the dean-doctor said, “but it’s the only time you’ve been wrong so far.” Then he took Colvin back to his office and gave him a cigar and some honest-to-God sippin whiskey and said, “Well, Dr. Swain, I am prepared to offer you a position on our faculty. Would you like to locate in St. Louis?” When Colvin hesitated, because he had never even given a thought to locating anywhere except maybe California in that long-ago idle fantasy, the dean said, “Of course, you could maintain your own practice in association with our hospital, and your teaching duties would not greatly distract you from your patients.”

“But I don’t even have a bony fide diploma,” Colvin pointed out.

The dean laughed, but nervously. Then he coughed and said, “Let me see if I can’t do something about that. Come back tomorrow.” And when Colvin returned the next day, the good Dean presented him with an actual Missouri Medical College diploma made out of lamb hide, with Medicinae Doctor in gold letters, and a fancy red leather cover and all. It didn’t even matter that they’d misspelled it “Calvin” and put a period wrongly after “U.”

“Much obliged,” the newly legitimate Doctor Swain said, “but last night I took me a walk down by your creek—what do you call it, the Miss’ippi?—I went down there and thought for a long time about your offer. That creek is too damn big and deep, just like this city. These here hospitals are too big and have too many people in ’em, and it’s a sin to Moses the way you work them pore women that have to run the hospitals. But the roads—them streets out yonder—are filled with people walkin around who ought to be in the hospitals. I reckon I’d be a whole lot happier if I jist stayed put, in Stay More.”

“This ‘Stay More,’” the dean said wistfully, “it must certainly be a special place.”

“It shorely is,” Colvin said. “Come see us sometime.”

When he got back home, Piney asked him, “How was St. Louis?”

“Porely,” he said. And then he said, “Piney, darlin, what do you say me and you git hitched?”

“I say I’m game if you are,” she laughed gaily. “Did you obtain your diploma?”

He showed her his diploma, and then he took it and made for it a frame out of spare boards from the corncrib and a windowpane from a back window where nobody would notice it missing, and he hung his diploma in his office and even invited Jack Plowright over to see it. “Mine aint printed on a animal skin, is the only difference I can see,” Doc Plowright observed.

Alonzo Swain, who had been elected justice of the peace of Swains Creek Township for several years running now, officiated at the nuptials of his son and Piney Coe. The wedding was held under the shade of Stay More’s lone pine tree, which towered over the intersection of Main Street and the Banty Creek Road, and it was attended by fifty-six Swains and forty-three Coes, plus an assortment of Duckworths, Whitters, Plowrights, Dinsmores, and even a bunch of Ingledews, including old Isaac, who played on his fiddle, accompanied by Doc Kie Raney on guitar, such things as “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair” and the wedding part of “Lohengrin.” Drakon was permitted to attend, kept in his cage. The bride was radiant and beautiful all in a white dress and an armful of white flowers: Queen Anne’s lace, common yarrow, fleabane, and hedge parsley. The groom stood up straight and tall and looked like he was mighty glad to be home, or mighty glad to be getting married, one, or maybe both.

Even if Colvin and Piney were not destined to live happily ever after together, they sure started off living happily enough to beat the band. And if I was you, if I had a smidgin of your talent for writing novel-books, I’d sure do one in which Piney is the only female, a heroine like she asked me to make her. I’d start off by reminding my readers that she was the seventh daughter in the family, just as her mother, Minnie Potts Coe, had been a seventh daughter. Now it’s well known everywhere that the seventh son of a seventh son is fore-ordained to be a physician, even in spite of himself, and there was no way on earth that Colvin U Swain could have not been a doctor. But did you ever know what the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter is fated to be? Of course, like any other woman in that day and age she was fated to be a housewife, or a spinster, one or the other. She wouldn’t have a career, like doctoring.

And I aint even going to say that the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter is ordained to be a doctor’s wife. No, that’s not it. What it is, is this. She is fated, or doomed, however you look at it, never to be told anything. I mean, you can’t tell ’em nothing! They already know it all. Before, we’ve had a notion of Piney’s fate through the way she talked, as if she knew exactly the way the language ought to be spoken, and wouldn’t hear of any other way. Now a woman like that, if Colvin told her the house was a-burning down and it actually was, she’d say, “You are mistaken.” Or if he tried to point out that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, she’d say, “That is not the case at all.”

Their house never burnt down (Alonzo moved in with the Widow Kimber and left the house on Main Street to the newlyweds, although he kept his office next to Colvin’s in the front), and the sun just went on rising and setting the way it always had, but Colvin and Piney had some problems. You’d think they might have sort of complemented each other: since he knew everything there was to be known about medicine, she knew everything there was to be known about everything else. Whenever somebody died and they sang that funeral hymn “Farther along we’ll know all about it, farther along we’ll understand why,” it didn’t apply to Piney, because she already knew all about it; she already understood why everything was. Between them, Colvin and Piney were totally omniscient. But Colvin was too strong-willed and opinionated to allow some woman, even his beloved Piney, to get the upper hand. They argued. If Colvin tried to point out that the Republican Party had always been the traditional party of the people of Stay More, all the way back to the Civil War, and was therefore the right party, Piney (and in those days women weren’t even supposed to care about politics) would likely come back at him with the information that the Democratic Party was the only just and valid party, and that Woodrow Wilson was the only person who could keep us out of another war. Never mind that she might be proved wrong; never mind that Wilson didn’t keep us out of the next war; never mind, goddamn it, that the Republicans are right, or wrong, just as often as the Democrats are. If Piney said the Democrats were the party, then they were. There were no ifs, ands, or buts to Piney. She knew everything.

The seventh daughter of a seventh daughter can tell you what beliefs are “true” and which are just superstitions, and not just about the Republican Party. Piney could tell you that it’s just an old notion that if you find a pin in the road and pick it up, it’ll bring you good luck, but she could prove that it’s true that if you find a pin in the road and don’t pick it up, it’ll bring you bad luck all day long. She’d also let you know that it isn’t true that singing at the table will bring misfortune on the whole family, but it’s certainly demonstrable that if you sing before breakfast, you’ll cry before supper. She was an expert on beliefs having to do with marital relations: she knew in her bones that it’s true that two persons using the same towel at the same time are sure to quarrel, but it’s only a superstition that you can “take the cuss off ’n it” by twisting the towel between the two of you. If Colvin was helping her do the dishes, as he often happily did, and they accidentally dried the dishes or their hands on the same towel, there was nothing for them to do but go ahead and wait until some bone of contention came along and then have a real bad quarrel over it and get it out of their system. And usually the quarrel was over something she knew she knew, and he had the temerity to challenge her belief.

But as often as not, Colvin for the sake of harmony would let her have her way, or concede she was right. She was a real good cook, and if she insisted that fish had to be baked although he liked his fried, he didn’t raise any objection. If he liked his sweet potatoes mashed but she kept them in the skins, that wasn’t the end of the world, as far as he cared. Even when it came to okra, which he’d always had sliced and fried in cornmeal, he wasn’t going to raise a fuss if she served ’em whole and slimy. When Piney started in to redecorating his office, putting up curtains and moving things around, he never even protested that he couldn’t find anything anymore. When she ordered from Sears Roebuck a fancy dark gray cheviot suit of wool for him to wear, he protested that there wasn’t another man in Newton County who had long tails on his coat. Piney just smiled and said there wasn’t another man in Newton County like him, period. But when she tried to get him to wear this new felt hat she’d ordered with it, a kind of homburg to replace his old floppy fedora, and he couldn’t persuade her that he didn’t want to look that genteel and swellish, all he could do was try a bit of psychology: the dent in the crown of the hat, he pointed out to her, was like an advertisement (she would have understood “symbol” better) for the dent in the crown of his penis, and he even yanked out his tool to show her the exact same resemblance, saying, “Now damned if you want me to be Old Peckerhead, do ye?” Piney just replied, “As long as men are going to personate their peckers anyway, by having heads, what does it matter whether you personate it with the dent in your hat or the part in your hair?”

And speaking of matters sexual, we may as well reveal that as often as not, Piney knew that the best place for the female in the process of coitus was woman-on-top. This was not because she wanted to dominate, or prove her obvious superiority, but because in her absolute certainty about everything, she knew that this position allowed both of them more control over the hiking to climax: she could let go, he could hold back. True? But it worried Colvin somewhat; man is, after all, a depositor, while woman is a receptacle. Man stashes; woman seals. He argued that gravity alone should be the determinant, and he tried to win the argument with his medical knowledge: “Sperm can swim upwards, but semen can only flow downwards.”

“Do you want to have fun,” she asked, “or do you want to have a baby?” Dr. and Mrs. Swain had a lot of fun, and, knowing everything, she let him go on believing that all the ways they did it, every time they did it, they were just dead-level set on having the time of their lives, when in fact she had decided to have a baby. She never asked him if they could. She never discussed raising a family with him. They never talked about times of the month or taking precautions. As far as Colvin was concerned, there ceased to be any connection between what they were doing and the existence of sperm and ova. Piney not only continued to believe that a woman can regulate and control the steady rising to climax in both herself and her partner, but can also control her conception and her contraception, and when she was ready, she conceived. She knew the exact moment, the exact instant, that one of those upward-swimming spermies, an audacious little scamp she’d already given a name, met up with her ripe fat lucious egg and said, “Howdy sweetheart, let’s cuddle up and multiply!”

She didn’t tell Colvin. She knew that the sex of the fetus was male, and she knew that the baby would be named after her father, McKay Coe, and the boy would be called Mackey Swain, and she knew that “Mac” means “son of” in Scotch-Irish, and that Mackey means virile or manly in Irish, and she knew that Mackey Swain would grow up to become a virile doctor like his father, and she knew that Colonel McKay Swain would serve with great distinction as a surgeon in some future national war, and that great stories would be told about his heroism on the battlefield, where, however, he would be mortally wounded.

“How come you’re a-weepin, darlin?” Colvin asked her one day, when she was thinking about Mackey’s tragic death, for indeed it was the first time Colvin had ever known her to cry. People who know everything do not cry. Crying is the result usually of not understanding something, of being unable to deal emotionally with a situation because it is not understood, and if you know everything you have no reason to cry. Piney was terribly embarrassed over her tears, which were not necessarily the result of a mother’s inability to grasp the reason why her beloved son will have been taken from her prematurely, because she fully knew that in order to serve his country and his fellow man as he will have had to do, Colonel Mackey Swain will have had to be willing to give up his own life, which he will have done, so it will not have been his death, nor the absolute foreknowledge of it, that made her cry, but rather the sudden fear, the overwhelming fear, that when the moment will have finally come that she will have been informed by telegram of her son’s death, she will lose control. And she had never lost control. In response to her husband’s question, she could only shake her head, wordlessly, and continue shaking it until he grew bored and left the room.

But Colvin’s magical physician’s fingers detected, in only the second month of her pregnancy, that she was with child, and he was as happy as he was mystified that she had not told him nor asked for his knowing collaboration in the happy event. When he confronted her with his findings, she confessed that she had known the exact moment of the conception, and that she had already named the child McKay “Mackey” Swain, and that she had been secretly sewing the layette ever since. She knew that the boy would be a brunette, that he would have a slight left clubfoot, that he would speak his first word at the age of eight months and take his first step at the age of eleven months, and that he would be toilet trained before his second birthday. She knew he would marry a Dinsmore at the age of eighteen. She knew everything about him, and she was happy to have the chance, now that she had confessed his conception, to tell Colvin everything that she knew about Mackey’s entire life and heroic death.

Piney made such a project out of Mackey that Colvin was forced to get himself a dog. This was Galen the First, although of course Colvin didn’t call him that, because he didn’t realize that the dog would be only the first of many, many dogs to whom he would give that name. He just called him Galen, after the ancient Greek physician, whom Colvin admired because he’d founded experimental physiology, and Colvin owned and read with pleasure his Corpus Medicorum Graecorum, and considered himself in many ways a Galenist. Galen was just an ordinary bluetick hound dog, scrawny and gangling and smelly, but he was devoted to Colvin in ways that Piney was not (although it is hard to imagine anything deeper than her devotion to him), and Galen went everywhere with Colvin, on every house call he made. I would like to discount as mythical the stories I heard that Galen sometimes licked the wounds of injured persons and thereby effected the healing. Surely that is stretching the blanket! If one is a collector of folk narratives, or “oral history” as they’re calling it these days, one learns to distinguish between the colorful, extravagant, but factual retellings of remembered events, and the embellished reshapings or reimaginings of “reality” which sacrifice truth for the sake of charm. Lord knows, Colvin’s entire story is shot full of the latter, but I think I’m doing a good job of not foisting upon you anything incredible or inconceivable, and that is because I’m editing the story as it came to me, and I must exercise the editor’s prerogative to stand up and say, No! it is not likely that Colvin permitted Galen to lick anybody’s wounds! Why, there’s not any more truth to that than there is to the story of Sukie Ledbetter, who claimed that Colvin cured her of her “barrenness” by permitting her to have intercourse with Drakon!

Where was I? Yes: Piney was so absorbed with that little Mackey in her womb that Colvin needed a dog to keep him company. Piney might have known everything, but she didn’t perhaps know that the reason Colvin and his dog were gone from the house so much was to escape from her constant recital of the life story of Mackey Swain. This was the period when Colvin became involved in the story of Nail Chism, the Stay More shepherd who was convicted of raping young Dorinda Whitter and sentenced to the electric chair in Little Rock…which is a story you’d admire to put into a novel at some future time, before or after this one. Remind me to tell you how Colvin helped hide Nail when he escaped from the prison, and how Nail used to could hear the trees singing, and all.

Well, I wish I could also suggest for one of your future novels the World War II story of the heroism of Colonel McKay Swain, but the sad truth is that Mackey Swain was stillborn. Piney may have known everything, but she was wrong about that. When she started gaining a lot of weight, she knew that pregnant women were supposed to do that, and not even Colvin realized that she was gaining a lot more weight than pregnant women usually do, and when she had some terrible headaches she knew that pregnant women are supposed to get headaches. But one day she discovered that everything was growing dim to her sight, and there were spots before her eyes, and she began violently throwing up, and she knew that these things weren’t supposed to be happening. Colvin wasn’t home or in his office. Just the week before, old Alonzo Swain, seventy-eight, had taken down his shingle, turned the office over to his son, and retired, for good, and was spending his days in the Widow Kimber’s bed, so he was not available in this emergency. Piney waited for as long as she could stand it, hoping Colvin would return to the office. Waiting, she began taking her own pulse, which was very rapid, and she was growing drowsy and dizzy and blind. Finally, she decided that she’d just better try to get across the road to Doc Plowright’s. She could hardly stand up and felt she would faint, and she was so dizzy she had to get down on all fours and crawl, out onto the porch, down the steps, across the dirt road into Doc Plowright’s yard, and up his steps. Piney, knowing everything, knew that there isn’t any such thing as “God,” but she prayed, anyway, prayed that Doc Plowright would be home. From what we know of Jack Plowright, she ought to have had the sense to have prayed that he would not be home. He was home, though, and he helped her onto his examining table and asked her a bunch of questions in an effort to find out where she hurt and what was a-troubling her. But there was nothing he could do because he had no idea what diagnosis to make.

Fortunately, Colvin came home, having been out on a call setting a broken leg, and after noticing that his wife wasn’t anywhere around the premises, and that Galen was acting kind of peculiar, he asked Galen, “Whar’s Piney?” and Galen did two or three complete turns and then headed across the road to Doc Plowright’s, and Colvin had the sense to follow him.

“I jist don’t rightly know what the trouble is,” Doc Plowright confessed to his colleague. “Aint it too early for her to be a-birthing?” By this time, Piney had begun to flail. That is, she was thrashing her arms and her legs wildly, and it took both men to hold her down to keep her from breaking a bone, and Colvin had to put a spoon wrapped in cloth into her mouth to keep her from biting her tongue. Colvin took her blood pressure, which was way up, and he tested her urine for albumin, which was present. He shook his head sadly and told his colleague that his wife was having eclampsia. “Ee-which?” Doc Plowright asked. Colvin explained “eclampsia” was from a Greek word meaning “I explode.”

Piney was exploding. Her convulsions kept both doctors busy for the next several hours, and Colvin was mighty glad to have the help of Doc Plowright, even if the man didn’t know the difference between eclampsia and eczema. Colvin injected Piney with magnesium sulfate to control the fits and gave her both morphine and chloral as sedatives, and he kept a close watch to see if the seizures would induce premature labor. Piney went rigid and lost consciousness. She twitched in her face and limbs in such a way as to make Doc Plowright ask, “She aint a-dying, is she?” Not yet, Colvin said.

All night they stayed with her. When Colvin could no longer detect the fetal heartbeat, he decided to induce labor. He saved the mother, but lost the child. Outside, Galen began to howl like a wolf. Across the road, Drakon escaped from his cage and tried to slither his way to the Plowright place, but was run over by an automobile, a Phantom Phaeton, and died, age twenty-one. Colvin discovered his corpse when he was carrying Piney home in his arms. He kept Piney in a darkened room of their house for several days. He buried the stillborn infant and the squashed snake in the Stay More cemetery and attempted to conduct a simple ceremony for each. He decided not to say anything to Piney about the loss unless Piney asked. He did not understand that Piney did not need to ask, because she knew. He was puzzled that she never even wanted to know if the baby had been a boy (it had), or that she never asked what the matter had been, so that he could have explained eclampsia to her. He began to have problems communicating with her; for example, if he asked her what she wanted for breakfast, she would likely respond, “I just don’t know.” If he inquired how she was feeling, she might answer, “Land knows,” without explaining who or what Land was. If he became specific with something like, Does your stomach hurt? she would more than likely reply, “It beats me,” leaving him to puzzle out whether she was trying to explain that her stomach was beating her. Once he asked her, Where do you ache? but she only told him, “Search me,” and he searched her pretty thoroughly without being able to determine if anything was dysfunctional that would cause her any pain.

He began to notice that she no longer was so all-fired stubborn in her opinions about everything, and he gently inquired, “Do ye reckon maybe you don’t know as much as you thought you knew?”

To which she could only reply, “You’ve got me.” Yes, he had her, and she was all he needed to have (there had been moments during her coma when he feared he’d lost her forever), but what was he going to do with her?

In the fullness of time, when she seemed to be pretty much back to normal, he noticed subtle changes. She began to fry fish instead of bake them, skin the sweet potatoes and mash them up, and even to fry the okra in cornmeal. And the very first time after her confinement that they were permitted to have intercourse again, she lay back down beneath him instead of clambering atop him, and the novelty alone of the position made him shoot off too soon, but she didn’t seem to mind. She just waited an hour and wanted to do it again. And then again after another couple of hours. And yet twice more in the wee hours. At dawn, when he was called out to tend a patient, he could hardly walk. But as soon as they’d had supper the next night, she yanked him off to bed again. In no time at all, after several nights of this, he had nothing left to deposit, he was plumb dry, but she kept on coming, sometimes before they got out of bed in the morning, sometimes during his noon dinner hour, and oftentimes on the table in his office whenever she could catch him without a patient. He developed blisters on his penis, and eventually a bend in it. Finally he decided to try satisfying her with other devices: his fingers, or even his mouth, but when he attempted this, she protested, “I want your thing in me! I want you to fill me up with your seedjuice!” He tried to explain that he was totally drained of seedjuice, that there was no way his system could manufacture enough of the stuff to keep up with her desires. She thought about that, and, although she no longer seemed to know everything, she understood that in order to be filled up with seedjuice she would just have to abstain from sex for a while, particularly during the days preceding her ovulation. Having made a habit of coitus a dozen times a day, it was difficult for her to taper off the habit, but she took up quilt making as a substitute and managed to go for days at a time without even thinking about seedjuice.

But each month, regular as the calendar, for the whole length of the calendar’s year, and more, she let Colvin go without any sex for an entire week in the middle of the month, and then, when she knew, as she sometimes still knew some things, that she was ovulating, and that Colvin’s system had replenished its store of seedjuice, she’d drain him dry with a succession of acts at all times of day and night.

This went on for another year before she finally had to admit to herself that she did not know everything, and therefore she was forced to ask Colvin a question. It was one of the few times that she ever asked him a question. “Why am I not getting pregnant?”

Gently he tried to tell her that while he wasn’t one hundred percent certain (he was the first to admit that in medicine there is never, ever anything like one-hundred-percent certainty), it was quite possible that the eclampsia had left some permanent damage to her interior organs of reproduction.

Secretly Piney had been planning the life and career of her second son, Potts Swain (named after her mother’s family, the Potts). Although she could not be certain that she knew this, she thought, or at least hoped that Potts, like his late lamented brother, Mackey, would follow in his father’s footsteps as a physician. Maybe Potts wouldn’t be a heroic army surgeon in some future war, but he’d be a good doctor, she knew. No, not knew, but thought, or hoped. Now she found it hard to believe, no, impossible to accept, that poor Potts couldn’t even get his medical diploma because the eclampsia had ruptured her reproductive system. Not sure any longer that she knew anything, she wondered if perhaps making Potts into a gynecologist, and a famous one, might make it possible for her to hope, if not to know, that her gynecological apparatus could be repaired so that Potts could be born.

Brooding on this puzzle, Piney isolated herself with her quilt making. She gave up sex entirely. Like the consumption of alcoholic beverages, quilt making is something that ought not be done in private; as long as drinking and quilt making are social activities indulged in the company of one’s friends and kindred, they are relatively harmless, but once you start drinking or quilting in private you are in a trouble. Colvin missed Piney. It was almost like finding himself without a mirror to look into and see his own image, because in so many ways Colvin and Piney were mirrors of each other. Not physically, although her hair was the same black as his and there were enough other similarities that they could have passed for twins. Not even emotionally, although being seventh son of a seventh son and seventh daughter of a seventh daughter gave them depths of temperamental kinship that transcended whatever “magic” powers they had acquired (and perhaps lost) from such a lineage. But probably mentally, because they remained each other’s best friend, and would always be, even when Piney withdrew so deeply into solitary quilt making and into her sadness over her infertility that she no longer talked to him or to anybody.

The years passed. Although America belatedly joined the world’s first great war, only two Stay Morons volunteered to become soldiers, as you have noted. Another great event of that time affected the town more than the war, and that was the outbreak of Spanish influenza, which presented Colvin with the first disease for which he could not prescribe a cure, because there was none. I myself as a young infantryman stationed at Camp Pike in North Little Rock had a bout with the flu, which later became an epidemic killing dozens of soldiers there. Nationwide, 548,000 victims of influenza died that year. Of those, only one was a patient of Doc Swain, but that was too much for Colvin, who had never lost a patient before. He ought to have been consoled by the survival of the 189 folks that he treated successfully for the flu, doing whatever was necessary to help them get over it. He’d given up his saddle horse in favor of a horse-drawn buggy, and his horse, Nessus, always knew the way home, so that after Colvin had been out all night tending the flu victims, he could go to sleep in the buggy and Nessus would take him home. Even Doc Plowright too was exhausted from treating, or trying to treat, the flu. It ought to have consoled Colvin that Jack lost six or seven of his patients, to Colvin’s one, but that one haunted his sleep and gave him bad dreams, in which he kept trying to resurrect the dead man. Never mind that the man was old Willis Dinsmore, who wasn’t so far off from dying of natural old age anyhow. Colvin began to have dreams in which he tried something different on Willis and saved him. Before long, he was “visiting” more flu victims in his dreams than he was in his buggy, and the funny thing was, the ones that he visited in his dreams got well! At least, more of ’em did than the ones he visited in his buggy.

There were two things Colvin couldn’t admit to Piney. One was that he had a touch of the flu himself. The other was that he was going around in his dreams curing people. The first was no problem: he just stayed away from Piney until his own contagion could no longer infect her. But the second was a big problem, because they had always shared their dreams, and Colvin couldn’t admit to her that he was going around curing all of these sick people in his dreams. Knowing everything, she knew he was up to something. She asked him where he’d been in his dreams, and he had to make up lies: he’d just taken a trip to Harrison, or he’d gone off fishing or whatever. Finally she accused him, “You’re seeing a girlfriend, aren’t you?”

Like all healthy, normal, even happily married men, he sometimes dreamt of women he wasn’t married to, but he wouldn’t admit this to Piney. As a matter of fact, he was visiting a patient in his dreams who was both a friend and a girl, a second cousin of his named Lorraine Swain, who was a dizzying redhead. In his dreams she came down with an awful case of the flu, and he was trying everything he knew to help her.

One day he happened across the girl’s mother, who was his own cousin, and just out of curiosity he asked her how Lorraine was, and the mother replied that Lorraine had had a real bad case of the flu but seemed to be completely over it now.

Weeks passed, and Lorraine came to him one day, saying, “Doc, you shore fixed me up jist fine when ye came in my dreams. But now I’ve got something else, and ever time I try to see ye in my dreams you’re out on a call.”

Apparently as a consequence of the flu, or even a slight pneumonia accompanying it, Lorraine had developed empyema, which is where an accumulation of pus builds up in the pleura, the lung coverings. Abscess is what it is, and Colvin had to spend a lot of time with her, treating her with various measures to avoid having to operate, which is often necessary to drain the cavity.

Colvin found that his daytime, “real,” unasleep treatment of Lorraine was not as effective as his nighttime, dreaming treatment of her, so he continued the latter to the point where, one night, Piney woke him up and accused him of being with another woman, and he simply tried to explain that he was treating a patient, Lorraine Swain. He was abashed because he’d actually had normal, healthy fantasies of getting into bed with Lorraine, but he had refrained from doing it, even in his dream. “For Godsakes, Piney,” he complained, “I’m jist a-doing my duty as her doctor!” Haven’t you been holding her hand? Piney asked, feeling the return of her old omniscience. Colvin blushed and had to admit that he had been holding Lorraine’s hand in the dream, not just for her comfort but to check her circulation and nerves. Haven’t you been feeling of her breasts? Piney asked, surprised and pleased to discover that now she knew what he had been doing, Colvin did an inadequate job of explaining that it was necessary to palpate her bosom in order to examine the state of her thorax. Haven’t you kissed her a time? Piney wanted to know, knowing as well as if she could see them doing it. Poor Colvin was really clumsy in his attempt to explain that he was trying to determine if the pus was odorless or infected and had put his nostrils right up against her nostrils in order to smell her breathing.

“You had better just keep that girl out of your dreams, you hear me?” Piney told him. And just to be sure that he had stopped seeing Lorraine in his dreams, each morning she would ask him if he’d dreamt of her. Now you may wonder if it was unethical for a doctor to be so henpecked by his wife that he’d neglect one of his patients even in his dreams, and the truth was that Colvin had discovered he was doing something he’d never have suspected himself of doing: lying to Piney. He was still seeing Lorraine every night in his dreams, but only to treat her condition.

Before he knew it, Lorraine was up and around and just as good as she ever was. One day, he was riding his horse up the road to see another patient when he came across Lorraine picking blackberries along the road, and he figured it wouldn’t be violating any of Piney’s restrictions if he just stopped and passed the time of day with her for a minute or two. In the course of their talk, Colvin learned that not only had he visited her every time she’d gone to sleep and dreamt, for a week or more, but in her dreams he’d told her what to take, and—get this—he’d even “opened her up” in her dream and removed a portion of her rib in order to drain the pus from the cavity and had injected some medicine into the cavity as well as into her chest muscle.

“Hold on, gal!” Colvin exclaimed, astonished because the treatment she was describing was exactly what he dreamt he had done. But how do you operate in a dream? “Show me where ye claim I cut ye open.” And right there in the road Lorraine unbuttoned her shirt to show him the incision. Bertha Kimber happened to be coming down the road at that moment, and word got back to Piney that Lorraine Swain had popped one of her boobs into Colvin’s face right in the road in broad daylight, and there was hell to pay when Piney got onto Colvin about that.

But the worst thing was, Lorraine Swain had told her best friend, Ella Jean Plowright, about how she had been cured in her sleep by dreams of Colvin Swain, and Ella Jean, who had been visiting her uncle, Doc Jack Plowright, for treatment of her nausea and vomiting, decided to give it a try herself, and sure enough, she went to sleep and had a dream where Colvin Swain appeared and assured her that her nausea was not morning sickness, as Doc Plowright had diagnosed it (a faulty diagnosis in view of the fact that Ella Jean was still a virgin) but was actually uremia, not nephritic but treatable by an injection which he gave her; the pain of the injection woke her from her dream, but within a few hours the vomiting had stopped, her appetite returned, and she was well enough to visit Lorraine and compare notes on how nice Doctor Swain had treated them in their sleep. Naturally, they couldn’t keep it to themselves, either, and before long everybody in Stay More knew about it, and ailing folks were going to sleep right and left in order to have dreams of Doc Swain.

Yesterday I asked your friend and mine, Bob Besom, who works over in the Special Collections department at the University Library, to look into the Swain papers and check on this matter for me. You know that they’ve got over there nine ledgers that Doc Swain kept during his years of practice, including several “calendar diaries.” According to Besom, there’s nothing of particular interest in this material, mostly just accounts of charges made and collected, accounts receivable but never received, et cetera, but Colvin did have the habit of jotting down all of his visits to patients with a notation of what he used to treat them, and the record is fairly complete. There’s even the record of how he treated me for typhoid that summer I was confined in Stay More for a few weeks. No commentary. He doesn’t say whether he liked me or not, or how we became friends. Just what medicines he used and that the treatment was successful and I got well…and, under “Amount due”: N.C.

But that was in Ledger #6, years later, and we’re concerned right now with Ledger #2, and Bob Besom was good enough to make photocopies of a few pages in that ledger for me, if you’ll hand me my reading spectacles from the table there.

June 3 Lorraine Swain Empyema following influenza. Clear yellow serous fluid. Tea of butterfly weed t.i.d. Dover’s powder for pain.

June 9 Lorraine Swain Fluid thickening. Irrigated cavity with hypochlorite. May try injection of gentian violet.

June 17 Lorraine Swain Ambulatory, robust, and claims I treated her in dreams (!) including surgery for drainage (!!) but section of 6th rib actually missing (!!!). ???

According to Besom, there are no further entries in the ledger on Lorraine Swain’s condition, but there is this:

June 30 Ella Jean Plowright, not my patient. Hardly know her, but had dream last night of treating her for uremia with injection, etc. Lorraine Swain confirms this is true.

July 3 Complaint from Dr. Plowright that I had “stolen” his patient and niece, Ella Jean. Swore to Jack I never touched her, nor spoke to her. “Don’t matter,” he said. “You cured her of uremia.”

Besom says there’s only one more entry, three months later, that is relevant to the matter:

October 4 Haven’t had an awake patient in over a month.

By “awake,” we may suppose that Colvin Swain meant exactly that: all of his patients were now visiting him in their dreams. All over Stay More, and even in Stay More’s “suburbs,” sick people were attempting to see if they couldn’t follow the examples of Lorraine and Ella Jean, and they were finding that it was easy, and they were rapidly converting skeptics by showing their evidence: a man proudly exhibited an enormous tapeworm which he claimed Doc Swain had extracted from him during his dreams; a woman showed a set of false teeth which she had swallowed and Doc Swain had extracted from her stomach in a painless dream surgery; several proud mothers displayed babies which Doc Swain had delivered while they were asleep and dreaming. There was even a case of a “vicarious incubation”: a girl who was too embarrassed over her “female trouble” to permit Doc Swain to visit her in her dreams was persuaded by her mother to allow the mother to have the dream for her, and the mother dreamt that Doc Swain had come and corrected the girl’s prolapsed uterus, and indeed the girl, who had been unable to walk because the womb had been protruding from her vagina, was now blissfully hopping, skipping, and jumping.

She was the most conspicuous advertisement for the Swain Dream Clinic, which nearly everyone was now patronizing. You didn’t need an appointment. You didn’t need to send somebody out in the middle of the night to fetch the doctor to your house. The Doctor Swain they met in dreams was if anything even nicer, gentler, more polite and easygoing than the “real” Doc Swain. And if the “real” Doc Swain could never be “a hunerd-percent certain” about anything, the Doc Swain who came in dreams was infallible and omnipotent.

Best of all, you didn’t have to pay! Not even in the barter of produce or livestock. But while that was considered a tremendous advantage from the patient’s point of view, it was not putting any food on Doc’s table. In fact, he was nearly broke. He had some savings, which he had deposited in a savings account in the Swains Creek Bank and Trust Company, the small financial institution that John Ingledew had erected on Main Street, and he hated to dip into his savings, but unless he could find some wakeful patients to treat, he was going to have to make a withdrawal. Poor Jack Plowright had already gone out of business and been forced to retire prematurely, after losing a court case in which he had unsuccessfully attempted to have his attorney, Jim Tom Duckworth, sue Dr. Swain for monopolizing the medical practice of Stay More. Colvin had had to go to Jasper for the trial and had testified that there wasn’t any way he could be monopolizing the medical practice, because he hadn’t had any patients himself lately, and he could prove it.

Then, as you well know, and have already told about in your Lightning Bug and elsewhere, the bank was robbed. A young Stay More man, son of Billy Dill the wagon maker, lover of Latha Bourne if not loved by her, came and raped her and robbed that bank and started one of the best stories that ever came out of the town, leaving Latha pregnant. There is no doubt in anybody’s mind that Doc Swain would have gladly visited her in her dreams and performed an abortion, because even though the “real” Doc Swain had taken an oath never to perform an abortion, the Doc Swain of dreams wouldn’t have let himself be stopped by such scruples or oaths. But she wouldn’t visit the Swain Dream Clinic; for whatever reasons of her own, she went off to Little Rock to live with her sister and have the baby. Never mind about that, for now. Her rapist robbed the bank, and Doc Swain was penniless.

So we have here two good reasons why Colvin was forced to accept the job that he took, which brings us to the real heart of our story. Come back tomorrow and I’ll take you on a tour of the “college” in Parthenon where Colvin Swain became medical consultant.

Chapter five

How long have you been a-sitting there? How long have my eyes been closed? I closed my eyes to get a glimpse of Tenny, the gal who’s the real heroine of this story, although we haven’t laid eyes on her yet. How many times have you been here so far? I’m not keeping count, but I’m a little dismayed to realize that I’ve talked so much, and told you all that I have, but I still haven’t really done nothing but a kind of prologue. Today we’ll meet Tenny, if all goes well. We’ve waited so long. But so far, so good? How’m I doing?

I see you’ve got there a fresh bottle of Chivas Regal to lubricate my larnyx. That’s real thoughtful of ye. We’ve run out of Gershon Legman’s contribution. I’ve been meaning to ask why you only come in the afternoons or the evenings, never in the mornings, but I reckon it’s because you’re up late of a night, drinking and thinking, and you tend to sleep late of a morning.

That’s what I was doing at Stay More, and Doc Swain was going to try to cure me of it, as we’ll see. Anyhow, if you’d been here this morning, you wouldn’t have missed the little excitement we had. There’s precious little to keep us from getting bored to death, but this morning one of our fellow residents got raped. You know how you read in the papers sometimes there’s a certain kind of punk kid who only lusts after old ladies? Well, there was a young feller working here, one of the orderlies, who fit in that category, and I could tell because of the way he was always buttering up to poor Mary C. You know that old woman I was telling you about, lived a few doors down the hall, who was always yelling, “Tell me another’n, Grampaw”? Maybe you never heard her, but she was always out there with her little-bitty voice like a child begging for another bedtime story…or, come to think of it, maybe that wasn’t what she was doing. Maybe there was a kind of edge to her voice, maybe a touch of sarcasm, as if she was accusing her invisible grandfather of having lied to her. It troubles me, come to think of it. I don’t take nothing personal from it, hell, she didn’t even know I was here. But anyway that punk orderly crope under the covers with her early this morning, and it turned out she knows other words besides “Tell me another’n, Grampaw,” She knows “help” and she knows “rape,” and she knows “Will somebody please come and git this thing offen me?” It woke me up. I recognized the voice and wondered why the voice was not begging to be told another one. I nearly tried to get myself into my wheelchair so I could go out there and see what was happening. But I guess the nurse on duty had got to them, and she stopped it and called the police, and they come and got the feller, and then Dr. Bittner came and examined the old lady and sent her off to the hospital. The reason Mary C. is just a-sitting there looking stunned is probably because she’s thinking it could’ve happened to her. And it could’ve.

So there will be one less voice in the chorus of those dotards out there. Maybe it will even inspire me, as we approach the real thickening of the watery plot of our story. Son, this is where it commences to get exciting.

It may have been toward the end of my second week in Stay More—I wasn’t paying a bit of attention to the calendar—when one morning Colvin came into my room and took my temperature and blood pressure and then asked, as he customarily did, “Well, Doc, did anything out of the ordinary pass?” and I replied with something like, “No, Doc, just six white horses a-flying over,” and after he’d winked and said, “Then it aint no wonder you’re a-feelin better,” and we had our laugh, he asked, “Doc, do ye reckon you feel up to hoppin in my car for a little spin?”

Rowena shaved me and I dressed and had a big breakfast, and Rowena had packed a hamper with a fine lunch of fried chicken and potato salad and I don’t know what-all. It just looked like we were going to be gone for the better part of the day. And we were. Doc explained he wanted to take me to Parthenon.

You’ve mentioned that village in each of your novels, but I don’t think you have bothered to speculate upon the circumstance whereby some old settler, more literate and imaginative than usual, had chosen to name his town after a temple dedicated by the Greeks to their favorite goddess, Athene Parthenos, meaning Athena the Virgin, because she was practically the only one of those immortal Greek women never to lose her cherry. All over America people were naming their new towns after Greek towns, and this Newton County feller thought he was doing the same, but he was mistaken. The name of the town was Athens. There was a hill in Athens called the Acropolis, meaning “high town,” and he might have used that name, as I believe you did in disguising Parthenon’s name in your novel Some Other Place. The Right Place. But this feller didn’t use “Athens” or “Acropolis.” He used the name of the temple on top of that hill. For all he knew, he might as well have called the town “Innocence” or “Chastity” or “Maidentown” or “Virginville.” But in his confusion over classical matters, he called it originally “Mount Parthenon,” which could only be translated as suggesting that we get ourselves up atop a virgin. Hell, it took eighty years for the natives themselves to learn how to pronounce the place. They used to call it “Par-THEE-nun,” and even corrupted that to “Par-THEE-ny.”

But Colvin pronounced it correctly when he told me where we were going, so I asked him, “Are you taking me to a big stone building on a high hill?”

He smiled. “Yep, Doc, we’re going up a hill to see a mighty fine big stone building, all right, the biggest stone building in Newton County, but that aint the Parthenon. I reckon strangers might think the town was named after that building, but the town has been there since 1840 and the building wasn’t done much more’n a dozen years ago.”

We drove northeastwards from Stay More a number of miles, the road mostly following along the east bank of the Little Buffalo River, and it was one of those gorgeous summer days with cottony tufts of clouds stuck hither and yon over the azure. I enjoyed that ride, especially in comparison to the last time I’d been in Doc Swain’s car, when he was transporting me down the mountain from the Widder Whitter’s. I paid close attention to the turnings and forks in the road, in case I needed to remember how to get out of Stay More, because as we’ve said before it’s even harder to escape than it is to find. But I could also sit back and enjoy the scenery and the fine cigar Doc had given me. “Beautiful country” was all I could say.

Actually, and fortunately for that part of the tale, the road is mostly downhill from Stay More to Parthenon, and that “up” he used was just geographical, as we all tend to speak of places north of us as “up” from where we are.

Fording Hoghead Creek (and all streams in those days had to be forded; there wasn’t a bridge anywhere in Newton County), I saw the godawfullest creature that I hope I ever have to see, and I thought for a moment we’d actually come across one of those gowrows or jimplicutes of legend. “What in hell was that?!” I said. Doc Swain laughed and explained it was just an oversize aquatic salamander, called a “hellbender.” It had scarcely disappeared from sight when a huge bird swooped down as if to attack it, a bird with a very long and agile neck that must’ve given rise to the legend of the giasticutus. “Just a great blue heron,” Colvin said, his “just” letting me know that there were more prodigious creatures out there.

We talked a lot, not just making chitchat or nature-study observations. It had not quite sunk into me yet that my companion, this mild-mannered, affable, folksy country doctor well into middle age, was actually the Doctor Colvin U Swain whose fabulous life and adventures had been captivating me (and, I hope, you) in recent days. Almost as if I were testing him to prove it, I asked, “Doc, what ever happened to Kie Raney?”

Colvin gave his head one shake of sadness. “Oh, he departed, some years back. Nobody knows for sure what he died of. I went over there, but just in time for the funeral, too late for an autopsy. Doc, sometimes”—Doc’s eyes glazed up a bit—“sometimes of a night I sit on my porch and look up at the stars, you know, and think about him. If that old Archer is shining up yonder amongst the constellations, I’ll recall ever word of that solemn oath Kie Raney made me swear.” He gave me a sharp look and asked, “You haven’t heard anything to give ye the notion I’ve ever violated a single one of those promises in that oath, have ye? Wal, Doc, before you’ve heard it all, you’ll know how and why I had to violate ever blessed dang one of ’em.” And he fell into a silence that lasted the rest of the way to Parthenon.

We came down off the mountain into this lovely village, about the same size as Stay More but with one considerable difference: in the distance, on a hill, rose a group of buildings that seemed somehow mysterious because they were so unusual. You’re an art historian, aren’t you? Didn’t you ever observe how any pastoral landscape painting, filled with meadows and shepherds, et cetera, et cetera, generally has some old buildings rising up in the distance? That feller who did those pretty things with the thunderstorm and the half-nekkid gal nursing her baby under a tree? George E. Owney? Didn’t he also do one of some fellers playing their guitars with a couple of nekkid gals hanging around? Pastoral Symphony or something like that? Well, you know in both those paintings of his there are these buildings in the background, not necessarily houses, though they could be, and not necessarily temples, though they could be, but human structures of some kind, as if to show that Nature may be pastoral but she aint wild, she’s been tamed by man, and those buildings in the distance give you the awfullest urge to go and get inside of them, out of the rain, out of the sun, out of the country. It’s like the buildings are a refuge against Nature, if Nature gives you any trouble.

Well, up on that hill was this cluster of buildings, and Doc Swain broke the silence that had come on him with thoughts of Kie Raney’s oath in order to start telling me about those buildings, even before we got to them. The buildings were still being used as a public school, shut down now for the summer, but Doc explained they had once been a private school, the Newton County Academy it was called, although the local folks had referred to it as “the college.”

Back in the years after that first great war, the one that involved the whole world, folks were so poor in Newton County that there wasn’t enough money raised from the taxes on their property to support public schools. Of course Stay More had had its own elementary school, first through eighth grades, for some time, and at one time Jasper, the county seat, had had a kind of high school, which is where your Latha Bourne went, riding in each day with Raymond Ingledew in his buggy, a long way to go for an education.

So a lot of Newton County people were willing to listen when the Home Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention proposed that a “mountain mission school” be established to provide some good education for the backwoods boys and girls of the hill country. If you know anything about the Baptists, you know how partial they are to “missions,” either foreign or domestic. A mission is a kind of meddling. Its purpose is to convert. The Baptists came into Newton County—hell, they didn’t come in; they’d already been there ever since displacing the unconverted Indians—and they decided to build their mission school to convert the older boys and girls from heathen illiterates into good Baptist Bible readers.

That was a period, just at the start of what the rest of the country knew as the Jazz Age, when the Baptists were somehow raising the money to build these schools in several places around the Ozarks and Ouachitas—at Blue Eye, Missouri, and in Arkansas at Maynard, Hagarville, Mt. Ida, and Parthenon. They chose Newton County because they considered it “the most destitute field in Arkansas,” and they picked Parthenon instead of the county seat at Jasper only because Parthenon is closer to the geographic center of Newton County. With the help of “subscriptions” from some of the better-heeled upstanding Parthenonians, and a few Stay Morons, like John Ingledew the banker, who, although he had no use for the Baptists, being like all the Ingledews not so much an atheist as a nontheist, was willing to put up a couple hundred dollars as his share toward building the campus. The main building alone cost $15,000, the most money that had ever been spent on a single structure in Newton County. Even abandoned for the summer, with some windows broken and dust everywhere, as it was when Colvin took me through it, it was still impressive: the largest stone building anyone had ever seen or imagined, two whole floors of six classrooms and an auditorium that would seat two hundred. It had even had a library! Nobody had ever heard of one of them things before, and thought it was some kind of berry which would turn you into a liar if you ate it. Although the contents had not been considerable, maybe three hundred volumes all told, it was the only thing approaching a book repository in all of that country. But when the building had changed hands from the Baptists to the state of Arkansas after a decade, the library had disappeared.

The Baptists had sent a young flatlander lady, Miss Jossie Conklin, to be the head of what was officially named Newton County Academy. Naturally the locals considered her a “furriner,” because she was from a “foreign country”—Texas. She had graduated from Baylor College, the biggest Baptist school in Texas, and she also had a “B.M.T.” from one of those angel factories, the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, where she’d met the feller Tim James, who not only outranked her with a “Th.M.” but would also replace her after a couple of years as principal of the Newton County Academy, which he accomplished by marrying her. But that’s getting ahead of the story.

Shapely Miss Jossie just showed up one day at Colvin’s door and commenced talking a blue streak. He had some trouble understanding her at first, because of her Texas accent, and he mistook her for one of those women homesteaders who had invaded the Ozarks a few years earlier. He kept waiting for her to reveal what her ailment was. He was mighty glad to have an awake visitor to his office, the first in a coon’s age, and he suspected that she was such a foreigner she hadn’t even heard about the dream cure that everybody else was freely availing themselves of. He hoped she had something really serious wrong with her, so he could make her into his first paying patient in over a year. But the longer he listened to her, the clearer it became that she didn’t really have anything wrong with her, or, rather, she had a whole bunch of problems but they weren’t medical. He offered her a drink of Chism’s Dew to calm her down, but she managed to blurt out that she never in her life had ever touched a drop. Even without the Chism’s Dew, he managed to get her to slow down and repeat some of the more difficult parts of what she was saying.

Finally he understood that this pretty gal in her ruffled blouse and smocky jumper was offering him a kind of job. She was fixing to start a school and wanted him to be the school’s doctor. It wouldn’t be a full-time job, since they had only 144 students to start with. It would only require that he make one trip a week to Parthenon, to check up on things, and to be available in emergencies at all other times. They could pay him twelve dollars and fifty cents a month, a pittance, but it was twelve dollars and fifty cents more than he had been making. Of course, if he were willing to conduct a class, one afternoon a week, teaching hygiene to freshmen, they would add another seven-fifty on top of that, making twenty dollars a month. And if he could coach basketball…? No? Well, coaching basketball was optional, and also voluntary, meaning no pay. Also voluntary was participating in the book drive for the library, if Dr. Swain might himself happen to have, or be able to locate, any suitable volumes?

He listened to her proposal with gravity. Now we know that Colvin didn’t think much of “school.” His brief experience at the age of eleven with the Stay More school, his memory of the tales Kie Raney had told about his years teaching at the Spunkwater school, and his brief experience at the St. Louis medical school, had pretty much soured Colvin on the concept of an institution of formal learning. He knew he couldn’t coach basketball, and he wasn’t sure he could teach hygiene, whatever that was, but he certainly was willing to be a doctor for the pupils if they needed him.

He had a question he wanted to ask. Why had she chosen him? Why not one of the doctors in Jasper, which was closer to Parthenon? “Everybody says you’re the best doctor in the world,” she said. “They tell me you practically invented the idea.” He was flattered, and since he needed the money and could easily spare one day a week, or seven for that matter, he agreed to do it. “I have just one question for you,” Miss Jossie said. “Of what persuasion are you? Not that it matters, too much, because we Baptists are tolerant of sects, but we’d just like to know which of the sects you follow.”

He thought she’d said “sex,” and he answered, “Why, the weaker variety, I reckon.”

“I don’t believe I know any such,” she said, and he figured she was asserting that she wasn’t weak, herself. “Do you observe Sundays?”

Colvin was not comfortable discussing sex with a stranger-lady, not unless it had something to do with her own condition. “Any day or night of the week suits me,” he said.

“Well, then, I don’t suppose it matters which day you come,” she said.

He blushed and said, “Or night, one.”

“How about Mondays, starting next Monday?” she asked.

She was a mighty feisty gal, and he wondered if she was making him a proposition. “Where?” he wondered.

“Just come to the Academy, to the main building, and you’ll find me,” she said.

That day we drove up to Parthenon, Colvin showed me, on the ground floor of the big stone building, the small room, now being used just as a storeroom for junk, old textbooks, and supplies. Mice had made a nest in one corner, and a broken window had allowed a free-ranging chicken to come in and lay some eggs. The chicken flew off with a squawk as we entered. The room had been stripped of whatever furniture it had held, but Colvin showed me where the desk had been, and, by the window, a kind of sofa, a lounge actually, a backless couch with one end curled up into a headrest, which had served as both the examining table and the infirmary bed for the occasional patient who had to stay, but, on Colvin’s first visit to the room, had misled him into thinking that was where Miss Jossie intended to engage in sects, causing the both of them considerable embarrassment, which had ended with Miss Jossie patting her dark hair back into place, straightening her jumper, and saying, “It isn’t that I’m not that sort of girl, I mean, well, I’m really not that sort of girl, you know, but we hardly know each other, now do we? Perhaps after we’ve had a chance to get better acquainted…but aren’t you a married man? Not that I wouldn’t even dream of being with a married man, I mean, I never have, but it isn’t inconceivable, you know, it’s just that it makes it rather complicated, don’t you think? Now please understand I’m not rejecting you, not totally anyway, I just…” She kept on a-talking like that until he interrupted her with a question: Why did she have this here sofa in her office? “My office?” she said, agog. “This is your office. Would you like to see the rest of the building?”

“Would you like to see the rest of the building, Doc?” Colvin asked me, and took me on a tour. Down the hall was the principal Miss Jossie’s office, perhaps still being used as a principal’s office and smelling of the body odor of one of the four Baptist men who had succeeded Jossie as principal during the school’s decade of existence as Newton County Academy. Two of the larger classrooms were on this floor. An anti-goggling staircase rose to the second-floor auditorium, which still had all two hundred of its seats in place and remained the largest gathering place in the county, larger than the courthouse’s main courtroom or any church. Up there also was the library, one room with two of its walls lined with bookshelves, empty. Colvin had been recruited to “volunteer” for the book drive and had canvassed his neighbors in Stay More for contributions of reading matter, discovering that only one of them had any books, the woman still living in the old Jacob Ingledew house, the lady you’ve chosen to call Whom We Cannot Name, so I will refrain from revealing my knowledge of her name. She contributed to the lie-berry of the Newton County Academy a set of the Brontë sisters, a set of Macaulay’s essays and poems, and a set of Gibbons. From his own meager lie-berry Colvin was able to sacrifice a set of Bulfinch and Mary Olmstead Stanton’s Practical and Scientific Physiognomy; or, How to Read Faces.

That first day, a most pleasant Monday in October, with the trees and sumac shrubs already turning every color of the warm part of the spectrum and the crisp air hinting of cool days to come, Colvin’s first task was to examine everybody. Teachers first. There were six of them, and Miss Jossie introduced Colvin to his colleagues as she brought each of them to his office for examination: Miss Billie Hood, a high school graduate from downstate, would teach the primary department, first through sixth grades, and had postnasal drip, for which he could only prescribe that she attempt sleeping with two pillows under her head and drink butterfly weed tea instead of coffee. Miss Dulcie Best, a graduate of the big high school at Little Rock, would teach the intermediate department, seventh and eighth grades, and had herpes zoster (shingles), for which he gave his special lotion compounded of herbs. Next, a stunning creature, name of Mrs. Venda Breedlove, a graduate of Jasper High School and Shenandoah Music School, would teach music, and had Ménière’s syndrome, with vertigo and deafness, for which she was under treatment by Dr. McFerrin of Jasper, so Colvin did not wish to intervene, even though Venda was the prettiest lady he’d ever seen outside of Stay More, and she flirted shamelessly with him during his examination of her. Nicholas L. Rainbird, a young possessor of the lone master’s degree, from the same angel factory that had produced Jossie Conklin, would teach history and natural sciences, and would not accept Colvin’s diagnosis that the chancroid lesions in his genital area were venereal; he insisted he had never, never, and would therefore get a second opinion from Dr. McFerrin. Miss Bee Leach, also from that angel factory but with only a “B.M.T.” like her classmate, Jossie, would teach English and Latin (!), which prompted Colvin to offer both his diagnosis and his prescription (for an unmentionable “female trouble”) in that language. Nec amor nec tussis celatur. And finally, Miss Jossie herself, who in addition to her administrative duties would teach arithmetic and something called “business,” and who said, “I don’t have to take off my clothes, do I?” All that he could find wrong with her, with her clothes still on, was that she had a very bad headache, treatable by his special neck massage and some aspirin.

The student body was much worse off than the faculty, and in the course of what remained of that first morning he was hard-pressed to see all 144 of them and give smallpox vaccinations to those who hadn’t had them. By coincidence, 144 is a dozen dozen, or a gross, and he used up a gross of wooden tongue depressors examining their gross throats and finding some gross disorders and diseases. He also examined their gross anatomies. Those with hookworm he could recognize at once because of their “angel wings”: protruding shoulder blades; those with pellagra he spotted because of their spots, distinguishable from the red dots of those with scarlet fever and the pimples of those with smallpox. There were cases of goiter, bone malformations, and assorted other abnormalities, including one lad, Russ Breedlove, son of the comely music teacher, Venda, who had diphallus (he possessed an extra penis), but did not realize his situation was irregular. Those who did not have a preexisting condition quickly were catching something from someone else, either infectious microbes or lacerations, abrasions, bruises, and punctures in the school-yard brawls necessary for boys to prove themselves to each other on school’s first day, or the rope-skipping (and -tripping) contests the girls were conducting, and all of these wounded were coming to Colvin in droves and exhausting his supply of Mercurochrome, which they learned to call Doc Swain’s “Cure ’em chrome” and wore proudly as a kind of war paint—or, rather, school paint.

One youth, refusing the antibiotic treatment Colvin tried to give him for his mastoiditis, declared he would just wait until he got home and “dream it off.” Colvin grabbed him by the collar and said, “What’s your name, boy?” and when the young man answered Lum Dinsmore, Colvin said, “You’re from Stay More, aint ye?” and Lum nodded. “Are they any more of ye?” Colvin wanted to know, and Lum told him that Dewey Coe and Opal Whitter were also from Stay More. Colvin got the three of them together in his office, closed the door, and gave them a stern lecture. Had any of them already told any of their classmates about the dream cure? Not yet, they said. Well, then, he said, they must promise him never, ever, under any circumstances, not for personal aggrandizement or gossipy inclination or even cash money, reveal, divulge, or betray, to any of their classmates, that the general populace of Stay More was no longer patronizing their doctors because they had learned how to use the dream cure instead. Their promises alone did not ease his mind, so Colvin threatened them, telling them that if they ever breathed a word of the dream cure to a soul, and then got sick with anything, he would refuse to let them into his dreams. He would stay up all night if he had to.

Few of the boys who attended Newton County Academy came daily from home, like Lum and Dewey. Most of them lived at such distances that they were boarded out at one of the homes in Parthenon, or they had rooms on the second floor of Casey’s General Store, an impressive stone building in the village. But all of the girls, except the few who already lived nearby, were housed in a dormitory, one of the other big buildings on the hill, just a stone’s throw from the main building. This girls’ dormitory was a fine two-story wooden building, with a hipped roof like the main building and a general style of architecture resembling Jacob Ingledew’s mansion in Stay More but three or four times as big. Colvin showed me the spacious empty room on the main floor that had been the dining room where everybody had their noon dinner together, but he missed his that first day, or rather was late for it, because he had to perform an emergency appendectomy on a student, Ora Casey, who had complained of “cute inner jestion.” She had been his last patient of the morning, and, sitting down to have his dinner with the “help,” the three girls who worked in the kitchen to pay their tuition (three or four dollars a month for those who could afford it), he was exhausted and realized he had only twenty minutes to eat before rushing off to meet his first class in hygiene, whatever that was.

But those twenty minutes were never forgotten by Colvin, because one of those three kitchen maids was Tenny. As a matter of courtesy, he asked the three of them their names, although he’d already inspected each of them earlier that day, finding asthma in Orva and scoliosis (a spinal curvature) in Olive, but nothing in Tenny, even though the young lady had insisted her right arm was killing her and her stomach really ached clean through all over down to the ground inside out slam to pieces. There were three things that struck him about Tenny: one, she was the only student at the Academy who, despite his thorough examination, was negative, negative, negative, not a thing in the world wrong with her; two, through one of those odd concatenations of circumstance or happenchance or whatever it was, she was the only girl at the Academy whose first name didn’t start with “O”; and three, she was the prettiest little thing he ever laid eyes on. I mean, she was a knockout of a looker. She had plenty of here and there for her age, fifteen, and she might even grow up (not that she wasn’t already fully grown) to look as gorgeous as that music teacher, Mrs. Venda Breedlove, who was a golden blond, but whose hair wasn’t nearly as long and wavy as Tenny’s light-brown hair. In addition to the almost-blond hair that came down nearly to her waist, and eyes that would put the sky to shame, and a mouth which seemed pouty because the lips were so broad and full and ripe, Tenny just had scads of taking ways about her. Oba and Orlena and Oma had eyes that were too far apart in their heads, while Odele and Orpha and Ona had eyes that were too close together, but Tenny’s azure eyes were set just exactly the right distance apart. Olga was too fat and Opal was too thin, but Tenny was just right. A poor girl named Olma had acromegaly, with massive jaws; another one, Obedience, had exophthalmic goiter with a permanent expression of frozen terror; Odessa had an adrenal cortex disease which gave her a heavy beard; and Oneida had myxedema, a very puffy face. Oleta and Orena and Orela had faces that were too pear-shaped, while Omega and Ova and Oklahomy had apple-shaped faces. Tenny was a peach.

“How’s your tunny, Temmy?” Colvin asked her as she started her second helping of custard pie.

“Huh?” she said, her full lips forming a perfect, tender, pretty-pink O, which struck him as ironic: of all the O-named girls, she alone could make her mouth into that exact pure shape. Ora and Olga and Orena had lips that were too fat and lopsided, while Oma and Olive and Opal had lips that were hardly visible, but Tenny’s lips…

He realized his slip and wondered why he was nervous around her. “How’s your tummy, Tenny?” he corrected himself. “You tole me this mornin it was a-hurtin ye bad, but I see it aint hurt yore appetite.”

“Hit’s a-killin me still, Doc,” she said. “I don’t reckon I can hardly walk, it hurts so bad, and probably I’ll be dead before sundown.”

“I misdoubt it,” he tried to assure her, but, fishing out his gold pocket watch and opening it, discovered he was already late for class. “’Scuse me, gals,” he said. “I got to run.”

His classroom was up there on the top floor of the main building, next to the auditorium, and its windows had a commanding view of the whole valley, now painted so nicely in autumn colors, a view that would provide his pupils with a relief from the tedium of the lessons. Jossie Conklin was waiting for him there outside the door, her arms full of books. “You’re late,” she said, as if he were a tardy pupil himself. Then she put the books into his arms and said, “The publisher, Mr. Henry Holt, is a good Baptist himself, and he donated a dozen of these to the school. Be sure the students take care of them.” Then she led him inside and introduced him to the twelve members of the N.C.A. freshman class, although he’d already met all of them that morning during his inspections of them. As she was finishing the introduction, the door opened, and Tenny came skipping in, her long hair streaming out behind her, and took a front-row seat. “You’re late,” Miss Jossie said to her. “Tardiness will not be tolerated in this school.” And she gave Colvin a glance to remind him that he was included in that intolerance. “Well, they’re all yours,” she said to him, and departed.

He cleared his throat. “Wal, howdy, folks,” he said, determined not to call them “boys and girls,” even though they were, ranging in age from fourteen to twenty. All he knew at that point about the course he was about to teach was that it was something you had to learn, and the only way you can learn something is to be treated as equally and civilly as Kie Raney had treated him. “Jist let me give each of y’uns a copy of this here book,” he said, but discovered after distributing the texts that he didn’t have one left for himself, so he had to look on with Tenny at her copy. The book was called The Human Body, and it was by H. Newell Martin, “Late Professor of Biology in the Johns Hopkins University and of Physiology in the Medical Faculty of the same.” Colvin was somewhat relieved for several reasons. He recalled the professor of physiology he’d met that afternoon many years ago at the Missouri Medical College, a pretty decent sort of feller. This book had a subtitle, “Its Structure and Activities and the Conditions of Its Healthy Working,” which suggested that the subject might be something that Colvin knew a few things about, since that was his line of work, more or less. The one thing he knew about “hygiene” was that it must have something to do with the ancient Greek lady Hygieia, who’d been the goddess of well-being. He’d once told Piney that if they had a baby girl he’d like to name her Hygieia, but Piney had made up her mind the baby would be a boy.

So this was simply a course in how to stay well, which all of them (except possibly Tenny) really needed to learn how to do. He ought not have too much trouble teaching these young people whatever they’d like to know about how the body works and what we ought to do to keep it running proper. He could use Kie Raney’s system of teaching that there’s both a practical reason and a pretty reason for everything. “I got a idee,” Colvin suggested. “How about let’s each of y’uns jist let yore book fall open to a page, and then you can ask me anything you like about whatever’s on it. Let’s jist go around the room, startin over here with you, Miss. What’s yore name?”

“Ophelia,” the girl said. “Folks call me Philly.”

“Wal, Philly, jist let yore book fall open and ask me anything.”

Philly took her book and let it fall open. Then she screamed, “AAAAAAHHHHHH!” and jumped out of her seat and tried to run away from it, as if a spider had landed on her. Colvin got her calmed down but he couldn’t get her to go back to her book. “Thar’s a skeleton in thar!” she said.

Sure enough, on page sixty-two was a walking spooky skeleton, looking as if he was a-coming to get you with a big grin on his face. “Folks, there’s nothing to be a-feared of,” he sought to assure them. “Hit’s only a pitcher. The pitcher is jist a-trying to show how the jiants of the body are hinged together. Did you know you’ve got two hundred bones in yore body? Now who can tell me why critters have bones?”

The youth Russ Breedlove (he of the diphallus) raised his hand and suggested that critters have bones so their skin won’t slide off, but another boy said, “A chaunk of meat has got to have bones so you could pick it up and carry it to the kitchen, and have something to gnaw on.” Philly finally came timidly back to her seat and sneaked a peek at the skeleton, and said that bones are hard and rough so’s to protect us from our enemies, or leastways scare ’em off. Finally Colvin resorted to the young lady he knew would be his star pupil. “You, Tummy,” Colvin called on her, but added, “I mean, Tenny.” Why does that gal tie up my tongue? he wondered.

“Bones is like the timbers that hold up a house or barn,” she said. She poked herself in her lovely ribs. “My ribs hold me up the way the timbers hold up the building.”

“Right,” Colvin complimented her. “But do they do anything else for your pretty torso?” The class giggled, and he was as abashed at his adjective as she was.

“I reckon they protect my lungs,” she said, “like the rest of my bones protect the rest of my innards. Bones is all we got to protect us from gittin squoze and scrunched by the cruel, mean world. But lots of times we git scrunched anyhow. I know a man who died of broken bones.”

“Bones can break, shore,” Colvin agreed. “But they’re also springy and pliable. I could jump out that winder right chonder, and maybe not break a thing.”

“LET’S SEE YE, TEACHER!” the thirteen of them chorused.

Colvin wasn’t sure he could survive the drop with all his bones intact and he realized he was getting off the track. “Wal now, if I was to break my fool neck, I’d not only fail of making my point, but I wouldn’t be around for the next part of the lesson, which is this: there’s both a practical reason and a purty reason for everything. The practical reason you’ve got a skeleton inside of you is to hold ye up and protect yore innards and get ye to moving around and about. But what could be purty about having two hundred bones? Anybody?”

The students stared at the textbook skeleton and screwed up their faces in concentration. They looked at one another. They examined their elbows and their kneecaps, their fingers and their toes; they poked their cheekbones and rapped their skulls. Finally Russ Breedlove offered, “Is it so’s folks can be sure you’re dead, if that’s all that’s left of ye?” Colvin suggested there were easier ways to determine if somebody was dead. A girl suggested that it’s mighty pretty to know you can sit up straight and walk tall because your skeleton is a-holding ye up. Various other near-the-truth answers were exchanged before Tenny held up her hand and said, “Humans are the purtiest of all God’s critters, and the reason they’re the purtiest is because of the way their skeletons stand ’em up on their hind legs and let ’em move about so’s they can do anything!”

“Except fly,” Colvin said. “Some critters can fly. How do they do that?” Because they got wings, several students said. “But what are their wings made of?” Colvin asked. Feathers, of course, the students said. “No, feathers are just the skin. The wings are bones.” He went on to ask them to speculate about the many ways that humans are indeed, as Tenny said, the prettiest of all God’s creatures despite their inability to fly. He asked them to discuss the prettiness of the visible bones, but none of them were able to name any visible bones, until finally Tenny said, “Fingernails? Toenails? Teeth?” Tenny’s fingernails were somewhat dirty from her kitchen work, but she had the best teeth Colvin had ever seen, if she would only smile, so he complimented her on her answer, which made her smile, and then he got them to talk about why we use our mouth bones—our teeth—to make ourselves more pleasant. Why do girls always show more teeth than boys? He also wanted to point out that the pubic arch in the female pelvis is also broader, to allow for births, and he wanted to talk about the articulations and ligaments that connect the pelvis to the legs. He wanted to talk about cartilage and foramina and vertabrae and marrow, especially about marrow, to ask if they (or Tenny) could figure out how hard bone can be alive like the rest of the body. And he wanted to talk about how diseases can hurt our bones as well as our tissues, how tuberculosis, for example, thought to affect primarily the lungs, can also attack the bones and cause their abscess. He wanted to talk about arthritis and bursitis and how drinking lots of milk might keep them from getting the osteoporosis that was stooping their grandmothers.

But Jossie Conklin came into the room and said, “This period was over fifteen minutes ago, and you have made these boys and girls tardy for English.” Colvin had time only to say, “Well, see you next week,” and make a wave of farewell.

None of his pupils made to leave. Moments passed, with Jossie glaring at them, her hands on her hips. Finally Tenny asked the principal, “How come he caint jist teach us English too?”

“Miss Leach is waiting to teach you English,” Miss Conklin said. “She is waiting to teach you that you don’t say ‘how come,’ you say ‘why’; you don’t say ‘caint,’ you say ‘can’t’; and you don’t say ‘jist,’ you say ‘just.’ Now get out of here!” After they were gone, she said to Colvin, “You’ve got a number of patients waiting for you in your office.”

Tired though he was, Colvin spent the rest of the afternoon setting broken arms and legs and meditating upon the fragility of bones. It was starting to get dark before he could put his horse, Nessus, into the buggy’s harness and prepare for the long ride home. As he was driving off, a young lady came skipping down the hill, waving her arms for him to stop, and he recognized her long, flowing hair.

“Have ye got the fatty goo, Doc?” Tenny asked.

“The which?” he asked. He was delighted to see her again, but he was weary.

“I’ve been reading our hygiene textbook,” she said. “The part on fatty goo, how a body gits ‘accumulated lactates’ in the muscles that makes ye give out and come down with fatty goo.”

He was too tired to correct her pronunciation. So instead of saying fatigue, he said, “Yeah, Temmy, I reckon I’ve got the fatty goo purty bad. It’s been a long day.”

“Can somebody die of fatty goo?” she wanted to know.

“Wal, I aint never heared of nobody a-dying of it,” he said, “although I reckon everbody when they get real old and worn out, if they haven’t already died of something else, they’ll jist die of fatty goo.”

“But not while they’re young?” she asked. “Because I think I’m a-dying of it, I’m so tard and beat out.”

“Angel, hit’s been a rough day for everbody but twice’t as bad for you, having to work in that kitchen and all. You jist git you a good night’s sleep, and them ‘accumulated lactates’ will go away.”

She would not let him go. “My old heart is calling it quits. I jist don’t have any pulse left.” She offered him her wrist.

He held her wrist. The skin was like silk, and warm, and he’d rather have sniffed her pulse than felt it. He didn’t need to drag out his pocket watch to know that her heart was beating perfectly normal. “That’s a mighty purty pulse ye got, gal,” he declared. “Purtiest pulse I ever seen. Not a bit slow nor fast, neither one. Now you jist go hit the hay.” He raised his coach whip to send Nessus onward.

“Doc!” she said, urgently. “If I don’t see ye again…or if I have to wait ’til ye come to that Other Place to see you again, in case I’ve gone to my reward when you come back next week, I jist want ye to know…I want to tell ye right here and now before I’ve quit this world, you were the nicest man I ever met!”

“Why, thank ye, Tunny,” he said. “That’s right kind of ye. But I ’spect you’ll be a-sittin on the front row of class next week, answering all the tough questions that nobody else can answer.”

She brought her other hand from behind her back. “I snuck ye a bite of supper,” she said, and gave him, wrapped between two sheets of notebook paper, a nice ham sandwich. “Have ye got fur to go? Whereabouts do ye live at?”

He told her that Stay More was a number of miles up the road, and he’d better be gittin on. “Night-night, Temmy,” he said. “Thanks for the samwich.”

She stepped up onto the buggy’s running board, as if to hang on there, threw her head at his, and gave him a big kiss meant for his cheek but landed half on his mouth, and then she was gone, and so was he.

Nessus knew the way home, and Colvin, as soon as he’d finished Tenny’s sandwich, dozed off and let the horse take the buggy home, as he had done so many times in the long-ago days when he was returning from calls paid on patients in all hours of the night. Colvin not only dozed but dreamt, and in his dream he began to give Tenny a complete physical examination from head to toe. She was totally naked for it, and her beautiful body distracted him in the process of giving her a thorough stethoscopy, followed by a bronchoscopy, a pharyngoscopy, and a laryngoscopy. While performing the latter, he heard a repeated laryngeal sound and, paying closer attention, he determined that it was simply Nessus neighing. The horse was trying to tell him that he was home. He staggered into the house and in reply to Piney’s “How was school?” he mumbled that it had given him a bad case of fatty goo. Then he hit the bed and resumed his dream, giving Tenny a fluoroscopy, an arthroscopy, and even a cystoscopy, following by a proctoscopy. In his comprehensive physical examination, he discovered that Tenny’s hymen was intact, confirming his observation that the areolae of her breasts were virginal pink, and he mused upon this exceptional circumstance, rare for an Ozark girl, unless she has no brothers or an impotent father (which in fact was the case, but Colvin didn’t know this yet).

Colvin’s complete attention to Tenny’s body was so meticulous that it prevented him from seeing any of the sundry Stay Morons who needed his attention for their ills and were trying desperately to mesh their dreams with his. The line of dreaming patients grew. The patients patiently waited for admission to his dreams, but the doctor was busy. All night long, and for several nights thereafter, the doctor was not available. People were beginning to worry whether they were dreaming properly or not. They tried catnip tea, taken warm just before bed, to help their sleep and dreams. Infusions of fresh alfalfa are supposed to help, but it was October and dried alfalfa doesn’t do the job. Nervousness and restlessness inconducive to good dreaming can also be palliated by infusions of the roots of butterfly weed, hard to locate in October because if the monarch caterpillars hadn’t chewed up the plants already, the first frost would’ve got it.

Then somebody came up with the brilliant idea that the only way to get the doctor’s attention in dreams would be to sleep in closer proximity to him. “Get up, Colvin!” Piney woke him on Saturday morning. “There are people sleeping all over our front porch!” He was irritated, being interrupted in the middle of his endoscopy of Tenny, but he got up, dressed, and went out to the front porch, and one by one began to rouse the sleepers, each of whom would blink, rub their eyes, and ask him if he was “real.”

There were even more of them sleeping there Sunday morning, spilling over into the yard, and the spectacle of all those folks dreaming up a storm at Colvin’s place caught the attention of old Jack Plowright, across the road, who, despite his spotty record of misdiagnoses and outright malpractice, was not exactly anybody’s fool, and deduced that these were prospective patients, some of whom had been waiting so long for Doc Swain’s attention in their dreams that they were now emergency cases. Doc Plowright stepped over there and invited them to come and see if he couldn’t treat them just as well in the world of “reality” as Doc Swain was failing to do in the world of dreams.

Thus, the magical days of the dream cure came to an end. Maybe, even, there were other elements of the enchantment of the old-time Ozarks that somehow were also ceasing to exist at that moment. As a matter of fact, because elsewhere in the nation it was the beginning of what has been called the Jazz Age, perhaps the Ozarks were going to be dragged into it.

Doc Plowright had his hands full, so much so that Colvin understood it would be a violation of that old oath he had sworn to Kie Raney if he did not pitch in and offer to help. So he spent the rest of Sunday actually receiving actual patients into his actual office, curing them all, and cleaning off the porch. Sunday night he slept his first dreamless sleep in many a moon, having concluded his complete physical examination of Tenny, and thus he was moderately refreshed and eager when he arrived for work Monday morning at the Newton County Academy.

There was a long line of students waiting outside his office, and Tenny was at the head of the line. She was almost as beautiful in real life as she had been all week in his dreams. Perhaps, he reflected, in a way she was even lovelier, because she hadn’t had on a stitch of clothes in his dreams, and somehow having all the secret parts of her body covered up with a pretty cotton floral-print dress gave her an allure that she didn’t have nude.

“I’ve missed ye so, all week,” she said, “even though I dreamt about ye ever night, all night long.” Once she was inside his office and the door was closed, she fell upon the lounge as if using up the remainder of her strength to do so, and declared, “Doc, I’m afraid I’ve got a metabolism.”

Colvin suppressed a chuckle and said in feigned seriousness, “I’m right sorry to hear that. What are the symptoms?”

“Jist like the book says,” she said, holding aloft her copy of The Human Body. “There’s a steady wastage of proteins from my cells. Also, I have faulty oxidations. I caint find the part where it says you can die of a metabolism. Can you?”

“Not me,” he declared. “But jist the other day, I had me a feller who took down real bad with a metabolism and it killed him right off.”

Tenny began to look happy, “Really? And there wasn’t nothing you could do for it?”

“Metabolisms are tricky,” he said. “You don’t want to mess with ’em. But the best way to prevent a faulty metabolic reaction is eat a big breakfast. Have you done that?” She nodded. “Then eat a big dinner, is all I can tell ye. Will ye do that?”

“I’ll try, but caint ye give me nothing for it?”

Colvin opened some bottles and took out both some yellow placebos and some green placebos. The yellow pills, he explained, were for the steady wastage of her proteins, and the green ones were for her oxidations. “Take one of each twice a day,” he said. “I’ll see you in class.”

After he’d sent her on her way, he realized that his complete week-long physical examination of Tenny had not actually included a basal metabolism test, but all of his other tests had confirmed his earlier impression that she was the healthiest specimen he’d ever come across in his years of practice, so it was very unlikely that anything was wrong with her metabolism.

As the semester progressed, Tenny’s alarms paralleled exactly the subjects covered in the textbook. Before they had finished the bones, she was convinced she had all the symptoms of multiple myeloma, and it did Colvin no good to inform her that usually the disease strikes only males above the age of fifty. As a consolation, when she thought she had spontaneously fractured her wrist as a result of the myeloma, he set it in a cast for a week, long enough to get them into the chapter on muscles. But when they studied muscular activity, she came down with all the symptoms of the Duchenne type of muscular dystrophy, and Colvin had to command her to take off her clothes, not so he could prove that she wasn’t a male (because he’d already proved that many nights in his dreams) but to prove to her that she wasn’t fooling him: she was definitely not a male, and only males get Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy. “See,” he said, and told her to get dressed, perceiving that she was more blindingly beautiful in the absence of her actual clothing than she had ever been in his dreams, and he had to turn his face away to protect his eyesight. After the chapters on the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system, she was sure she had multiple sclerosis. Colvin dreaded to introduce the chapter on the structure and functions of the cerebrum, so he wasn’t too surprised when she became convinced she had cerebral palsy. Colvin unwisely attempted to argue that she couldn’t possibly have it because she was not exhibiting the spastic movements of a sufferer of that disease, and he demonstrated how the cp victim attempts to walk. Instead of convincing her that she lacked this behavior, he was unwittingly teaching her how to become spastic.

Tenny didn’t need that. She’d already acquired a reputation on campus as dangerously different and difficult. She was strong-willed, outspoken, and viewed as a show-off, especially because in all of her classes she outshone everybody else. She didn’t respect the rules (that very first night, when she’d run out to talk to the departing doctor about fatty goo, she had been punished for breaking the rule that you must stay in the dormitory after supper), and she had already accumulated more demerits than any other student. But perhaps worst of all, in a student body whose bodies and faces ranged the spectrum between grotesque and acceptable, she stood out conspicuously because she was so breathtakingly beautiful. Other girls sniffed and pouted with envy at the very sight of her. And boys, alas, were so dazzled by her looks that they could not even approach her, and kept their distance.

Now, all of a sudden, this smartest and loveliest of all the students was walking around—or attempting to walk around—with the terrible lurching dip-and-jerk movements of a sufferer of cerebral palsy. If anyone could have proved that she was just pretending, that might have been cause for confining her to the dormitory, but as far as anyone (except Colvin Swain) could tell, she actually had come down with the hideous affliction that strikes so many young people and is certainly no laughing matter.

Jossie Conklin summoned Colvin into her office. “What’s wrong with Tennessee?” she asked him.

“Never seen it myself,” he admitted. “Some of the old-timers of Stay More was actually born there, and I hear tell the east parts of it are real purty, but it got kind of overcrowded, is why they moved on to this part of the country.”

“Ha ha,” said Jossie. “I’m talking about your student, and mine.”

“Oh,” he said, and abruptly realized that he had never learned dear Tenny’s whole name. “The gal, you mean?” he said, and attempted to measure her height above the floor, about five feet and five inches, and then even attempted to outline in the air her basic bodily configuration, exceedingly shapely.

“That’s her,” Jossie said. “Is she really dying?”

“Not on your life,” he said.

“What about her life? She can hardly move. What is her disease?”

Colvin tapped his head. “She’s got a real awful case of hypochondria, but it aint fatal.” Abruptly he realized he had violated one of Kie Raney’s commandments: don’t never blab nobody’s troubles to nobody else.

“Hypo what?” said Jossie. “Is it catching? Should she be quarantined?”

Colvin wondered if he had seen, heard, or read of any cases of contagious hypochondria. It was certainly hereditary, but not contagious. “I don’t believe so,” he said.

“What are you giving her for it?”

“There aint nothing much you can give for it,” he said. “Just attention. She needs somebody to pay her some attention, and I’m doing my best.”

“I need your assurance that she won’t spread it.”

“I guarantee you she won’t.”

But the student body of Newton County Academy, the girls out of deathly envy and resentment of Tenny and the boys out of their own shame at themselves for lacking the nerve to approach her, began to ape her movements, mocking and teasing her. All 143 of them, from first through twelfth grades, began to walk—or to attempt to walk—with the same stiff lurching scrape-and-kneel as Tenny.

It was a sight to behold, but Jossie Conklin, beholding it, came to Colvin and shrieked, “Now they’ve all got it!”

“But only one of ’em has got it real,” he said. “All the rest of ’em is jist pore imitations.” Having said this, he wondered just how “real” it was for Tenny.

He knew, and hoped, that the only solution to this mass hysteria was to move on to another chapter. I’m going to have to move on to another chapter myself and send you away for now, but I want to finish this one first, just as Colvin had to finish the chapter they were still bogged down in, on locomotion, the autonomic nervous system, fatty goo, sleep, et cetera. The very last of that et cetera was the thyroid, and that’s where Tenny came to him in private to ask if hyperthyroidism is as fatal as cerebral palsy. Colvin hated to lie, but he did. He told her that her cerebral palsy might last another several years before it did her in, but her hyperthyroidism would kill her off before Christmas. That made her real happy. He knew that the worst sequelae of her new condition, Grave’s disease, was simply eyeballs bugging out, like poor Obedience “Beady” Spurlock, one of the other girls in the class, who actually did have exophthalmic goiter, as I’ve already told you, with a permanent look as if she’d seen a ghost, and there was no way that Tenny could possibly imitate those pop-eyes.

But he underestimated Tenny. In no time at all, she was causing him infinite distress with her constant expression of huge eyeballs protruding from the front of her face as if they would fall out. At least, if it made any difference at all, she no longer walked like a cp cripple. So the other students gave up copying her. They just couldn’t copy her eyes. Of course, Beady Spurlock already had it, and she began to think up ways to kill Tenny.

The odd thing was, even with her eyes all pooched out of her skull like that, Tenny was still so ravishingly gorgeous that all the boys were afraid of her and all the girls hated her guts. So she had not a friend in the world, except Colvin, and he decided to capitalize upon that circumstance in order to begin what was going to be a long, long treatment of her central disease. He knew that trying to cure hypochondria is like trying to shape a piece of flint into an arrowhead with nothing but your fingernail. But, to paraphrase that ancient Chinese saying about journeys, the longest carving begins with a single scratch.

So he did two simple things. He sent off for a copy of that fine old book, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, which I mentioned very early in my story. Then on his way to work he stopped at W. A. Casey’s general store in Parthenon and bought one of those big circles of candy on a stick, I guess what you’d call a giant lollipop or an all-day sucker.

“Do you like suckers, Tammy?” he asked her nervously in his office and presented her with it. It was his first gift to her, and she was thrilled. “Jist git comfy and we’ll visit a spell.”

She plopped out on that lounge by the window, and he pulled the curtain to keep the sun’s glare out of her bulging eyes. She commenced a-licking that huge lollipop, which would in fact take her all day. When she was as relaxed as she’d ever get, he said, “All righty, Angel, let’s us start at the beginnin, and you tell me all the marvels of yore whole life long.”

Chapter six

Your champion and mine, sweet Miss Mary Celestia a-sprawlin yonder with that clever grin on her face, has taken it upon herself to correct me on another error, but I think she may be growing as deaf as you are, to go along with her blindness as a final withdrawal from this sorry world. She claims I said Tenny was the most beautiful gal on earth. Did I say that? Hell, you being so deaf yourself, you wouldn’t know if I did or not, would you? I didn’t hear myself say it. I didn’t even say Tenny was the prettiest girl in Newton County, which she wasn’t. Mary says she wants to remind me that you’ve already pointed out in more than one of your books that Latha Bourne was the most beautiful girl in the world. Didn’t I tell you Mary knows your books? Well, so do I. In fact, there was a time before Colvin Swain was telling this story to me that he told much of it to Latha herself, a-sitting there on her porch with her the way they did so often, with nothing better to pass the time of day but talk about how the past was passed but had been so nice, and so mean, to both of them. So Latha knew almost all of the story about Tenny, and she would never forget the one afternoon that her dear friend Colvin got up his nerve and told her that he wanted her to know that Tenny may have been the prettiest little thing he’d ever laid eyes on, but she wasn’t anywhere near as lovely as Latha.

To tell you the truth, Tenny wasn’t even the second most beautiful female in Newton County, after Latha. She was third. Late today I’m going to have to bring Mrs. Venda Breedlove into this story, that music teacher at the “college,” because if anybody had ever thrown a beauty contest like that one where the shepherd boy gave that golden apple as first prize, and Latha won it, then the shepherd would have had to give a silver apple to Venda, and poor Tenny would have had to be happy with the bronze apple…but I think we already know her well enough to know that she wouldn’t have wanted any of them apples.

Anyway, I’ll have a good deal to say about Venda later on, because if Colvin was the most important man in Tenny’s life, Venda was going to become the most important woman, more important than Tenny’s momma or her grandma or anybody else. That grandma was the one she was named after, Tennessee McArtor, who had been born in that state east of here and had twenty children but chose to spend her old age, and that of her husband, Grampaw Ray McArtor, with her favorite daughter, Tenny’s momma, Jonette McArtor, who married Wayne Don Tennison. Both families went way back practically to the beginnings of Newton County. The Tennisons may have come originally from Indiana, not from North Carolina or Tennessee or any of those other mountain places that produced most of the settlers of the Ozarks. No doubt the family was related at one time to the same people who produced the great poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson, but they didn’t know how to spell it. They could also have been related to the Tennisons that was already settled all over the Missouri Ozarks. But as Wayne Don Tennison said, “It don’t matter where we come from. It only matters where we’re a-gorn, and that’s straight to Salvation.”

He was a Holiness preacher, Tenny’s dad. Some people call them Pentecostals, they themselves prefer to be called Church of God, I’ve always known them as Holy Rollers. Whatever you call them, they have some wild church services, with plenty of shouting and flopping around and speaking in tongues. And they handle poisonous snakes. When Tenny lay a-licking that lollipop on the lounge in Colvin’s office and telling him her whole story, all fifteen years’ worth, his ears perked up when she got to the part about the copperheads and rattlers and moccasins, because he’d been quite a snake handler himself. But Colvin had handled snakes as friends and pets, while Wayne Don Tennison handled snakes to convince the skeptical that he had the spirit and the power and the faith and the glory of the Lord in him, because the Bible says, “They shall take up serpents,” and although the Bible doesn’t say it, it ought to have said, according to Wayne Don, “You better take up snakes yourself if you want to attract enough believers to start a congregation in the Baptist back brush of the Ozarks.” Wayne Don was the first snake-handling Pentecostal in Newton County, and he had the devil’s own time trying to scrape together enough believers to fill a brush arbor, let alone a church house. He had started out a Baptist, like most of his neighbors, and in fact his wife, Jonette, never really quit being a Baptist, but Wayne Don had the “gift” for speaking in tongues and the Baptists wouldn’t tolerate that, so he had to try to start his own church, and he’d been trying ever since, hardly ever making any money at it but convinced he was God’s own appointed servant to convert the Baptists into Pentecostals.

Colvin sensed that when Tenny talked about her father, she was both embarrassed and angry. She had never quite recovered from her first attendance, when she was four years old, at a Pentecostal meeting held on the front porch and in the front yard of their house on Brushy Mountain in eastern Newton County. For pews, rough lumber had been spread across empty tomato crates to make backless benches in the yard, but hardly anybody remained seated once the services started. She had been required to watch her daddy, for whom she had a lot of natural affection, screaming and crying, jerking and jumping, whistling and hooting, swaying and swooning, strutting and stamping, twitching and falling, working up a sweat that completely soaked his clothes, and then sticking his hands into a box and bringing out a whole bunch of big writhing snakes that like to have given her her first heart attack. Afterwards she shunned him, couldn’t bring herself to look him in the eye or listen to him, closed up her ears when he tried to demonstrate he still knew how to talk gently and rationally, and she transferred her affection to her mother’s daddy, Grampaw Ray McArtor, a pleasant man who was always smiling and making Tenny laugh with his quips and his banter, and who wouldn’t attend the Holiness services himself but would take Tenny fishing during them, or play his fiddle to get her to sing and dance, or otherwise entertain her despite eventual violent arguments with Wayne Don, who tried to tell her that she was going straight to Hell by avoiding church, and when his pictures of Hell failed to intimidate her, began to shake her, grabbed her by her shoulders and shook her and shook her, saying, “You wouldn’t never of been born if it wasn’t for me!”

What he meant was, ironically, not that his loins had sired her, which maybe they hadn’t, but that it was his prayers and his gift of Divine healing which had cured his wife, Jonette, of her barrenness. Tenny had two older sisters—much older: Jonette at the age of fifteen had given birth to one girl, and at the age of sixteen to the other one, but both girls had grown up and married and gone away from home and even had children of their own before Jonette, at the age of thirty-seven, had, after years of fruitless attempts and even visits to some doctors, been able at last to conceive Tenny. Wayne Don claimed that it was his conversion to the Holiness faith and his acquisition of the gift of Divine healing and his many, many prayers for his wife to regain her birthing powers, prayers uttered fluently in “the unknown tongue,” that had made Tenny possible. She was literally a gift from God, and Wayne Don had tried to name her Dove, as the bird of God, and because her older sisters had been named after birds, Oriole and Redbird, but Jonette felt it was her mother’s advice that had made her fertile again, so she named the baby after her mother, Tennessee. And what had that advice been? Tenny couldn’t be sure, but from some remarks that Grampaw Ray McArtor had made, she had suspected since the age of five that Wayne Don was not her actual father.

Whatever Jonette had done to become pregnant again, the pregnancy had not been good for her health, and while she adored and treasured little Tenny as the child she’d waited twenty-one years to have, she possibly also felt some hostility because, as she said to Tenny one day in a rare moment of anger, “I aint had a single blessit minute of feelin good since the day you was born!” Although Jonette and her mother were close, they argued over methods of treatment for Jonette’s many ills. Tennessee McArtor in the best Ozarks tradition had a “natural” cure for everything (even for infertility!) and believed devoutly in the efficacy of superstitions and herbs, while Jonette, being much younger and much more “modern,” believed just as devoutly in any number of patent medicines that were available. When Jonette was bothered with one or another of the “female troubles,” her mother would insist on administering teas brewed from black snakeroot (Cimicifuga) or squawroot (Caulophyllum thalictroides), while Jonette would prefer taking large doses of Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound (18% alcohol) or Watkins’ Female Remedy (19% alcohol).

But Wayne Don Tennison did not believe in any sort of medicine except Scripture and speaking in tongues. “Is any sick among you?” he was given to frequent quoting of James 5:14–15. “Let him call the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord; and the prayer of faith shall save the sick.” Wayne Don was so opposed to both his wife’s patent medicines and his mother-in-law’s herbal remedies that he even omitted the oil from that Biblical prescription.

The same conflicts of opinion occurred over the little girl’s ailments. Tenny remembered at the age of three receiving the devoted attentions of her whole family because she had croup. From her description of it, Colvin determined that Tenny had had laryngismus stridulosa, for which he would have put her into a hot bath with mustard, and blankets over the bath to make a tent so she’d inhale the steam, and then have steamed a kettle of tincture of benzoin beside her bed. But Tennessee the grandmother had tried dosing her with skunk oil—this stuff is rendered from the fat of skunks trapped in the winter, and makes a strong stinking mess. It made Tenny vomit, and then the grandmother rubbed Tenny’s chest with a salve made of groundhog oil, turpentine, and kerosene. After this, Jonette the mother insisted on trying something called Campho-Rub on top of the groundhog mess, and having Tenny drink something called Dr. Sloop’s Twenty-Minute Croup Remedy. The alcohol in the latter (15?) had given Tenny a pleasant buzz that partly took her mind off her paroxysmal cough, while the stroking of her mother’s fingers in applying the former had done nothing for her larynx but had made her chest feel good. Then her daddy had spent a whole night chanting and warbling some gibberish over her bed, and shaking his fist at God. What Tenny remembered best about the whole experience, however, was the way one or another of them, including Grampaw and Daddy, kept sitting down beside her bed and looking at her with great concern. This, Colvin decided, may have been what kept the little girl from a blockage of the larynx which might have been fatal. But it was also, he knew, the beginning of the need for attention which every hypochondriac craves.

At a very early age, Tenny began to observe that her father and her mother argued loudly about everything but primarily about health matters, since Wayne Don rejected medicine and doctors but Jonette swore by her patent nostrums and remedies, and constantly complained of one or another disorder, disease, or emotional problem that could only be cured by Wine of Cardui or Carter’s Little Liver Pills or Zymotoid, and tried to ignore Wayne Don while he was speaking in tongues she couldn’t understand in his efforts to help her.

Tenny had the thrash at four. Did you ever get that when you were a kid? Maybe you called it thrush. It’s an inflammation of the mouth with white patches on the tongue and lips and palate. Colvin knew it was caused by a fungus, Candida albicans, and he knew it generally affected babies and children who already had a serious constitutional weakness, and he usually treated it with applications of borax-honey and gentian violet but also did a lot of other things to improve the child’s general condition and keep the infection from invading the throat and lungs. He listened with astonishment to Tenny’s recital of the “cures” her family had tried on her. Her grandfather Ray McArtor was convinced that common creek water drunk right after a rain would do the trick, but if anything this just gave her a new set of germs. The grandmother called him a fool and said that the rainwater had to be drunk out of an old shoe, but it has to be a shoe that hasn’t been worn by any of Tenny’s kinfolks, so they searched all over that part of the country to find an old cast-off shoe that had been rained in, and dosed Tenny with the water, but it didn’t seem to help too awfully much. The grandmother then tried various ointments made of crushed green oak leaves, and of garden sage, and while the latter seemed to help a little, it didn’t remove the white patches. The mother took over and dosed Tenny’s mouth with Dr. Philpott’s Thrush Tonic and Mme. Yale’s Antiseptic Syrup, but these had no effect. Finally, since Wayne Don’s babbling of gobbledygook wasn’t helping either, he was persuaded to try the old folk belief that the only cure for thrash is to have a preacher blow into the child’s mouth. We may only imagine (Tenny was unable to say) what psychological effect it may have had on the child for her daddy to grab the sides of her face and squeeze her mouth open and press his lips up close to hers and blow and blow and blow. This was just a few months before the experience she would have of watching him go crazy in a church service. His ministrations gave her a headache and a bad taste in her mouth, but didn’t seem to help the thrash, so Wayne Don had to just keep on doing it, day after day, along with intermittent recitations of the unknown tongues, plus the others’ repeated doses of all that rainwater and sage ointment and patent medicine, until finally the thrash just cleared up of its own. Colvin considered the possibility, without sharing his theory with Tenny, that something in her had held on to that thrash in order to continue to get all the circus of concern she was getting from all of them.

That experience of her father blowing air into her mouth was probably what set her to studying the whole business of breathing. The Tennison cabin had a great view toward the west, and Tenny could sit for hours on the porch, not necessarily admiring the view but watching it while she meditated upon the passage of air in and out of her body, through her nostrils, and between her teeth, wondering where the air went and what it did when it went there, deep down inside. Sometimes she would see how long she could hold her breath without passing out. For the longest time…in fact, until Colvin’s course in hygiene finally got around to Chapters 23 and 24 on respiration, she believed that the air she inhaled went down into all of the parts of her body, even her feet, and that it went up inside her head, and that if she didn’t breathe properly or allowed herself to fall asleep and not pay attention to her breathing, the absence of good air inside her head would cause the headaches that she often had.

Studying the way your own body breathes is a sure way to start feeling that your body doesn’t belong to you, or, maybe a better way of putting it is that your body is also inhabited by somebody besides yourself, who never forgets to do your breathing for you, especially while you’re asleep. Although they had given Tenny a doll or two of her own to play with, there wasn’t any kind of doll that had a body as interesting as her own body, so she spent a good deal of time examining herself all over, inside and out, every inch, heart and soul, sometimes with the help of a hand mirror. She became her own doll. Does that make sense? She believed that she was inhabited by another entity, her breathing-doll self, and she even gave it a name, ’See, taken from the last syllable of her own name, Tennessee. Of course it must’ve sounded redundant even to herself when she addressed that doll and used the verb “see” at the same time, as in, “’See, see what a cute nose ye’ve got,” or “Let me see, ’See,” or “’See, see what I mean?” She did a lot of talking to ’See, more, by and by, than she ever did to her folks, except maybe Grampaw McArtor.

Tenny and ’See were not twins or clones or double-gangers or whatever you’d call them. There were differences. For example, on the matter of favorite things. Tenny and her ’See would sit “together” of an evening on that porch, watching the sunset, and studying its colors, and while ’See decided that her favorite colors were the bright red ones, crimson and carmine and scarlet, Tenny decided that she preferred the sunset’s dark purplish colors, the deeper bluish shades. These colors did not exist anywhere around the house or in their clothes or anything Tenny and ’See could see except the sunset. Once, after watching the sunset until it got dark, Tenny and ’See tripped over a washtub and fell off the porch and cut her leg, which bled. When Grandma McArtor held Tenny in her lap while her mother stopped the bleeding and covered the wound, Tenny studied the color of the blood and decided it was ’See’s blood because it was ’See’s favorite color, and she told herself that if she ever bled herself, it would be deep purple, and it wasn’t until a number of years later, when Colvin’s class got to Chapter 17, on the Structure and Functions of Blood, that she finally asked, “Why is blood red instead of blue or some other color?” and received from Colvin an answer that satisfied her.

When Grampaw McArtor started dying, Tenny and ’See spent as much time with him as she could get away with, as if to repay him for all the time he’d spent with her when she was sick, or sad, or scared. Ray McArtor had consumption. He could only explain to Tenny that his lungs was bad, and he wasn’t sure what had caused it. Nothing he ate. Maybe his cigarettes, he didn’t know. His wife, Tennessee, and his daughter Jonette were doing everything they could, and Jonette had sent off for a whole bunch of stuff, a four-week supply of Addiline, a quart of Prof. Hoffs Consumption Cure, and a box of Dr. Hill’s Systemic Wafers. Wayne Don was coming down with laryngitis from speaking in tongues on his father-in-law’s behalf. They tried everything on Grampaw McArtor, but he kept on getting worse, losing lots of weight and coughing all the time. Tenny told ’See to see if she couldn’t get down inside of Grampaw and see what was wrong with his breathing, and fix him up. When Grampaw began coughing up blood, Tenny was convinced the blood was a signal that ’See was sending up, to let them know that she was down in there finding the trouble and getting rid of it. For two months Grampaw coughed up blood and couldn’t get out of bed. One day when nobody but Tenny was sitting with him, he smiled at her and said he reckoned it was time he told her good-bye. She asked where was he going. ’See was still down inside him and Tenny didn’t want him taking ’See with him. He said he didn’t believe in that Gloryland that Wayne Don preached about, but he was going somewhere that folks don’t even have to breathe, nor eat, nor take a shit. That place was the same place that every bird and bug went when their time was over and the birds and bugs didn’t have to breathe anymore, nor eat, nor take a shit. “Can I go too?” Tenny asked him. Not for many and many a year, he said, but he’d be waiting for her when she finally came, and maybe in that place folks could go fishing or fiddle and dance and sing even if they didn’t breathe nor eat nor…Grampaw’s voice faltered and his eyes closed and Tenny had to finish the sentence for him, “…take shits?” but he didn’t hear her, because he was already over there in that place amongst those folks and birds and bugs. He didn’t take ’See with him, either. ’See came back into Tenny and helped to console her over Grampaw’s departure, and they talked a lot together about how long they might have to wait before they could go to that place and visit with Grampaw.

One of the awfullest things about Grampaw’s leaving was that Tenny would never get any answers to the many questions she’d asked him which he’d responded to by saying, “I reckon we’ll jist have to wait until you’re older before I can properly answer that fer ye.” Now here she was, much older, but Grampaw was gone. If the McArtors and the Tennisons had always been oversolicitous for Tenny’s health and well-being, they were even more overprotective when it came to shielding her from all the “nastiness” that exists in this world, and she remained ignorant of all things that were considered indecent or foul. They were determined that she remain “pure” until the age of sixteen, when she could get married. Her grandmother Tennessee had married at fourteen, and her mother, Jonette, had married at fifteen, but they were determined to keep Tenny “innocent” until she was sixteen, even if folks talked about her becoming a spinster at that age.

Not only did they not give her any sort of teaching that could’ve been remotely called “sex education,” but they did their level best to keep her from ever finding out that there is any such thing as sex. Any kid growing up on a farm is bound to see some evidence of Nature’s way of propagating the various species, such as a bull mounting a cow, or a boar giving it to a sow, or a stallion with a yard-long pecker trying to stuff it into a mare. But not Tenny. Her folks were not only very careful to use all those old euphemisms, like calling a bull a surly or a male-cow, and calling a boar a stag-hog, but they also were careful never to use even euphemisms if the connotation was sexual; for example, they couldn’t even mention rhubarb or okra or horn or goober or even tool because of the suggestion of a penis, an item of the anatomy which they were determined to conceal entirely from Tenny’s knowledge. Whenever the various male farm animals were displaying their penises in preparation for “service,” Tenny would be kept inside the house with the curtains drawn. There was an old dog on the premises who had the habit of sticking his pecker out of its sheath so he could take a lick of it, but Jonette sewed a pair of pants for him to wear whenever Tenny was around.

Tenny did not know there was such a thing as the male organ until she was nine years old. Her folks were careful not to let her play with boys, for fear she’d find out, and they weren’t happy about her playing with girls, for fear some girl would tell her. So she’d mostly had just ’See for companionship and Grampaw ’til he went away, and ’See didn’t know anything more about penises than Tenny did, and Grampaw never could bring himself to say. When she was nine years old, her mother took her visiting a cousin who had recently had a baby. Babies, she knew from asking her grandmother, were born from women’s mouths after being carried in their stomachs for three seasons. Both her grandmother and her mother agreed that women have to puke the baby out through their mouths (Tenny had spent many hours with her mirror studying her mouth and ’See’s mouth and trying to make it open up enough to expel a baby), but her grandmother and mother disagreed on how the baby got into the woman’s stomach in the first place, the grandmother insisting that a woman had to have a husband who could journey deep into the woods to find and bring home a mess of babyberries for the woman to eat, while the mother knew that all the woman had to do was drink enough Wine of Cardui (20? alcohol) so that she was relaxed sufficiently to permit her husband to feed her some babyberries, which were hard to swallow. Tenny would just have to wait until she was sixteen and got married and could find out. Anyway, this cousin had recently puked up her baby, and was about to change its diaper, and before Jonette could stop her daughter from getting a good look, Tenny observed that the baby had some kind of growth between its legs. Too polite to call attention to it on the spot, Tenny waited until she was alone with her mother to ask about it. Her mother explained that it was a large wart. All boy babies have those big warts, Tenny was told, which was God’s punishment on them for being descended from Adam, the first male, who was disobedient and smart-alecky and tough, which boys have been ever since. The warts could never be removed or healed; they just kept on getting bigger and bigger.

When Tenny was eleven, she happened to come across a seven-year-old neighbor boy who was standing in the path heeding nature’s call, and she noticed that he was making water through his wart! He was even holding on to it! She drew nigh for a closer look. “Does it hurt, at all?” she asked him, because she had never had any kind of wart, not even a mole, nor boil, nor even a blister. She had seventeen freckles, was all.

“What hurt?” he said, ceasing his tinkling.

“Yore wart,” she said, and pointed.

The boy laughed. “This aint no wart, you silly,” he said. “This here’s my doodle and when I git growed up I’ll be able to stick it in ye.” He gave it a shake and pointed it at her. “Wouldje like to feel of it?” She reached out gingerly and touched it. It began to swell, and she backed away, wondering if she’d caused it some strut by touching it. But he held it proudly as it plumped, and told her, “Girls don’t git doodles. Too bad. Do ye want to show me where ye aint got nary un?”

When she showed him, he said, “See!” as if calling to her doll-self although she knew he wasn’t. Then he said, “Well, that’s jist what ye git for bean a gal. Nothing but a cut.”

Not very long afterwards, her cut began to bleed. She thought it was ’See signaling again, ’See sending out her favorite color to let Tenny know that she was away up in there doing something, she didn’t know what. This blood had a kind of tinge of purple, which was Tenny’s favorite color, not ’See’s. Tenny hoped it didn’t mean that she had consumption like Grampaw, but maybe it did. She wanted to be able to ask someone, but she couldn’t. If she had a stomachache or a bad headache, she wouldn’t feel the least hesitation about telling her mother or her grandmother about it, so they would comfort her if not cure her, but somehow she felt that this profuse bleeding from her cut was just a personal matter between her and ’See, not to be shared with anybody. After five days, the bleeding stopped, and Tenny waited to feel ’See returned to the world of watching sunsets, but ’See did not return. Tenny began to think that all of that bleeding was ’See’s way of saying good-bye, as Grampaw had said good-bye. She decided that ’See had gone to that Other Place where Grampaw had gone, and although people who had not yet gone there still called it by the ugly name, Death, Tenny knew that ’See was not dead but just roaming in that Place where Grampaw was. Tenny was very sad and lonely to lose her only companion, but she was happy for ’See, that ’See had escaped this terrible world where everybody has to breathe constantly, and eat all the time, and take many, many shits.

But while Tenny never heard from Grampaw again, every month Tenny got a message from ’See, and Tenny knew it was from ’See because it was in ’See’s favorite color, addressed to Tenny in a tinge of Tenny’s favorite color.

Colvin’s class had to get away on along to Chapter 35, Reproduction, the last chapter in the book, the last week of school, before Tenny learned the name for that monthly message and learned that all girls get it and it didn’t come from ’See. That was in the springtime, the middle of May, and Tenny had already passed her sixteenth birthday, the age at which her parents had told her she would get married. She had not met anyone she would want to marry, except Colvin Swain, and he was already married, and she was trying to decide how she would be able to tell her parents that she was not going to get married, because all she wanted to do with her life was to long for a man who was already married. But then when she got to page 622 and the explanation of what the book called “the monthly sickness,” she grew angry at Colvin for the very first time. Despite her devotion to him (or because of it), she couldn’t understand why he hadn’t troubled himself to correct her ignorance when she was a-laying there licking lollipops on his lounge. She must have already consumed a couple dozen of those suckers (in fact, Colvin had told the storekeeper to order him a box of them, and there had been twenty-four to the box). So the next time she stretched out on Colvin’s lounge, she refused the final sucker, saying, “My teeth are going to rot plumb out from eating them things.” And she added irritably, “And you don’t know yore ass from yore elbow about dentistry, do ye?” And then on top of that she said, “And apparently you don’t even know enough about menstruation to tell me I’m wrong when I’m a-layin here spillin my guts about me and ’See.” She let that sink in, and waited for his apology or whatever he had to say for himself.

Colvin was abashed. Dear Tenny had never been cross with him before, and he wasn’t sure he deserved it. The school year was at an end now, and he might not see her again, because he’d decided not to return for another year to Newton County Academy. He didn’t need the salary. Ever since the previous autumn, when his people of Stay More had abandoned the dream cure and returned to the good old ways of being treated in the flesh by him and Doc Plowright, he hadn’t really needed the piddling pay that N.C.A. was doling out to him, although Jossie Conklin had offered him a raise to thirty dollars a month for the next school year, and thirty-five if he could see his way to coaching basketball. He didn’t want it, and only two things had kept him from quitting before Christmas: he wanted to help Tenny, if he could, and he believed that anything you start you ought to finish. Well, he could never finish helping Tenny. He’d read Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, all the thousand pages of it, and even reread the parts on the cure of hypochondriacal melancholy several times, but he hadn’t really learned anything about curing Tenny, who, despite sometimes thrice-weekly sessions on the lounge with lollipops, remained just as hypochondriacal or hypowhateverall as she had ever been. When they had taken up Chapter 13, The Receptor System, she had been so impressed by the section on Pain that she had developed analgesia, loss of the power to feel pain (which had at least alleviated her headaches for a whole week). After Chapter 14, The Ear, she had become deaf, not responding to his tuning forks or voice and not hearing the class discussion of Taste and Smell, which had kept her from losing the sense of either. Colvin had dreaded Chapters 15 and 16 on The Eye, but had arranged with Tenny’s classmate and only friend, Ozarkia Emmons, to spend a week serving as a kind of seeing-eye dog for Tenny, who had of course been excused from kitchen duty until she could again see the dishes. Colvin had decided to skip entirely Chapter 20, on the Action of the Heart, because he didn’t want Tenny to acquire any of the symptoms of cardiac disease. It bothered his conscience, cutting out the heart, and Tenny had even asked him about it, “Why did you ignore the heart?” and he’d tried to explain that it was a very tricky subject, and the heart has things about it that we can’t know, by heart. Ever once in a while, Tenny would say, “You left out my heart,” and they both knew what she really meant. The day he ought to have taken up the heart was her sixteenth birthday, the beginning of the year in which she would get married. Colvin had a form of heart disease himself, which made him give her on her birthday a golden ring set with an amethyst, not because it was her birthstone (it was) but because it was her favorite color. The ring was the first jewelry she ever owned, but she had to tell her friend Zarky and anyone else who asked that it had come from her rich older sister Oriole who lived in a big city. Colvin tried to cure his heart disease by rereading what old Burton wrote in the chapters on “Love-Melancholy.” But Burton hadn’t been able to do any more for Colvin’s love-melancholy than he had done for Tenny’s hypochondria. There might not be any cure for it. Colvin had realized it might become incurable when he had learned that Tenny’s childhood had been so much like his own: because they had both been reared in such solitude they had a special bond of lonesomeness that would always draw them to each other. On that day in February, with the very first signs of the coming of springtime, when he’d left from home with that amethyst ring in his pocket, Piney, who still knew everything, had asked him why he had got into the habit of going up to Parthenon on Wednesdays and Fridays also if he was only supposed to work on Mondays, and quite possibly she had not accepted his explanation that the students at N.C.A. were having the usual run of late-winter ailments that needed his increased attention. The painful truth was, Colvin still loved Piney. With all his heart, I was about to say, but then I remembered that he had omitted the heart, and I also remembered the sad thing about the old-time Ozark use of that word, “love,” that I’ve already told you, as if you hadn’t already found it out in your own life in the Ozarks: the word itself was considered indecent, so that if a hillman ever did admit that he loved a woman, he meant only that he petted her or screwed her. Piney, knowing everything, knew the word in all its meanings, and knew it in its sense of deep-down devotion as well as desire, and she loved Colvin in that sense even if she never told him so. And he fully reciprocated the feeling, even if he never told her so. Tenny hadn’t known the word. It had never once been used in the house where she grew up. The first she ever heard of it was when Ozarkia Emmons, her seeing-eye dog during that spell of blindness, smuggled a copy of True-Story magazine into the dormitory, where such trash was strictly forbidden. Zarky was the only girl who was friendly with Tenny and didn’t seem to hate her for her good looks and intelligence, even if she hadn’t been appointed by Dr. Swain as Tenny’s seeing-eye dog. Tenny’s and Zarky’s beds in the dormitory were side by side and when somehow Zarky got ahold of a copy of that lurid confessional magazine, she read parts of it aloud in a whisper to poor blind Tenny, who thereby learned about something called “love,” a disease which is supposed to attack you during your adolescence and possibly continue for the rest of your life. Love is such an awesome disease it wasn’t even mentioned in the hygiene textbook. As a connoisseur of diseases, Tenny was totally captivated. Love might or might not give you hot flashes and heart irregularities, but it definitely affects your brain and your whole nervous system. It makes you pick out another person and focus all your attention on that person, pretty much in the same way that Tenny had once focused all her attention on ’See. But ’See had been a girl, and love is supposed to make you want to spend every minute you can steal with a member of the opposite sex. Tenny supposed that perhaps this could have applied to her feeling for Grampaw, except she could not honestly remember ever wanting to get into bed with Grampaw, which is what you have to do. She had spent many hours beside Grampaw’s bed but never in it. Zarky had actually spent a whole night in the bed of one of her uncles, and while she was too bashful to give Tenny all the details, she made the experience sound wonderful. “More fun than sending off a big order to Sears Roebuck,” Zarky said. Tenny asked if the uncle had brought her a mess of babyberries. “Baby berries, you say?” Zarky said. “Well, if they was any babyberries, he poured so much cream over ’em I couldn’t see ’em.”

But what Zarky had had with her uncle could not have been this thing called “love,” because the essential characteristic of love is not what you do with your bodies but rather what you do with your ears and voice, parts of the anatomy that Tenny was now an authority on, having spent countless hours on Colvin’s lounge talking to him, and having finished the chapter on ears in her textbook at the cost of her hearing, now returned although she was blind. Love is blind, Tenny learned, but it sure aint deaf nor dumb, because the main part of love is feeling as if you could say anything that pops into your head to that other person of the opposite sex, and that opposite-sex person would hear every word you said and even tell you in return some of anything that popped into his head.

The only person that Tenny had ever felt this way about was her doctor. Learning all about “love” from Zarky and her copy of True-Story, Tenny realized with a shock of recognition that these were exactly the feelings she had for Doc Swain, even though he was twenty years older than her, and married, and a teacher, and everybody knew that teachers weren’t allowed to “flirt” with students, and vice versa. Students could flirt with each other, and teachers could flirt with teachers, and in fact Mrs. Venda Breedlove was flirting something awful with Doc Swain. An essential lesson of True-Story is that love between two persons married to somebody else is very dangerous. It always ends in heartbreak, suicide, disaster, or gunshot wounds from jealous spouses. So Tenny knew that her great overwhelming passion for Doc Swain was hopeless, because he had a wife, and Tenny didn’t understand why Mrs. Breedlove didn’t leave him alone on account of it, especially since she had a husband herself, even though there was a rumor going around that Mrs. Breedlove no longer lived with her husband but had her own house in Jasper, right off the square, where she lived with her boy, Russ, who was one of the boys who rode a horse to school; he had a big white stallion he called Marengo, and each day he brought his mother to school riding sidesaddle in front of him. Supposedly Russ had to take Marengo and spend weekends living with his father and helping him in his blacksmith shop on the other side of Jasper. Zarky thought that Russ was awfully “cute,” a word that Tenny was slow in learning because she associated it with “acute” in reference to diseases which are sudden and intense. Perhaps Zarky had a crush on Russ which was sudden and intense, but the way she and other girls used that word “cute” was as if it had something to do with looks, and there was no denying that Russ was the sightliest-looking boy at Newton County Academy, understandable in view of how pretty his momma was, and especially when Russ was mounted on Marengo with or without her. Tenny had Mrs. Breedlove for music twice a week and also Mrs. Breedlove was in charge of the Glee Club, which was an organization of students who were supposed to be devoted to merriment or joy but mostly just stood in rows trying to sing the school’s song:

There’s a school of learning

There our hearts are yearning;

N.C.A. we love thee.

To thine ideals guide us

Lofty aims supply us.

In life’s joys and sorrows

O’er land and waters,

Thy sons and daughters,

We will e’er to thee be true.

Although Tenny was the only member of the Glee Club who could sing all the words without forgetting one or making a mistake, she wasn’t sure she could honestly say she loved N.C.A., because N.C.A. was not a member of the opposite sex to whom she could say absolutely anything that popped into her head, the way she could talk to Doc Swain. Whenever she sang the song, she always substituted “Colvin Swain” for “N.C.A.,” same number of syllables and nobody noticed if everybody was singing.

There was one final thing she knew about love, and that is this: it always gets bigger. Sometimes like a little tree sapling, it may start out just as a seed, but it keeps on growing, and it never stops growing until it dies and goes to that Other Place where we don’t have to breathe, nor eat, nor use the privy. Tenny was bothered by the thought that she could not say everything to Colvin that popped into her head, but she was confident that if love grows, then someday she would be able to say everything, including this, “Colvin Swain, I love thee.”

But she had told him her whole life’s story, had told him things she would never have mentioned to Grampaw, and had told him her deepest, darkest secret, about ’See, and about ’See’s monthly message in red, and Colvin had just sat there with a pleasant smile on his face, saying, “That shore is real purty” and “How did that make you feel?” And then now at the end of the school term, by coincidence right at the time of a message from ’See, Tenny had read that textbook’s shocking last chapter, Reproduction, and had learned about menstruation. Most of the chapter was just dull stuff about cell division and maturation of germ cells and heredity and chromosomes, but then all of a sudden there it was, a section on the Male Reproductive Organs with all kinds of stuff on vas deferens and vesiculae seminales and spermatozoa, and penis. Especially penis. She realized she had read the entire section of three paragraphs on the penis without once taking a breath, not once. Erectile tissue, enclosing cavities that filled with blood! Corpora cavernosa, two of those caves along the penis’s topside, that swell with blood! Corpus spongiosum, that surrounds the pee-tube and culminates in the glans, a “terminal dilation,” sort of like a mushroom, covered with a prepuce, soft, moist, red, to the meatus, the opening of the pee-tube, where some other stuff also comes out. The book didn’t say a single blessed word about either a practical reason nor a pretty reason for all of that apparatus, except something about the spinal cord being the center of reflex excitation associated with sexual emotions. Since the book had already made quite clear that we experience emotions not in our heart or soul or guts or anywhere except our brain, Tenny wasn’t sure how the spinal cord could be the center of sexual emotions, whatever those were, and she couldn’t wait for the class to take up that chapter. She would ask Colvin in private, with or without a lollipop. But before she got a chance to see him again, she kept on reading, into the Reproductive Organs of the Female. Just as she suspected, girls are much more complicated than boys. The only illustration in the portion on the male was a cross-section of a testis that made it look like a slice of lemon, but the female portion had a bunch of pictures, including a poor girl’s whole cut-away bottom end with all those tunnels and tubes and cavities up in there. Tenny had no idea that she was so deep, and in three different places down there, one for pee, one for shit, and one for…blood? She couldn’t be sure what the middle tunnel was for, squoze betwixt the other two but running way up to a big-mouthed critter labeled uterus. She kept on reading, and was amazed to discover that women make eggs just like chickens, only they don’t lay them or sit on them to hatch them, but hatch them up inside.

And then, the section with that big word, menstruation, and the explanation of ’See’s message. Tenny reddened as she read, not from embarrassment but from anger and also perhaps because she was menstruating at the moment, and she came across this: “During menstruation there is apt to be more or less general discomfort and nervous irritability; the woman is not quite herself, and those responsible for her happiness ought to watch and tend her with special solicitude, forbearance, and tenderness, and protect her from anxiety and agitation.” Tenny felt kind of cheated, thinking of all the wasted opportunities she might have had for solicitude, forbearance, and tenderness if only she had told her mother or grandmother about the message from ’See.

She also realized that it was her menstrual discomfort and nervous irritability which made her snap at Colvin, “And apparently you don’t even know enough about menstruation to tell me I’m wrong when I’m a-layin here spillin my guts about me and ’See.”

Colvin realized it too, and once he had thought the matter over, he asked her, “Are you getting the message right now?”

It didn’t take her long to figure out what he meant, and she confessed, “As a matter of fact, yes, I am. Started yesterday.”

“Didn’t your folks ever use words like ‘courses’ or ‘flowers’ or ‘monthlies’?” he asked. Tenny shook her head. “‘On the rag’? ‘Unwell’? ‘Period’?” Tenny shook her head. “‘Flying the red flag’? ‘Falling off the roof’? ‘Coming around’?” Tenny shook her head. “Well,” Colvin tried one more, “surely you’ve heard of ‘having a friend’?”

“I never had no friends except Grampaw and you,” she said.

“And ’See,” he reminded her. “Don’t you see? Maybe that there’s the purty reason for the menstruation, and I wanted to hear ye draw me a pitcher of it. The reason I never interrupted ye to set ye straight was because I thought the idee of ’See as a kind of soul who has gone to that Other Place but sends you a monthly message is a much nicer explanation of catamenia than anything us doctors could come up with. Or that textbook, either.”

“But what about ‘babyberries’?” she asked. “What about my stupid idee that babies are born from the mouth? How come ye never set me straight on none of them other dumb notions?”

“I jist wanted to git to know ye,” he said, and then he went a little farther than that. “I jist wanted a glimpse of your soul.”

“Why me and none of them other kids?” she wanted to know. “Maybe they’ve got some purty dumb notions too. But you don’t spend any of yore time with them. I think Zarky suspicions that this purty ring came from you, and Zarky says there’s a lot of talk going around that you are giving me private lessons in ‘reproductive behavior.’ I wasn’t sure what she meant. Don’t ye dare laugh, but until I read it in the book, I never heard of a pennus!”

Colvin blushed, but he corrected her pronunciation. “That’s ‘pee-nis.’ Why do you think the textbook kept puttin off that chapter, till the very end? Since all the rest of the body is the result of what happens to it after it’s been conceived by the coming together of the male and female, you’d think that chapter on Reproduction ought to come first instead of last, wouldn’t ye? Why do you think they held off so long?”

Tenny thought. “No, maybe the whole reason that all of the other things are there—bone and blood and breath—is to make the coming together of the male and female possible. Maybe the book’s trying to say that’s all we live for.”

Colvin smiled. “I never thought of it that way, but I reckon ye may be right. I thought the book put it off so long in order to give us time to get used to the idee. You know there’s no way I could start off the first day of class talking about sex. I have to build up to it. I have to git to know ye first.”

“Do ye know me now?”

“I know ye now.” He reached up on the shelf and took down the lollipop box to show her that it was empty. “There aint no more, and I aint gonna git another box, and school’s over, anyhow. I reckon I’ve learnt near about all ye have to tell me.” Painful though the very thought of it was, Colvin was trying to work his way up toward saying good-bye. This was the last day of school, and she would be going home tomorrow, and it was quite possible he would never see her again. Even if her parents were not determined to get her married off, now that she was sixteen, she might not be coming back to Parthenon again, and, in any case, he had made up his mind not to return himself. But the closer he got to the moment of saying good-bye, the more he realized he wasn’t going to be able to do it. He was in love.

“The last page in the textbook is about death,” she pointed out. “I’m still a-dying, and you haven’t cured me of that.”

“We’re all a-dying, Tenny,” he said, surprised he’d been able to say her name correctly without messing up. “The textbook says, ‘While death is the natural end of life, it is not its aim—we should not live to die, but live prepared to die.’ You’ve been living to die, Tenny. I wush I could of stopped ye from doing that. I wush they was some way I could prove to ye what ye jist said: that maybe the whole expectation of us livin and havin bodies is not for dyin, let alone gittin sick, but the coming together of male and female.”

“There is a way you could prove it to me,” she suggested, although she had to catch her breath three times to say this.

And he knew what she meant, but he couldn’t do it here, not in his office, not on that lounge. Not even with the door locked. He wasn’t even sure he could do it if some magic enchantment could evacuate all the rest of the population of the campus and Parthenon too and leave him and Tenny the whole place all to themselves, with a big bed right in the middle of it, and it full dark with maybe just a nice moon to set the mood. Picturing such a scene in his mind’s eye, he recognized a certain familiarity about the setting: you only see places like that in dreams. Thinking of dreams, he had a sudden bright idea, and he asked her, “Do you ever dream, of a night?” Of course, she said; doesn’t everybody? “What do you dream about?” he asked. She reminded him how for example that whole week last fall she had a dream every single night of him, with all her clothes off, and him poking some instruments into every orifice of her body. It had nearly cost him her respect for him, because he had been totally unable to find anything wrong with her. “And was I really there in your dream as if you could reach out and touch me?” he wanted to know. It was more like him reaching out and doing all the touching, she said, but she sure could feel it, all over her body. “Well, then, Tenny, how about, tonight, let’s—” He tried to make his suggestion, but he couldn’t come right out with it. After all, she was a virgin, and he wasn’t sure he had any right to take her virginity away from her, even in a dream, not in this year that she was scheduled to become married. He postponed bluntly suggesting, “—Let’s me and you have a dream in which we lay down together…” by becoming gruffly pedantic and trying to explain to her certain matters which were not covered in the hygiene textbook, namely incubation, succubation, and masturbation. None of these were covered because all three of them were events in the mind’s eye, and the textbook didn’t even discuss the mind’s eye, a supreme part of the anatomy even though it was invisible, like the things it observed. All three words came from the Latin root, cubare, to lie down upon, same root that gives us concubine, meaning a woman who lies down with a man without being married to him. Incubatio refers to the man lying down with the woman, in her dream; succubatio refers to the woman lying down with the man, in his dream; and masturbatio refers to anybody lying down with themselves…

Tenny yawned. She had to yawn, not because she was bored, but because she had understood very quickly what her lover was trying to suggest but wasn’t able to, and the suggestion had taken her breath away, and when your breath gets stolen, according to the textbook, yawning is an involuntary respiratory reflex that returns your breath to you. But when Colvin saw her yawning, he assumed he was boring her, so he tried again, “How about, tonight when we go to sleep, you in your bed and me in mine, and we start to have dreams, how about let’s—” Damn him, he still couldn’t come right out and say it, and Tenny was about to become asphyxiated despite yawning.

So she used what little breath she had left to say, or ask, “I’ll be your concubine and succubate you?”

“That’s the idee!” he said. “Except of course a concubine is a lady with a lot of experience, and it will be your first time, so I’ll have to be real careful and gentle with you.”

She had no breath left, but she managed to utter, “I caint wait.”

The really good thing about doing it this way, he explained to her, was that they were permitted to choose whatever location they wanted, just anywhere at all, and furnish it as they wished, and even decide what kind of fancy clothing they would be wearing when they took it off to get undressed. So they were able to kill the rest of the long afternoon by discussing and determining the ideal setting for their tryst, adjusting the temperature, getting the moonlight just right, selecting the bedcovers, starting a breeze to waft the curtained canopy of the huge four-poster, and even deciding which platters the Victrola would play throughout, a mixture of soft and slow numbers in the beginning, and faster things later on.

They were all set. But one thing troubled Tenny, and she was brave enough to inquire about it. She reminded him that she was in only the second day of having a friend or flying the flag, whatever, and she was worried that might be messy, not a message from ’See. “I might could git blood all over ye,” she warned.

He patted her hand. “My goodness, I’m a doctor, Tenny, and folks’ve been gittin blood all over me for years.”

Trying to kill the rest of the day in her dormitory, she reflected that he hadn’t even given her a good-bye kiss, which might have left her with something to help endure the rest of the dying but everlasting day.

Killing time in his barnyard and killing a rooster for Piney to cook for supper, he realized that he and Tenny had not agreed on a specific time to hop into their dreambed together.

Time, though, is just something you kill in your waking hours. In dreams, time is indestructible, undying.

But Tenny could not get to sleep. Away in the night, Zarky whispered, “You still awake, Ten?”

Long after bedtime, Piney said, “You still awake, hon?” but Colvin lay there feeling like a kid on the night before Christmas.

It must have been after midnight before Tenny and Colvin finally met, and joined hands and gazed together at the huge mahogany four-poster with a quilt in a Garden Butterfly pattern of velvet and linen broadcloth, and a canopy hung with long chiffon curtains a-wafting gently in the breeze to the tune of slow violins on the Victrola. Tenny was dressed in a royal purple silk nightgown that clung nicely to all the swells and buds of her young body. Colvin was dressed in a loose-fitting flouncy-sleeved white shirt such as swashbucklers wear to do their duels and adventures in. Can you see me? he asked her uncertainly, because the atmosphere was just a mite clabbered. Naw, I’m blind of one eye, and caint see out th’othern, she replied, but she was just teasing in response to his silly question, because of course she could see him, and he had never looked handsomer, even in her previous dreams. Well, he said, gesturing at the extravagant bed, do you want to crawl in first, or you want me to, or both of us at the same instant, or what? She put her finger on his lips, saying, Oh hush, Colvin. Could you jist hold me real tight for a long time, first? So they just put their arms around each other, and mashed their fronts together, and squeezed. Neither of them had any further doubt that they were “real.” But just to be certain, she stroked the back of his neck with one of her hands, and he lay one of his hands alongside her cheek, and they spent a long moment assuring themselves that their hands were indeed touching live flesh that was warm, almost hot. Even that was not enough, so Tenny said, or asked, Do you think we could kiss, now? and she raised her lips and after an awkward few moments of readjusting their noses to keep them from bumping into each other, they succeeded in getting their mouths to mash together. He reflected upon how the anatomical juxtaposition of two orbicularis oris muscles in a state of contraction can be felt in the soles of the feet, the spine of the back, and in every corner of the brain. She had tried to kiss him on the mouth that very first evening of that first day they’d met, last October, but her aim had been off, and she’d missed, and she’d waited all year for this second chance. Now her aim was pretty good, except for the noses. Each of them was thinking, simultaneously, in the same words, “I wonder how long a kiss ought to last,” but neither of them did anything to remove their lips, and pretty soon Colvin realized that his corpora cavernosa were engorged with blood, while Tenny studied the sensation of a liquid seeping from her vulva that was certainly not blood but something else. I’d better take a look, she said, concerned, and stepped back, but Colvin misunderstood her, thinking she wanted to have her very first view of the male organ, and rather timidly he exposed himself to her view. It is possible that some things get exaggerated in dreams, and maybe the penis Tenny saw was larger than in “reality,” but whatever the case that sudden materialization before her sight of an object the textbook hadn’t even had the guts to illustrate distracted her entirely from her immediate objective, which was to determine the color and composition of whatever was smearing up her groin. Hold on a second, she told him, and nervous Colvin took that to mean she wanted him to handle his own part, so he got a good grip on it. But what she meant was that she needed a second to lift her own royal purple nightgown and run her hand up between her legs to find out what that substance was. She examined her fingers: it certainly wasn’t blood, it wasn’t even the least bit reddish. It was kind of like some clear ointment. Tenny had a quick mind, and if dreams exaggerate, then her mind was even quicker now, as she stared back and forth between her fingertips and his greatly distended penis, and realized the connection: what was coming out of her was an involuntary liniment intended to grease the passage of that big penis into her vagina. All year in hygiene she had studied the marvels of the involuntary system—heartbeat and breathing and glandular activity—the things that go without any effort on our part to keep them going, and now this struck her as the most marvelous involuntary doing of her whole body, and made her think again of ’See, as if ’See had returned once more to oversee the sweet ceremony of saying good-bye to virginity, and was bringing along the oil to do it with. This hard breathing she was doing was certainly as if ’See had resumed control of her lungs. Of course Colvin’s mind was just as quick as hers, if not quicker, and he understood what she was doing, and thinking, and therefore he did not even need to say, as he was tempted to, That there is jist the secretion of the greater vestibular glands of Bartholin. No need to bring that Danish physician into their bower, nor that British surgeon William Cowper, who named the glands that were producing a big drop of dew on the end of Colvin’s instrument. In just a little while, he might say something like, Let’s mix your Bartholin with my Cowper, but before they did that he wanted to make sure that Tenny understood two important things: the rupturing of the hymenal membrane, which would mingle one kind of new blood with the older blood of her menses, and her possession of a tubercle at the top of her vulvar groove which was homologous with the penis and ought to be respected as the seat of the woman’s pleasure just as the penis was the man’s. All the textbook had dared to say about it was to name it, clitoris, and to say it was very sensitive. Colvin wanted to be sure Tenny knew how to use it, because it wasn’t something a girl could wrap her fist around and jerk off.

In dreams it scarcely matters, or is even known, whether one is right-side up or upside down, so without even being aware of it they were no longer vertical but horizontal, stretched out together upon the percale sheets of that fabulous bed, and Colvin took Tenny’s fingers in his own and guided them to the exploration of her vestibule, while he gave her a rather lengthy explanation of the structure and function of, as well as both the practical and pretty reasons for, the hymen and the clitoris. Tenny grew squirmy, not because she was embarrassed, nor because she was impatient, but because it was exciting her as she had never been aroused before, not the feel of her own fingers there but the thought that it was his fingers which were making her fingers feel. We all need to feel that others are making us feel. But I’m afraid there was one other reason for her squirming. All this time, the Victrola had somehow started a new platter; this was a good sixteen years before the first automatic changeable Victrola, but dreams don’t know that, and it was playing not just the violins getting faster but a bunch of clarinets and oboes and flutes getting faster and faster, urgent and immediate, and Tenny thought she was approaching a glimpse of that Other Place where people and birds and bugs don’t never have to eat nor breathe nor defecate. But she suddenly realized that here on the doorstep of Paradise she needed to go to the privy. They had not taken the trouble to furnish their dream with an outhouse, but there was a lush virgin forest all around their bower, and she could “use the bushes” just as well as she had back home on Brushy Mountain. ’Scuse me, she said, I’ll be right back. And she jumped out of that big four-poster and ran off into the forest, hoping she was not ruining the moment or the mood. Colvin sadly watched her go, and worried that his corpora cavernosa would release their blood and let his pecker droop and he might have an awful time getting it to rise again.

Now I hate to mention it, but I myself have got to attend to one of nature’s subpoenas. Son, I’m going to have to ask you to excuse me while I summon the orderly to help me get out of this bed and into that potty-chair yonder. No, no, I don’t want you to help me; I’m such a goddamned cripple I have to be lifted and carried. The whole process is so complicated and cumbersome that I’d appreciate it if you’d just run along now and hold your curiosity until tomorrow, when I’ll be obliged to reveal the somewhat disturbing conclusion to that wonderful dream-tryst they were having.

Damn it all, I’m almost eager to get myself to that Other Place where people don’t have to eat nor breathe nor

Chapter seven

I don’t mind telling you that yesterday after you left and I finished my interminable business, Mary C. and I got to talking about this matter of being able to take a roll in the hay in your dreams. Mary said she didn’t think it was possible. Well, you’ll recall when I was a graduate student in psychology at Clark, I did my whole damn thesis on dreams, and I must’ve read everything written on the subject, not just Freud, but Jung, Ferenczi, Brill, Abraham, all those fellers. Two things I learned pretty fast: one, all dreams are sexual, period. But two, there are very few dreams that are explicitly sexual. Dreams are filled with sexual symbols, but you hardly ever see a real pecker or a real twitchet in a dream, let alone such particulars as maidenheads or clits. I not only kept records of all my own dreams in those days but I went around talking to other graduate students, women as well as men, and getting them to tell me their dreams, and I almost never found a case of anybody actually getting their ashes hauled in a dream, and let me tell you this right now: I never once found a single case of any two people having the same dream at the same time, goddamn it!

So what are we to make of this story? This is what me and Mary got into an argument about that lasted till bedtime last night, and then she had the boldness to suggest to me that we give it a try, I mean, see if we couldn’t “get together” in our dreams. Hell, maybe I shouldn’t be saying it, but Mary and me haven’t “got together” in the world of “reality” for many and many a year. We don’t never even sleep together. I was already past seventy when I married her, and it wasn’t no May and December marriage neither, more like November and December. But anyhow, just as an experiment, we agreed last night to see if we couldn’t meet in our dreams. We tried our best, too. But the sad fact is, you don’t have no control whatever over what you’re going to dream. Among the involuntary systems of the human body, the dreaming system is the most involuntary of them all.

That don’t mean the story of Colvin and Tenny is a bunch of hooey. Nor even a fairy tale. Any good story, in order to hold our interest and entertain us, must concern itself with things that never happened to us but which we believe could possibly happen to us. And I for one, even though I never met Mary nor anybody else in my dreams for the explicit purposes of unashamed and undisguised he’n-and-she’n, have the right to believe that what happened to Colvin could’ve happened to me!

So if you and Mary want to sit there and laugh behind your hands while I try to tell this, go right ahead, that’s your privilege. If you don’t want to believe me, you might as well just turn off that hearing aid, goddamn it, and I’ll lay here and finish telling the story to myself, which is what I’ve been doing most of the time anyhow when you aren’t here or Mary Celestia has faded off into whatever celestial realm she prefers to inhabit.

Anyway, excuse the interruption, and excuse my present dyspepsia. I hope you didn’t get too impatient, being sent away right smack in the middle of the first really good sex that we’ve had so far, before it even had a chance to “consummate” itself, as they say. Maybe yesterday I didn’t have the heart, nor the bowels, to reveal that this sex story didn’t have a climax, but an anticlimax.

Because when Tenny, hurrying so fast to finish her visit to the bushes that she dampened her pretty purple nightdress, finally got back to the four-poster, rehearsing in her mind how the time had come at last that she could say, Colvin Swain, I love thee, she discovered to her horror that there was a naked lady in bed with Colvin! Being smart, she knew that sometimes in dreams we can step aside from ourselves and see ourselves as if we were somebody else, so she calmed down enough to attempt to tell herself that the naked lady in the bed was herself. But the lady’s hair was blond, not light brown nor nearly as long as her own, and it was cut in the fashion of Mrs. Breedlove’s. And she and Colvin were wrestling to beat all, something fierce, with Venda on top! Colvin looked over Venda’s shoulder and saw Tenny and yelled her name, Tenny! but she had already turned and was running as hard as she could, trying to find her way out of there.

Zarky was shaking her shoulder, saying, “Wake up, Ten! You’re havin a nightmare.”

“I sure am,” she said, and burst into tears, and cried so hard that Zarky had to hold her until sunrise, when she got up and began stuffing her clothes and books and things into a gunnysack to take them back home to Brushy Mountain.

“Who’s Tenny?” Piney asked Colvin.

He stared at her while he rubbed his busted dream out of his eyes, and began to feel the intense frustration of not having achieved his expected joy. “Aw, heck,” he said. “I was jist havin this dream of treatin ole Jim Bullen for his heart problem, and I asked his wife, Sarah, ‘He took that there medicine I gave him, din’t he?’ And when she wouldn’t answer, I kept a-saying, “Din’t he? Din’t he?’ You must’ve jist heard me saying, ‘Din’t he,’ not ‘tenny.’” Then Colvin jumped out of bed, grabbed a quick breakfast, and told Piney he had to go back up to Parthenon to collect his belongings. Piney wanted to know why he hadn’t just collected his belongings yesterday, on the last day of school, but he could only say that he’d overlooked a bunch of things.

He drove as fast as he dared without running the buggy off the road or wearing Nessus out, and reached the N.C.A. while it was still early day, and parents were arriving and departing with their wagons, and a few automobiles, to pick up their kids to take them home. Seeing him, his devoted students gathered around him to say good-bye and to wish him a happy summer and to beg him to please reconsider and come back in the fall to teach something else like psychology or basketball. Colvin, who was looking all around for Tenny, could only tell them that he’d sure had a lot of pleasure knowing them, and he hoped they’d have the best of luck in life and not forget to take real good care of their bodies and systems.

He couldn’t find Tenny. He even entered the girls’ dormitory and boldly marched up to the sleeping rooms, but Tenny wasn’t among them. Thelma Villines, the housemother, grabbed him and told him that men wasn’t allowed up here. He asked her, “Have you seen Tennessee Tennison?” but she could only say she reckoned that Tenny had done already gone. Colvin spotted Ozarkia Emmons on the front porch, and asked her, “Have you seen Tenny?”

Zarky gave him a kind of frightened look and said, “Teacher, I don’t know what ye done to her last night, but ye broke her heart. She cried her eyes out ’til daybust, then lit out fer home.”

“Afoot?” he asked. And when Zarky nodded, he looked wildly around, as if he could see her, and asked, “Whichaway is Brushy Mountain, do ye know?”

Zarky pointed vaguely eastwards, then corrected her point to southeastwards. “Some’ers up in there way over round about beyond Mount Judy,” she said.

He had no idea how far it was, but he thought he might be able to catch up with her, and he was getting back into his buggy when Venda Breedlove came up to him and put her hand on his arm and said, “Honey, I’m sorry about last night.”

He stared at her. Rather than accept her apology, he replied, “You ort to be. That wasn’t your dream. That there dream belonged to somebody else.”

“Let me guess who,” she said. “If you’re aimin to catch up with her, you’re way too late. She caught her a ride out of Jasper on the mail truck.”

Colvin clenched his teeth, and glared at Venda. “Woman, you’ve done went and made an awful how-de-do of things. Tenny took a lot of trouble to git that rondy-voo set up jist right, and you come buttin in and spoilt it.”

“That there was the purtiest bed I ever did see,” Venda declared. “I jist couldn’t resist it!”

“Hit was Tenny’s four-poster, and quilt, and all, gosh-darn ye!”

“She’s jist a chile, Colvin,” Venda said. “Even in yore wildest dreams, she caint give ye the kind of lovin I could give ye, if you’d let me. You shouldn’t have thrown me out.” And Venda put her hand on his knee and began to scoot it along the inside of his thigh.

Colvin told himself that if all he was interested in was loving a woman, he couldn’t do better than Venda. This gal had the old oomph oozing out of every pore of her body, and oomph was not in his medical dictionary but could easily be defined as that, or possibly it, with a lot of these and those, or what it takes. Venda Breedlove had what it takes to run up any man’s pressure. All year long she had been so friendly with him, and made herself so available, that if he hadn’t been completely absorbed with Tenny, he could easily have given in to Venda’s obvious enticements. Even after he had thrown her out of the four-poster, he had had more than physical pangs of regret. Her naked body had felt so voluptuous during the moments it took him to disengage himself from her that even now, thinking of it, he felt the blood backing up in his corpora cavernosa, and for a long moment he gazed upon sweet Venda with a desire that erased Tenny for the duration from his mind.

The gossip about Venda Breedlove was almost as alluring as her seductive body, and Colvin had been tempted all year to invite her to lie on his lounge and tell him all about herself, if not with a lollipop perhaps with a soda pop and a sentence he had rehearsed in his mind but had never spoken to her, “I’ve heard so many stories about you, I’d like to know the truth.” Nobody knows where she came from. She was said to be an orphan who was discovered one day floating in a johnboat on the Buffalo River, fully grown but as naked as she’d climbed into that four-poster, amnesiac but so lovely that she entranced the three sisters who found her, rescued her, dressed her, and took her home with them. These sisters, Aggie, Thalie, and Phrosie Grace, lived up toward Pruitt in northern Newton County, and they dutifully notified Sheriff J.C. Barker of their discovery, but he made an investigation without being able to find out just who she was or where she was from, or what she was doing naked in that johnboat. She had no memory of a mother or father, and wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. Sheriff Barker wasn’t about to let those Grace girls keep her, because everybody knew those girls were kind of “funny,” if you know what I mean—it was a scandalous sort of Lesbian incest going on amongst them—and Barker was afraid they might turn the poor girl into one of them, so he took her home to his wife, figuring to give her a place to stay temporarily until she could find work or a husband, whichever came first. Pretty soon Barker himself was sneaking around with her, and Mrs. Barker was about to throw her out, so Barker fixed her up with his best buddy, Mulciber Breedlove, the blacksmith, who had once been living with Aggie Grace, one of those girls who found Venda.

Old Mulce was just about the ugliest feller in Jasper, and he was practically a cripple from a childhood accident that left him with twisted feet and dislocated hips, and a way of walking that made folks poke fun at him when they ran out of jokes about the fact that Aggie became a dyke as a result of trying to live with him. But he was a steady worker, the best blacksmith in the country, and a solid, peaceable, upstanding citizen, and he fell in love with Venda at first sight and became her devoted slave, willing to do anything for her. He made her a lot of jewelry out of horseshoe nails that was a sight to behold. Venda was so charmed by a wedding ring that he made out of a horseshoe nail that she couldn’t turn him down, and became his bride. He was the happiest man in the Ozarks, having such a beauty for a wife, but he should’ve had the sense to know he couldn’t hold her. When the baby boy Russ was born, Mulce became even more devoted as a father than he’d been as a husband, but he already had suspicions that he might not be the boy’s real father, or at best only one of his fathers, since the boy had two peckers, a sign that maybe he had two daddies.

Rumors of Venda’s infidelities were commonplace. She was not just the most beautiful woman in the country (your Latha was still a little girl at the time) but she was also the earthiest. Folks called her feisty and fleshy, the latter having nothing to do with her weight but with her devotion to the pleasures of the flesh. Feisty suggests fast and fleshy suggests flashy, and she was both of those too.

She had a lot of nerve accusing Colvin of picking a child when he took up with Tenny, because Venda’s own most famous love affair was with a boy who was practically just a kid, a teenager from up around Gum Springs named Donny Kilgore. He was only fifteen when Venda was out in the woods one day trying to show her little boy Russ how to hunt with his “bone air,” and she come across Donny also a-hunting, and was so smitten with passion for him that she left little Russ to amuse himself while she talked Donny into stepping over behind some boulders to hide them from sight. Venda didn’t take Russ with her next time she went hunting. She was bringing home more rabbits than they and all the neighbors could eat, and Mulce complained she was hunting too much. The truth was, Donny was such a good shot he could bag a whole nest of rabbits in no time flat, and have all the remainder of the afternoon to shag Venda. But pretty soon she wasn’t even bothering to bring home rabbits, nor even squirrels. She’d just disappear at all hours and didn’t even care if Mulce fumed and hollered. Practically everybody knew she and Donny were off somewheres fucking like minks, and a few folks had even spied them at it, in broad daylight.

But Donny kept on hunting in the woods, because that’s what he liked to do, next best to shagging Venda, and that was his downfall, because one time when he was a-chasing a bunch of wild razorback hogs, one of the big old boars turned and charged him and buried those sharp tusks in his side. Venda found him and took him to Doc McFerrin in Jasper, but it was too late to help him, and he died, and Venda was so heartbroken she didn’t even think about fooling around with anyone else…except her favorite man, who was Mulce’s brother.

I can vouch for that brother myself, from the time when I was stationed at Camp Pike in North Little Rock, during the First World War. My battalion captain in the infantry was a feller named Marty Breedlove, and he used to brag about going home on furlough to Jasper, where he’d “snitch a little twitchet” from a gal named Venda, who he’d been a-banging ever since she married his brother fifteen years before. This Breedlove was a stuck-up, belligerent dude with a real mean streak in him, and I never liked him. He was a right handsome feller, though, and claimed that Venda loved him because his brother was ugly as sin, and sin was a subject Venda was a foremost authority on.

Seems what happened was, his brother, Mulce, caught them at it, in his own bed, and he threw a minnow seine over them to tie them up together while he beat the living shit out of both of them. Marty came back to Camp Pike from the furlough all black and blue, and wouldn’t say any more about it. Venda was forced to move out, and took the boy with her, and went off to Shenandoah Music School to study singing so she could get some kind of job. When she finally came back to Jasper, Mulce went to court and got an order that the boy had to spend weekends with him, and that was the arrangement that was still in effect when Colvin first met Venda.

When the Baptists hired Venda to teach music at the new Newton County Academy, they didn’t know anything about her past; all they knew was that she had a certificate from the Shenandoah Music School and knew a few tunes on the piano. But rumor grows faster than tumor, and pretty soon Jossie Conklin had heard enough about Venda to require a little meeting between them, during which Venda told Jossie that she had turned over a new leaf and wiped her nose, in order to bring up her boy Russ properly, and she’d even start going to Sunday school if they wanted her to. In fact, her and Jossie became real good friends, and it was Venda who taught Jossie how to get a man…but that’s another story. And it’s true that for the whole duration of that first school year, Venda did not stray from the straight and narrow, she actually went to Sunday school, and she taught her pupils how to sing all those good old-time Baptist hymns as well as the Newton County Academy song. She paid a lot of attention to Russ, as if to make up for neglecting him when he was a child, and she bought him that beautiful white stallion Marengo not just so she’d have transportation from her Jasper house to Parthenon, but so all the other kids would look up to Russ and maybe even forgive him for being such a mischievous scamp, always bent on causing trouble, maybe what we’d call a punk nowadays. Because Jossie and Venda were such good friends, Jossie went easy on Russ when he misbehaved and broke the rules, like riding Marengo around the school yard a lot faster than was safe. Russ had more demerits than anyone but Tenny, and Jossie was known to remark, more than once, that Russ and Tenny ought to make a pair, because they both had the same habit of trying to see how much they could get away with. But if Jossie was tempted more than once to expel or suspend Tenny, she wouldn’t want to do that to the son of her good chum Venda.

If Venda herself had genuinely reformed, as far as her general conduct was concerned, it was only because she had outgrown the likes of lame Mulce and his belligerent brother Marty, and she realized that even the late lamented Donny Kilgore had been beautiful and loads of fun in bed but scarcely worth talking to. Going off to that music school had shown her that there were men in the world who were interested in higher matters than using her vaginal muscles in lieu of their own fingers. As soon as she met Colvin Swain, on that first day of school when he’d examined her along with the rest of the teachers, and had been so pleasant and kind and genuinely interested in her as a person, she knew that this dark, mysterious man had a deep, sensitive side that could possibly respond to parts of her that no other men had ever known. Colvin was not nearly as handsome as Marty Breedlove, and he wasn’t even in the same category of manhood with Donny Kilgore, but he had a certain strength, and ruggedness, and cozy down-home attractiveness about him that made him more satisfying to behold than any man she had ever laid eyes upon. Most of all, he was intelligent, even wise. Venda Breedlove felt that knowing Colvin Swain would be the best way to know herself.

The trouble was, he seemed to be preoccupied with that girl, Tennessee Tennison, who Jossie was always complaining about as a “problem pupil,” even though Tenny was the top student in Venda’s music class and the best soprano in the Glee Club. Although Venda was madly jealous of his constant attentions to Tenny, she understood that it was in his nature as a wise, sympathetic physician to want to help a young woman beset with problems, and she did not hold it against him. After all, he had cured the girl of cerebral palsy, deafness, blindness, and a whole bunch of other disorders. You don’t blame a Samaritan for his benefaction. But Venda had been trying all year, in subtle as well as not-so-subtle ways, to let Colvin know she was available to show him undreamed-of physical pleasure, and he had not risen to the bait, and she was beginning to suspect that he was actually violating the unwritten principle that teachers should not seduce their students. That, or else he was getting all he wanted from some dumpy cow of a wife back home in Stay More.

Venda was beginning to get evil-minded again, and to itch for a man’s arms and his other three extremities. She had never gone for so long, eight months, without any sex other than what could be so easily obtained in laying down with herself in fantasy or dream. As a matter of fact, it had been during one of her autoerotic dreams that she had become disgusted with herself and gone rushing out into the forest in search of any creature’s actual penis, a desperate journey that had caused her accidental discovery of that magnificent four-poster with Colvin just lying alone on it with a hard-on that was beginning to droop. It was the answer to all her dreams, and fortunately she was already conveniently divested of any nightwear, since she never slept in a stitch. But when she took a flying leap onto him, he tried to push her away. And he had spoken aloud one dreadful word, Tenny!

Now, however, his Tenny was gone home for the summer to whatever bushwhacker shack she inhabited in the remote sticks of the county, where her folks would get her married off before she became any more sixteen than she already was, and Venda could invite Colvin to drop in and visit her in her pretty white cottage off the square in Jasper. “How about this afternoon?” she asked him.

Colvin was tempted, although he didn’t particularly care for Jasper. The county seat was a place he had to visit when he needed to pick up something at Arbaugh’s Rexall, or when he had to go to the courthouse, but Jasper was the private turf and battlefield of two other competing physicians, McFerrin and Bradley, and he was not comfortable stomping around in their stomping grounds. “I better not, I reckon,” he declined, and then, because it is automatic hospitality to temper any rejection with a counterinvitation, he added, “You’d better jist come go home with me.”

Venda raised her eyebrows. “What about your wife?” she asked. “Oh, I din’t mean it like that,” he said, wondering why Venda didn’t understand that such invitations are just formalities, tendered in courtesy, not meant to be taken literally. “I just meant, if ye ever happen to be in Stay More, stop in and say howdy.”

“So that’s it?” Venda demanded. “I throw myself at ye, and that’s all I git?” When he did not comment, she said, “You aint a-comin back here to work in the fall, so I might not never even see ye again. Except maybe in my dreams. Do ye suppose we could git together once in a while in our dreams? I’ll furnish the four-poster.”

Colvin could only smile as pleasantly as he could and say, “I’m sure it would be a right purty bed, but, to tell ye the honest truth, I think I’m going to have to give up dreamin. It’s too risky.” He raised his coach whip and gave a cluck to Nessus, and the buggy began to move.

“You haven’t seen the last of me, Colvin Swain!” Venda hollered after him. He would not stop. He kept on going, down the hill, away from Newton County Academy, out of her life. “But you’ve seen the last of Tenny!” she screamed.

He stopped. He turned. He stared at her, and asked, “Jist what do ye mean by that?”

“You know she’s supposed to git herself married, now that she’s sixteen,” Venda said.

“Yeah, that’s right, I reckon,” he said, and drove on. But as the summer progressed, Colvin began to wonder if Venda was right, that he never would see his Tenny again.

For a while, Colvin kept on trying to meet Tenny in his dreams. Every night he would find the spot in the enchanted forest where their bower had been, and it was still there. He would sit down atop that beautiful Garden Butterfly-pattern quilt of Tenny’s, and just wait for as long as he could stand it. Sometimes he would call for her, softly. She never showed up, and so he just started sleeping in that four-poster. It was a mattress that Tenny had stuffed with the down of a hundred geese, and even a few swans thrown in for good measure, and it was the best sleeping that Colvin had ever had. Whenever he woke up, he was always back in his own bed beside Piney, but he was so rested that even his arthritis stopped bothering him.

Life went on. Piney was glad that he wasn’t leaving three times a week to go to Parthenon, and she started showing her appreciation in several ways, cooking his favorite dinners with a lot of special pies and cakes for dessert, refraining from arguing with him whenever she was right and he was wrong about anything, and totally satisfying his libido before he dropped off to sleep and went searching for that four-poster, which he no longer sought in expectation of consummating the unfinished love with Tenny but only in hopes of finding her and talking to her and explaining to her what had happened before.

One night when he went to the four-poster, he was surprised to discover that there was another, larger four-poster right beside it, with an even more beautiful quilt in a Cottage Tulip pattern, atop which was reclining the naked, wriggling, perfumed body of Venda Breedlove. She was a sight such as no man could resist…except a man who had just been disburdened of all his semen by his wife. Sorry, chickabiddy, he had to say to her, but I’m all fucked out.

Then what did ye come here for? she demanded. He explained to her that he just wanted to talk to Tenny, that he’d been coming here every night hoping to find her. He said he hoped that Venda hadn’t done anything to her. She’s gone to Brushy Mountain, and probably already married, Venda declared. You might jist as well climb in here with me, and I’ll bet ye a hunerd dollars I know something that will rise up yore pecker again. Colvin said that he had no doubt that Venda could do it if anybody could but he just wasn’t of a mind to try it, right now. Then he asked her if she knew where Brushy Mountain was. Do you think I’d tell ye, even if I knew? she said. But I honestly don’t have any idee whar it is. Jist some’ers at the ends of the airth.

All that summer, Colvin had been in the habit of asking people if they might know the location of Brushy Mountain. His dad, old Alonzo Swain, had been all over the whole county and knew the name of every mountain, hill, and rise, but he’d never heard of Brushy Mountain. Colvin asked several old-timers, patients of his who’d lived in Newton County all their long lives and done some traveling all over the county’s back brush, and one very old man said that he’d been there, many years ago, but had been drunk at the time, so he couldn’t even draw a map, and all he knew was that it was somewhere east of Stay More, east of Spunkwater too, up toward Mount Judea. Colvin checked with Postmaster Willis Ingledew on the possibility that there might even be a post office of that name, “Brushy Mountain,” but there wasn’t. Finally Colvin overcame his prejudice against Jasper to venture into the county seat and inquire at the tax assessor’s office. B. E. Greenhaw, the assessor, consulted his maps and his plats and his rolls and his records, and found a Dry Brush Fork and a Bushart Holler, but no Brushy Mountain. Driving his buggy away from the courthouse, Colvin passed the pretty little white cottage where Venda lived, and there she was, sitting on her porch swing, and she saw him, and began beckoning like mad, trying to get him to come join her, but he just lowered his head and drove on.

One day Colvin got a postcard from Tenny. All it said was a question: “Dear Colvin. What do you call the disease of being unable to dream? Your Tenny.” There was no return address. The postmark was Mount Judea, so Colvin decided to just send a letter addressed to her General Delivery at Mount Judea, and he wrote and rewrote it five or six times before he was satisfied with it. He told her there was no word in the medical dictionary for such a condition, so he would have to coin a word, oneiresia, loss of the power to dream, a word just for her and her temporary (he hoped) condition. He told her that he was awfully sorry that their romantic rendezvous in that dream had been trespassed upon by an uninvited interloper, Venda Breedlove. He explained that even though Mrs. Breedlove had been as naked as the day she was born, there had not been any actual intercourse between them. He suggested that Tenny ought to try drinking some butterfly weed tea before bedtime to help her relax, and allow herself to dream again, and if she could do that, Colvin would be glad to join her, and they could pick up where they’d left off before they’d been so rudely interrupted. He said that if she still couldn’t dream, just send him some kind of little map to show how to get to her house, and he’d rush right up there and handle all her problems in person in broad daylight. He said that he sure did care for her more than he’d ever cared for anybody, and he thought she was the most wonderful person who ever lived. He mailed this off, and waited, unable to do anything else for five days, until his letter was returned to the Stay More Post Office marked in a postmaster’s crude scrawl “ADRESSY ONKNOWEN,” and Piney, picking up the day’s mail, asked him who Tennessee Tennison was. He took his letter, tossed it into a pile of papers on his desk, and said it was just some student who’d tried to get her grade changed.

The summer was almost gone before it eventually dawned on Colvin that we don’t need to know the exact location of a place to reach it in our dreams. All those years he’d been obliged to practice the dream cure, when patients were no longer actually coming to his clinic, nor even sending messengers there to summon him to their homes, he had been venturing to all sorts of locations to treat the various dream patients. He had delivered babies on rooftops and tree limbs, and removed tonsils in streambeds and caves. He had performed cystoscopies while riding backwards on a galloping horse, and had set more than one broken bone while floating in the air. Seldom if ever would he have been able to say, “I’m two miles eastwards on Banty Creek” or “I’m about to enter Jesse Dinsmore’s place.” Locations don’t matter in dreams.

So one night at bedtime he decided he’d have more energy for the journey ahead if he refrained from sex, and he gently told Piney to keep her nightdress down because he had a headache. Instead of mounting him, she stroked his temples with her fingertips, which made him feel guilty for lying but also put him right to sleep. The way was dark, and long, and bent with many strange turnings. He didn’t even try to heed forks in the road, nor look for any signs or landmarks. All he had to go by was Tenny’s talk about the place during her lollipop sessions; the cabin faced westward, high on Brushy Mountain, and it had tomato crates stacked in the front yard to make crude pews for the Pentecostal services. After a long arduous climb through the mist, Colvin eventually came to such a place, on the western bench of a lofty mountain covered with the brush of red cedar and blackjack oak, and he was accosted by an old hound dog who might have been the one Tenny had told him about, but the dog wasn’t wearing pants. His male organ was clearly visible. As dogs are supposed to do, the hound barked to alert the occupants of the house, and a man appeared.

From Tenny’s description, Colvin realized the man, in his late fifties, had to be Wayne Don Tennison, but Colvin politely inquired anyway if this was the Tennison place. The man nodded. I’m Colvin Swain, from over to Stay More, he said, and I’d like a word with yore darter, who was my pupil at the Newton County Academy.

The man made a gesture toward the very top of the mountain, a lofty crag, and said, Passel akimbo gondola armadillo bodacious oregano now, also enchilada asafetida lally-gaggin mezzo-soprano worryword.

Colvin stared in the direction the man was pointing but couldn’t see anything except the peak, obscured by clouds. Colvin gave his head a shake, to clear his hearing, and said, I shore am sorry, but I din’t catch a word ye said. Wal, maybe one or two words, but they didn’t make ary bit of sense.

Yes, violincello hacienda cabala guano jillikens, the man said, incunabula zero formula cicada antihero sang root lashins and lavins armada lambda pagoda missingmyth.

Colvin realized two things at once: the man was not speaking English, nor, despite certain Spanish and other Latinate words, any understandable language; and the man was not now pointing at the mountain peak but was motioning for Colvin to go. I jist wanted to see Tenny for a minute, Colvin pled, to explain something to her and find out if she’s all right.

But the man more dramatically motioned for Colvin to depart the premises, and angrily intoned, Memoranda dobbers cymlin gigolo, corrigenda lolliper adagio hoopla!

Tenny came rushing out of the house and grabbed her father’s arm, saying, Daddy, let me talk to him! But Tenny had aged something terrible! She looked like she was pushing forty, and her beautiful long hair was cut short, and Colvin wanted to cry, “My God! What have they done to you?” but she took his arm and led him away from the house, and out of earshot of her father. She said, The old fart is jist talkin in tongues and he don’t even know what he’s sayin. Then she looked him up and down, saying, So you’re Colvin Swain, air ye? I’ve heared tell the most marvelous things about ye. But also the most horrible things. She offered him her hand. I’m Oriole Eubanks, Tenny’s older sister. One of ’em, anyhow. Redbird’s coming soon—she lives way off up to Kansas City now, though she din’t marry the least bit better than I did, ’cause Jerry Bob Eubanks owns the biggest insurance agency in northwest Arkansas, I’ll have ye to know. He couldn’t come with me. Too busy. I done been here two weeks, tryin my best to help baby sister, but I done all I could and I’m a-hankerin to git on back to Springdale.

What’s wrong with her? Colvin demanded.

Oh, jist real bad heartsick, I reckon, Oriole said. Of course she had a bunch of ailments that Maw and Granny helped her with, nothing too serious—summer cold, costiveness, vapors, hip-swinney. But mainly she’s jist reached the age where it’s time for her to git married, and the only feller in this whole wide world that she wants to marry is you, and if we’re not mistaken, you’ve already got a wife. So there. That’s it. Pure and simple. Oriole paused for breath, then examined him more critically, and asked, You aint by any chance thinkin about leavin yore wife, air ye?

What could Colvin say? Sure, he had given it some thought, but could not admit, even to himself, that he had been thinking about it. So all he could say was, Not any time soon. I was sort of hoping to give Tenny a chance to git grown up, and finish school, and all.

Git growed up? Oriole snorted. Aint she growed enough fer ye already? I tell ye, if I’d had her face and figure when I was sixteen, I’d of had ever man in the state of Arkansas tryin to lead me to the altar. Well, I din’t do so bad, with Jerry Bob, but many’s the time I’ve thought it wasn’t fair that God would give such good looks to jist one gal without spreadin it around! And caint none of us understand why a girl as beautiful as her hasn’t already had gobs and mobs of fellers proposin to her. Is there somethin wrong with her we don’t know about? You’re her doctor. Does she have some fatal disease that we don’t know about that’s scared off all of the fellers that might want her for a wife?

All Colvin could think to say was, Tenny’s a goddess, I reckon, and all men are afraid of divinity.

Huh? Oriole said. Well, it aint funny. Maw and Daddy has even went to see this fortune-tellin woman, Cassie Whitter, who lives way back up on yon mountain, to ask her how to find a man for Tenny.

Well? Colvin said impatiently, for he knew Cassie Whitter. What did she have to say?

Oriole took his arm and directed his attention to the mountain peak, rising up from one end of Brushy Mountain, that Wayne Don had been gesturing at. See that crag yonder? Oriole said. Wal, Tenny’s jist a-sittin up there in a black dress, and I’ll tell ye why. The fortune-teller Cassie Whitter, Oriole explained, had done her “reading” of Tenny’s future and had at first refused to tell Wayne Don and Jonette what she had discovered. Wayne Don would not leave Cassie’s cabin until she told him; Wayne Don promised he would “camp out” there forever and speak in tongues all day long until Cassie told him. She finally gave in. “Hit wouldn’t do no good,” Cassie said, “to hope for her to have a ordinary husband. You mought as well dress her in a black wedding gown with a black veil and leave her alone on some mountaintop, to see who would come along and take her. Whatever bridegroom she gits is bound to be a freak, maybe a double-headed monster, a pale rider on a pale horse.” That’s all they could get out of Cassie, and they came back home sorely perplexed, because they didn’t know any neighbors who had pale horses, let alone any freakish neighbors, except Clint McCutcheon, who was an albino, which made him pale all right, but his horse was a spotted Appaloosa, not white. And they’d never heard of black wedding gowns, or any other color for that matter, because both Jonette and her mother, Tennessee, had been married in ordinary dresses—fancy dresses, to be sure, but not gowns. The only black garment for women in the household was a sateen wrapper that Tennessee McArtor had ordered from Sears Roebuck to wear to the funeral of her husband, Ray. But it was black, and it could be made to fit Tenny. So Tenny had been up there all day on that mountaintop in that black dress, waiting to see what pale rider would come along on a pale horse, maybe with two heads, the rider, that is, not the horse, but come to think of it, maybe the horse would have two heads too.

Colvin began running toward the mountaintop. You aint got no pale horse! Oriole called after him, but he kept running, wishing he had any color of horse, so he could get there faster. That mountain peak was a long way up there, and mostly obscured by mist. He was tired out, and had to slow to a walk and even sit down and rest a bit during the steepest parts of the climb.

At last he heard singing. He recognized, coming from far away, Tenny’s lovely soprano voice. He stood still and tried to make out the words, identify the song. But there were no words. It was not even like her father’s babble. It was just pure notes, rising and falling, not meant to say anything but only to chant, or to carol, some wordless expression of a feeling he could recognize from having read Robert Burton: kindly melancholy, a mixture of yearning, wanting, hoping, desire, with maybe a tinge of loss and bewilderment. It was an incredibly beautiful song, and it made Colvin’s skin break out in goose bumps, and an enormous shiver to run up his spine.

The singing gave him the strength to make one last determined effort to climb the mountain, and finally he came in sight of her, standing on the foggy peak with her arms wrapped around herself and her face lifted to the sky, singing that heartbreaking chant. Black did not become her, and he wanted to grab her and take her home and put her into a pretty dress, and marry her himself if he had to. Tenny! he called to her so that she would look down at him.

“Who’s Tenny?” Piney asked.

He stared into his wife’s eyes until he knew that he had lost his way out of the dream. For a moment he was tempted to answer Piney’s question, to confess his love for his student, to express to someone who could understand (and Piney understood everything) his love and his concern and his great uneasiness and even fear over that prophecy of Cassie Whitter’s. He knew who the Pale Rider was, and the meaning of the Pale Horse. He was surprised that Wayne Don Tennison, a minister of the Gospel, even if a Holy Roller, was not familiar with the sixth chapter of Revelation. Was Tenny still, at this moment, on that mountain crag? Colvin became more desperate than ever to reach her, but Piney would not let him go back into his dream again. “Aw, I was jist dreamin of buying you a pianer,” he said. “We was gone plumb to Little Rock to shop for pianers, and I kept turnin down one or another, this’un sounded too scratchy, and that’un was too twangy, or tinny. I was jist rejectin that tinny pianer when you woke me up.”

Maybe Piney didn’t believe that, but it was the best he could do. He got up, dressed, had breakfast, and told her it was time he paid his respects on old Kie Raney. He wasn’t lying, either. But instead of hitching Nessus to the buggy, he went down the road to Ingledew’s Livery and asked Willis Ingledew if he had any pale horses. There was a kind of off-white or dirty-white palfrey named Lampon, and Colvin rented her and rode her as fast as she would go to the cave where he had grown up, in the woods above Spunkwater. Nothing had changed. It was almost as if he were sixteen again, Tenny’s age, the age he “graduated” from Kie’s preceptorship. And Kie hadn’t changed a bit either. He bashfully shook hands with his former foster son and protégé and invited him to sit down and tell his whole life story since he’d left the cave at sixteen. But Colvin apologized, saying he was really in a terrible hurry, and he’d stop back later on to explain, but right now all he wanted was to know if by any chance Kie Raney might know the location of Brushy Mountain. Kie had to scratch what remained of his hair for a long time. “I aint been on Brushy Mountain since I helped a granny woman deliver a breech baby, oh, nigh on to sixty year ago. McArtors they were.” Colvin begged Kie Raney to try and remember where Brushy Mountain was and tell him how to get there.

The directions that Kie gave him were similar to those he had followed in his dream, and he recognized some of the boulders and lightning-struck trees and waterfalls that he had seen in his dream journey. But real journeys are always longer and harder than dream ones, and poor Lampon was tired and worn out by the time Colvin finally reached Brushy Mountain, and he realized he might have to dismount in order to climb up to the crag where Tenny was…if she was. He thought he’d best stop at the house to say howdy and ask if Tenny was still up there.

“Now that shore is a kind of a pale horse,” Oriole said, smiling. “But you aint very pale yoreself, and you got only one head.”

“Howdy,” Colvin said. “How’s ever little thing? Everbody feelin okay?”

“Maw’s got some bad chest pains,” Oriole said, “if you’d care to look her over.”

“Later, maybe. I got to git on up to the mountaintop to see about Tenny.”

“She aint there no more. That real pale horse and that real pale rider done come and got her.”

Colvin was stricken. “You don’t mean to tell me. You don’t mean she…she didn’t depart, did she?”

“She departed down to Jasper, which is where the feller finally took her. She knew him, of course, or we wouldn’t’ve asked him to spend the night, and Daddy wouldn’t’ve allowed her to ride off with him this morning. She knew the pale horse too. Named Malengro or Menargo or something.”

“Marengo,” Colvin said. Then he said, “Russ Breedlove!”

“You know the feller? Aint he a sight to behold? Maw and Granny is still swoonin over what a looker he is, and I tell ye, I’m tempted to up and leave Jerry Bob myself and see if I caint git Russ to notice me!”

Colvin was a mite perplexed. “You folks just allowed the boy to swoop down and git her and take her off like that?”

“He was wearin a white shirt,” Oriole declared. “And when he spent the night with us, I talked Tenny into spying on him while he slept, and sure enough, he is a kind of a freak, if not a monster. But despite filling the bill all we could hope for, he claimed he wasn’t comin to git her for hisself. Naw. His momma had sent him. That’s Tenny’s music teacher, Miz Breedlove, and she tole her boy Russ to say that she wanted to give Tenny some private lessons for her voice if Tenny would care to just come stay with her in Jasper, until school started. So Tenny just packed up her school clothes and her books and all, and off they went.”

“Voice lessons?” Colvin said, more to himself than to Oriole.

Wayne Don Tennison came out of the house, and said to Colvin, “Kimono ambeer pudenda? Albino chaunk rotunda? Halo silo solo!”

“I think he wants to show you his snake collection,” Oriole translated. “Or else he’s inviting you to stay to dinner, one.”

Colvin stayed to dinner, the womenfolk not sitting down at the table until after he and Wayne Don had finished eating, as was the custom. Then Wayne Don took Colvin to look at his collection of rattlesnakes, copperheads, and water moccasins, and Colvin petted the reptiles and made appreciative remarks. Jonette Tennison, Tenny’s momma, hoped the doctor would take a quick look at her chest pains, and Colvin examined her and determined she had heartburn, which, he attempted to explain, could not be helped by the Dr. Potter’s Heart Tonic she was dosing herself with, because it had nothing to do with the heart but was caused by a hiatus hernia, for which he prescribed rest, six meals a day rather than three, and the avoidance of coffee, tea, and Heart Tonic.

Throughout this business, Colvin was asking himself if he’d want to have Wayne Don and Jonette as his father-and mother-in-law. He decided they weren’t any worse than Piney’s folks, and he kind of liked Oriole. She was okay. Finally taking his leave, and asking how to find the road to Jasper, he said he expected he would be seeing all of them again.

But Lampon, he discovered, was in no condition to carry him the long way into Jasper, so, impatient as he was, he reluctantly decided to return the palfrey to Ingledew’s Livery, wait until the next day, and take Nessus with the buggy into Jasper.

“Hon,” Piney asked, “are you feeling all right? You don’t seem to have been yourself lately.” Colvin tried to assure her that he was “jist fine,” which was his favorite expression for everything in the world. “Well, I’ve been thinking,” she said, “about what you dreamt. You know, getting me a piano. I think it would be very nice to have a good piano, if we can find one that isn’t tinny.”

Colvin coughed. “I don’t know if we could afford one,” he said. “To pay for a good piano, I’d most likely have to teach another year at Parthenon.”

“Wouldn’t you want to do that?” she said, in such a way that he knew she knew that he’d been thinking about it.

“Wal, I reckon I’d best run up there and see if they still want me,” he said.

So he would use that as an excuse to leave for Jasper the next day at dawn. That night he had a dream in which it seemed that Tenny was calling for him; she was somewhere out of sight trying to contact him, so he went out looking for her. He went to Venda’s house, and Venda was sprawled out sound asleep and naked and inviting on her bed, but the other bed in the house had neither Tenny nor Russ in it. He tried the Academy, drifting around through the girls’ dormitory and the classroom building, but she wasn’t there. Next, he visited their enchanted-forest trysting place, and the four-poster was still there, although covered with dust and pine needles, and some birds, tufted titmice, had built their nest on the Garden Butterfly quilt, but there was no sign that Tenny had been there for quite some time. Yet he could clearly hear her calling his name, and he called back, “Where are you, Tenny?” Piney asked him if he was still shopping for pianos.

The next day, he left ostensibly for Parthenon but he didn’t stop at the Newton County Academy. He drove his buggy on to Jasper, and pulled up in front of the little white cottage off the square where Venda Breedlove lived. He just sat there for a while, studying the house and wondering if his darling were actually inside. If so, which room?

Venda stepped out onto her porch, dressed in her house robe, with her hair up in curlers, and holding a cup of coffee. “Good mornin, precious,” she said. “I’ve been expectin ye. Climb down and have you a cup of coffee with me.”

Following her to her kitchen, he saw that there were only two bedrooms, and both were empty. “My first question is,” he said, sitting down at her kitchen table with the cup of coffee she poured for him, “not where is she, but how did you find out the whereabouts of Brushy Mountain? You tole me you didn’t know.”

“There are some men in this town who can tell you anything if you ask ’em right,” she said, and winked at him.

“Okay, then, my second question is: where is she?”

“It’s Saturday, did you notice?” she said. “On weekends, Russ has to go and stay with his daddy, over on the other side of town.”

“So what’s that got to do with Tenny?”

“So Russ took her to meet his daddy. My ex, you know, Mulciber, is a fine, upstandin, solid citzen, not only the best blacksmith in the country but also the Jasper Fire Chief. Even if he was a son of a bitch to me, he don’t deserve to live all by hisself, and he’s been kind of lonesome ever since he threw me out. Russ and me figured that maybe Tenny could cheer him up or something. Who knows? Her folks want to git her married off, and Mulciber’s jist about the most eligible bachelor in town.”

“Ding blast it!” Colvin exclaimed, outraged. “Why, the way I heared it, Mulce is the ugliest old galoot in the country, and so crippled he can hardly walk. What would Tenny want with a gimpy freak like that?”

Venda touched him under his chin to make their eyes meet, and said, “Women don’t always git what they want, in this world.”

Her double meaning wasn’t lost on him. “Did you jist cook up this scheme so you could git me away from her?” he demanded. She only smiled, and began taking the curlers out of her hair. “You didn’t really bring her to Jasper to give her voice lessons, now did ye?” he insisted, but she wouldn’t deny it or confirm it. “But didn’t it occur to you,” he wanted to know, “that you’d be a-punishing that pore gal to fix her up with the likes of Mulciber Breedlove?” Venda just went on smiling and removing the rest of the curlers from her hair. “What has Tenny done to you, that you’d want to punish her?” he asked. Venda took a hairbrush and began to brush her golden hair. “Has she offended you because she’s so young and fine and sweet to behold?” he asked, standing to confront her and setting down his coffee cup. Venda opened her house robe, revealing that she had nothing beneath it. He could not take his eyes off her mons veneris, and it was almost as if he were addressing his next question to it: “What I’d like to know is: if she must’ve hated you for jumping into her four-poster with me like ye done, and thought of you as her rival or enemy, how did you make friends with her so fast? What did you get Russ to say to her to persuade her to come here?” Venda came to him and gave him one of those kisses where the tongue too comes into play. He hadn’t ever had one of those kind before, and his corpora cavernosa nearly hemorrhaged. He tried to push her away, but she dropped to her knees and clawed at his fly until she had it open and could get her hands inside. She brought him out and swallowed him. Then she very slowly unswallowed him, and he forgot the next question he was going to ask her. He wasn’t getting any answers to his questions, anyway. But he began to remember this question, because it was an important one: “Did you trouble yourself to explain to Tenny that you hadn’t been invited to that four-poster of hers, and that you and me weren’t really fucking?” Venda couldn’t answer, because her mouth was full, but she gave her head a vigorous shake, which bent his cavernosa ever which way. Colvin had never felt sexual excitement like this before, and while he knew that the busy activity of her lips and tongue and whole mouth was the main cause of it, he knew that there had to be another reason, and he asked her, “Did you put something into my coffee?” She could only nod her head energetically, which pained his pecker somewhat, because it was so stiff it wouldn’t bend down. “What?” he wanted to know. She managed to mutter some syllables which, for all he could tell, were cream and sugar. “Spanish fly?” he asked. She shook her head, which wobbled his pecker. “Ginseng?” he asked. Another shake and wobble. “A drop of menstrual blood?” he asked. She giggled while shaking her head; the giggles tickled his frenulum. “Snakeroot? Mandrake? Yarrow? Mistletoe? Dodder? Wasp nests? Coon bone? Horse spleen? Powdered heart of roasted hummingbird?” He ran through the whole catalog of known aphrodisiac substances, but she just kept on shaking her head, in between thrusting it forward and drawing it back. He had never realized that the muscles of a woman’s neck would allow such a variety of lively movements. He was determined to remain true to Tenny, but there is no resistance against whatever chemical substance Venda had concocted for him, and he was in her power. He could only follow eagerly when she wrapped her hand around his pecker to make it into a leash, and led him off to her bedroom. The bed wasn’t a four-poster, but that was okay.

For the rest of the morning, Venda allowed Colvin to exist without a single thought of Tenny. At noon he had no physical appetite remaining but he was hungry, so she fed him dinner, pork chops and corn on the cob and a big glass of buttermilk, into which she probably put another ten or twenty micrograms of whatever private stock love potion she was using, so that without even waiting for him to digest his meal she took him back to bed for the rest of the afternoon. Again he had no thought of Tenny, and his only thought of Piney was a reflection upon those times, years before, when Piney in her eagerness to conceive again had depleted entirely Colvin’s reserves of “seed-juice,” but it had taken her several days and nights to do it, and now Venda had drained him empty in just a matter of hours. He was bone-dry, and tried to call this fact to Venda’s attention, but she said, “You can still explode even if ye caint shoot off, cain’t you?” And she was right; if anything, each successive orgasm was more paroxysmal than the one before, and he was beginning to amaze himself at the way his whole body shook and shuddered at the moment of unproductive ejaculation. “Thirty-seven,” Venda remarked after one particularly violent explosion had left him so limp that he could only lie there as if in a coma. He thought she was revealing her age to him, and he wanted to assure her that even though that was a year older than he was, he didn’t mind. But then she explained, “You’ve done come thirty-seven times,” and she smiled beatifically, adding, “but I’ve come seventy-one, myself.” He allowed as how he didn’t think mortal human beings were capable of that many, and therefore they must be either inhuman or immortal, one. He told Venda that if she would reveal to him the ingredients of whatever love potion she had used on him, they could both get rich bottling the stuff and putting it on the market. She just laughed and said, “And then any hussy could use it. Do you think I’d let any woman other than me ever git a-holt of it?”

“Wal, you’d better pour me another little drap of it,” he suggested.

“How about some good whiskey for a chaser?” she offered, and jumped out of bed long enough to mix him a drink.

It was real fine whiskey, better than Chism’s Dew, and possibly even bottled in the bond. And she must have been generous in lacing it, because his tired, sore, scrubbed old jemmison, which looked as if it had leprosy, commenced to unbend and rise yet again, and Venda helped it along with some more of her mouth music, saying, “I bet ye didn’t know I could yodel.” If that’s what you call it, her yodeling gave his corpora cavermosa a transfusion. Pretty soon, they were at it again, plunging and bucking, grunting and squealing, lifting and floating, galloping and trotting, you never saw anything like it, nor had they. Colvin realized that not only were his testicles empty but so were his lungs; he had used up all his breath, and didn’t have enough of it to keep going. Venda herself was nearly all out of breath too, but she had at least enough to get on top and keep bouncing her bottom, and she still had some strength left in those powerful vaginal muscles of hers that were milking his jemmison, and he hoped that she could keep going just another minute, which was all he needed to have the biggest burst he’d ever had…

He happened to glance over and notice that there was a couple of folks sitting in straight-backed chairs beside the doorway, watching them. One of them was this woman’s very own offspring, a young man name of Russ. The other one was Colvin’s very own true love, a young lady name of Tenny. Such a situation had all the earmarks of a dream, or perhaps even a nightmare, but it was still unclabbered broad daylight. Russ had a big grin on his face like he was really having fun watching his naked mother squatting atop a chemically elongated pecker. Tenny’s mouth had formed itself into that perfect O which was the envy of all her O-named classmates, and she was resting the fingers of one hand, on which she wore that amethyst gold ring, alongside her cheek, as if in astonishment. But both of them were just sitting there, watching. Venda hadn’t noticed, she was trying so hard to reach number seventy-two. After recovering from the first reflex jerk of surprise, Colvin realized that it was simply too late to make any pretense. It was clear to even a blind and deaf person who still retained a sense of smell that some real fucking was going on in this room. And to a person, or two of them, like Russ and Tenny, who could see and hear as well as smell, there was no fooling whatsoever. Colvin was so close to number thirty-eight that he figured he might as well just keep on keeping on, so he did, but he closed his eyes out of some sort of politeness, as if by shutting her out of his vision he might be sparing her a little of spectacle. Venda went wild as she arrived within reach of her climax, and she reached mightily for it, and got it, and commenced yodeling again, but in a different key from when she’d had a mouthful.

Colvin didn’t even have enough breath to sigh, let alone utter anything, but he used the last of his strength to thrust so hard into her that when he came back down the bed slats busted and the whole bed came crashing to the floor.

Have I made up for yesterday? Yesterday I sent you away frustrated with the interrupted telling of the first attempt of Colvin and Tenny to make love. Today I’ve just managed to tell you the single most intense, sustained, and repeated bout of sex that I’ve ever collected, as if to atone for yesterday’s short-coming. I ought to wait until tomorrow to say what happened next, but I expect you’ll be coming back again anyhow. And tomorrow we’re going to have to get real serious.

So let’s clean up here, first: Venda and Colvin just lay there on the mattress where it had crashed to the floor, and it took both of them a long time to recover their breathing abilities. During that time, Colvin could only stare woefully at Tenny and shrug his shoulders and spread his hands as if trying to communicate by sign language that he wasn’t responsible for whatever he’d just been doing. Finally Venda sucked in a big draught of air and got her eyes working, and discovered that they had an audience, and cried her son’s name. The audience, both of them, began to clap, first Russ and then Tenny timidly followed his example.

Then Russ and Tenny exchanged the merest of glances before getting up from their chairs and rushing out. The courthouse was conveniently just down the street, and they went in and got a marriage license and found a justice of the peace and had themselves declared man and wife before sundown.

Chapter eight

Is it raining out? I can’t see it but I think I can hear it. Mary Celestia, because her bed’s yonder by the window, is the self-appointed Regulator of the Blinds, an irony that won’t be lost on you, and she prefers to keep ’em closed because even though she’s blind the light hurts her eyes. So I can’t watch the rain, if that’s what’s falling out there. I shall never again see the dogwood bloom nor watch the red-horse shoal. But I can still see and hear and smell all the Ozark rains that ever fell in my life, and I can feel the ones that fell on me, and I could tell you the difference between an early summer rain, such as what’s falling out there now, and a late summer rain, which was what commenced deluging the village of Jasper before Tenny and Russ left that courthouse where they got married. You know of course that in the Ozarks it was considered the best possible omen for a good downpour to fall on a funeral, since it meant that the dead man’s soul was at rest, and even a few drops of rain at a funeral were more comfort to the bereaved family than anything the preacher man could say. Every Ozarker knew the little verse:

Happy is the bride that the sun shines on;

Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on.

And it was felt, therefore, that rainy weather on a wedding day is nothing short of calamitous. Russ and Tenny had planned to get on Marengo and ride back up to Brushy Mountain for the first night of their honeymoon, and the shivaree and infare and all, and so Tenny could say to her folks, “Well, I went ahead and got myself hitched like y’uns wanted me to. Are you happy now?” But they could only huddle miserably in the doorway of the courthouse and watch that toad-strangling pourdown. Leastways that old courthouse, plain and simple as it was, built in the first years of the century out of humble rough limestone, somehow had a little classical pediment over that doorway, and that was what Colvin noticed when he went out in his buggy looking for them. He just sat there in the open buggy with his clothes already soaked plumb through and through, and the lightning crashing down too close for comfort, and the thunder reverberating from wall to wall of those mountains that surround the little town, and he observed how the young couple had that Greek pediment over their heads as if the triangle was protecting them from the storm. They didn’t wave at him, and he didn’t wave at them, but he began to understand what they had done, going to that courthouse. Why else would a young couple go to the courthouse? Not to pay their taxes, nor to serve on a jury.

Now I suppose some day if you’ll try to turn all of this into a novel, you’ll want to know some of the facts about the situation that I haven’t yet offered. So maybe you need to know Russ Breedlove a little better, not that it would change your opinion of him, but it would help you understand why he and Tenny done what they did, or did what they done. What little we know about him so far is that he was seventeen years old and was about to be a sophomore at Newton County Academy, where he was considered the best-looking boy. We know that the principal, Jossie, had remarked that Russ and Tenny ought to make a pair, because they both had the same habit of trying to see how much they could get away with. He was mischievous, audacious, even bodacious. Tenny herself was known to refer to him as “an eternal boy,” and while she might just have meant he’d always be a male or masculine, she could’ve also meant that he’d never grow up. He was charming but cruel, with maybe a sadistic streak in him: one of his favorite pastimes was catching butterflies and striking sulfur matches to hold beneath them and watch them burn, the slower the better. The biggest difference between him and Tenny was that she had the highest grades at the Academy, and he had the lowest, not because he was stupid but because he just didn’t give a damn about school.

He was from a broken home, which was a rare situation in the Ozarks, where divorce was practically unknown. We’ve seen that his mother, all the years he was growing up, was too busy fooling around with men to give him much attention, although she really did adore him. That time she first seduced young Donny Kilgore and left little Russ alone to play with his bow and arrow, she didn’t know that Russ followed her and spied on them and that was the first of many “primal scenes” he witnessed between his momma and different men, culminating in the one with Colvin. And during that first primal scene he made an astonishing discovery: Donny Kilgore had only one pecker. For quite some time thereafter, until Venda took up with another man and Russ could spy on that man and discover that he too had only one pecker, Russ considered Donny Kilgore a freak or a cripple, one. Russ wanted to ask his mother if maybe Donny had got one of his peckers cut off in an accident or something, but to do that would be to admit to his mother that he had been spying. Russ had reached puberty himself when he discovered that all those years, even while she was having her torrid affair with Donny Kilgore, his mother had been screwing Uncle Marty Breedlove, Mulciber’s brother, and that possibly even Uncle Marty was his real father, or at least his co-father, along with Mulciber. Russ began to wonder—and would continue to wonder, until he had a chance to ask his hygiene teacher, Doc Swain, about it—if it were possible that his having two fathers was the reason he had two peckers, and that Mulciber was the progenitor of one of his peckers and Uncle Marty of the other one.

When his mother was fooling around with Uncle Marty, Russ liked to put on the army uniform that Marty had taken off and dress up with it, pistol and all, while he watched his momma and Uncle Marty move through every possible coital position and commit every conceivable sexual act. When eventually Russ considered his visual education complete, and was growing bored with both watching their behavior and dressing up in the captain’s uniform, he told his mother that he knew about her and Marty and would tell Mulciber about it unless she would do with him what she had done with Marty and Donny and everybody else. Venda tried to explain to him that mothers aren’t supposed to do it with their own boys, and therefore she simply couldn’t, not that she didn’t want to, because she adored Russ, and if he weren’t her son she would screw him blind. Her refusal made Russ tell his father, or co-father, Mulciber, that his uncle, or other co-father, Marty, was screwing his wife, and, as we’ve already seen, Mulciber caught them and beat them up and put a stop to all that, and threw Venda out of the house.

When Venda went away to that Shenandoah Music School and took Russ with her, in her loneliness she listened more sympathetically to Russ’s constant requests to be permitted to sleep with her or at least have her get rid of his virginity. He talked of practically nothing else, unless it was to express lewd desires about any other female who came within his line of sight. She jokingly told him that he was practically the embodiment of carnal lust, but she still hadn’t said a word to him about the exceptional circumstance of his having two peckers. He pestered her so much that finally she agreed to let him feel her breasts. This of course gave him an erection, or rather a pair of them, which, she told him, were called “hard-ons,” and she allowed as how it might not be too awfully wicked if she just used her two hands to make him come, and thereby started the practice, or the arrangement, that continued through the first year at Newton County Academy. She never did tell him that he was abnormal for having two peckers; she acted as if using her two hands to bring him off was just a natural thing that she did every day just as every day he helped her with her grooming and dressing, her hair and makeup and all. She just assumed that he would want both of his peckers to shoot off simultaneously, and that was her goal, although occasionally, since she was left-handed, his right pecker sometimes got off before the left one did. Ever so often, about once a week on the average, he would beg her to let him stick his peckers into her, but she would just tell him that was something that wasn’t permitted. She never tried to explain to him that it was anatomically unlikely, or anything like that; she just said it wasn’t “allowed” or “approved” or “permitted.”

Although he hated his classes at Newton County Academy, and would flunk Latin and barely pass English and math, he would achieve a C in hygiene because the subject interested him and because he liked his teacher, Doc Swain, and would never forget the little talk he’d had with Doc Swain on the first day of school, when the doctor was examining everybody and Doc Swain did not act surprised to discover that Russ had two penises. Doc Swain admitted that it was exceptional, quite rare in fact, but he didn’t tell Russ that he was abnormal, let alone a freak. “They call it diphallus,” Doc Swain had told him, making it sound not like a disease but a way of life, and said that some ignorant scientists refer to these cases as diphallic terata, implying that they are monstrosities, but, while they are certainly curiosities, they are nothing to be ashamed of. Doc Swain told of some other known diphallic young men in faraway places with names like Cuba and Scotland and New Jersey, and he said that the prevalence of the condition was about one case in five million, meaning that there were at least twenty other fellers in the United States with the same condition. Russ was thrilled to learn this. Doc Swain asked him several questions of a personal nature, such as whether he was able to urinate through both (he was), and whether erections occurred simultaneously (they did), and if there was bilateral ejaculation (Russ didn’t understand what this meant, but after Doc Swain rephrased it in plain English, without implicating Russ’s mother, Russ admitted that, yes, generally he bilaterally ejaculated). Doc Swain clapped him on the shoulder and said, “Wal, son, I wouldn’t worry about having an extry one, if I was you, but if it ever causes you too much trouble I could always cut one of ’em off fer ye.” Doc had laughed to let him know that he might’ve been just kidding, but Russ wasn’t too sure, and every time he saw Doc Swain in hygiene class, he remembered the suggestion and brooded about the possibility of having himself unilaterally emasculated. He kept wondering why it might be necessary, especially after they got to the chapter on reproduction and the pictures including some poor girl’s whole cut-away bottom end with all those tunnels and tubes and cavities up in there, making it clear that there were plenty of places he could stick both of his peckers.

He wasn’t the only one who liked Doc Swain. Russ’s momma talked about Doc Swain all the time. Russ had to listen to her, during the daily ride to and from school on Marengo, and at the supper table, and even at bedtime. If Russ had begun to bore his mother with his constant talk about wanting to stick his peckers into her, she had begun to bore him with her constant hints that the only pecker she ever again wanted into her was Doc Swain’s, and Russ thought Doc Swain must have a colossal pecker or an awfully handsome one, because Doc Swain himself wasn’t especially good-looking. To hear his mother tell it, Doc Swain was the greatest man who ever lived, and if his momma had her way about it—and she usually had her way about everything—Doc Swain was going to become her next lover, if not her husband for life, the latter possibility hampered by the fact that Doc Swain already had a wife somewhere, not that he ever mentioned her. It embarrassed Russ to watch his momma flirting with Doc Swain, more even than he had been embarrassed watching her fucking with various other men. And his momma was becoming so preoccupied with Doc Swain that she was beginning to neglect Russ again. Sometimes she might go for a whole week before remembering that he had not one but two hard-ons that needed attention.

His mother’s unrequited absorption with Doc Swain became matched eventually by the vehemence of her jealousy toward Tenny Tennison, the prettiest of all Russ’s classmates and the one girl whose very presence, even from a distance of a hundred yards, would give Russ hard-ons. It took Russ a while to realize that his mother was so madly jealous of Tenny not because Tenny gave Russ hard-ons but because Tenny was somehow preventing Doc Swain from reciprocating his mother’s lust for him. Russ didn’t understand why Doc Swain would want Tenny, who was probably a virgin and didn’t know anything, when Doc could have the beautiful, experienced, and most desirable Venda just for the asking, and this gave Russ an ambivalent feeling toward his much-admired physician/teacher: while he couldn’t help envying Doc Swain because of his mother’s lust for him, he also resented Doc Swain because Doc was not making Russ’s mother happy.

Even after school had let out for the summer, his mother got worse instead of better. “You and me have got to find us some way to ruin that gal Tenny,” she told him one summer’s day. “And I mean ruin her.” She studied Russ’s face intently while an idea slowly crept into her mind, and then she grabbed Russ and gave him a kiss on the mouth. Russ had succeeded in achieving mouth-kisses with Olga and Orva and Orlena and Ohio, but those Baptist girls had always kept their lips tight together and considered the kiss finished in not more than three seconds. Now Russ’s momma parted her lips and brought her tongue out and stuck it into his mouth and wrapped it around his own tongue, and his two peckers swole so much they commenced bumping into each other. After a long while, she broke the kiss and said, “Do ye like that? Russ honey dearest, if you really like me and want a bunch more kisses like that, I want you to go up to Brushy Mountain and git Tenny Tennison and bring her down to meet your father, and I want you to git ’em together and keep ’em together. Git the idee?” Russ said he knew his father wasn’t much of a looker, in fact, he didn’t mind saying that Mulciber was the ugliest wretch he’d ever laid eyes on, and he wasn’t very confident that such a pretty young thing like Tenny would want to take up with him. His mother gave him another, longer one of those open-mouthed kisses, and whispered in his ear, “I promise I’ll let you have what you’ve always wanted. If you will do this thing for me, I’ll let you stick both of your hard-ons in me.” That was a proposition that Russ couldn’t refuse, but he wanted her to promise that she wouldn’t let anybody else stick any peckers into her before he got his chance to do it, and she promised. And he wanted to know if the offer would be null and void if by chance Tenny and his father weren’t attracted to each other, which didn’t seem likely anyhow. So his mother pressed into his hand a little purple vial with a cork stopper in it, and gave him an eyedropper to go along with it, and explained that it was a love potion, and to put not more than six drops into Tenny’s drink, and, if needed, not more than four drops into Mulciber’s. That way, they’d be irresistible to each other. Whoever touched a drop of that special love potion would fall madly in love with the first person they laid eyes on. Russ had just one more question: how was he supposed to persuade Tenny to go off with him, and to let her folks know that it was above-board and all? “Just tell ’em,” Venda said, “that because she has such a sweet singing voice and lots of possibilities for being a great singer, I am offering to put her up here at my house and give her free voice lessons.”

His mother had a little map, that she had acquired somehow from the county judge, Frank Criner, showing how to get up to Brushy Mountain, and she gave it to Russ and told him to wear his Sunday-school shirt, and comb his hair good, and all. Then he climbed atop Marengo and took off. Even with the help of the map, it was hard to find and took him nearly all day, and when he got there Tenny wasn’t at home. Her folks, her mother and granny and a couple of older sisters named Oriole and Redbird, fell upon him like he was the first male creature they’d been able to lay hands on in ages, and they made a big fuss over his horse and even over his Sunday-school shirt, as if they’d never seen a white shirt before. Oriole kept saying, “Why, you aint no monster, after all!” and Redbird kept saying, “Couldn’t no horse git no paler than that’un,” and Russ began to get the notion that somehow he had been expected. It was a right peculiar family. The father didn’t get a chance to say much, and when he did, Russ couldn’t make out exactly what he was trying to say.

Finally they told him that Tenny was waiting for him, but she was waiting up on the top of the mountain. He didn’t understand. He didn’t know how she knew he was coming, and he didn’t know why she was waiting in an inconvenient place like the mountaintop. But he followed their directions and went on up there. It was a hard climb, and he had to leave Marengo tethered to a tree while he made the last part of the climb. When he got up there, she was just sitting on a rock with her head in her hands, and she was dressed all in black, which made her look somehow a lot older, although the black was a fine background for her long light-brown hair. As usual, whenever he so much as glimpsed her, both of his peckers expanded to their full size and caused a pair of great bulges in his britches, which he had to cover with his hat as best he could. He stood there with his hat over his groin, realizing that he didn’t have the nerve to ask her if she’d like to fuck, and he said bashfully, “Howdy, Tenny.”

She raised her face and gazed at him without surprise. The blue sky of her eyes was rainy. “Howdy, Russ,” she said. Then she observed, “That’s a purty white shirt.” She asked, “Did you bring Marengo with you?” and when he nodded, she said, “I guessed it might be you. But you’ve got only one head.” He didn’t know what she was talking about, so she had to back up and tell him all about the prophecy of Cassie Whitter.

He was embarrassed. “Wal, heck, I shore wouldn’t mind being yore bridegroom, but it aint me. It’s my daddy. I mean, I wasn’t supposed to tell ye until you’d had a chance to meet him, but that’s who you’re supposed to marry,”

“Is he a freak?” Tenny asked.

“Most folks think so,” Russ said. “He’s in purty bad shape, what with his crippled legs and all. But he’s a good man, and he’d treat you real nice and keep you happy.”

“Nothing will ever keep me happy again,” Tenny said, sadly. Then she stood up. “Well, if I caint marry Colvin Swain, I might as well marry yore daddy or anybody. Let’s go.” Russ helped her down off the mountaintop. The west wind was beginning to blow real hard, and it was getting a mite too airish up there, and was turning dark, too. He helped her climb up on Marengo, sidesaddle the way his momma had ridden to school with him so often, and he explained to her that they could tell her family that she was going to Jasper to live with Venda Breedlove and take voice lessons, until school started. “But that aint true, is it?” Tenny said. “I don’t want to live with your momma. I hate her guts.” Russ assured her that he himself sometimes hated Venda’s guts, and that it was just an excuse to persuade Tenny’s folks to allow her to come to Jasper.

It was dark by the time they reached the cabin, and of course the Tennisons insisted that Russ spend the night. They gave him a big supper, with five kinds of dessert, and treated him like he really had proposed to Tenny and was planning the nuptials. It wasn’t a big cabin, and both beds was all full up, what with the sisters visiting, so they had to fix Russ a pallet on the kitchen floor, and that’s where he slept. It was a real hot August night, without any kitchen windows to let in the night air, and Russ stripped down to his underpants to keep cool, and, once everybody else had gone to bed, he left the sheet off, although just the thought of sleeping in the same house with Tenny gave him a pair of all-night erections, and he realized he’d better try to wake up in the morning before the women came in to fix breakfast.

Way along in the night, he was awakened by something like a bee sting on his thigh, and looking up from his pallet, he beheld Tenny standing over him with a candle. A drop of the hot candle wax had fallen on his leg and stung him. Tenny’s mouth was open in that O which distinguished her from all the O-girls at school, and she was staring transfixed at his peckers, both of which had escaped through the fly of his underpants. Nobody except his momma and Doc Swain had ever seen his peckers before, and he was somewhat embarrassed, and grabbed the sheet to cover himself. It occurred to him that Tenny had been meaning to slip into bed with him, but why did she have the candle? Now she blew the candle out and said to him in the dark, “So you are the one, after all. My sisters said you were, and they told me to come in here and look at you to find out if maybe you are a freak, but I didn’t believe them.” He waited breathlessly for her to lie down beside him, and he waited, and waited, and after a while he realized that she was no longer in the room.

At the crack of dawn, he dressed and went out to sit on the front porch and think about what had happened. He felt somewhat humiliated, that she had discovered his secret and thought of him as a freak, and that she hadn’t been attracted enough to want to get in bed with him. He was tempted to saddle Marengo and go on back to Jasper without her, but if he did that his mother would be angry and wouldn’t keep her promise, and he could hardly wait for his mother to keep her promise. After a while, Tenny came out and sat on the porch too, but she didn’t say a word to him, so he didn’t speak to her. They just sat there together silently, as if they both understood something that didn’t need any discussion. At breakfast, the Tennisons and the grandmother and the two older sisters all talked about the wedding and the shivaree and the infare dinner as if it was all set, and they wanted to discuss who to invite and what cakes and pies to make, and all that. Russ tried to remind them that his job was only to transport Tenny into Jasper so his mother could give her voice lessons, and that they’d both be going back to school in the fall at N.C.A. But Tenny’s family just smiled and winked at each other, and went on making a big fuss over him.

Finally Tenny got her gunnysack with her clothes and stuff, and they climbed up on Marengo and said their good-byes. Tenny’s sisters kept saying to Russ that if he changed his mind about Tenny, either one of them, Oriole or Redbird, would be awfully glad to have him, but Russ figured that was just insincere politeness, like when you ask somebody to come go home with you but you don’t really mean it. Besides, there was no question of changing his mind about Tenny, because his mind was not his own, but his mother’s; if it had been left up to him, he would have gladly made the Tennisons happy by becoming Tenny’s man.

In Jasper, Tenny reminded him that she didn’t want to have to see his momma because she despised her for ruining things with Doc Swain, so Russ took her straight on over to Mulciber Breedlove’s house on the other side of town. It was a fairly nice place, big two-storied house, as befits an upstanding citizen, and had some modern conveniences, including one of the first “enclosed horn” Victrolas in Newton County, which Russ had persuaded his father to buy. The house was right next to the big Breedlove Smithy, where Mulciber spent his days shoeing horses and mules and fixing wagons and tools. Russ belatedly realized, as he dismounted and led Tenny to meet his father, that nobody had said a word in advance to Mulciber about this “arrangement,” let alone thought to get his approval. When Tenny got her first look at Mulciber, her intended, she blanched and looked as if she were about to puke. Russ had to allow that he would have had the same reaction himself if he didn’t already know the man.

And for his part, Mulciber was civil, even hospitable, but his eyes didn’t light up at the sight of Tenny. “Paw, she’s come to stay,” Russ declared. Mulciber just allowed as how that was pretty nice, he reckoned, and he hoped she was a good cook.

“Well, I’ll show her around and maybe play the Victrola for her,” Russ suggested. He took Tenny into the big house and showed her the big kitchen and a room actually called “living room,” meant to contain just a big sofa and assorted chairs and the big Victrola which, he revealed, had an enclosed horn. He cranked up the machine and put on a platter of a jazz band playing “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows.” It was the first jazz that Tenny had ever heard, and he explained to her what jazz was, how the black folks had started it, and how the word itself, and especially the sound of the music, were suggestive of the motions that men and women are impelled to make in doing what was found in Chapter 34 from the hygiene textbook, Reproduction. Then he left her to listen to another platter called “Arkansas Blues” while he ran back out to the blacksmith shop and said, “Paw! You don’t understand! I’ve brung her for you! She’s all your’n, Paw!” Old Mulciber just looked kind of pensive and replied that he shorely appreciated the thought, but that he’d taken a vow when he got rid of Russ’s momma that if he ever took up with a woman again, she’d have to be as homely as a stump fence because he’d had all he wanted of well-favored women, and that there Tenny gal was near about as sightly as Russ’s momma, blast her hide.

There was nothing to do but dope their drinks at supper-time. Russ used the eyedropper to measure out six drops of the love philter his momma had given him, and slipped it into Tenny’s glass of milk. Then he slipped four drops into his father’s coffee. Next, because he knew that the stuff would make you fall madly in love with the first person you laid eyes on, he found an excuse to get himself out of their line of sight long enough for them to take a drink and look at each other. He said he had to go to the privy, and he actually did, and sat there and waited for a good long while, long enough for them to have taken a drink and then laid eyes on each other. But when he returned to the house, Tenny was just sitting there with her milk untouched and Mulciber had finished his coffee and gone. Tenny said that some customer in one of those Model T automobiles had come honking up to the blacksmith shop and Mulciber had to go see about ’em. As for herself, she was relieved he was gone, because the very sight of him had made her become so nauseated that she couldn’t touch her food. “But aint you at least thirsty?” Russ insisted. “Don’t you want a little sip of that there milk?” Tenny just held her stomach as if she were about to puke. Russ went to the window and looked out at the blacksmith shop, and there was Mulciber flat on his back up underneath an auto, some furriner’s out-of-state vehicle, no top, owned by some lady in one of those newfangled skinny-tube dresses, and her hair bobbed. “Uh-oh” was all Russ could say. Then he tried unsuccessfully to get Tenny to drink her milk. She said not only was she sick to her stomach but also had one foot in the grave, with a runny nose and all-over miseries and maybe a touch of the flu. She was coughing a lot. Russ commenced to get agitated, that his plans were going awry, and in his nervousness he decided he might as well have a little snort of that milk himself, just to keep it from going to waste. So he told Tenny that as long as she didn’t want it, he’d just drink her milk.

There wasn’t anything to do but play the Victrola some more and wait to see what had happened to Mulciber. But Mulciber never did come back. At one point in the course of his long and desperate pursuit of Tenny, Russ paused to get his breath and went down to the blacksmith shop, but there wasn’t any sign of Mulciber or of that lady in the auto, and Mulciber had hung his CLOZED sign on the door. He never came back, neither, and Russ ceased to care, because he had only one thing on his mind. It was the same thing he always had on his mind, but this time it was not only on his mind but also on every other part of his being. The very sight of Tenny had always given him duplicate erections, but he’d never been able to do anything except have the red-comb-and-stone ache. Now, he was emboldened by the love potion to make overtures. He tried every good jazz record in his collection, even including “I’ll Say She Does,” which was supposed to incite lust in old maids. But I’ll say she didn’t, not Tenny. He kept asking her if he couldn’t get her something to drink. “Maybe jist a glass of water, maybe?” he suggested. But she didn’t think she’d be able to “keep it down.” He offered to show her how to dance, how to do the new rages called the Charleston, the shimmy, and the black-bottom. It was difficult for him to demonstrate these dances holding his hat over his groin, so finally he just said, “The heck with it,” and tossed his hat away and didn’t mind that she could see the two great bulges making a V across the front of his pants. She didn’t seem to pay much attention; after all, the night before, she’d already seen them without any coverings. Further emboldened by her nonchalance, he offered to show her the fox-trot, which involved some bodily contact, and gave him a chance to demonstrate that his V could fit into the V of her pelvis. This feeling so mightily emboldened him that, since she kept shaking her head whenever he asked, “Aint you thirsty yet?” and “Caint I git you nothin to drink?” and “Would ye keer fer maybe some real lemonade?” he was moved to improvise and to offer to show her the latest craze in dancing, called, he said, “the business,” which would require them to lie down on the floor and for him to get on top of her.

But she looked at him sidelong, and said, “Russ, I aint that scatterbrained.” When she saw the expression of frantic desperation on his face, she added gently, “Besides, what would your daddy think, if you was to shag his bride-to-be?”

“Tell you the honest truth, Ten,” Russ said. “I don’t believe my daddy wants you. He told me you are jist way too purty for him, and his next wife has to look like a stump fence.”

Tenny gave him another sidelong look and declared, “I figured that was jist a trick, you saying you wanted me to take up with your paw. You really jist wanted me for yourself, now didn’t you?”

Russ realized he was going to catch holy hell from his mother, but it was too late for that. “Yeah, Tenny, that’s the truth. I really truly jist want you all for myself. And boy, do I want you!”

“Then say it,” she said.

“I jist did,” he said. “Boy howdy, do I want want want ye!”

“No, I mean, say you want me to marry you. Ask me to.”

“Tenny, babe, would you keer to be my wife?”

“Cassie Whitter said my husband would be a two-headed monstrosity. I reckon she must’ve been thinkin about them.” And she reached out and touched one of the prongs of his V. Her touch drove him wild, although he was already as wild as he’d ever been in his life. “So I reckon if I caint never marry Colvin Swain, then you are it. Have you got a four-poster in this house?” Mulciber’s house had some fancy headboards and footboards on the beds, but none of them was a four-poster. Russ took her upstairs to the bedrooms and showed her what they had. “Any extry quilts?” she asked. “Have you got a Garden Butterfly pattern?” They looked through the quilt chests, but the best they could find was a kind of homely Double Chain. “Have you got any slow music for the Victrola?” she asked. They searched through the platters, and tried out a few, but the only thing even fairly slow was something called “The Sheik of Araby,” with some suggestive words about “At night when you’re asleep, into your tent I’ll creep.” Russ began to wonder if he was going to have to wait until she was asleep before he could try to creep his peckers into her.

But since Mulciber never did come home that night, they had the house to themselves and went to bed together. He asked her if she wouldn’t at least care to try a swallow of some cough syrup or at least a glass of water for her cough, but she still wasn’t thirsty. She asked him if he had any white nightshirts with flouncy sleeves such as swashbucklers wear, but he’d never heard of them. She said, “There’s a couple of things you ought to know,” and she began to sound like a schoolteacher, telling him how what they were fixing to do would cause the rupture of something called the hymenal membrane, and it would get blood on the sheets. She took his hand and guided his finger to feel the thing she was talking about, and the touch of her down there excited him so much that his peckers started doing the Charleston together. Then she raised his finger to another place, and he could have sworn it was Doc Swain talking, instructing him in the existence of a tubercle at the top of her vulvar groove which was homologous with the penis(es) and ought to be respected as the seat of the woman’s pleasure just as the penis(es) was/were the man’s, and she asked him if he remembered page 620 of their hygiene textbook, wherein the clitoris is identified. He’d made a better grade in hygiene than any of his other courses, and like everybody else had been fascinated with that chapter on reproduction, but had been so intent on finding the word diphallus that he had not noticed clitoris, and so disappointed in not finding the former that he didn’t really care about the latter, which seemed useless anyhow.

He tried to pay attention to Tenny’s little lecture, but he wasn’t sure how it was supposed to help him in any way. He was going to have to get blood on the sheets and that was all there was to it, so he might as well get started. Rather clumsily he got her to lie on her back and spread her legs, and he took his two dancing peckers in his hand and held them tight together to make them quit dancing, and then he tried to get them to go into Tenny’s hole and rip that hymenal membrane. It wasn’t much of a fit. He gave a shove, but they wouldn’t go in, and Tenny said, “Ow!” like he was hurting her. He attempted to put just one at a time into her, but with both of them so stiff he couldn’t get one to go in without bending and hurting the other one. He attempted several different positions, atop her, beside her, and even behind her, and raising her two legs one way or another, and finally lifting both of her legs to put over his shoulders. Nothing worked. He decided the only thing to do was see if he couldn’t get one of his peckers to use that other tunnel while the other pecker went where it was supposed to, a kind of complicated position that required him to lie perpendicular to her from behind, and he tried that, using both of his hands to try to guide his peckers into their respective holes, until finally it dawned on him that there just wasn’t enough lubrication. Her parts were all dry, and his parts were each oozing just a drop or two, not enough. “‘Scuse me,” he said, getting up. “I’ll be right back.” And he ran downstairs and looked for something oily or greasy, finally finding a bottle of his father’s Wildroot cream hair oil, and he grabbed that and took it back upstairs. Tenny was sound asleep. She had a smile on her face like she was only pretending, but he shook her and discovered she really was in deep sleep, and maybe having a lovely dream which accounted for the smile on her face. The Victrola was playing “…at night when you’re asleep, into your tent I’ll creep…” so he took advantage of her sleeping to smear some of the Wildroot over both of her holes and both of his poles, and then he tried to make entry into her sleeping body. He tried and he tried, and wore himself plumb out, and had just enough strength left before falling asleep himself to smear some of the Wildroot on his two hands and make love to himself.

The next day, he could think of only two things: one was that he was going to catch holy hell from his mother, who was going to have a conniption fit, see red and sizzle, hit the ceiling, and jump down his throat. The other thing, a more disturbing thing, was that even though the love potion had sort of worn off, he was still in love with Tenny. It must be true that whoever touched a drop of that love potion would fall madly in love with the first person they laid eyes on, but Russ hadn’t realized that it meant you had to love them forever. He sure didn’t mind being in love with Tenny, because she was not only the most well-favored and sightly person in the world, next to his mother, but she was also the nicest, possibly even nicer than his mother, who wasn’t going to be very nice at all, from now on.

The sheriff, Sam Hudson, knocked at the door and told Russ that his daddy was being held at the jail and Russ could come and get him and take him home. Charges had not been pressed, but Mulciber was jailed for disorderly conduct, trying to molest a tourist-lady staying at the Commercial Hotel, where Mulciber had spent most of the night and was arrested in the wee hours. So Russ told Tenny to make herself at home, eat anything she took a notion to, and play the Victrola, and he’d be right back. He brought his father home, and then was obliged to work with his father in the blacksmith shop and make sure Mulciber didn’t try to go back to the Commercial Hotel. All of this activity gave Russ time to think about what he was going to say to his mother.

That afternoon, he asked Tenny if she would go with him to his mother’s house and tell his mother the “truth”: that the sight of gruesome Mulciber had made her so pukey that she couldn’t possibly marry the old geezer.

“I tole you, I don’t want to see your momma,” Tenny said. “That would make me even pukier.”

“But you don’t need to hate her no more for coming between you and Doc Swain, since it’s me you’re gonna marry, and when me and you git married, she’ll be your mother-in-law, so you’ll have to see her.”

Tenny seemed to be thinking about that, and whatever thoughts she was having were making her very sad. Russ wondered if she really did want to marry him, and, even if she did marry him, would she always be carrying a torch for Doc Swain?

Neither Russ nor Tenny had the slightest notion that they’d find Doc Swain at Venda’s house. When they went in the door, and heard the sounds coming from the bedroom, it took Russ awhile to remember that such sounds are the cries and grunts not of people being hurt but of people enjoying that supreme act which he himself had never yet known. Just as he had done so many times in his childhood when his mother was entertaining a lover, he crept silently toward the noise. Tenny followed. When they saw who was in bed with Venda, Tenny gasped, but her sound was drowned beneath those coming from the bed. The couple in the bed were having such a splendid time of it that they did not notice Russ arranging a couple of chairs so that he and Tenny could take a load off their feet while they studied the spectacle. Russ had seen this sort of thing many times before, but Tenny hadn’t, so he figured it might further her sex education and maybe put her in the mood for it. She was obviously awestruck, and her mouth was fixed into that almost holy O. The bed partners switched positions, with Russ’s mother on top, allowing her freedom of movements which, Russ hoped, would suggest to Tenny that perhaps she and Russ could more successfully manage their hookup if Tenny was on top doing the connecting.

Russ hoped that whatever feeling Tenny still had for Doc Swain would be wiped out by watching this. As for himself, he had all the proof he needed that his mother was dishonest and hateful: she had promised him that she wouldn’t let any other man stick his pecker into her until Russ had a chance to reap his reward for fixing up Tenny with Mulciber, and even though that effort had failed, Venda was going ahead and breaking her promise without even waiting to find out the results of the attempt.

Now Doc Swain had turned his head and detected that Russ and Tenny were watching, but that didn’t stop him. He just kept on. Russ thought that was funny, and he grinned at the doctor, and the doctor grinned back at him and kept on thrusting beneath the wild bounces of Venda. All those times that Russ had spied on his momma with her lovers, he had never actually seen a simultaneous coming, but now he was watching one, and not only that but the bed was coming apart too, and when it did and they and the mattress crashed to the floor, his mother looked over and saw him and cried, “Russ!” in such a way that he knew she knew that he had been spying on her all those years.

He was so impressed with the performance that he spontaneously began to applaud, the same way he’d clapped his hands in joy when his mother had brought him a present as a little boy, only it wasn’t joy now, but a kind of sarcastic admiration. Tenny caught the spirit of his applause and did some herself. Then he and she looked at each other, and her eyes said to him, “I’ve done seen enough to make me hate him and her both for the rest of my life,” and his eyes replied to her eyes, “So you and me don’t have nobody in this whole world excepting each other, and we might as well git out of here and go live happy ever after.”

They got out of there, and rode Marengo straight to the courthouse. It all happened so fast that he couldn’t even remember afterwards if he and Tenny had actually said anything, until they were both standing there saying, “I do,” and then the man said, “I now pernounce y’uns man’n wife and you kids air shore gonna git wet as dogs if you try to go out in that!” and he indicated through the window the growing thunderstorm.

Now it was drowning geese and strangling toads. He and his bride could only huddle in the doorway of the courthouse and wait for it to stop. “Are you okay?” he thought to ask her.

“‘Happy is the bride the sun shines on,’” she said.

“But the sun aint shining,” he observed.

“And I aint too awful happy,” she said.

Well, here come Doc Swain in his buggy, acting as if he hadn’t just been caught bare-assed with his red hand in the cookie jar. Now the fool was just sitting there in the deluge, sobby as a dog, and liable to get hit by a thunderbolt any second now. He just sat there with all that water running down his sad wistful face and he didn’t wave howdy or nothing. Tenny just glared at him. Russ didn’t personally have anything against Doc Swain, and still greatly admired him, even though he had once been the chief object of his bride’s affections, and therefore a rival. But Russ had never forgotten how kind Doc Swain had been to him, and how Doc had even offered to excise his extra pecker if necessary, and Russ was beginning to wonder if it might not be necessary.

“I reckon I’d better have a word with him,” Russ told Tenny.

“Don’t you dare!” she said. “Just ignore him, and maybe he’ll go away.”

But Doc did not go away. Even the horse looked miserable. The thunder was slamming back and forth all down the mountainsides, and the wind was blowing the hard rain into the courthouse doorway so that Russ and Tenny were getting wet anyway.

“Maybe you ought to go have a word with him,” Russ suggested.

“Huh?” Tenny said indignantly. “Have you taken leave of your senses? I don’t have ary thing to say to him!”

So they just waited for him to go away or for the rain to go away, but neither Doc nor the rain would leave. It commenced getting on to dark, and they both knew that it was too late to make it back up to Brushy Mountain for the shivaree and infare and all. Russ decided there was nothing to do but go on back to Mulciber’s house for their wedding night. “Let’s make a dash for it!” he said, and they ran out into the rain and hopped on Marengo and headed for Mulciber’s. Russ looked over his shoulder at one point and saw that Doc was following in his buggy, and Russ spurred Marengo to try to outrun him.

They arrived at Mulciber’s. Russ didn’t know the concept of déjà vu, but he thought there was something awfully familiar about walking in and discovering a naked couple fucking, only in this case it was not the bedroom but the living room, on the sofa. Russ’s Victrola was up as loud as it would go, and Russ’s jazz music was playing, and there was Mulciber a-humping some stranger-lady, who, Russ recognized by her bobbed hair, was the same lady who’d stopped at the blacksmith shop yesterday. Once again Russ and Tenny pulled up some chairs and sat watching, although Russ couldn’t help noticing that this couple weren’t nearly so spectacular as Venda and Doc had been. Nor did they come simultaneously. When they were all done, Russ didn’t feel like applauding. He told them that all in all, he’d seen much better, but they’d done tolerable. Then he told his father that he and Tenny had just gotten theirselves married down at the courthouse. His father and the lady were hastily putting their clothes back on, and his father said the lady’s name was Edna. Although Russ didn’t think that Edna looked very much like a stump fence, Mulciber declared that Edna was “going to stay awhile,” so he’d appreciate it if Russ and Tenny would get lost. “But where can we go?” Russ whined.

“I was you, I’d jist take her to your mother’s,” Mulciber suggested.

Russ counted his money. He had once had six quarters, but he’d paid two of them for the marriage license, and two more to the justice of the peace, leaving him with only two, not enough for even a cheap hotel room. Tenny didn’t have a cent. So the only way to avoid sleeping somewheres out in the rain was for them to go on back to his mother’s and throw themselves at her mercy, and maybe if he told her how sorry he was and all, she might even forgive him.

On the way to Venda’s, they couldn’t help noticing that they were still being followed by Doc in his buggy. Tenny was still determined not to see Venda, but she was tired, and soaked through by the rain, and a bit chilled, and her cough was getting worse, and she told Russ she hoped maybe there was some way she could have a bed at Venda’s without having to face the woman.

“Wait on the porch while I talk to her,” he told her, and then he boldly stepped into the house to face the music, make the best of a bad job, pay the fiddler, and lay down and roll over. But he could stand up and take it. “Maw,” he said, “I shore am the sorriest feller on airth, and I don’t know how to tell ye this, but I’ve done went and fell in love with Tenny myself, and we’re fresh-married.”

“Sweetheart, that’s only fair-to-middlin funny,” Venda said. “I’ve had a real hard day, and if you’re trying to cheer me up with some jokes, you laid an egg.”

“It’s the honest to gosh truth,” he said. “Paw didn’t want her, and she didn’t want him, and I accidental-like drank some of that love potion myself, and then we seen you and Doc a-fuckin like a pair of minks, so we jist skipped on over to the courthouse and got ourselfs hitched.”

Venda didn’t say anything for a while, but she didn’t get red in the face or clench her fists or start steaming out the ears. Finally she just said, “Go to your room.” He tried to protest, but she made it clear that she was still boss, so he did like he always did when she told him to go to his room. He went to his room. He sat on his bed and put on his baseball glove and slammed his fist into it, and he felt twelve years old. By-and-by, she came into the room and closed the door behind her. First, she asked him a question: “Do you honestly think that I could tolerate my competition as a daughter-in-law?” He figured it was one of those questions that are just said for the sake of making a point, and didn’t have any answer to them, so he didn’t try to make one. Then she asked him another question: “Don’t you think it’s bad enough that I have to watch Colvin falling for her without watching my own son doing it too?” He decided this was another unanswerable question made for show, so he didn’t try to answer it either. “Do you know what you are?” she asked, and it must’ve been the same kind of question, because she answered it herself: “You’re a motherfucker!” He winced because that was truly an awful word, even though it described exactly what he aspired to be. “You’re not only a motherfucker but a motherkiller, and you’re killing me with what you’ve done!” Her face turned red, her fists clenched, and steam came out of her ears. “Oh Jesus H. Fucking Christ! I guess I didn’t bring you up proper. You never learned to tell right from wrong, or even up from down, and you never learned to obey me! You stupid wretch, I sent you out to ruin Tennessee Tennison, I mean totally wreck her life, I mean make her so miserable that she would be sorry she was ever born, let alone was such a knockout and built like a brick shithouse! I wanted you to dilapidate her to where she’d think she was a corncrib made of corncobs! And what did you do? Not only did you fail to destroy her, you led her down the aisle!”

“Hit weren’t no aisle,” he protested feebly. “Hit was jist the hallway at the courthouse.” But that cut no ice with his mother, who begin to pick things up and throw them against the walls. “Maw, look at it this way,” he tried to reason with her. “I’ve done went and removed your competition. You don’t need to worry about her stealin Doc’s heart away from you, because now she’s a married woman and Doc has to leave her alone.”

Venda stopped throwing things against the wall. She stared at Russ in such a way that he realized he’d made a good point. She thought about that, and then she said, “Now, why didn’t I think of that?” It was one more of those questions that don’t have any answers, so he didn’t tell her why she didn’t think of that. Then she finally asked a question that was answerable: “Speakin of whom, jist where is this blushin bride of your’n?”

“She’s out yonder a-settin in the porch swing,” he said.

“Well, maybe me and her ought to have a heart-to-heart women’s talk,” his mother said, and started to leave the room.

“But she still hates your guts on account of what ye done with Doc Swain, and she don’t want to see you. Me, I don’t hate your guts but you shore let me down, breakin your promise and all.”

“We’ll talk about that later. I think maybe I will give Tenny some voice lessons after all, and maybe even teach her how to yodel. I’ll fix you some supper in a little while. You’re still grounded.”

His mother left him, and he felt both relieved that he had managed to cool her off a bit, and unhappy that she had grounded him. Dang it all, she couldn’t ground him, because he was a married man, and married men don’t get grounded—they don’t even have to obey their mothers anymore. He scarcely had time to brood about this before his mother returned and just stood in the doorway staring at him for a while, until she said:

“Okay, I get it. You really did fix her up with Mulciber, didn’t you? And you’ve just been pretending you didn’t, just to tease me, or just to git even with me for breakin my promise not to fool around with any other man until I gave you your reward for fixin her up with Mulciber. Oh, you naughty boy, you! That’s just the kind of stunt you’d pull, isn’t it? So all this time you’ve just been waiting to collect that big reward! Well, come to Momma!”

She held out her arms to him, but he didn’t understand. “Where’s Tenny?” he asked.

“She shore aint on no porch of mine,” Venda declared.

Even though he was grounded, Russ rushed past his mother and out of the house to the front porch, but Tenny wasn’t there. There was no sign of Tenny, up nor down any of the streets. The rain had stopped, completely. The last vestiges of the sunset were visible to the west, clouds the same color as that pretty ring that Tenny wore. Russ stood there a long while, watching the sunset and thinking. His mother came and joined him. It was his turn to ask one of those questions that are meant just for show. “Do you know what I think?” And since his mother made no attempt to answer it, he told her, “I think Tenny must’ve rode off with Doc Swain.” Then he told his mother how Doc had come to the courthouse and followed them to Mulciber’s and then kept on following them, all the way to Venda’s, and he must’ve somehow talked Tenny into going off with him. That was terrible. The thought greatly pained Russ. If everything had gone the way it ought to have gone, with clear skies and all, he and Tenny would be enjoying the beginnings of the shivaree along about now, up on Brushy Mountain, with folks making stupendous noises shooting off guns and banging pans and scaring the daylights out of him and his bride. Instead, the wedding night was plumb flummoxed and shot to hell! Russ felt so sorry for himself that he began to cry, and his mother began to cry also, feeling sorry not for him but for herself because she had her own problems dealing with the situation.

Mother and son held each other and bawled their hearts out.

Chapter nine

Tenny, as we are about to discover, no longer had hypochondria, but ironically just at the time that she was cured of it I seem to be coming down with it myself. Leastways, Dr. Bittner this morning said he couldn’t find any reason why I should be having this cough. You’ve noticed it, I’m sure. It started somewhere along in there about when I had Tenny up on that mountaintop. Dr. Bittner didn’t give me a very thorough look-see; he just had me open my mouth for a second, and then he said it was possible I had a bit of gastric reflux that was causing a backup to irritate my throat, and he gave me some pills for it, but what I probably need is just some old-fashioned cough drops, so if you can remember, next time you come, could you pick me up a package of Smith Brothers?

How did Colvin persuade Tenny to get into his buggy and go off with him? Of this entire story, that was the part that Doc was most stingy in telling me about, as if modesty prevented him from bragging about the accomplishment. After all, she was mad as hell at him and never wanted to see him again. So I personally don’t know everything that passed between them while she was sitting in that porch swing of Venda’s and he was sitting in his buggy. I know only a few details, that he started off by asking her to confirm his suspicion that she had actually had a dream the night before. At first, she wouldn’t even talk to him, but she finally admitted that, yes, for the first time all summer she had had a dream. He told her he had tried to reach her in her dream, but couldn’t find her, and she admitted that she’d been looking for him but couldn’t find him either. “Sometimes,” he said to her gently, “other folks keep us from doing what we want to do, don’t ye know?” Then he got her to listen while he tried to explain what had happened last May to spoil that beautiful dream they were having together, that Venda had intruded into that beautiful enchanted forest and four-poster they had created, that Colvin had not wanted or welcomed her, and that they were certainly not making love then, but yes, they were making love earlier this afternoon because Venda had doped his coffee with a powerful love potion. The thing was, that love potion was supposed to make a feller fall madly in love forever with the first person he saw, and although it had robbed Colvin of his willpower and allowed Venda to seduce him, he definitely had not fallen in love with Venda.

“I still love you, Tenny,” he said. “I reckon I didn’t need ary love potion the first day I laid eyes on ye, up at the school. I fell in love with you that day, and if love is a disease, as you once thought, then mine has been progressive, chronic, insidious, and terminal. I will love you all the days of my life.”

Like I say, I don’t know what else he said, but maybe he didn’t need to say anything else, because the next thing she knew, Tenny was standing up from that porch swing. “I love thee, Colvin Swain,” she said aloud, “and you don’t know how long I’ve waited to say it.”

“I will make the rain stop for you,” he said, and he believed it himself, that he could do it, and he goddamn did it. The rain just quit. It didn’t taper off or fade away, it just all of a heap stopped, and the sky cleared up and the sunset was visible, and by god if he didn’t also arrange for the sunset to be in all the possible variations of her favorite color, amethyst.

She got into that buggy with him, and they had a real long, powerful, thrilling kiss. They didn’t care whether anybody saw them, or whether Russ or Venda came out of the house. No, it wasn’t that they didn’t care; they didn’t even think of it. It never crossed their minds that there was anybody else in the world except themselves. Finally Colvin broke the kiss long enough just to cluck his tongue and say, “Gidyup, ole Ness.” The buggy began to move, and Colvin wrapped his arm around her, and she lay her head against his shoulder.

If he’d had his druthers, he’d have taken her straight to Stay More. But two mighty things kept him from it: one, of course, was that there was already a woman in Stay More who loved him very much and whom he still loved right considerably; and two, it had rained so hard that the roads were quagmires, and even if the buggy didn’t get badly bogged, Hogshead Creek wouldn’t even be fordable. He had stopped the rain, but he couldn’t dry up the route. And night was coming on.

Did I mention that the owner of the Commercial Hotel at that time was Bob Swain, Doc’s own cousin? No? Well, I thought I had. Maybe I hadn’t even mentioned that Bob was one of the few fellers in Jasper that Doc considered a friend. Anyway, it was no problem for Colvin to take Tenny to the Commercial and ask Bob to keep it quiet. Colvin asked Bob, “Have any of your rooms got four-poster beds in ’em?” Bob said that only the bridal suite did, and it would cost him a bit extra, and Colvin said money didn’t matter. The Commercial was a fairly large white house, two stories, rambling all over creation with porches or verandas upstairs and down hither and yon, and the bridal suite was up on the second floor, with a good view of the main road through town and the mountains to the west. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you that the quilt on the bed was Garden Butterfly, so I won’t, although you must believe that it was a Gingham-and-Calico Butterfly, a kind of cousin to the Garden variety. There wasn’t any Victrola to play soft music, but Tenny could hum and sing both, if need be, and in the course of the evening she did. One thing bothered her: there was a toilet in the bridal suite. It was the first indoor running-water toilet Tenny had ever seen, and when Colvin explained to her what it was, she said that was too bad, and would bring other folks running in and out all night, invading their privacy. Colvin convinced her that it was their own personal toilet and nobody else would use it. The first thing they had to do was get out of their soppy clothes, and Colvin borrowed some of Bob Swain’s clothes for himself, and one of Bob’s wife’s dresses for Tenny; it was several sizes too big, but it was a cotton-print dress with orange butterflies all over it. Even in their borrowed clothes, Colvin didn’t think it was a good idea for them to have their supper at the communal tables downstairs with everybody else, so he got Bob’s wife to bring a tray with some supper up to the room. Tenny’s appetite had returned, but she was still coughing. Knowing her as he did, Colvin knew that she could have all the symptoms of bronchitis or even pneumonia—it was a short, dry, unproductive cough, like this one I’ve got—without actually having those diseases, or anything else. He felt her cheek, which was neither hot nor cold, and he took her pulse, which was normal. He asked her routine questions such as what kind of headache she might have, but she didn’t have a headache, she didn’t have a stomachache, she didn’t have any trouble eating or breathing, she didn’t have anything wrong with her except that little cough. He was surprised to find her so asymptomatic, and he wondered what had happened to make her want to stop being ill…or to replace all of her usual symptoms with just that cough. How long had she been on that mountain crag? Had she actually been made to wear a black dress? He wanted her to talk, not simply to tell him what had been happening to her, but because he was still at a loss for words himself, and needed her to do most of the talking.

So, coughing now and again, she told him everything that had happened to her recently, including the night before, when she was the guest of Russ and his daddy, Mulciber Breedlove, and Russ had been under orders from his mother to play Cupid and fix Tenny up with Mulciber, but Tenny had been sickened by the very sight of the ugly old blacksmith, who was indeed the sorriest-looking specimen of humanity Tenny had ever seen. It was a good thing she was so sick she couldn’t even drink her milk, because she suspected that Russ had doped her milk to make her fall in love with Mulciber. Then she knew that he had, when he drank the milk himself and became “over-frisky” and “a-rollixin.” He was so fired with lust that he had proposed to Tenny. She hadn’t exactly said yes, but she’d gone to bed with him.

Doc raised his eyebrows. “So you’re not a virgin anymore,” he said, and was surprised that he felt no intense dismay or jealousy. Well, after all, he told himself, virginity is just a state of mind, anyway.

But she said, “I guess maybe I still am. He couldn’t get it in. I mean, he couldn’t get them in. Colvin, did you know that Russ has got two of them?”

Colvin nodded, although the nod itself was a violation of the oath to Kie Raney never to discuss a patient’s condition with anybody else. “It’s uncommonly rare,” he said. “But that don’t make him a freak.”

“Still, Cassie Whitter prophesied that I’d marry a freak, and I don’t know how to tell you this, but me and Russ got married this afternoon.”

“I figured you did,” he said.

“You don’t hate me for it?” she asked. “Can you forgive me for it?”

“Can you forgive me for already being married?” he asked.

“I reckon I can,” she said. “I guess—I guess the main thing that made me marry him wasn’t because Cassie Whitter augured it but the thought I was getting even with you. I thought it wasn’t fair for you to be married, and me not.”

They talked until way past bedtime. Colvin of course realized that the moment might come eventually when he would be required to demonstrate his manly vigor, which was totally sapped from his day-long romp with Venda, so he wanted to postpone bedtime as long as possible. Past midnight, he began really to fret, and he wasn’t sure he could explain to Tenny’s satisfaction that a man who has made love thirty-eight times in one day simply cannot hope for another erection without whatever drug Venda had been supplying. So he kept talking to Tenny about everything, and eventually a subject that both of them had been avoiding reared its ugly head: what were they going to do with themselves? The sun was going to rise the next day, and the day after, and how were they going to face it and live with it, enwrapped in their great but illicit love for each other? “We have got to find a way,” he said, and they spent the next hour thinking and talking about finding a way. Colvin concocted some whimsical schemes, but rejected each one of them. He could take her to live in Stay More and tell Piney that she was just a student who needed a place to live because the dormitory was all filled up. No, he couldn’t. He could take her away to some distant place and start all over, like perhaps belatedly accepting that offer to teach and practice in St. Louis. No, he couldn’t. He could offer Piney half of all his worldly goods and what little cash-on-hand he owned to leave him, to move out of his house. No, he couldn’t. He could put Tenny back for her sophomore year at Newton County Academy, and go on teaching there himself, to give both of them time to see if they couldn’t work something out. Yes, he could.

Colvin had no trouble at all persuading Tenny that she ought to return to school, because she had been intending to do that anyway, and had not even considered that her marriage would interfere with continuing her education. There were a couple of other girls at N.C.A., Olivia and Oralie, who were married, although of course they were not permitted to stay in the dormitory and had to live off-campus with or without their husbands. “Tenny,” Colvin declared solemnly, “I am going to have to go on living with my wife. Do you want to go on living with your husband?”

“Do you think he would let me, after tonight?”

“What’s ‘tonight’?” he asked.

“You and me are really going to become lovers,” she declared. She gestured toward the bed. “It’s a four-poster, all right,” she observed, “but it’s a sorry substitute for that one we had in our dream.” She lifted Bob’s wife’s butterfly dress over her head, and the sight of her naked body gave him such twitchings in the Kobelt bulb of his corpus cavernosum and the fundiform ligaments at the root of his penis that he felt his equipment was desperately trying to put itself into order. But as he got out of Bob’s clothes, he realized there was just no way the blood sinuses would engorge. Tenny had never seen a limp pecker before. Colvin’s in that dream as well as with Venda, both of Russ’s at all times, and Mulciber’s—a total of four peckers she had seen, and all of them had been hard and upright and just a little scary, especially the double-barreled job of Russ’s. Now as Colvin stood there looking abashed and uncertain, her smart mind did some quick thinking and determined the reason for his dangling doodle, and she requested, “Colvin, what if we just hold each other until we’re asleep? Sleep is where you go to be all alone. And dreams are where you go to get away from the loneliness of sleep. Maybe we could even find that forest again.”

Which is what they did. They entangled their naked bodies beneath the Gingham-and-Calico Butterflies, and after a long goodnight kiss they fell asleep and were soon meeting at the old four-poster in the enchanted forest. The bigger four-poster that Venda had dragged in beside it was still there, but Colvin found an ax and chopped it up into firewood, which he ignited to take the chill off the first signs of autumn. Once that bed was burnt, all was just as it had been before, with the moonlight exactly right and a canopy hung with long chiffon curtains a-wafting gently in the breeze to the tune of slow violins on the Victrola. And once again Tenny was dressed in a royal purple silk nightgown, and Colvin was dressed in a loose-fitting flouncy-sleeved white shirt such as swashbucklers wear to do their duels and adventures in. Tenny had made just two changes from the previous dream: she had added “Arkansas Blues” to the stack of platters the Victrola was going to play, and she had added a flush toilet identical to the one in their Commercial Hotel bridal suite, just in case she had to go, and wouldn’t have to suffer the sort of run-to-the-bushes which had spoiled the previous dream. So they were able to pick up exactly where they’d left off before they’d been so rudely interrupted. Colvin was able to finish his little lecture about the location and function of the clitoris, and he did something that Russ had not even tried to do in his fumblings and probings the night previous: he actually caressed her clitoris, and with the help of his fingers and his voice and the Victrola and the moonlight and the firelight from Venda’s burning bed, she was lifted to a mountaintop much higher than that she’d had to stand upon in black to await her bridegroom, and from this mountaintop she soared free on zephyrs that seized her and carried her all over the world. Only afterwards did she know, because Colvin told her, that she had begun to sing the same chant she’d sung on the crag above Brushy Mountain: the pure notes, rising and falling, of kindly melancholy, a mixture of yearning, wanting, hoping, desire, with maybe a tinge of loss and bewilderment. Colvin realized, however, that it was the kind of song you had to hear from a distance, not up close, and hearing it up close somehow took the haunting holiness off of it. So Colvin asked if she couldn’t turn that into a song of joy, and she tried, and while singing it she realized that he was inside of her, that he had entered her painlessly, joyfully, and that she really was not a virgin anymore.

The next morning when he awoke Colvin discovered that there was some blood on the sheet. He would have to pay Cousin Bob some extra for that. He did not wake her, but took the liberty to examine her and determine that carunculae hymenales were all that remained of her hymen. As we are all able to do, sometimes, he sought to recapture the dream, and remembered it, and was astonished by its authenticity. Now in the light of the rising sun, he saw that the lovely landscape of her body was beaded with sweat like the morning earth beaded with dew, as if the exertions in their dream had made her perspire. He decided to take a towel and blot up the sweat and if that didn’t wake her, he would leave her be.

But she woke. “Dreams are where you go to get away from the loneliness of sleep,” he repeated her words to her. “But daylight comes to reveal all the other people in the world that we have to deal with.” He had her get dressed, and he put her in his buggy and took her to Parthenon. “You’ve got to have a place to live, and I’ve got to see if I caint work out some kind of future for me and you.”

Jossie Conklin just happened to be in her office, the only person on campus. Colvin had Tenny wait in the buggy while he went up to talk with Jossie. Jossie was thrilled to learn that Colvin had reconsidered and might want to return to N.C.A. for another year, but she had to inform him that the Baptists had sent from Baylor a new man, Tim James, with a master’s degree, to teach Bible and Science with explicit instructions to teach the hygiene course without any reference to reproduction. Jossie was awfully sorry, but there just wasn’t any way Colvin could teach hygiene. “I don’t suppose you could teach Psychology, could you?” Jossie asked. “And coach basketball?”

Colvin lied. He knew as much about psychology as he did about basketball, which is to say that both were inexact sciences, that throwing that thing up in the air might or might not get it through the hole, you couldn’t never tell, you could only use your mind to hope that it would go through the hole, but if you missed the hole you might or might not get a chance to try again. Neither psychology nor basketball was like medicine, in which you can at least count on some things to happen. But Colvin supposed that both psychology and basketball had something that medicine lacked: entertainment value, since they were sports and had the power to divert and even to amuse. “Yes ma’am, I reckon I can handle both,” he said. “But I shore hope you don’t have to wait until jist before class starts to let me see the textbook.”

Jossie laughed, and handed him a copy of his textbooks for Psychology. There was no textbook for basketball. He was amazed at the little coincidence that the author of Human Behavior was named Stephen Sheldon Colvin, Professor of Educational Psychology at Brown University. Our Colvin had never heard of anybody else with the name Colvin, and he felt a little as Russ must have felt when he learned that he wasn’t the only person in the world with diphallus. Right away Colvin believed that Professor Colvin was his spiritual kin, or at least psychological kin, and could probably teach him a few things, which he in turn would attempt to teach his students. Thumbing through the book, Colvin noticed that there was a section on the nervous system, which he already had in his head. No, he wouldn’t have any trouble teaching psychology.

They shook hands over the deal and agreed upon a salary of thirty dollars a month, including his duties as school physician. Then Colvin said, “Jossie, hon, I wonder if it might be possible for one of the girl students, my best pupil from last year, you remember Tennessee Tennison, well, as you may know she comes from a dirt-poor family way back up in the jillikens, and they threw her out, and she don’t have nowhere to stay, and I was just wondering if she could go ahead and move into the dormitory, and live there by herself until school starts.”

Jossie studied Colvin as if she might be guessing at things that weren’t within her realm of understanding. Then she smiled a knowing smile and said, “Thelma Villines, the housekeeper, has already moved in, so if it’s okay with her, it’s okay with me.”

Colvin installed Tenny in the dormitory with the help of Mrs. Villines, who reckoned she could find some work to keep Tenny busy and earn her room and board. Then Colvin had a private moment alone with Tenny to say good-bye to her and tell her he’d try to get back this way whenever he could. They kissed.

“Thank you so much for everything,” Tenny said, and she walked alongside him and his buggy to the edge of the campus, but, in the superstition of the Ozarks, turned aside to avoid watching him disappear from sight.

Colvin’s dealing with Jossie had been like falling off a log compared with dealing with Piney. The road to Stay More was still more liquid than solid, and several times he got mired, and both he and Nessus were covered with mud and exhausted by late afternoon, when they reached home. He had concocted a dozen good excuses, but Piney, who knew everything, knew that he must have been “carrying on” with Jossie Conklin, and she accused him of it. “Strike me dead if I never even touched her!” Colvin protested. “Except to shake her hand when we agreed on my salary…which, you’ll be happy to know, means that now we’ll be able to get for you that pianer.”

“Goody,” she said. “Let’s go.”

And sure enough, Piney insisted that Colvin take her to Little Rock to shop for a piano. It wasn’t easy. First he had to scare up some kind of loan of the money, and since the Swains Creek Bank and Trust Company had been robbed and was out of business he couldn’t apply for a loan, all he could do was hatch a kind of health insurance scheme which the American Medical Association wouldn’t have endorsed. He examined his ledgers and made a list of all the patients who had ever paid him in cash money instead of livestock, produce, working-it-off, or other form of barter, and he went around to each of them, a total of only thirty-nine, and with his hat in hand he offered to treat them in perpetuity regardless of the severity of their condition in return for a modest advance premium of only twenty dollars. Eleven of the patients claimed that they didn’t see how they could possibly raise that much cash money, although seven of these admitted that it sounded like a real bargain. Five patients told him he was out of his mind. But from twenty-three patients he collected twenty dollars each, and with this money he was able to take Piney to Little Rock. Instead of using Nessus and the buggy, inadequate to freight the piano back to Stay More, he hired a team of mules and a wagon from Ingledew’s livery, and with Piney sitting on the buckboard beside him, he drove to Russellville, reaching it in two days, and took a Missouri Pacific train from there to Little Rock, and spent two nights in the capital city, where he had never been before, nor had Piney, and they were able to enjoy the sights of the city, including the enormous state capitol which imitates the U.S. Capitol; the state’s tallest edifice, the Donaghey Building, towering fourteen floors above the street; and the recently opened Broadway Bridge spanning the Arkansas River, the largest and most expensive bridge in Arkansas. Both Colvin and Piney, walking across it on the pedestrian skirt, found it incredible that anything in the world could cost a million dollars. At the Hollenberg Music Company, a high-pressure salesman who was himself a piano virtuoso demonstrated that the affordable pianos indeed sounded tinny. They found one baby grand that did not sound tinny but was far out of their price range, and the salesman by playing Liszt on it convinced Piney that she’d never learn how to play a piano and had better play it safe and stick with one of these here player pianos that used rolls of perforated paper to do all the work for you. Of course player pianos cost a good bit more than ordinary instruments where you have to do the fingering, and then also of course you have to get yourself a supply of the rolls of the perforated paper to make the thing go, and the transaction left Colvin flat broke except for just their return train tickets, but Hollenberg Music Company paid the freight for taking the piano back with them on the same train to Russellville, where they loaded it into their wagon.

Piney had needed a whole day just to pick out her rolls, at forty cents each for those that had words, and thirty cents for the wordless ones. Piney’s selections included “Red Pepper,” a rag; “Woodland Echoes,” a reverie; “Barcarole,” a descriptive piece from The Tales of Hoffman; “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home?”—a jazzy blues number; “Frolic of the Frogs,” a concert waltz; “Nights of Gladness,” a dance waltz; and “Humoreske,” a light classic. All these were wordless. The wordy pieces were: “Arkansas Blues,” a blues piece that sounded familiar to Colvin; “When I’m Gone You’ll Soon Forget,” a ballad; “Tonight You Belong to Me,” a waltz; and the following fox-trots: “All I Want Is You,” “I Wish You Were Jealous of Me,” “Roses of Picardy,” and “Then I’ll Be Happy.” How do I with my imperfect memory recall all these titles? Because I played all of them on Piney’s piano in the days I dwelt in Stay More and, hell, I still know the words of most of ’em, and if you and Mary would excuse me, I’ll see if I can’t still croak one of ’em for you:

Blues ________ have overtaken me _____________,

I’m so weary, days are full o’ gloom _____________,

Homesickness has got me down in mind _________,

’Way down in old Arkansas ___________________.

I know a lot more of “Arkansas Blues” than that, but I’ll interrupt it the same way Colvin interrupted me when I tried to put it on the player piano and sing it “Doc, that was Piney’s roll,” he said, “but it was Tenny’s song, so I’druther you’d play something else, if it’s all the same to you…”

Piney’s player piano immediately became the sensation of Stay More, and folks would come from all over to loaf around the porch of the Swain Clinic and listen to Piney a-pumpin the pedals and singing the tunes that had words to them, and even the tunes that didn’t have words inspired all the listeners to make up their own lyrics. The Stay Morons invented a dozen different versions of the lyrics to “Red Pepper Rag,” and they even concocted a respectable chorus for that concert waltz, “Frolic of the Frogs,” as well as a four-part contrapuntal harmony for “Barcarole.” But everybody’s favorite was “Roses of Picardy,” even though nobody had the least notion where Picardy was, and Colvin himself, who never could sing worth a damn, usually joined in when there were a hundred people out in front of his house crooning about the hush of the silvery dew and there’s never a rose like you.

Of course the problem with all of this music was that it made everybody neglect the old-time folk songs and ballits that had been family heirlooms all the way back to the seventeenth century in old England and Scotch Ireland. When I was collecting the thousand titles for my four-volume Ozark Folksongs, published in the late forties, I had the devil’s own time culling out the new stuff from the old, because so much of the repertoire of the best old singers and pluckers had been “contaminated” by what they’d learned from their Victrolas and from piano rolls.

But the Jazz Age was creeping into the Ozarks, and there was no stopping it. When the Newton County Academy opened its doors for the fall semester of its second year, Colvin immediately noticed that the dresses of many of the girls had hemlines scarcely below the knee, and some of them had painted faces (although for the first day only, because a strict N.C.A. rule would forbid the use of rouge and lipstick), and nearly all of the girls had cut their hair short, and were wearing it in what was called “bobs.” He held his breath, waiting to see if Tenny might’ve cut short her waist-length hair.

But he couldn’t find Tenny. She wasn’t in the dormitory. He accosted Thelma Villines, the housekeeper, who only said, accusingly, “Didn’t you never know that married gals aint allowed to live in the dormitory?”

He went to Jossie’s office. The principal laughed and said, “I heard all about how you eloped with Tenny on her wedding night!”

Colvin recalled, much belatedly, that Jossie and Venda were practically best friends. “Where is she?” he asked.

“Well, as you should have known,” Jossie said, “married girls are not allowed to live in the dormitories, and we had to evict her. She had nowhere to go. Her husband and her mother-in-law very graciously gave her a place to live in Jasper.”

Colvin was greatly chagrined at the thought. “But she’s coming back to school?” he asked.

“We shall have to see,” Jossie said.

This was an October Friday, his school day changed from Monday of the previous year because the basketball teams would be playing their games on Friday afternoons. He had also promised Piney that he would not be traveling to Parthenon extra days each week if it could be avoided. So each Friday he would receive and examine pupil-patients in his office, teach a class in psychology, and coach basketball, a full day that would leave him, he had been hoping, a few moments in the company of his hopeless but not impossible love. Just as he had done on the first day of the semester the October before, he spent the morning examining everybody, faculty and students alike, for evaluative diagnosis, and finding the usual gamut of maladies, malformations, malnutrition, malignancies, and malaise, as well as malingering. It was more time-consuming this year because the student enrollment had increased by forty, to 184, and that was forty more smallpox vaccinations to give.

Doing the faculty first, he was surprised to find a friendly Venda eager to see him and be examined. Venda was the proud new owner of a Ford automobile, and drew Colvin to the window to look out at the parking lot, where it sat right alongside another Ford owned by Tim James, the new Bible and science teacher who had taken Colvin’s hygiene class. Colvin didn’t understand how these people could afford to buy autos on the trifling salaries they earned, but he supposed they didn’t spend their money on things like player pianos. Venda didn’t have any complaints, but she took her dress off anyway just to see if it might give Colvin any sort of reaction. He was trying hard to remain professional on Doctor’s Day, and he kept his clipboard covering the rising in his pants. Venda said one reason she got the auto was because there wasn’t room on Marengo for all three of them, and Tenny had usurped her position on Russ’s horse if not on his heart.

“Where is she?” Colvin asked.

“Oh, I reckon she’ll be coming in to see you for her checkup like everbody else,” Venda said. “Anyhow, she can tell you that we’ve been good to her. She has done what she was told, and has been real handy around the house. And you may not believe this, but I really truly have been giving her voice lessons, although her voice aint in none too good a shape, with this sore throat she’s got and her cough that won’t never go away.”

Before leaving his office, Venda took Colvin’s chin in her fingertips to get his full attention while she declared, “I hope you won’t let that gal come between us this year.”

One of the first pupils waiting to see Colvin was Tenny’s husband. Like his mother, he surprised Colvin by being friendly. Russ announced to Colvin that he intended to “go out for” the basketball team, and he hoped that “Coach,” as he would now begin to call the man who was also “Doc,” “Teacher,” and “Wife’s Lover,” would find a place for him on the team. But also he was thinking about signing up for Psychology. Could Teacher tell him anything about what the subject involved? “Is psychology anything like apology?” Russ wondered.

“Well, I reckon you could say so,” Colvin allowed. “We’ll study regrets. We’ll study why we feel the way we do, and why we think the way we do, and maybe even why we do what we do. How’s your wife?”

“Oh, she caint complain,” Russ said. “That cough of hers comes and goes, and she’s kinder moody most of the time, but she caint really complain, so she don’t.” Russ explained that Tenny at the moment was over visiting her friend Zarky in the dormitory but would probably be coming in to see Doc Swain pretty soon. Then Russ said a strange thing. “Coach, there aint no use pretendin that you aint still the only feller in this world that Tenny cares about. She don’t hardly talk about nothin else, and I reckon I ought to be jealous but there don’t seem to be nothin I could do about it. Except maybe…do you recollect you once offered to hack off my extry pecker for me? I’ve wondered a lot if she would like me more if I had only one of ’em.”

Awkwardly Colvin tried to determine if the diphallic condition rendered intercourse difficult or impossible, but Russ blushed and hemmed and hawed and managed to say only that “We aint been able to work out a good fit.” And then he said, “Heck, Doc, I don’t need the extry one. Will you slice it off for me? Of course, I don’t mean right now, but sometime soon?”

“Let me think about it some,” Colvin requested, and pointed out that he had no experience with that particular operation and would have to study up on it.

Strange to relate, not very long after Russ had left, Colvin had a visit from one of the forty new students, a pretty girl named Oona Owens, whose file indicated that she had come from a remote village in Madison County to the west. When Colvin asked his conventional opening question, “Has anything been a-troublin ye?” Oona giggled and declared:

“I aint never been to a doctor afore.”

“Don’t be bashful,” he said. “Jist let me check a few things. If you’ll open wide and say ‘Ah’…” Colvin put a tongue depressor into her mouth and looked around, and then he stuck an otoscope into each of her ears, and a nasoscope into each nostril. Apart from slight adenoids, her head was negative. She giggled again when he stethoscoped her chest, and also when he hit her knees with his reflex hammer. He performed all his little tests, but she didn’t seem to have anything wrong with her except for the adenoids. “You’re okay,” he said. “I’ll see you in Psych class.”

“But Doc,” she said, “there’s one little thing a-troublin me. I caint show it to ye, though.”

“Well, can you tell me where it’s at?”

She quickly touched her crotch and instantly drew her hand away. “Down here,” she said. “My pu***…,” her voice fell to a whisper.

“Is it itchy? Have you got a rash or sores or anything on it?” he asked.

“Nope, nothing like that. Only there’s two of ’em.”

Colvin studied her, and kept his face impassively benign. Then he said that of course he couldn’t tell for sure without examining her but it sounded as if she had what was known as duplex vagina, which, although it was exceptional, quite rare in fact, didn’t mean she was a freak or anything, and there was nothing to be ashamed of. Colvin told her of some other known cases of duplex vaginae in faraway places like Rhode Island and North Dakota, and that while offhand he didn’t know of another case of it in Arkansas, there was bound to be a few he didn’t know about. He said he hoped that after she got to know him better, as her teacher for Psychology as well as the school physician, she might feel comfortable enough to permit him to have a look and determine if she had a true duplex vagina, that is, two of them, or only a septate vagina, that is, one of them with a kind of partition dividing it into two parts. The latter condition was fairly common, and even more common was the condition of having a double uterus. Colvin felt it was premature to discuss with her her sexual life, if any, or the possibility that when she became a mother she might have to have a Caesarean, so he did not mention these things. He simply said, “I’m right sorry there aint nothin I could do to help your condition.” Except, he said to himself, introduce ye to a feller who’s probably dyin to meet ye,

“I aint worried,” Oona said. “They don’t pain me none. But will they keep me from being on the basketball team?”

“Only in the sense that they mean you’re a female, and the basketball team is for males.”

“Huh?” she said. “But there’s a girls’ team too, aint they?”

Sure enough, he discovered after checking with Jossie Conklin on the matter, there were going to be teams for both boys and girls, and he was expected to coach both. “I thought you knew that,” Jossie said. While he was at it, he asked Jossie, since she was supposedly a math expert or at least the math teacher, to calculate the odds against a person with X condition, one out of five million, being found in the same place and same time as a person with Y condition, one of three million. Jossie did a lot of figuring, and even used her adding machine, but finally announced that the odds were incalculable. In other words, it was impossible.

It was almost time for noon dinner before Tenny finally came to see him. He was thrilled to see that she had not cut her hair, nor was she wearing face paint, and her dress, which obviously was a cast-off of Venda’s, still came down to her ankles. She seemed kind of pale, though, and thin. “Tenny!” he said.

“Colvin!” she said, closing the door behind her, then she leapt into his arms. “I’ve missed ye so!” They had a long kiss, and she commenced rubbing her body all over his, especially in the areas where the legs end, then she tried to pull him down to the sofa. He resisted, protesting that there were other students outside the door waiting for his attention. “I’m a-perishin for ye!” she exclaimed. “I’ve got to have you inside me, right now!”

“But Tenny,” he said. That was all he knew to say, which perhaps was enough, the way he said it, to try to let her know that although he himself had an enormous erection at this moment which he would dearly enjoy sliding into her, they were going to have to learn restraint and discretion and patience if they were successfully to manage their romance. “Later maybe we can steal a moment,” he tried to console her, “but right now all I’m supposed to do is examine ye. Has anything been a-troublin ye?” He automatically asked his routine question, then said, “I wish we could talk for hours, but this is a real busy day for me. So why don’t ye jist talk and tell me everything while I do an examination on ye?”

So Tenny talked constantly while he gave her as thorough a physical examination as his instruments would permit. She said she had nothing whatever wrong with her. He found that hard to swallow in view of her long-standing hypochondria. She said that she was so happy that school was starting up again, so she would not only get to see Colvin in his office, like now, but also she was going to take Psychology! “Do ye think I’d have any aptitude for that subject?” she asked.

“Tenny, the subject of psychology ort to have been named after you,” he said truthfully, not meaning to imply that there was anything wrong with her mental processes or her motives or her behavior.

She was also going to “go out” for the girls’ basketball team, so she could be with Colvin during even more of the precious Fridays, and she hoped that when they took long trips to the places where they would play games against distant teams, she could ride beside him in whatever conveyance was used. Possibly even, if any of those games involved going to other towns that could not be returned from in the same day, and they had to spend the night, they might even contrive some way to spend the whole night together, ever now and then, because she had thought about this quite a lot with both her heart and her head as well as her twitchet, and she had decided that they were going to have to find a way to hook up their sexual links not just once but many, many times repeatedly in the same night…or day, or whenever. “Remember,” she said, “‘we have got to find a way.’ That’s our motto.” It might even be possible for them to sneak off sometimes to Venda’s house in Jasper, when Venda and Russ were at the school. Yes, Tenny was doing all right, living at Venda’s house. At least she didn’t mind it too much. It was a roof over her head. From the beginning, Tenny had been required to do most of the cooking and housecleaning, but she didn’t mind. One of the first big jobs Venda had given her involved sorting and straightening the pantry. Venda’s pantry had been a terrible mess, everything all jumbled together as if any time Venda had been to the store she had just thrown her groceries all of a heap into the pantry. There were bags of dried beans that had got all mixed up with bags of dried corn, and Tenny had been required practically to sort all those seeds, one by one, and it had taken forever, and the only thing that preserved her sanity was the memory of the time she had watched a bunch of ants carrying little grains of sand diligently and patiently to build their ant heap, and she had sought to do her sorting with the same mindless persistence. Tenny wondered if Venda had just given her such a tough job in an effort to part her from her senses, and, having failed, had given her the next tough job, which involved…But Tenny understood that Colvin had other students waiting for their medical examinations, and she had better save the rest of the story for later.

Colvin was greatly disturbed. Not over the tasks that Venda had been giving Tenny, although that was disturbing enough. What was more disturbing, for now, was what his examination of Tenny revealed. At first, he couldn’t believe it, because he’d so thoroughly examined Tenny in the past without ever finding anything whatever wrong with her that it was hard now to accept that there might actually be something wrong with her. He wondered at the irony of the transposition: as long as she was a chronic complaining hypochondriac, she was safe, invulnerable, and absolutely healthy; but once she abandoned her hypochondria and claimed to be “just fine,” she was actually sick. His hand on her chest detected fremitus. His stethoscope found a vesicular murmur. Her pulse was rapid. Her skin was not dry, but clammy, beaded with sweat as it had been that morning in the Commercial Hotel. He asked her to cough, and collected on the end of a tongue depressor an expectoration that was greenish, muco-purulent. He debated with himself whether to tell Tenny of his suspicions, and decided against it “Tenny,” he said, “I’ll see you in Psych class, and again at Basketball, but right after that I’d like you to come back here to my office for just a minute so I can give you another test.”

“Could we take more than just a minute?” she asked. “Couldn’t we take long enough to see if that sofa is good for anything besides lying on with lollipops?”

He laughed, as if that might dispel his anxiety. “We’ll see,” he said, and kissed her again and sent her on her way, asking her to take it easy.

Then he visited Jossie’s office yet again and inquired into the possibility of having a student-messenger with a horse ride into Jasper and pick up some stuff at Arbaugh’s Rexall, and he wrote and signed and sealed into an envelope a note from his prescription pad to R.C. Arbaugh, requesting a vial of tuberculin. The note said that just in case they were out of stock, kindly send somebody to Harrison to get it right away, and hang the expense.

His mind was not on the subject as he went to face his Psychology class. He had read enough of the Colvin textbook, and he had a fair idea of what he wanted to say, but his concern over Tenny’s condition seized his mind and would not let him think of anything else. He had distracting problems finding the meeting place of the Psych class: for some reason it had been scheduled to meet in the gym, the new, long, low barnlike building of fieldstone that completed the triangle of main buildings on the campus. The pupils were not sitting at desks but just around on the floor. At least he had been provided with a portable blackboard, and he wrote his name on it, as if there were anybody (there wasn’t) who didn’t know it. Jossie Conklin had not yet arrived with an armload of the textbooks.

“Wal, my friends,” he started off, “I hope we’re gonna have a heap of fun in here. But I ort to tell ye, right off, that what we learn in here aint really necessary. You can live without it. It won’t make you rich, and it likely won’t make you happy neither. So what’s the point in messin around with it? Unlike other subjects you’re taking, it caint be put to much practical use. It won’t teach ye how to speak proper. It won’t help ye to do sums. Some of y’uns remember I taught a course last year in hygiene, which at least showed everbody how to take care of theirselfs and keep healthy. Wal, this here that we’re gonna do might or might not give ye some sort of mental comfort, but I wouldn’t guarantee it. It might help ye understand better how your mind works. It might help ye to get along better with yore feller man. I can’t guarantee none of that. But I can guarantee that if you pay attention, and put your heart into it, it will shore enough give ye somethin to think about!”

He plunged right in, with Prof. Colvin’s first subject, Consciousness, and managed to keep them paying attention for half an hour’s worth of talk about how imagination is necessary to consciousness, and the different levels of consciousness (which he diagrammed on the blackboard) and how each of them affects our conduct. His lecture was hampered by his thoughts of Tenny and her condition. She was right there on the floor, not next to her husband but not far from him, and she was looking up at him with adoration, and also with a look of expectation, as if he might be about to explain the meaning of life.

Seeking to demonstrate the distinction between consciousness in full control and consciousness when it is reflexive or instinctive, Colvin noticed that there was a basketball lying on the edge of the court. He picked it up. It was the first time he had ever handled one. He bounced it. It sprang free from his control, but he chased it down and recaptured it. “Now if I was to try to make this thing go through that hoop,” he declared, “trying with all my might to make it go in, the chances are I’d shorely miss.” He propelled the ball upward, and, sure enough, it did not even come close to reaching the hoop, falling short by a couple of feet or more. “See?” he said, chasing down the bouncing ball again. “But if I had learned not to let my consciousness interfere with my instinctive tossing of the ball toward the hoop, there’s a fair chance I might get it in.” He shut off his mind and tossed the ball again, and it rose in a long smooth arc and went cleanly through the net. It may have been an accident, or beginner’s luck, but the students gasped, and then applauded, and several of them hollered things like, “Dandy shot, Coach!”

“Now you may be wondering, aint it a contradiction to try to consciously be instinctive? That will be the subject of our next meeting, and here’s your homework.” He wrote on the blackboard a list of questions he had made up for them to answer, such as, “List several examples of instinctive behavior you’ve observed in yourself.” He wrote down the page numbers, 1–23, for them to study in the Colvin text.

Finally, he asked, “Any questions?”

One boy raised his hand and said, “Yeah, Coach. When is our first game?”

“Game?” Colvin said. He glanced at Tenny, as if her facial expression might give him some clue, but she seemed merely to be awaiting his answer to the question. He realized that perhaps the students expected him to enliven the dull classes with some games. It oughtn’t to be too awfully hard for him to make up a few, although Prof. Colvin didn’t really get into the matter of play and Hall’s theory of games until the second chapter. “Wal, week after next, I reckon,” he said. “I ort to be able to have some games ready for y’uns by then.”

A girl raised her hand and asked, “Don’t we need some special shoes?”

Colvin thought that was a funny, if irrelevant question, and he laughed. “Heck, you can go barefoot for all I care!” he said. The students looked at each other, and Colvin sensed that they might have been disappointed in his answer. “I mean,” he said, “wear jist whatever kind of shoe you want.” He dismissed them.

Several of the students lingered after class to fool around with the basketball, trying to put it through the hoop, and he was pleased to see that they were attempting “lab sessions” with his talk about instinctive behavior. But he needed that basketball for his next hour, so he reluctantly expropriated it from them.

Most all of these students, however, were also going to be in Basketball, which, he discovered, was not meeting here in the gym where there were several hooped baskets available, but up on the second floor of the main building, where his hygiene class had met. When he got to the assigned room he discovered that every seat in the room was filled, kids were sitting on the floor and standing against the walls, and there was a big crowd outside the door who couldn’t get in. This potential audience included most of the faculty as well, and Colvin was dismayed at the realization that there might be not only girls’ and boys’ teams but also a faculty team that he would have to coach. Jossie came up to him and asked, “Would you mind if we moved to the auditorium?” Then she added, “I didn’t even try to bring the textbooks, because there simply aren’t enough to go around.” Feeling already dazed with his agitation over Tenny’s condition, and the experience of having just conducted a class, Colvin wondered if he had perhaps misunderstood Jossie previously: maybe there was supposed to be a textbook for Basketball. He certainly hoped so, because he needed one. All he had was a five-cent Little Blue Book from Haldeman-Julius, Fundamentals and Rules of Basket Ball, which just scratched the surface and left him uncertain about the distinction between a forward and a guard.

The group nearly filled the auditorium, which at least had a couple of basketball hoops attached to the sides of the stage, which had been the basketball court before the gym was built. He was both pleased and intimidated to see that so many people were interested in basketball. He noticed that even Venda was present, and he waved at her. He was too self-conscious to climb up on the stage where the basketball hoops were, so he decided to save that for later. He just stood in front of the first row, holding his basketball in one arm, and looked out over the crowd until he spotted Tenny, and he smiled at her, hoping the sight of her would give him encouragement, but on the contrary it simply reminded him that he was going to be distracted throughout Basketball by the thought of the results of the tuberculin test he would have to give her. He cleared his throat, and had a panicky thought that he might never again have the beginner’s luck shooting the basketball that he had had in Psych class, so maybe he had better not even try. “Wal, howdy, folks,” he began, and amended that to “Ladies and gentleman” to include his colleagues. He really didn’t know what to say next, and a long moment of painful silence drifted by, until he thought to break the ice with a little chitchat. “Aint it a beautiful day, though? It don’t look to rain anytime soon, and I kinder like this airish weather myself after that hot summer we had. How is everbody feelin? I hope you’re feelin fine. I’m feelin just fine myself.” All of them were smiling pleasantly as if all of them were feeling fine too except that they were a little impatient for him to get down to business.

One thing that Colvin knew for certain about Basketball was that the entire object of all of that running back and forth and trying to get the ball through the hoop and steadily piling up point after point was to win. Winning was everything. “We’re going to win! This is all about winning!” he said to them suddenly, and with such enthusiasm that his audience broke into spontaneous cheering. “Aint nobody ever gonna beat us! We will be the champ-peens of the whole country!”

Now there were two things that had to be talked about in the very beginning, and he might as well get them out of the way as quickly as possible. The first one was a bit of a problem. He had hoped that he might be meeting the boys’ teams and the girls’ teams separately, because this was a matter that couldn’t comfortably be discussed in mixed company, but since everybody was here together, he might as well try to make the best of it He needed to discuss the absolute necessity, from the physician’s point of view as well as simply a matter of personal well-being, that each of the boys—including the two males on the faculty—obtain and always wear a good-fitting athletic supporter. “Call ’em jock straps or whatever,” he said, “they serve an important function which it ort not be too difficult for you to figure out. So I expect to see each of you fellers with one the next time we meet. As for you gals…” and he went on to discuss the need for them each to own and wear a good-fitting brassiere. It ought not be necessary to call attention to the fact that all the running and jumping of basketball would make their bosoms bounce up and down like mad if they didn’t have a good brassiere to hold ’em down. These here new Jazz Age fads, with boyish high-hemmed dresses and bobbed hair and what-all, might be okay just to be seen in, but apparently there was a new fad to de-emphasize the bosom by not wearing no brassiere at all, and that simply would not do, as far as we here are concerned.

“Okay? So the next important item we have to discuss is: what are we going to call ourselves? We need a mascot name. And it ought to be original and distinctive, not just something commonplace like Tigers or Lions or Bears or Bulldogs or whatever. Any suggestions?”

The members of the audience exchanged looks with one another, and Colvin hoped that they were actually thinking about the matter. Jossie Conklin raised her hand and said, “Perhaps in view of the subject, we ought to be the Butterflies!” and she laughed and looked around to see if any others had grasped the significance of her remark, but only Nick Rainbird, who taught history, was also laughing.

Tim James, the new man (Bible and Hygiene, and destined shortly to become Jossie’s lover), said, “Since we’re the Newton County Academy, what say let’s call ourselves the Academicians?” and he fell out of his seat with his own laughter but few of the faculty and none of the students joined in.

“Let’s let the students be heard from,” Colvin suggested, and they listened to several suggestions, some of them good ones based upon the local fauna, such as Hellbenders, which, however, was thought a little too naughty for a Christian school.

Russ Breedlove suggested, “If it’s the Newton County Academy, how about we call ourselves the Counts?”

“And call the girls the Countesses?” Colvin asked. He rather liked the idea although he wasn’t wild about it. He proposed to write the various suggestions on the blackboard and let them vote on a winner. He wrote down all those suggested, and waited to see if any others were proposed.

Tenny raised her hand and rather quietly offered, “As far as that matter goes, how about the Newts?”

There was a lot of laughter. Colvin allowed as how that might be appropriate if they had to travel distances through rough country, because newts were amphibious salamanders. “Of course, newts is tiny little critters, but they’re elusive and slippery and they can go ever which way,” he pointed out. “Yeah, that might be an appropriate name for us. I’m all for it. Thank you, Tenny.”

“Excuse me,” Jossie Conklin said to him, “but what does all of this have to do with psychology?”

Colvin wasn’t sure he understood her question. “Wal, I reckon if we had a mascot name, it would give us a sense of identity, you know. If we think of ourselfs as newts, even though they’re slinky and no-account, we can play our games better as a team.” He was proud of his answer, but he also was beginning to have a growing sense of uneasiness that something was amiss.

“A team?” said Jossie Conklin. “I should think we’re perhaps a class, not a team. I facetiously suggested that if we have to adopt a mascot for Psychology class, it might be the butterfly, but I don’t suppose even you, Dr. Swain, realize the connection between Psyche and the butterfly, do you?”

Colvin stared at her. Slowly he began to understand his great mistake, and as it dawned on him, he grew very red in the face and could hardly breathe. He could only stand there, thinking that it was bad enough he had mistakenly lectured to his basketball teams on Consciousness and Instinct, but it was unforgivable that he had urged his Psychology class to wear jock straps and bras. He sought some consolation from the excuse that Tenny’s problem had distracted and rattled him. And indeed, that was all he could think about. His eyes sought hers in the crowd, and he tried to communicate to her by his eyes alone his misery. His real misery, he understood, was not over his embarrassing mistake but over the possibility that this lovely girl, who had captured his heart, who meant everything in the world to him, and who had even, just now, by a stroke of her original mind, given a name to the official mascot of the Newton County Academy, had fallen victim to the Great White Plague.

“Friends,” he said to the filled auditorium in a voice quiet and abashed, “doggone if I aint done went and made a boo-boo. The sorriest kettle of fish I ever mommixed. I’m supposed to handle two things, Psychology and Basketball, but I’ve done got ’em all confused one with the othern, and I’ve preached to the Basketball folks as if it was Psychology, and here I’ve been talkin to y’uns as if this was Basketball. So I do humbly beg yore pardon. Some way we’ll git this all straightened out.

“But, you know,” he went on, “come to think of it, it don’t make all that much difference. If you stop to think about it, in the scheme of things, in the coming and going of the seasons, in the times for laughter and the times for crying, the times for building up and the times for tearing down, and all those other times the Preacher spoke of, trying to tell us about vanity and how everthing don’t matter all that much anyhow, whether we are studying Basketball or playing Psychology, or the other way around, don’t really amount to a whole heck of a lot of hills of beans, nohow. There are more important things, like love and staying alive. So if y’uns will excuse me, that’s all I can tell y’uns today.”

Chapter ten

A couple more afternoons is all it will take. I have enjoyed your company so much that I’ve been tempted to drag this story out as long as I can just to keep you here, but I think you realize yourself that we’re getting toward the end of it.

Push that little red button on that thing, will you? And I hope you don’t mind. My young friend Mike Luster, who aspires to be a folklorist and comes to visit me just about as often as you do, has left his tape recorder here with the request that we preserve the remainder of whatever words I have to say in this story. Not that he mistrusts your ability to remember, let alone to hear, any of this, but he just wants to be sure that the end of the story is permanently recorded. You don’t need to worry that he might ever try to make a novel out of it himself.

I suppose there’s a possibility that the tape recorder could intimidate me somewhat, hold me back, slow me down, whatever. For, although I insist that I’ve always told you the exact and honest truth without any embellishment, I’ve never had to be constrained by any thought of what permanent reception my words may have. In this regard, I’ve been like the old-time Ozark storyteller himself: my words have been only for the occasion, only for the present audience; I’ve known that my words might get repeated by my audience to some future listeners, but as far as the story goes, it begins and ends right here and now. I never had much luck trying to use a tape recorder myself, not for stories. I collected hundreds of folk songs with my recording machines, but those songs were things already known and rehearsed and possessed of some permanence to begin with. Whenever I tried to tape a good story, it somehow inhibited the storyteller.

Maybe the only differences you’ll notice are these: the rest of this story aint so comical. Assuming you’ve been amused by a lot of what I’ve told you—even though you don’t laugh much, I can tell when I’ve tickled you—you may find the rest of this story somewhat downbeat, certainly minor key. And also I’m fixing to switch it into the present tense. Why? Well, why do you do it your own self? In all your novels, you downshift (or upshift, is it?) from the past to the present tense toward the end, and then finally into the future tense. I’ve studied what you’ve done. I’ve considered that in my own collections of tales, there is often a kind of indiscriminate shifting from one tense to another, because that’s simply the way those old folk stories got told, perhaps without any rhyme or reason as far as tenses are concerned.

But if you’ll pardon the analogy, there exists between storyteller and listener a kind of romance, and the progress of it parallels the stages of courtship: holding hands, hugging, and finally fucking, or some kind of consummation. All that past tense business is just holding hands, making contact, nothing truly intimate. But when you shift to present tense, you’re drawing the listener into more intimate contact, as if to make sure that the listener becomes a part of the story, not just an audience to it. And then, through the ultimate intimacy of the future tense, you make sure that the listener is always a permanent part of the story. Am I right? Thank you for bringing me the Smith Brothers cough drops. I need them.

Hug Tenny: she definitely has TB. When Colvin leaves that auditorium and goes downstairs, first to the principal’s office to see if the vial of tuberculin has been delivered (it has), and then to his own office, Tenny follows him, and they lock the door. At once they use the sofa, out of similar as well as different reasons, both out of love, but Tenny out of overwhelming desire and Colvin not so much from desire as out of solace for his miseries, including his continuing embarrassment over the mix-up. He wants to ask Tenny if she herself, being in both Basketball and Psych, had not realized his error, and, if so, why in heaven’s name hadn’t she told him? But she will not let him ask. Her hands are all over him. Her mouth is all over him. The ferocity of her ardor almost scares him, for he has never known a woman to want it so much. The building is emptied now of people, the school grounds are likewise evacuated, but still there must be someone around who can hear the sounds that Colvin and Tenny are making. Somewhere out there, surely, is Russ Breedlove, waiting to take Tenny home atop Marengo. He will just have to wait.

He will just have to wait even longer, for Colvin and Tenny, when they have finished, do not rise from that sofa but lie there in each other’s arms for a long time, not simply because it feels good to hold each other like that, nor simply because they are all worn out from a busy day and a strenuous turn at sex, but because it is postponing as long as possible the test.

But finally he must get up and administer it. He keeps his back to her while he dilutes the tuberculin and draws into the hypodermic syringe a tiny amount, 0.1 mg., and then he takes her arm and promises that it will not hurt very much, and it does not.

“What’s it supposed to do?” she asks. “What do you think might be wrong with me?”

Colvin Swain surprises himself by not telling her the truth. “Likely there aint nothing wrong with you,” he says, “but this here is just a little test to make sure. We’ll keep a close watch on your arm there where I stuck ye, and see if it has any kind of reaction. Now if you want a ride home, you’d better run and see if you caint find your husband.” He kisses her one more time, asks her to contrive to meet him here about this same time tomorrow, and she is gone.

He has no microscope in this office. He takes home with him to Stay More the specimen of her sputum he had collected earlier, and uses his microscope to examine it, after an acid-fast stain. Long after he has finally and positively identified a bacillum, Mycobacterium tuberculosis humanis, he continues to stare into the microscope, watching the goddamned critter. “Know your enemy,” he says to himself, and he wants to study every curve of this tiny, evil rod until he can almost predict what it is trying to do. He knows what its brothers and sisters are already doing inside Tenny’s lungs. Thriving on oxygen, they are seeking out the parts of her lungs where they can get plenty of air. They are hunting for her alveoli, the tiny air sacs of her lungs, private chambers, where they can have their orgies and reproduce.

But her strong young body has not welcomed them, and it has sent platoons of white blood cells to interrupt those orgies in those alveoli, and rout them out, swallow them up, and ideally kill them. Yet in swallowing them, the white blood cells might not be killing them but only giving them protection by enwrapping them in pockets, spinning caseous cocoons around them. These shells are the tubercles. Tenny’s body becomes hypersensitive not only to the bacilli but to those tubercles, and this is what will cause her skin to become inflamed where Colvin injected the tuberculin.

Maybe, just maybe, her disease will not progress beyond this point; the bacilli will spread no farther, and any of them remaining in her alveoli, instead of having further orgies, will go to sleep and remain dormant, sealed off in those tubercles, and she will have a normal life.

That is what he hopes for. After supper, though the night grows chilly and dark, he sits on the front porch, wearing his favorite cardigan sweater. He needs to think. His dog Galen comes up and slobbers on his shoe, and nuzzles his leg, and gets a pat or two on the head for his pains, then curls asleep at Colvin’s feet. Colvin is moved to think of the dog’s namesake, and he remembers that Galen, the last of the great Greek physicians, quite possibly suffered from tuberculosis himself. Galen established the first institution for the treatment of TB and sent his patients to recuperate on the most beautiful beach in the world, in a place where the special herbs eaten by the cows produced the magical therapeutic milk that Galen prescribed for his patients. There is no record of the rate of cure of all those milk-drinking patients of Galen.

Colvin thinks of all the names that the disease has been called since Galen’s time, when it was known as phthisis, pronounced not as bad as it looks, thigh-sis, inherited into old-time parts of the Ozarks as “tis-sis” or “tis-sick” as in the legendary tissick weevil, who was thought to cause it. But most people in the Ozarks still knew it by its nineteenth-century name, consumption, because that is what it does, it consumes the body, starting with the lungs. Colvin had enough experience with it—from patients of his who thought they had catarrh, asthma, bronchitis, weak heart, stomach trouble, scrofula, or just the common cold, and succumbed to it, despite his ministrations (there are no really effective ministrations)—to think of it as the Great White Plague. During the years of his medical education, with Kie Raney or by himself, it was the Number One Killer in the country, and he had learned to fear it more than any other disease. Like any good physician, Colvin takes pride in his ability to manage and conquer his patients’ ailments, and he can stare arteriosclerosis in the face and say, “Arteriosclerosis, I am your better!” but he cannot face up to the Great White Plague with the same fearlessness and confidence. It is the one disease that is better than he.

Colvin broods on his porch for so long that finally his wife, Piney, comes out of the house and sits beside him, and, because she knows everything, she knows that something is profoundly disturbing him. All she says is, “Do you think you could talk to me about it?”

Because she knows everything, he asks her, “Is there any cure against the Great White Plague?”

Although she knows everything, she does not know that one, nor does anyone else, at that time. “You would surely know if there was,” she admits. After a while she asks, “Who has it?”

“A girl named Tenny,” he divulges.

“Yes,” she says. “Tenny.” As if it’s someone she’s known all her life.

Colvin wants to say more. He wants to confess his great inner conflict: he had first permitted himself to become so involved with Tenny because he knew for certain that, hypochondriacal as she was, she would never have anything actually wrong with her, she would never need him as her doctor, and therefore it was not a breach of doctor-patient ethics for him to fall madly in love with her. But now that he has discovered that Tenny does indeed have a great need of his attentions as her physician, will he have to violate ethics (not to mention Kie Raney’s Oath) in order to go on loving her?

Because he cannot voice this torment, his wife at length speaks up, saying, “You’d best come in the house, Colvin. It’s getting cold. Real cold. And I suppose you won’t be waiting until next Friday to be going back to Parthenon, will you?”

No, he cannot wait another week. Reactions to the tuberculin test begin to show up within twenty-four hours, and he goes back to his Academy office the next day, Saturday, to meet her. She has escaped from Jasper, from her husband and her domineering mother-in-law, on the excuse that there is an important meeting of the Erisophean Society, the Academy’s literary club.

Although Colvin hardly needs to see the results of the tuberculin test to confirm his diagnosis, he has to punish himself, or make himself share the ordeal that lies ahead for Tenny, by seeing it anyway: the swelling and the redness on Tenny’s arm, the positive reaction declaring, “This pore gal is infected, infested with the Great White Plague. So now what, Doc?” He cannot answer.

Tenny wants so eagerly to make love again, without even waiting for him to explain what the redness and swelling from her tuberculin test signify. Colvin knows, from his vast knowledge of the enemy, that the Great White Plague is rumored to increase the sexual urge, that perhaps if it doesn’t directly heighten the libido, it causes some kind of mysterious chemical effect in the body which stirs the glands, or at least it raises the temperature of the body in such a way that the heat is perceived as sexual heat. He is not certain that he can believe any of this. He wants to believe, and he has every right to believe, that Tenny desires him so ardently not because of her fever but because she loves him as much as he loves her. And when he obliges her and himself, and marvels yet again at the intensity and abandon and joy that she expresses in the act, he does not permit any thoughts of fever or chemistry to diminish his own pleasure.

They are still lying in each other’s arms, in the Saturday sunlight coming through the window that is almost enough to take the October chill out of the air, when she at last requests, “Okay, my dearest dear, it’s time maybe you tell me how come my arm has turned red and swole up where you stuck me.”

Colvin, as I think we have seen, is a good liar but not a great one. He knows he cannot indefinitely postpone letting her know the truth. She will have to learn it all somehow, sometime. But he can be as gentle as possible without lying. “Do you recollect,” he says, fully aware that they are lying on the very sofa where she had reclined to tell him about it, “that time when you was a child and your good old Grampaw McArtor lay sick abed and you spent so much time with him, and even sent your best friend ’See down inside of his lungs to see if she couldn’t cure him?”

“Sure I remember all that,” Tenny says.

“Well, there’s just a possibility that you might have caught what he had, although catching the disease didn’t mean that you’d show any sign of it for many a year. The little bacilli that cause it could have been asleep in your system all this time, just waiting for a reason to wake up and start doing their dirty work again.”

“Colvin Swain!” she says, and sits up abruptly. “Are you tellin me that I might have consumption?”

He sits up too. “It appears so,” he admits. He explains how the tuberculin test works. He also confesses to having taken the sputum specimen home with him and examined it under the microscope and seen the curvy rod in its acid-fast stain. Does she remember from Hygiene class, he asks, what bacilli are, and how they behave?

“I reckon I learnt the practical reason,” she says, then smiles and adds, “but I never learnt the pretty one. If there is one.”

“Awfully pretty from the bacterium’s way of lookin at it,” he says. “If I was a bacterium, I’d be mighty proud to cavort around in one of yore lungs.”

“But you’d be a-killin me,” she points out, rightly.

“I wouldn’t know I was,” he avows, rightly. “Like all other critters in this world, including humans too, I’d just be doing my job, to git along in the world, competing with my fellow critters as well as with my host or hostess for my share of being able to breathe and to eat and to—”

“To shit,” Tenny says. She shudders, and clutches her chest. “So now my lungs are filling up with bacteria shit and I caint even cough hard enough to git it out.” Involuntarily, but as if she wants to do it, she coughs violently, and Colvin reaches for a handkerchief for her sputum, which does not yet, he is glad to see, contain any blood. Whether it contains any bacteria shit he might not even be able to determine with a microscope, but Tenny has given him a thought: if the tuberculosis bacilli are creatures, what happens to their excrement? He realizes that science has spent much time determining that they must breathe, but not that they must eat and shit.

She clutches his sleeve and asks in the same child’s voice she first asked him, a year before, “I’m like to die, aint I?”

But a year before it had been almost as if she were seeking constantly to find something that would kill her, and Colvin had to assure her continuously that she was not going to die. Now she has everything to live for, and earnestly wants to, but he is going to have to remind her that, as the textbook had concluded, we should not live to die, but live prepared to die. “Not everbody who catches the Great White Plague dies from it,” he declares. “Lots of ’em live forever. Or, I mean, at least a natural lifetime.”

“Can you give me anything for it?” she asks, forlornly, as if she knows the answer: there is no medicine for tuberculosis.

“I’m givin ye some creosote for your cough,” he says. “And some cod-liver oil to give ye vitamins A and B. You need all the vitamins you can git. You need to keep on eating good and don’t lose any more weight. You’ve done already lost too much.” He seizes her arms and gazes earnestly into her eyes and says, “Look at it this way, Tenny. It’s a mighty fracas. On one side, there’s them bacilli a-trying to break ye down and consume ye. On the other side, there’s you and your body, with me doing my best to help ye, fightin back at the bacilli. We don’t have any medicine that can kill ’em. Caint nothin kill ’em exceptin yore own white blood cells. Remember leucocytes, in Hygiene? In the battlefield of your lungs, there’s going to be a powerful fight a-raging, and you can win it!”

His pep talk about winning reminded him of what he had said to the Psychology class under the assumption they were the basketball teams. Perhaps it reminded her as well, because she asked, “Will I have to quit school?”

“Maybe not,” he says. “Jist don’t go around coughing in nobody’s face, and let’s hope you don’t start a-sneezing. Sorry to say, but I caint let ye be on the girls’ basketball team. It would be too strenuous for you, and you need to rest ever chance you git. But you can be the team manager and come to all the games.”

In the weeks ahead, Tenny has to make a number of adjustments. She has to give up her job working in the kitchen and dining room. Colvin does not tell anyone that Tenny is tuberculous, but he thinks it advisable that she not have to handle the chores she had done to help pay her tuition, not alone because she needs to rest but also because it reduces the risk of her spreading her disease. She proposes to work in the laundry instead. The laundry is a creek bank down the hill from the school, and the laundress’s job is just to maintain the big black iron kettle in which water is heated and the clothes are thrown. “So long as you didn’t spit in the pot,” Colvin teases her, “that would be acceptable.” But he doesn’t want her working, at all. He persuades her to allow him to pay her tuition, and, optimistically, he pays it for the full year, $28. She can devote what energy she has to her classes.

What she mostly needs, to prepare her for the fight against the disease, is rest. Colvin gives her a key to his office so that she can go there at all times of the day when she doesn’t have classes, and rest on the sofa. Officially he uses the office only one day a week himself, but now, because of Tenny, he comes to school two, three, sometimes four times a week. Piney smiles and says nothing, because she knows everything and people who know everything are inclined to smile and say nothing.

But there are many hours, every day, when Colvin is not in his office, and Tenny comes to let herself into it and rest on the sofa. Lying on the sofa reminds her of all those sessions with giant lollipops, and it is a comfortable memory. Now, though, she is alone, and only occasionally has Colvin to talk to. Colvin wants her to open the window beside the sofa to let in as much fresh air as possible, although the air is cold and Tenny must keep her winter coat on. He tells her the fresh air will help stop her cough, but she does not quite understand why, if the tuberculosis bacilli are such lovers of air and seekers of oxygen, this exposure to the fresh air isn’t aiding and abetting the enemy. And indeed, medical science itself is confused on this matter, but Colvin is inclined to side with those who believe that fresh air is beneficial.

Lying there for hours on the office sofa, Tenny is bored. If she can fall asleep and take a nap, fine, and she often does, but more often she just lies there. She begins to stop by the library upstairs to get whatever reading matter she can find, a magazine or a newspaper or a book. The library has a few novels that might keep her in sustained thrall, by Gene Stratton Porter, Harold Bell Wright, Rafael Sabatini, and Grace Miller White, but for some reason she is not able to read a novel. She makes an attempt to read one of them, Kathleen Norris’s Butterfly, attracted by the title, but can only plod through a couple of chapters before losing interest. Colvin brings her to read some books that he has obtained for himself and finished: F. M. Pottenger’s Tuberculosis and How to Combat It, D. MacDougall King’s The Battle with Tuberculosis and How to Win It, A.K. Krause’s Rest and Other Things, and Dr. E.L. Trudeau’s An Autobiography. She finds these readable and interesting and very helpful, although they impress upon her how easily and frequently fatal the disease is. The latter book introduces her to the concept of the sanatorium, and she wonders how far it is to Saranac Lake, New York, and she begins to have daydreams of living that kind of life in a place like that, with nothing to do but rest, eat good food, get lots of sunshine and fresh air, and live forever.

“Colvin,” she says wistfully one day, “I don’t reckon there’s any place like Saranac Lake hereabouts, is there?”

No, he tells her, the nearest thing to it is just the Arkansas State Tuberculosis Sanatorium at Booneville, down in Logan County on the other side of the Arkansas River, maybe a hundred miles or so away, and probably not nothing at all like Saranac Lake.

“Oughtn’t I to be there?” she asks.

“Hell, it aint even in the Ozarks!” he tells her. “It would sort of be like gittin sent off to prison, and you’d be surrounded with a lot of folks in worse shape than you, and you’d feel all cooped up, and have lots of strict rules to foller.” He pauses, then adds rhetorically, “and when would I ever see ye again?” When she cannot answer that, he observes, “Tenny, this here is your own private sanatorium, with your own personal doctor who loves you. And you git to stay in school besides.”

She not only stays in school, but, typically, excels in all her classes. In Colvin’s course in psychology—and, for the most part, he has straightened out the difference between Psychology and Basketball—Tenny is always the first among the hundred or so filling the auditorium to raise her hand with answers to his questions about Reflex, Instinct, or Sensation, and, more importantly, to ask pertinent questions about things he has overlooked or never even considered.

Despite his first-day error, or because of it, the Psychology class continues to refer to themselves as the Newts, and to talk about winning, and to think of themselves as a team who are out to beat the world by developing superior reflexes, instincts, and sensations.

Principal Jossie Conklin summons him to her office one day. She begins by saying how much she has been enjoying the Psychology class, and how she has learned so much in the class about Expression that she has had an easy time of approaching the new man, Tim James (Bible and Hygiene), and revealing to him her attraction to him, which he has reciprocated, even to the extent of—with some suggestions from her best friend, Venda Breedlove—the development of episodes of quite intimate contact between them. But, and this is the main reason she wants to talk to Colvin, Jossie has inadvertently discovered that Colvin is “keeping” Mrs. Tennessee Breedlove in his office, perhaps for purposes of gratification of the flesh. What happened was, Jossie had observed Tenny letting herself into Colvin’s office on a day when Colvin was not there nor supposed to be there. After a while, Jossie had let herself into the office with her master key and discovered Tenny sound asleep on Colvin’s sofa. Rather than wake her and ask for an explanation, Jossie had decided to keep a close watch and see what was going on, and, on another occasion, when Colvin was there and was supposed to be there, she quietly unlocked his door and peeked in to discover that he was doing something he was not supposed to be doing: he was atop Tennessee with his trousers down. Jossie had been quickly able to determine, from Tennessee’s own behavior and sounds, that the student was not being taken advantage of, in fact was a willing, eager, even joyous participant in the proceedings. Indeed, Jossie has to confess, she had even learned a thing or two, by watching, about the possibility of the female’s taking a less than passive role in the exchange, contrary to what she had been taught or had assumed and had followed in her relations with Tim James. Nevertheless, in any event, be that as it may, for having said all that, Jossie feels constrained to demand, “What in hell is going on?”

“Tenny and me are crazy about each other,” Colvin confesses.

“Obviously,” Jossie says. “But you are both married to other persons, and you are committing adultery, and you are using school property for illicit purposes, and you are violating every conceivable standard of personal and professional morality, and I ought to fire you and expel Tennessee.” When Colvin cannot think of a proper defense against that indictment, Jossie goes on, “But Tennessee is the top student in this school, and you are not only doing a bang-up job with Psych class but I hear that your boys’ basketball team went up against the fearsome Antlers of Deer and lost by only thirty points.” Colvin is humbly grateful for that “only.” But it is true that the Deer team is the best in Newton County, and the Newts had been lucky they hadn’t lost by a hundred points. “So,” Jossie says, “I can’t fire you, and I don’t suppose it would do me any good to try to forbid you to keep on seeing Tennessee. But I can’t allow her to have a key to your office, so that she can come and go in there any time she pleases.”

“Wal, heck,” Colvin protests. “Mostly she just goes in there to rest on the sofer.”

“Rest?” Jossie says. “If you call that rest, I’d like a chance to watch when she’s busy.”

“No, I mean when I’m not here, between her classes, she needs to take it easy, doctor’s orders, on account of her condition.”

“What’s her condition?”

“You know,” he says truthfully, “doctors aint supposed to tell their patients’ troubles to other people.”

“Okay. But is it contagious?”

Once again he decides to lie, but a little white lie about the Great White Plague. “Nope.”

“That’s what you said about her cerebral palsy,” she reminds him. “But the whole school caught it.” And he is all too aware that there is a possibility the whole school could catch Tenny’s tuberculosis if they were exposed to it closely and constantly over a long period of time. He cannot promise anything.

Jossie says, “Well, you are lucky that poor Venda isn’t holding this against you. Maybe because she’s got another boyfriend now.”

As a matter of fact, fortunately for our story, which already has such a tangled web of interpersonal relationships that it needs all the simplification it can get, Colvin has not been seeing much of Venda, outside of Psych class, where she has called attention to herself with some rather stupid answers to questions, and a general ineptitude for the subject. He has escaped her extracurricular blandishments with the lie that he is being faithful to his wife. Venda would have found this inexcusable and frustrating, but it happens that Nick Rainbird, the History and Natural Science teacher, also as a result of being in the Psych class and learning the same ideas of Expression that had helped Jossie start something with Tim James, has been liberated to express his long-secret infatuation for Venda. So passionately have Venda and Nick become involved with each other that she has even lost interest in her continual revenge upon poor Tenny. After subjecting Tenny to the three ordeals, or tasks—the sorting of the jumbled pantry, the shearing and gathering of wool from some dangerous sheep, and being sent to climb Mt. Sherman with a bucket to fetch home some water from an ice-cold spring that was jealously guarded by a cranky old man’s attack dogs—Venda had planned a fourth and final, crushing task for Tenny but, becoming involved with Nick Rainbird, Venda couldn’t even remember what she had planned. “Oh, the hell with her,” Venda has said. “She can go to Hades for all I care.” And while this may be construed as a dismissal, perhaps in its perverse way it is consigning Tenny to the fate of her fourth and final task, her descent into the Underworld of tuberculosis.

While Venda has lost interest in Tenny, her son has not. Russ still sleeps with Tenny every night…except those occasions when the basketball teams must travel to such remote locations for their games, Huntsville over in Madison County, Valley Springs in Boone County, Snowball in Searcy County, that an overnight is necessary, and while Russ opts to bunk with the other guys in one room, and Tenny is presumed to be bunking with the girls in another, Coach and Manager are actually contriving and conspiring to spend the night together in a third, in each other’s arms. Russ does not know this, but he knows that his wife cares more for Coach than for anyone or anything in the whole wide world. He has resigned himself to this fact. He cannot change it any more than he could change the seasons so that summer would follow autumn. Still, he is able to sleep with Tenny almost every night, kissing her goodnight and snuggling up against her and, after waiting until she is deeply asleep, experimenting with one or another positioning of his dual peckers in an effort to get one or another of them to penetrate one or another of her orifices, always, alas, without ease or success. These sessions usually leave him achy and restless. But he has made a shrewd and remarkable observation: after such a night, he always plays better in basketball, as if the frustration and pent-up jism of his efforts with Tenny are translated into his energy for the game. Russ Breedlove is the star forward of the Newts, or at least the highest scorer, and he doesn’t mind admitting to himself that his shot goes through the hole more frequently and adroitly because he cannot shoot off either of his peckers into any hole.

But there are still all those days when there aren’t any games to be played, and Russ would sure admire to shoot off both barrels every chance he could get. He is still convinced that if only he could get rid of his surplus pecker he would be able to poke the survivor not only into Tenny but into any gal who struck his fancy. He keeps planning to visit Doc again when the man is Doc and not Coach or Teach or Wife’s Lover, and remind him once again of his standing offer to slice off the spare. He keeps putting it off, however, and eventually it is Doc who calls him in, not, as it turns out, over the matter of performing the surgery.

“Russ, son,” Doc says, “has Tenny told ye anything about what her trouble is?”

Russ realizes that Tenny has many troubles, but he isn’t sure which one Doc is talking about, so he shakes his head.

“She hasn’t told you she has tuberculosis?” Doc asks.

“Aw, hell, Doc,” Russ observes, “at one time or another’n in her life, she has had cystic fibrosis, multiple sclerosis, neurosis, diagnosis, halitosis, and just about ever other ‘osis’ there is.”

“Those were only in her mind,” Doc points out, “but she has really and truly got tuberculosis, and it can be catching if you’re exposed to it long enough, and I thought I’d better warn you that it would be better for you if you didn’t sleep with her.”

Russ narrows his eyes at Doc. “Shitfire, Doc,” he says, “you’re jist a-makin that up, because you don’t want me to sleep with her, because you’d rather sleep with her yourself.”

Doc coughs and blushes, and Russ realizes he has hit him where he lives. But Doc tries to deny it. “No, now, I’m a-tellin ye the honest to God truth, boy. What she has got aint easy to catch, like the common cold, but if you’re exposed to it night after night, month after month, the chances are you jist might come down with it yourself.”

Russ thinks. At length he asks, “Is that there tuberculosis the reason she coughs so much, and is gittin right skinny, and looks so pale, and drenches the bedclothes ever night with her sweat?”

“You’ve noticed,” Doc says, not without a little sarcasm. “Well, then, believe me, it’s serious, and it’s catching, and I jist thought I’d better do what I could to keep you from gittin it too.”

“Thanks, Doc,” Russ says, “but there aint a extry bed in our house. I may jist have to start sleepin with my momma!” The thought greatly amuses him, and he has a fit a laughter, although the possibility privately captivates him.

“Let’s keep this a secret,” Doc requests. “No sense in gittin anybody alarmed about it, so I don’t want nobody in this school to know about it.”

Russ agrees to keep mum, and takes his leave, but comes back a moment later. “Doc,” he says, “I hate to keep on reminding you, but there’s still a little problem that you promised to fix,” He points to his crotch.

“Yeah, I aint forgot,” Doc admits. Then he asks, “What do ye think of Oona Owens?”

“Don’t change the subject, Coach,” Russ says, although, by changing his form of address from “Doc” to “Coach” he has already partly changed the subject himself, because if he is the star forward of the Newts, Oona is the star guard of the Lady Newts (or Newtesses, as some call them). “She’s a whiz, aint she, Coach?” Russ observes. “Aint never seen a gal who can grab a ball the way she can.”

Coach Swain has often, during practices, allowed the girls’ team and the boys’ team to scrimmage against each other, by prior agreement “playing dirty,” no holds barred, the girls clawing and scratching and as often as not out-rebounding and out-shooting the boys. Russ has never faced a boy guard anywhere who can hamper him as effectively as Oona does. He not only admires her ball-hawking and bodychecking, but he also thinks she’s an awful pretty dish for an athlete. He even adores the odor of her sweat.

“Have you ever thought of steppin out with her?” Coach asks.

“Shoot, Coach, I’m a married man,” Russ reminds him.

“So am I” is all Coach says, but it is enough to remind Russ that Coach has not allowed the marriage vows to stop him from extramarital activity, including with the two women closest to Russ, his mother and his wife.

“You’re jist tryin again to git me away from Tenny,” Russ accuses.

“No, I’m jist tryin to git ye to find out if there might not be some other gal in this big wide world who could pleasure ye more than Tenny.”

“How could Oona do that?” Russ wants to know.

Colvin Swain must do some debating with himself. As Doc Swain, he is bound by oath not to let know Russ know of Oona’s “condition.” But as Coach Swain, he has no oaths. No, perhaps Coach Swain is not allowed to know everything that Doc Swain knows. “There is jist no tellin,” he says to Russ. “But if I was you, I’d shore keep my eye out fer a chance to play with Oona off the basketball court.”

And sure enough, there eventually comes a chance, during the post-Thanksgiving tournament in Eureka Springs, which requires two nights on the road, and possibly three if the Newts can advance into the semifinals. For once, the teams are staying in an actual hotel, albeit a small and very cheap hotel, but one in which there are several rooms at their disposal, three for the boys’ team, so that they’ll only have to sleep two to a bed, three for the girls’ team, ditto, one for Coach (and clandestinely Manager too), and even a spare room which happens to be the place where Russ Breedlove and Oona Owens discover that they have an anatomical affinity which affords many possibilities and delights. Coach Swain is supposed to chaperone his players on these overnight trips, but he is preoccupied and does not seem to know or notice that Russ and Oona are spending the night together. He is somewhat troubled, or disappointed, the next day in the tournament, when both the Newts and the Lady Newts are embarrassingly blown away by their opponents, principally because their star players, Russ and Oona respectively, are not giving it their all. Although eliminated from the tournament, they have one more night in their hotel before the long trip home, and once again Russ and Oona conspire to seclude themselves together in the spare room.

In his own room, with Tenny, late in the night after they have exhausted themselves with sexual doings, Colvin cannot resist telling Tenny what may be happening nearby between Russ and Oona. He is violating his oath, but he feels that Tenny ought to know. The disclosure renders Tenny speechless. Colvin wonders about this, because she has already told him that Russ is no longer sleeping with her, that Venda has consigned Tenny to sleeping on a pallet in the pantry, and that Russ has even told her that as far as he’s concerned they might as well not consider themselves man and wife anymore. Finally, Colvin has to ask her, “Well? Does it make ye mad that your husband is cheatin on ye?”

“Oh, no,” Tenny says. “I jist feel kind of jealous, as if she’s able to do somethin that I could never do.”

Colvin laughs. “Would you want an extra vagina if you could have one?”

“I’d like to have a dozen of ’em,” she says, “if you could have a dozen penises.”

He laughs again. “Where would you put all of ’em?”

“Here,” she says. “And here. And one of ’em around here. And one up here.”

Playfully they re-create their anatomies so that they could be joined together all over their bodies. Almost by accident, Tenny gives herself a vagina in her left lung, her bad lung, and at the moment of realization of what she has done, she begins coughing, and for the first time spits up blood.

Hemoptysis. He has hoped that this would not happen. He realizes that it is spontaneous and inevitable, but that sexual activity can bring it on. There is less than a teaspoon of blood. This hemoptysis does not alter the prognosis, except that it may spread the disease to other parts of the lungs, and it can also increase the risk of pneumonia.

“’See?” she says. He thinks at first she is saying it accusingly, as if she knows that their act of love has caused it. But then he realizes that she is calling out to her old playmate or other self. He hopes that verily ’See will return and help in the battle. He knows that Tenny must remain in bed for seven to ten days until the bleeding has stopped, but he can’t keep her in this bed.

“We’ve got to git you home so you can rest in bed for a week or so,” he declares.

“Home?” Tenny says, and laughs. “Where’s that?”

“Don’t laugh,” he says. “Try to stay as still as you can. Don’t even talk unless you have to. Talking and laughing can make it worse.”

As soon as he had learned that Tenny has been sleeping on a crude pallet in Venda’s pantry, an airless room reeking with smells of foodstuffs—vinegar and onions and spices and moldy cheeses—Colvin has been putting his mind to the problem of a better place for her. She cannot return to the dormitory. There are a couple of spare rooms in the gymnasium, but they are not heated at night. Likewise his office is unheated.

Now he decides bravely to take her to Stay More. Of course he cannot put her up in his own house, not with Piney there, but he can put her up in the hotel. Not too long before, the old woman living in the big Jacob Ingledew house on Main Street, the woman you have chosen to call Whom We Cannot Name in your architecture novel, died, and the house was inherited by Willis Ingledew, the bachelor storekeeper, who moved into it with his spinster sister, Drussie Ingledew, who realized that a house of a dozen rooms was too big for the two of them and decided to turn it into a hotel, the only hotel that Stay More ever had, and not a very successful one. In fact, when Colvin installs Tenny in one of the upstairs guest rooms, a south-facing one (Colvin’s own house is on the north side of the hotel), she is the only guest there. Both Drussie and Willis are greatly in Doc Swain’s debt for various medical services that he has rendered for both of them, and they welcome the chance to barter Tenny’s hotel bill in return for their medical bills, and they are even amenable to Doc’s request that they not tell a soul that a young lady is confined to one of their upstairs rooms. Colvin explains to them simply that she is a student at N.C.A. who has come down with a disease—medical ethics prohibits his revealing to the Ingledews just what the disease is—which requires confinement to bed for as long as ten days, and the N.C.A. itself simply does not have the facilities for such infirmary care. The reason for secrecy, he says, is so that word will not leak back to the student body of N.C.A. and possibly bring a horde of other students wanting to be treated likewise in the Stay More Hotel.

Tenny loves Stay More, as all of us who have seen it are bound to do, even if she can only see south and west from her room—enough, at least, to see the big general store, the old gristmill, pretty Banty Creek, the schoolhouse, and the looming rise of Ingledew Mountain. She is, however, somewhat nervous at the thought that Mrs. Swain, her lover’s wife, dwells just a short distance to the unseen north. Her agitation is compounded by the fact that patients with hemoptysis usually become extremely nervous. Knowing this, Colvin gives her half a grain of codeine sulfate, and watches to see if he might need to give her morphine, but he does not. Not yet, at least. The codeine quietens her, and he hopes he can keep her quiet and resting without any more of it. Even if he could get up his nerve to sneak out on Piney in the still of the night, he makes no attempt to sleep with Tenny while she is in Stay More.

But he visits her several times a day, and in the evenings too. Drussie Ingledew is, if nothing else, an excellent cook, and she follows Colvin’s dietary instructions to the letter in making sure that Tenny gets the nourishment she needs, including half a gallon a day of the same splendid well-water that helped my own recuperation at Stay More. With all of this attention, Tenny ought to be getting better.

Piney observes that Colvin isn’t running off to Parthenon every chance he can get. He seems to be hanging around his office at home much more than usual. Or he seems to be moseying down to the Ingledews’ house/hotel more than once a day. She could easily ask him why, but she decides to ask Drussie Ingledew, who, being her nearest female neighbor, is also the closest thing on this earth to what might be called a “best friend,” other than Colvin himself. At least Drussie and Piney are on good speaking and gossiping terms, and Piney has permitted Drussie to come and pedal her player piano any time she feels like it. But when she asks Drussie why Colvin is spending so much time at the Ingledews’, all Drussie can say is to stammer that it appears Willis and Colvin have got a lot to talk about. Piney, knowing everything, knows this is not true: she knows that Colvin doesn’t talk to Willis at all except to exchange howdies. Drussie knows that Colvin is spending most of his time upstairs just talking to the girl. Or listening to her. Once, Drussie eavesdrops, curious to see what on earth could possibly be the subject matter that can keep them talking for hours on end, but all that she can make out is that the girl is talking about how “it looks as if I have always had this need to suffer, so now I’m really and truly doing it,” and Doc Colvin is trying to tell her that although he is sure sorry about her suffering, he feels he ought to try to get her to see that if people didn’t suffer they wouldn’t appreciate all of the many things that bring on the opposite of suffering, namely, pleasure and joy and happiness. If it didn’t rain so hard, we wouldn’t appreciate sunshine. Et cetera. Drussie thinks Doc would have made a good church preacher.

Piney is so happy to have Colvin staying in Stay More so much more these days that she makes a mistake: early one morning, even before putting the breakfast coffee on to boil, she sits herself down at her piano and puts in the roll of “Roses of Picardy” and plays it, singing all the words about the hush of the silvery dew, et cetera. It is only when she is all the way through, all the way down to “there’s never a rose like you,” that she realizes her grievous error, and announces loudly to the house, “Any fool knows, Sing before breakfast, Cry before supper,” which, although Piney knows too much to be superstitious, is the one superstition which she does not consider a superstition because it is so unfailingly true. All day long she waits to see what is going to make her cry.

This is the day that Colvin has to make an important decision. Tenny’s hemorrhaging has not stopped. If she loses much more blood, he will have to give her a transfusion. He knows that the next step in the treatment, if the bleeding continues, is artificial pneumothorax. This involves injecting gas into the pleural cavity in order to collapse her lung and keep it from working. He has induced pneumothorax with other patients, and knows how to do it, and he possesses in his clinic the Floyd-Robinson apparatus for properly doing it, although he realizes the Floyd-Robinson is not without its faults: the manometer is too short, and sometimes if the patient coughs it can blow out the entire contents.

After giving her a sixth of a grain of morphine to relax her, he explains to Tenny what he is going to do, and asks her to try very hard not to cough during the procedure. He has made sure the room is warm enough that he can remove her gown, and he has her lie on the side of her “good” lung. She cannot quite understand why he wants to make one of her lungs stop working, and is uncertain about how well she can breathe with only one lung. He tries to assure her that she can breathe just fine with one lung, and that stopping the bad lung will force it to rest, just as she is forcing her body to rest, and rest is really the only cure for her condition at this stage.

The very sight of the Floyd-Robinson needle with its trocar and tubing attached would be enough to throw any patient into shock, so he must be very careful that she does not see it. He gives her novocaine, taking care to infiltrate the pleura. He is going in behind her armpit, and he uses a small cataract knife to make an incision to allow the needle to penetrate more smoothly. Very slowly and gently he inserts the long needle, wishing he had a third hand to place on her forehead, a fourth hand to hold her hand, and a fifth hand to wipe the sweat off his brow. Tenny whimpers. The sound is so childlike that he realizes just how young she is. Now he begins frequently to pull out the trocar on the back end of the needle, and take readings from the manometer. The manometer now begins to fluctuate, and shows a negative respiration, and he realizes that the needle has reached the desired space between two layers of pleura. He can now inject the gas. As the gas goes in, he keeps a steady eye on the manometer, as it begins to register positive pressure, and he slowly injects about 15 cc of gas every minute or so, until he has injected 250 cc, which has taken him nearly half an hour.

“Tell me when I can cough,” Tenny pleads. “I need to cough, real bad.”

“Shhh,” he hushes her. Her voice is causing the manometer to fluctuate, but he realizes he has injected enough gas, and he slowly pulls the needle out, and seals the wound with collodion. “Okay,” he says. “Cough, but not too hard.” And she does.

Immediately afterwards she feels fine, and even wants to get out of bed, but he wants her to lie still. He takes a washrag, dips it into the washbasin on the stand beside the bed, and wipes the sweat from her face and body. He takes a hairbrush and smooths out her long, long hair, which he then arranges nicely on either side of her head on the pillow, and down over her bare breasts. She is a vision, and he bends down and gives her a long kiss. He is not unmindful that you should never kiss anyone with TB, but this is not just anyone; this is Tenny.

She breaks the kiss, and whispers, “There’s somebody standing in the door.”

He turns. It is Piney. He is mortified, more even than he had been that time that he and Venda were caught in sexual labor by Russ and Tenny. That time, at least, he had had the excuse of being under the influence of both a love potion and whiskey, and not responsible for his behavior. Now he has no excuse for being a mature, conscientious, respected physician, sober and ethical, who is keeping his mistress as a patient in the Stay More Hotel and is discovered by his beloved wife giving his mistress a kiss which is passionate enough to show any but a blind person or an idiot that he is deeply in love with her.

For her part, Piney, who knows everything, does not know what to say. She does not need an explanation, nor an introduction. She knows that this is Tenny, of whom her husband spoke often in his sleep and finally in his wakefulness in telling Piney that the girl has the Great White Plague. Piney knows that Tenny is not simply Colvin’s patient, not simply his student, certainly not simply his friend, but his true love. Piney knows, without even observing the Floyd-Robinson apparatus beside the bed, that her husband is doing his level best to cure the girl of the Great White Plague, and she knows that if anybody can cure the girl, Colvin can do it. But the kiss she has witnessed confirms her in her knowledge that some kind of bond exists between Colvin and Tenny that transcends both conventional morality and “reality,” whatever that is, and is a bond that can never be broken. This is the thought, and the knowledge, that brings tears to Piney’s eyes, and validates the supposed superstition, Sing before breakfast, Cry before supper. So in a sense she has brought this great sadness upon herself by foolishly neglecting to remember that venerable axiom. Her own sense of blame does nothing to diminish her tears, but increases them, until she is standing there weeping so hard she cannot stand it, and, being unable to stand it, turns and flees.

It is the last that Colvin will see of her. Much later, he will hear a rumor that she is living with her sister Sycamoria on the other side of Demijohn, and, later still, he will hear that she has moved into Harrison, the biggest town in that part of the Ozarks, and is working there in a grocery store. And later still, he will attempt to locate her, at least to offer to convey to her the player piano, if she still wants it, but he will not be able to find her in Harrison. Years later, and even at the time I was a patient in Doc Swain’s house, some of the folks of Stay More will still be speculating that Colvin is still waiting for Piney to return, but if that is true, and I have reason to doubt it, it is a futile expectation.

Three or four more treatments with the Floyd-Robinson apparatus are necessary in order to complete the collapse of Tenny’s lung, but Colvin is able to carry out only a couple of these before Tenny is evicted from the hotel. Drussie, with Willis backing her up, comes to Colvin to tell him that, one, since Piney has moved out he might as well move Tenny into his own house, and, two, there is such a scandal attendant upon the rumors of why Piney has left town that the Ingledews don’t want to contribute to it any further by harboring a love nest under their roof.

Reluctantly, because he still thinks there’s a chance that Piney might come home any minute as soon as she recovers from her shock or grief or jealousy or whatever emotion she is having, Colvin moves Tenny into his own house, but puts her to bed not in the big bed that was his and Piney’s. He puts her in the selfsame cot that I was to use during my convalescence there, and I have to confess that when I learned that fact it gave me the same sense of immediacy and actuality that I am trying to achieve with this present tense. One reason he will not put her in the big bed, apart from its being Piney’s, is to minimize the temptation for further sexual activity. For although Tenny despite her illness continues to be as hungry for him as ever, if not more so, he doesn’t think it’s wise to risk further hemoptysis brought on by the labor of love.

When finally her lung is collapsed, and the hemorrhaging has stopped, her disposition and outlook have improved so much that he allows her to get dressed and get out of bed. She even wants to fix meals for the two of them, but he doesn’t think she’s strong enough yet for that. He does allow her to sit at the marvel of the player piano and pedal it, asking her not to play “Roses of Picardy” but willingly listening to her play “Arkansas Blues” over and over again.

She is not well enough to return to school. During his day-long trips to Parthenon each Friday, during which he does his job as quickly and perfunctorily as possible (and the Newts, both girls and boys, have yet to taste their first victory), he canvasses Tenny’s other teachers for her lessons, so that she can try to keep up. And of course he gives her special tutoring in Psychology.

Then the Christmas season comes, and school shuts down.

Colvin cuts down a scraggly cedar tree, eschewing a more attractive pine, and Tenny helps him trim it with popcorn strings and gilded walnuts and strips of colored paper glued into chains.

“What would you like for a Christmas present?” he asks her, being not very good at shopping, or surprises.

“I just want to be fucked!” she exclaims. It is the first time he has heard her use that word, and he is both somewhat shocked and aroused. He dearly wishes he could oblige her, and he attempts to explain why it is not advisable. She pouts, and sulks, and continues to brood until finally she announces, “I want to go home for Christmas. I mean, really home. Brushy Mountain.”

When he has determined that she will not have it otherwise, he decides that it will be good to get her out of this house, which is still haunted by Piney’s spirit if not her presence. And almost without his noticing, his practice has collapsed as much as Tenny’s lung, on account of the scandal. Despite the increase in illnesses that are provoked by the stress and guilt of the holiday season, people have stopped coming to Doc Swain’s or calling for him to come to them, even as a last resort. Unbeknownst to him, he has become an outcast in his own community, and it will take him some time to overcome it.

So he hitches Nessus to the buggy, and takes Tenny home to Brushy Mountain. Snow has fallen and accumulated in the upper reaches, and the going is difficult, but he gets her there, wrapped snugly in furs. Her family, having heard not a word from her since Russ took her away on his white horse, are overjoyed to see her, but they can see at once that something is wrong with her, and she tells them right off that she is being consumed by the Great White Plague, and that Doc Swain has had to collapse one of her lungs.

She turns to him. “I never did bother to ask ye. How long has my lung got to stay collapsed?”

“Two years, at least,” he admits. “Maybe three or four.”

“What?!” she says. “How come you never told me? I thought it would only be for a few weeks or so.” She pounds her fists on his chest until he can seize her wrists and stop her. And she may be heard, at other times of that day, saying to him such things as “What have you done to me?” and “How could you do something like that?” and she begins to realize that she is losing her temper, and that she is very angry at the world, or at life, for having allowed her to come down with a real disease, and she is taking out her anger on her dear sweet Colvin. But this knowledge doesn’t stop her from doing so. The Tennisons and her Grandma McArtor cannot help but notice it, and they wonder what she is doing in the first place with this man she hates so much, since it was Russ Breedlove that she was supposed to have taken up with.

Angry Tenny wants to take over the rest of this story, and we may soon have to let her. She wants to assert herself, to stop being the passive dupe of artificial pneumothoraces and the helpless victim of dreadful diseases and the passive, fragile heroine of a novel and to see if she can’t take control of her own life. So she decides to send Colvin away. He is permitted to spend this one night, sleeping on a pallet on the kitchen floor, but he must go back to Stay More after breakfast. In her own bed, thinking of him sleeping on the pallet on the kitchen floor, she remembers that that is the same way and the same place that Russ had slept, and, dwelling upon this, she cannot sleep. Insomnia has rarely been a problem for her, but eventually she rises and lights a candle, and remembering how she had accidentally dripped hot candle wax on Russ, sets the candle at a distance from Colvin’s body. She gives him a little shake, and then a less gentle shake, but he is deep asleep. She whispers his name without succeeding in waking him. She speaks his name aloud without waking him. She slips under the covers and embraces him without waking him. Now she notices that his penis is fully erect, making a tent in the bedcovers, and she marvels at this, wondering what kind of dream he could be having. Fondling it, she remembers all the incidents of pleasure it has given her, and she decides that she would like one more. She hikes the hem of her nightgown and sits atop him, and gets it into her very easily, and sighs and moans so loudly it ought surely to waken him, but it does not. Taking charge now, wanting to keep this moment of joining as a sensation to be experienced forevermore, even through eternity, she will permit time for her, and thereby for us, to slip into the future tense. She will rise and settle, lift and ease down, again and again and again. Not only will she create enough buffing and smoothing to throw her into her own mighty climax, but she will also generate enough sliding of his penis’s skin to force his testicles to erupt their contents upward into her. She will only briefly reflect that it will be perhaps the wrong time of the month, two weeks since her last period, the only time in her heavy affair with Colvin that she has not observed the calendar or taken precautions.

The next morning she will be tempted, before sending him on his way, to ask if he will not have been at all aware of what she will have done. But she will still be maintaining her attitude of anger, or at least vexation, and she will not even bring herself to be properly appreciative of the gift he will give her upon his departure, which will be the only Christmas gift he will have been able to think of that might be useful to her: a year’s supply of the roots of butterfly weed, which he has dug up from the very patch that Lora Dinsmore had turned into when Alonzo pursued her, roots which Colvin has reduced to a powder with his mortar and pestle. “It won’t do ye no harm,” he will say. “And maybe it’s all that can help.” She will not want her folks to see her kissing him good-bye, so she will not kiss him.

At least the tea made with the powder from the butterfly weed will be more soothing, and therefore helpful, than the various remedies and nostrums that her family will begin to employ upon her. Throughout the holiday season, one after another of these will be tried, beginning with Grandma McArtor’s old-time, surefire cures which Grandma will regret she will never have been able to use on Grampaw McArtor until it was too late. One of these she will remember from back home in Tennessee will involve a rattlesnake, and Wayne Don Tennison will sacrifice one of his prize pets so the snake’s skin can be pickled with whiskey, and Tenny will drink the whiskey. But this will only make her drunk, so more radical cures will be tried:

As an inhalant, it will have been known that pulmonary disorders can be relieved by constant exposure to the unpleasant but beneficial fumes of feces, so Tenny will be instructed to spend as much time as she can stand, hour upon hour, sitting in the privy, taking deep breaths. But it will be so cold out there that this will come close to giving her pneumonia, and the odor will cling to her whole body and will make her offensive company.

Also from an excretory perspective, it will have been widely known that urine is a specific for pulmonary tuberculosis, and Tenny will be urged, and then required, and then compelled, to imbibe her first water upon arising, morning after morning, until she will be tempted to try to get back out of the future tense because she will no longer feel in control of what will be happening to her. The butterfly weed tea will help to remove the taste.

She will tell this to Colvin on a postcard, belatedly thanking him for the butterfly weed, and she will conclude, “Between shit and piss, I am fed up with all the old-time superstitions, and I wont have nothing more to do with none of them. But I will keep on drinking your tea.”

Tenny’s momma, noting that the grandmother’s traditional albeit radical remedies will not seem to be working, will decide to dose Tenny with Tuberclecide, Prof. Hoff’s Consumption Cure, Yonkerman’s Tuberculozyne, and Nature’s Creation. None of these, however, will produce any noticeable effect, since the essential ingredient of most of these is simply a combination of turpentine and kerosene.

Tenny’s much-older sister Oriole will come home for a visit, mainly to show off the new automobile which her rich husband will have given her for Christmas, a Climber Six Roadster—“The Car Made in Arkansas by Arkansawyers.”

Like her fancy Climber auto, Oriole will be progressive and modern, and when she will find out that baby sister has the TB and will be doing nothing for it except fooling around with the stuff that Gran and Momma will have been trying on her, Oriole will decide to take matters into her own hands. She will put Tenny in the Climber and drive her to the Booneville Sanatorium.

Tenny will hope that their route might take them through Stay More, so that she might see Colvin once again. She will have forgiven him for the artificial pneumothorax, which probably has done her a lot more good than the shit and piss and kerosene, and also the butterfly weed has kept her calm and helped her cough and made her feel generally good.

But the route will not go to Stay More. To get from Brushy Mountain to Booneville, Oriole will drive the Climber on some terrible roads westwards only until she can reach the state highway, which will be graded and fairly smooth and will get them to Russellville, and thence across the Arkansas River, out of the Ozarks, up into the Ouachitas, and finally to Booneville.

So the best that Tenny will be able to do is to send Colvin a postcard, once she will have settled at “San.”

Colvin will crush the postcard in his fist, and will be heard to say to nobody in particular, or to all of the postal patrons of Stay More, most of whom will have forgiven him his scandal, because he will now be living alone and paying the awful price of his loneliness for it, “The soul has gone out of the Ozarks!”

Chapter eleven

Bless your heart, you’ve brought me a bouquet of butterfly weed! Mary, lookee here at what Harington has done! Oh, goddamn me, I not only forget that Mary can’t see these flowers, more importantly I forget that today Mary aint even there! Is she? No, last night Dr. Bittner decided to move her to City Hospital for a while. Nothing too serious, I hope, and just in case you’re looking for synchronicities as you usually do, it don’t have anything to do with Mary’s lungs. It certainly aint TB. Something wrong with her gallbladder. She can’t eat. Dr. Bittner says it could be cancer of the gallbladder, maybe not, but he wants to be sure. Anyway, I’m sure sorry she’s not here to listen to my telling of the end of my long tale, but I reckon she can make it up, hearing it on Mike Luster’s tape recorder, if you’ll kindly push that little red button there.

No, wait, first I just want to say another thing about Mary and then I want to say something about these lovely butterfly weed flowers you’ve brought me. I don’t want you to take this as any sort of criticism or blame of any kind, but do you recall that Mary was your instructor for freshman English, for all of two weeks, back in the early fifties? Mary hasn’t forgotten it, how you came to her and told her you were transferring out of her class because, one, you’d spent all your high school years with women teachers and you were hoping to have men teachers in college, and two, damned if you were going to read the Holy Bible as your first assignment in the course. You were kind of an arrogant sonofabitch, weren’t you? With a typical freshman attitude. You didn’t know who Mary was, that she was the only expert on Ozark folklore at the University. You thought she was just some homely looking spinster teacher like all those you’d had in high school, and you thought the worst part of it was that she was so all-fired religious she was going to make you read the Bible. Well, let me say two things: just as you didn’t know who Mary was, she had no idea of course who you were, that you were going to become, many years later, one of her favorite novelists. Anyway, you didn’t hurt her feelings dropping her course. It happened all the time to her. But it made her a little sad that she hadn’t been able to make clear to you, maybe on account of your poor hearing, that she was assigning some of the Bible to read not because she was the least bit religious, which she aint, but because it contains some of the finest fiction in the history of literature.

I reckon I bring this up, on this very last day that I may see you, just to remind you that the story I’ve been telling you, no less than the Bible, can be taken either as the exact history of some people, of the love between a doctor and a young girl in a remote part of the Ozark Mountains, or it can be taken as a clever yarn. The point is, what difference does it make? Would you have enjoyed it any more if I could verify everything in it? I have here at the foot of my bed a stack of photocopies which our mutual friend Bob Besom—special agent in Special Collections at the University, last heard from when he showed us parts of Doc’s journals to indicate how Doc was involved in the dream cure with Lorraine Dinsmore—has taken the trouble to copy from various issues of Sanatorium Outlook, a newspaper written and published by the inmates—I mean, the patients—at the Booneville Sanatorium between 1923 until the year 1970, when tuberculosis had been so largely eradicated, partly, as we’ll see, because of what Doc Swain did, that the sanatorium had to shut down and become a ghost town. Anyway, there are a few references to a Tennessee Breedlove, or a Mrs. Breedlove, or “our sweetheart Tenny” in these issues, if you’d care to look at them.

But before we join Tenny at the sanatorium, let me just thank you from the bottom of my heart for these lovely orange flowers, which, I take it, are your parting gift to me just as the roots of this plant were Doc’s parting gift to Tenny.

The plant goes by more names than tuberculosis does: in addition to butterfly weed, it has been called white root, silkweed, pleurisy root, orange milkweed, orange root, canada root, witchweed, swallowwort, wind root, chigger weed, archangel, agerajum, and, one of my favorites, Indian paintbrush, because, as you can see, it looks as if each flower, compounded of dozens of these little umbels, each one of which resembles, if you look closely, a ballerina in bright orange tutu, could be the head of a brush that an Indian might have smeared with orange pigment in order to paint a picture.

I won’t ask you where you picked these, because I think I know: the roadside, or waste places, spots where even other weeds can’t grow, because the butterfly weed can stand the most severe drought and the worst possible soil. It can grow anywhere. And even though the monarch butterflies, after getting drunk on the nectar of the flowers, lay their eggs on the leaves, and the caterpillars strip the foliage bare, it doesn’t kill the plant. The plant keeps on growing, and seems to grow forever.

Will we find a metaphor here for Tenny? I doubt it. Much as I’d like to draw parallels between the bacilli consuming Tenny and the caterpillars consuming the butterfly weed, there really isn’t any connection. The caterpillar eats in order to metamorphose into a gorgeous butterfly. What possible beauty is there in what the bacilli do, other than propagate their awful species?

And since we are not concerned with the butterflies and the caterpillars so much as the big white roots of the plant, which are used to make that miraculous tea, we might conclude that the only connection, if there is one, is in the botanical name of our plant, Asclepias tuberosa, and its double allusion, to both the great Greek physician and to tuberculosis. But I’ll have to leave you to explore that. I am running out of time.

As far as butterfly weed is concerned, one of the first things that will happen to Tenny, when she will be checked into the sanatorium, will be that a gruff nurse, Mrs. Hull, searching Tenny’s belongings, will discover the year’s supply of powdered butterfly weed root that Colvin will have given her, and will confiscate it, on the grounds that it violates a regulation: patients are permitted to have only those medicines that the sanatorium doctors prescribe for them.

“But it makes me feel so much better!” Tenny will protest. “And it aint really a medicine, just a harmless stuff for making tea.”

“There’s another rule you better learn fast,” Nurse Hull will snap. “Don’t never talk back to me.”

Tenny will quickly discover that Booneville will not be Saranac Lake, nor will it be Davos-Platz, which she will not have known about, because this will be the same year that Thomas Mann will first publish The Magic Mountain. Tenny’s magic mountain will be twelve miles away but will seem to loom closer, Mt. Magazine, at 2,800 feet the highest point between the Appalachians and the Rockies. The sanatorium itself will be at a high elevation, over a thousand feet. It will have its own farms and dairies and gardens for the raising and growing of all of the food consumed in the sanatorium.

“They set a real scrumptious table here,” Tenny will write to Colvin, “and I am trying to get my weight back up, although many a morning I just can’t keep my breakfast down.”

She will be installed in Hemingway Hall. This certainly will carry no allusion to the novelist, who will not have published his first novel yet, in fact will still be proofreading his first collection of stories, In Our Time. Judge Hemingway of Little Rock (no known relation) will have been one of the founders of the institution, which will have been one of the very first state sanatoriums in the South, and will eventually become the largest in the nation.

Hemingway Hall will have a very long veranda running the whole length of it, upstairs and down, and Tenny will be taken to the upstairs veranda her first afternoon. As far as her eye can see, women and girls are wrapped in identical blankets, reclining on identical white wooden lounge chairs, all of them wearing identical expressions of wakefulness but obliviousness. There will be almost a military aspect to it, the uniformity of it, the endlessness of it. Tenny will not know just what she will have expected, but she will not have expected to conform to the identical poses and blankets and sickly demeanor of all these dozens of females lined in ranks off into the distance. Mrs. Hull will place Tenny in an empty lounge chair and wrap her in blankets, saying, “You will stay here until the bell rings at three o’clock. You are a lunger, is what you are, like all these other ladies. Some of them are chasers, but you may not become a chaser until you’ve proved that you can abide by all the rules and handle yourself properly. There will be two hours of absolute rest each morning, and two hours of absolute rest each afternoon. You must rest four hours each day, in addition to ten hours sleep at night. The reason you need so much rest is because—” Tenny will want to interrupt and tell Mrs. Hull that she has already had quite a lot of experience at resting, on Doc Swain’s orders, and she knows how to do it, and doesn’t need any explanations of the need for it. But Mrs. Hull will consider that talking back, and will reprimand her for it. So Tenny will wait patiently, stretched out on her wooden lounge, until Mrs. Hull will finish her long lecture on the need for rest, and leave her alone.

Tenny will ask the woman reclining next to her, “Aint there nothing to read around here? No magazines or nothing?”

The woman will look at Tenny in shock, and then will look at the woman on the other side of her, as if to confirm that the other woman will have heard Tenny. Then she will say, in just a whisper, “Hush! We aint allowed to talk during Rest, ever, and we shore aint allowed to read nothing during Rest.”

Tenny will lie there, taking in the view of Mt. Magazine, but her eyes will be hurting from the bright sky, until finally the bell will ring, and all of the women will get up identically, rising in the same motions, unwrapping their blankets in the same motions, and folding the blankets neatly in the same motions to leave on their identical wooden lounge chairs.

The woman next to Tenny will inform her, “Rest is over. It’s Our Own Hours now.” Our Own Hours is a kind of free spell, nothing required, and the residents of Hemingway Hall will want to meet the new girl, give her the once-over, and give Tenny all of the “inside dope” on the way of life here. Introducing themselves, they will reveal to Tenny something which will confirm her impression of the sameness, the uniformity of the place: every last one of them will have a given name or a nickname starting with P: there will be Pinkie, and Peeny, and Paula, and Petra, and Polly, and Portia, and so on: there are even some with very unusual names like Philadelphia and Phronsye and Persephone.

Giving her the lowdown on what’s what, they will want to warn her that while visiting between the sexes is permitted in certain supervised areas during Our Own Hours (and a number of them will have already gone off to visit men and boys), the one rule that is the most hidebound rule at the sanatorium is that no “pairing off” is permitted between men and women. You may think of one of the fellows as your boyfriend, but you cannot go off alone with him, anywhere, anytime. Why, just last week two of the patients were caught trying to do some heavy wooing out in the woods behind Echols Hall, and both of them were “fired,” that is, sent home to their families.

One thing that will be permitted, or at least will be over-looked or even not known to the authorities, will be communicating with your boyfriend at night by flashing him messages in Morse code with a flashlight, if his cottage or dormitory is within sight of yours. There will be a canteen in the main building, carrying all kinds of wonderful things and goodies, where you will be able to buy a flashlight. Will Tenny know the Morse code? No? Well, Pippa or Prunella or Poppy will be glad to teach it to her. First, of course, she will have to find herself a boyfriend to “correspond” with, and the best time to do that will be during the Monday night and Thursday night picture shows, when the men and women will be allowed to sit together.

Tenny will find some things to like about the place, such as those picture shows (even if she will never sit with a male, she will never have seen a picture show before, and will be spellbound, and will become almost addicted to the magical screen), some things that will leave her indifferent or just annoyed, such as the required religious worship services four times a week, and some things that she will not like at first but will come to appreciate, such as the daily shower. She will never have had a shower bath before, and, if you can imagine, her first experience with this new ablution will greatly discomfit her.

She will enjoy seeing her name in the newspaper. Hand me the top sheet from that stack. Just a few days after her arrival, she will get this issue of Sanatorium Outlook, and just as the picture show and the shower will be totally novel experiences for her, so will be the experience of seeing her name in print, set in type, somehow permanized. Here it is: “Let us welcome the new arrivals this week: Mrs. Petunia Butterfield, Gardiner Evans, Miss Patricia Brewer, Harry Dunlap, Mrs. Tennessee Breedlove,” et al., et alia, two dozen names in all, but there is our Tenny big as life among them.

Here directly below the list of new arrivals is another column of names, beneath the headline ARRESTED THIS WEEK. Tenny will study the names, equally divided between males and females, not finding anyone she knows, and wondering what crimes they will have committed. She will have noticed, particularly among the men patients of the population, a number of shady-looking characters, almost thugs, whose very appearance will frighten her. But some of the women too, sickly and morbid and mean-looking, will have looked as if they were capable of felonies or at least misdemeanors. Tenny will suppose that it will be possible to get yourself arrested just by violating any of the two dozen rules which she will have been required to memorize, and she will wonder if the sanatorium has its own jail where those arrested are locked up. Reading this house-organ newspaper, she will also learn that there are thirty thousand cases of tuberculosis in the state of Arkansas. She will wonder, since the population of the sanatorium is just a fraction of that, if all the others are just dying at home. She will learn that one of those thousands does indeed die every two and half hours, around the clock. And she will learn that the motto of Sanatorium Outlook, indeed the motto of the sanatorium itself, is “Better, Thank You.”

Tenny will wait a long time for someone to ask her, “How are you today?” so that she will be able to say, “Better, thank you.” But the chance will never come—not because nobody will ever ask her that, but because if they did she will only be able to reply, “Not any better, I’m sorry to say.”

She will not be able to avoid the feeling that day by day she will be growing worse. The simple mirror will tell her that. She will visit the sanatorium’s doctor for women, Dr. Baker, a handsome and friendly young man, more often than she will be required to. He will have given her X rays and fluoroscopes and a bunch of other tests. He will ask her who performed the artificial pneumothorax and she will tell him about Colvin. “Good job” will be his only comment. She will ask him if she cannot please, please have returned to her the harmless butterfly weed that Nurse Hull took away from her, and he will ask her where she got it, and she will tell him that Doc Swain gave it to her. “I suppose we might as well let you have it back,” he will say, “but let me have it tested chemically first, just to make sure it can’t do you any harm.”

On her most recent visit to Dr. Baker, she will remind him that she will still not have got the butterfly weed back. Then, after he will have spent long minutes listening to her chest with his stethoscope, she will ask, “Will I ever be able to say ‘Better, thank you,’ when somebody asks how I am?”

His face will be full of sympathy. “I wish I could encourage you,” he will say. “I wish so much that I could give you some hope. I wish so much that I could make you into a chaser.” She will wait to hear him add, “But I cannot.” He will not. His face will seem to say it.

She will write to Colvin, plaintively, “If I could only live long enough, I might learn how to live.” But she will not be learning anything about how to live in that sanatorium. Paradoxically, she will be a prisoner of the clock and the bell which rings to signal the end of one period and the beginning of the next, but at the same time she will have no sense of time at all, so that after two whole months she will think that she will have been there only a month, and she will have to depend upon her one close friend, Penny (who will rhyme with her and even agree with her in many ways, including the nature and extent of her condition), to remind her that it is Monday or Thursday, the day of a picture show.

“I hate to ask you for anything, dear Colvin,” she will write to him. “But the sunlight on the veranda hurts my eyes so, and some of the other women have smoked glasses which they wear to shade their eyes. I could buy some in the canteen, for only 78 cents, but I don’t have a penny to my name.”

In return Colvin will send her ten dollars, and a birthday card for her seventeenth birthday, on which he will write: “I wish this was more. But I am trying to save up my money so I can come and visit you, which would cost me hotels and food and all. Do you want me to come and see you?”

Tenny will be very happy that Colvin wants to come and visit her. Most of the other patients will have visitors from time to time, but she will not have. She will be worried that the very sight of Colvin will make her want to violate all sorts of rules with him. She will have heard the rumor that there is a certain place, in the basement of the main building, where patients who are married may take their visiting spouses for brief sessions of supposedly conjugal recreation, but Tenny, not married, or at least not to the man who will be visiting her, will not be able to apply for the use of that facility.

On a lovely day in March, with signs of spring in full flourish, Colvin will arrive during morning Rest and will wait patiently for morning Our Own Hour, when Tenny will come downstairs and into his arms. After they will have kissed, Tenny will tell him that one of the rules forbids all kissing. “I’ll probably be arrested,” she will declare. “Every week, a passel of folks gits arrested, for all kinds of things.”

“I wish you could be,” he will say, chuckling, and when she will look peeved he will take the trouble to explain to her something that nobody else has troubled to explain. “Arrested” in sanatorium parlance has nothing to do with the detainment of violators but refers to the checking of the disease. If your tuberculosis is arrested, you are well enough to go home, hence the Sanatorium Outlook’s regular list of those arrested is a list of those released from the sanatorium. “It would be so wonderful if your disease could be arrested,” he will say to her. “But I reckon you know the chances are pretty slim for that.”

She will have to wait, nervously, while Colvin will go off to confer with the sanatorium doctors, with Dr. Stewart and Dr. Baker. Our Own Hour will be expired before he returns, but he will have received permission to remain with her the rest of the day. “I aint too darn certain your doctors and me saw eye to eye on a lot of things,” he will declare. “Leastways, they let me look at your X rays, and I managed to reclaim your butterfly weed. Also, I got permission to examine you myself. Come on.”

Colvin will take Tenny out to his buggy, still drawn by good old Nessus, and will drive her the four miles into the town of Booneville, where he has a room at Herod’s Hotel, not fancy but comfortable. Along the way, Tenny will want to know all of the news he knows from home. He will tell her that he will not be teaching at the Academy this term, although he will still be visiting once a week as the physician. Tenny’s husband, Russ, and his girlfriend, Oona Owens, will be inseparable, and it will be assumed that since Tenny will never return that Russ and Oona will become permanently connected. Venda and Nick Rainbird will be talking of getting hitched. Jossie Conklin and Tim James will be doing likewise, and Tim will have been hired by the Mission Board to replace Jossie as principal. The basketball teams will be dissolved, but Russ himself will be teaching archery, and quite a lot of the student body will be taking lessons in the sport. Tenny will not ask Colvin if by any chance Piney has returned home; she will assume that Colvin will have told her if Piney had.

Finding herself alone with Colvin in his hotel room will be almost too much for Tenny. She will beg him to take her to bed. She will complain that it has been so long, months now, since she will have had him inside her—not even informing him of that last time, which he probably didn’t know about—and she will miss it so, will dream of it so, will want it so.

“Dr. Baker told me you had morning sickness for two or three weeks,” Colvin will say to her.

“Hell’s bells, Colvin, I’ve had morning sickness, afternoon sickness, evening and night sickness too, day in and day out, but all I’ve got right now is heartsickness and lust. Take off your doctor’s face if not your clothes and come to bed with me.”

But he will keep his doctor’s face, frowning, and will say, “Throwing up in the mornings is not a symptom of tuberculosis. It’s usually a symptom of pregnancy.”

She will think about that, and will declare, “It’s true I aint flown the red flag the last few times I was supposed to.”

“So,” he will say. “It sure didn’t take you very long to find yourself a boyfriend.” His voice will express anger, so unlike him, and he will add with bitterness, “You know, I’ve been persuading myself it’s just a superstition, or leastways just a faulty observation, that folks with TB are prone to get horny. But you seem to be a living example!”

She will laugh. “I never heard that. But I can tell you there are some gals in Hemingway Hall who don’t never talk about nothing else! I can also tell you, though, that it’s practically impossible for any couples in that sanatorium to find any way to get together for that purpose.”

“So how did you manage to do it?”

“Colvin, even if I had a boyfriend, which I don’t, the only way he could’ve knocked me up, with all the rules they’ve got in that place, would’ve been to slip me his sputum cup—we’ve all got these sputum cups we have to turn in twice a day—he could’ve slipped me his cup filled with his jism instead. Yeah. That must’ve been what happened.” Saying this wryly, mockingly, she will have hoped to bring a grin to Colvin’s face, but he will still look as all-fired solemn as ever.

“Then who was it?” Colvin will want to know. “When and where?”

She will take his hand. “Dear Colvin, I have never had any man inside me but you.”

He will withdraw his hand. “The last time we did it was that Eureka hotel in November! That wouldn’t give you morning sickness in February!”

“No, the last time we did it, or maybe I ort to jist say the last time I did it to you, was on the kitchen floor of my house on Brushy Mountain, in the middle of a night before Christmas.”

He will stare at her, and will abruptly sit on the bed. She will sit beside him. “That’s pretty hard to believe,” he will say.

“I reckon there’s a lot about me and you that’s pretty hard to believe,” she will observe, smiling. “But I did it to you without ever waking you up, and got your jism inside me at just the best time of the month, so now me and you are going to become Mommy and Daddy.”

He will shake his head. “Having a baby will kill you.”

“If it does, then the baby—and maybe it will be a girl—will keep you company in your loneliness, and maybe sometimes remind you of me.”

Colvin’s eyes will fill with tears. “Tenny, I won’t never need nothing to remind me of you. I will remember you every day of my life, all the days of my life. But listen to me, sweetheart. It takes nine months to make a baby, and even if you could hold out that long, and the baby could be born, the baby would be infected with tuberculosis too. Even if you could do it, would you want to bring into this world a baby as sick as yourself?”

Tenny will think about that. Instead of answering his question, she will ask, “You don’t think I can last nine months?”

“I brought you here to look at you,” he will say. “Now we’d best get on with it.”

He will have her undress. He will spend a long time with his stethoscope pressed to her chest, her back, her sides, even her shoulders, having her take deep breaths, shallow breaths, and coughs. He will look into every one of the openings of her body, including the one through which she will have hoped to pass the baby. “Hmmm” is all he will say, then or throughout his hour-long examination.

At length, he will ask, “Did Dr. Baker ever tell you how long he thought you might last?”

“No, only that I don’t have much of a chance.”

“There’s something you’ve got to think about, Tenny, and I won’t beat around the bush. Trying to carry that baby in your womb is going to shorten your life, which, Lord knows, aint going to be very long anyhow. My advice is: terminate the pregnancy. Now,”

“You mean take it out of me? Aint that illegal?”

“Yeah, abortion is illegal, not only according to the laws of the state of Arkansas, which strictly forbid it, but also the policy of the sanatorium, which will not allow it.”

Tenny will burst into tears, letting out a lot that she’s been holding back. “I wanted so much to have your baby,” she will say between her sobs. Colvin will keep his arm around her for a long time, until she will be able to stop crying. At length, when she will be in control again, she will ask, “So how can I git it taken outen me if nobody will allow it?”

He will tell her about Doc Kie Raney, and the oath that Kie had made him swear as a young doctor just starting out. “I’ve been practicing medicine now for many a year, but I’ve never performed an abortion. That don’t necessarily mean that I don’t know how to do it, though. I think I can do it. Would you trust yourself to me, knowing that all I want to do, all I could possibly do, is make you live just a little bit longer?” At these words, Colvin will burst into tears again himself, which will prompt Tenny to begin crying all over again, and they will just hold each other and have a good long cry for a good long time.

The rest of Colvin’s visit will be a blur in her mind. Much of the rest of her short life will be a blur in her mind. She will recall asking Colvin if the abortion will hurt and he will assure her that it will not hurt nearly as much as the artificial pneumothorax, but it will hurt none the less, and produce blood. He will refuse her request to have a glimpse of the fetus. Will Colvin stay two more nights at Herod’s? Or only one? She will not be able to tell. She will know that they will never be able to sleep together, and he will take her back to Hemingway each night, and then eventually he will be gone. She will not even be able to recall the details of their parting. There will not have been anything dramatic or sentimental about it that will furnish her memory something to dwell upon. Her memory, like her vision, will withdraw into blur.

When Dr. Baker will find out that she has had an abortion (which his very next examination will uncover), he will pretend at first to be sternly disapproving, because of sanatorium policy, but then he will say, “You know, if it weren’t for the damned policy, I would have done it for you myself. Your Colvin Swain is a very wise man, and an incredible physician, with a vast knowledge of tuberculosis. Did he tell you that Dr. Stewart offered him Dr. Schroeder’s job? Schroeder is leaving, and we need a men’s physician, and Dr. Stewart made your Colvin a very good offer, with the added inducement that he’d be able to keep a close watch on you, who are apparently his all-time favorite patient. But apparently that wasn’t enough to persuade him to give up his practice in Stay More. Tell me about this Stay More. What’s it like?”

So Tenny, growing increasingly nostalgic herself, will attempt to give Dr. Baker a picture of Stay More, what little she knows of it. She will be haunted by the “what-if” of the possibility that Colvin could have become a permanent fixture around the sanatorium, and she will wonder why Colvin will have never mentioned the offer to her, but she will understand something she will not say to Dr. Baker: Colvin will have turned down the offer not because of his love for Stay More (although certainly that will be a strong consideration) but because he will have known that if he took the sanatorium job he might not hold it very long before his “all-time favorite patient” will no longer be there, because she will have gone to that Other Place where people no longer have to breathe or try to breathe or eat or try to eat or shit or try to shit.

She will be moved, eventually, from Hemingway to Hospital. The latter will not require long stretches of sitting on the porch in Rest. In fact, the schedule in Hospital will not even be the same as elsewhere in the sanatorium. No one in Hospital will be allowed out of bed.

One day Dr. Baker will announce to her, “We would like to try a thoracoplasty on you.” The very name, which rhymes with nasty, will terrify her, and none of Dr. Baker’s efforts to explain the need for the operation or what it involves will do anything to lessen her horror. She will realize why so often the rest of her short life will be becoming a blur: because a clear view of it will be too much to take, and she will not be able to accept the idea of a thoracoplasty, which will involve the removal of all of the ribs on one side of her chest, leaving her deformed and with long hideous scars. All she will be able to see in the blur is her body as a misshapen blob.

“If I’ve got just a short time on this earth anyhow,” she will say, “I’d much rather that Colvin laid my pore body to rest with it still looking mostly like it ought to,”

“But possibly the thoracoplasty will buy you some time to enjoy life a little longer,” Dr. Baker will argue.

“‘Enjoy’ aint the word,” she will say.

“Wouldn’t you rather get out of Hospital and go back to Hemingway?” he will attempt to tempt her.

She will realize that she misses the long Rests on the veranda, especially now that spring is here and everything is blooming and the air is so fine. But to pay eleven of her ribs for it? “Could I write to Colvin and ask him what he thinks of the thoracoplasty?” she will request

Dr. Baker will look annoyed. “The operation ought to be done at once. I’ve scheduled it for tomorrow morning. By the time your letter got to Stay More and you received a reply, it would be too late.”

She will attempt to write Colvin anyway, that last evening before the operation, but will discover that she cannot properly apply a pencil, let alone a fountain pen, to a sheet a paper. The effort will resemble a first-grader’s letters, and, dismayed at her handiwork, she will allow all the letters to become a blur. She will ask the nurse to write a letter for her, but dictating a letter, something she will have never done before, will deprive it of its privacy and she will not be able to tell Colvin that she thinks Dr. Baker is some kind of mean rascal. “I guess by the time you get this, I won’t be your Tenny anymore,” she will say.

She will have hoped that the operation will be one of those where they put you to sleep and when you wake up it’s all over and you don’t feel a lot of pain. But she will discover that the operation will be performed under local anesthesia. She will be made to lie on her good side, with sandbags holding her flexed body in place, and most of what happens will happen behind her, on her back. If it will not have been for the newly acquired power of her mind to make a dull blur out of everything, she will have been able, if she desired, to count the removal of the ribs, one by one, with a big pair of shears that makes one cut on one end and another cut on the other end, and then she will have been able to hear the sound of each cast-off rib clattering into a bucket But she will blur all this out and will think instead of Colvin’s Hygiene class, that first day when they studied bones and she had made her comparison between the skeleton and the timbers holding up a building. What now will hold her up? Will she be able to stand? To walk?

Dr. Baker will assure her that with the help of a chest support she will be able to stand and to walk but that she ought to spend as much time as possible at Rest, on the Hemingway veranda. He will tell her that all the bandages will have to remain in place for a week, and that she will have to resist the temptation to look beneath the bandages to see if her body is still there.

After several days, she will ask him, “Was that operation supposed to make me feel any better?”

Maybe it will be a question that he will have never given any thought, because he will not be able to answer it. “Thoracoplasty has often been thought of as a lifesaving last resort,” he will tell her. “We didn’t do it to make you feel better.”

By cruel coincidence, the day that the bandages will be removed will also be the day that Colvin will return.

“I wouldn’t advise you to look in a mirror,” Dr. Baker will caution her. But of course that will not stop her, although her mind will shift automatically into blur as she approaches the mirror, and she will not be able to notice the length or the shape or the configuration of the scar, nor even how it has made her lopsided. Being in blur, her mind will not even be able to notice that her face will still be Tenny, her hair will still be Tenny, her breasts—albeit one of them will be droopy on one side—will still be Tenny.

Being in blur, her mind will not even recognize Colvin when he will appear. “Tenny, sweetheart, it’s me, Colvin,” he will attempt to get her to see him. “I’ve come to take you home.”

“Colvin?” she will say, trying to see him through the blur. “Why are you here? Have you come to take that job?”

“No, hon, I’ve come to take you home. Let’s get all your stuff together and get out of here.”

Dr. Baker will appear, and Tenny will recognize him. He will begin talking to Colvin, and Colvin will begin answering him, the two doctors talking simultaneously in rising animosity. Their contention and their noise and their gestures, which seem to be threatening each other with bodily harm, will upset Tenny and force her further into blur. She will be too blurred to notice that Dr. Stewart will have arrived also, and that the three doctors will have gone into another room, closing the door so that Tenny cannot hear their quarrel. For a long time they will leave Tenny alone in the cocoon of her blur.

“Tenny. Tenny.” The caller of her name will be Colvin, and she will attempt to fight her way up out of the blur so that she can see him. “Tenny, sweetheart, listen to me careful, and see if you caint answer. Do you want to go home?”

“Not to Brushy Mountain,” she will say.

“No, no, no. I reckon I had in mind Stay More. I ort never have let you leave it in the first place.”

“Okay,” she will say, and will manage a smile.

“Well, I aim to take ye there. The confounded problem is, this goddamn institution has got a policy which says a patient cain’t be discharged just on the signature of a physician. A family member has to sign the discharge papers.”

Tenny’s mind will be coming out of its blur enough for her to understand what this means, and she will wonder how they could possibly get the discharge papers up to Brushy Mountain for Momma or Daddy to sign them.

“There aint but one thing to do,” Colvin will say, “and that’s for me to become a family member. Tenny, will you marry me?”

Tenny will be simply thrilled, and will come entirely out of her blur. “Colvin Swain, how could you want to marry me, looking the way I do?” And she will turn to show him the hideous scar running down her back.

He will put his fingers beneath her drooping chin and lift it up. “You are just as beautiful as you ever was, and always will be,” he will declare.

“But aint me and you both already married to somebody else?” she will want to know.

“Not as far as we’re concerned,” he will say. “As far as we’re concerned we’ve done already been married to each other for quite a spell. But we’ve got to make it official. So I’ve got to run out and see if I caint find us a preacher. You just go up to your room and put on your best dress, and pack your suitcase, and I’ll be back before you know it.”

But Colvin will take a long time to return, and Tenny will begin to worry. She will have another worry too: just as her mind has a way of drifting into its blur, maybe she’s also beginning to imagine things. Maybe Colvin will never have been here at all.

Nurse Hull will insist that Tenny take her afternoon Rest, even if she will be wearing her wedding dress. Tenny, still largely in control of the future tense, will determine that it will be the very last Rest she will ever have to endure.

Rest will not have ended when Colvin will return, with a man, dressed in gray and with one of those funny collars. Tenny will whisper to Colvin, “He aint a Catholic, is he?”

“No,” Colvin will say. “He’s an Episcopalian. I presented our situation, in honesty and truth, to several preachers, but they all turned me down, except this feller.”

Where would they like to be married? Right there on the Hemingway veranda, in full view of all the other patients? No, they will go downstairs to a private room, the same room that Dr. Baker and Dr. Stewart will have used for their fight with Colvin. Tenny’s friend Penny will serve as a witness and sort of the maid of honor. Colvin will reject the idea of either Dr. Baker or Dr. Stewart as the other witness and best man. He will recruit a simple man, a groundskeeper nicknamed by the patients “Grasshopper.”

Tenny will be greatly moved by the beauty of the ceremony, so rich in contrast to the simple words that the courthouse justice had used to marry her and Russ.

She will be especially delighted that the ceremony, like this narrative, will appear to be in the future tense:

Tennessee, will you have this man to be your husband; to live together in the covenant of marriage? Will you love him, comfort him, honor and keep him, in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, be faithful to him as long as you both shall live?

She will be about to answer in the future tense, “I will,” but her poor body will collapse, and only the quickness of Colvin and the preacher will prevent her from falling to the floor. A chair will be drawn up into the gathering, and she will remain seated for the remainder of the ceremony. As soon as her body is propped into the chair, she will say, determinedly, “I will.”

Colvin, will you have this woman to be your wife; to live together in the covenant of marriage? Will you love her, comfort her, honor and keep her, in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, be faithful to her as long as you both shall live?

Colvin will say, “I will.”

The preacher will read from his Bible. “And they twain shall be one flesh; so then they are no more twain but one flesh.”

Then Colvin will take her hand and say, “In the Name of God, I, Colvin, take you, Tenny, to be my wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until death do us part.”

She will reach for his hand and will repeat the words after him, “In the Name of God, I, Tenny, take you, Colvin, to be my husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until death do us part.” Then she will add, on her own, “Except that we won’t be parted by death.”

“That’s for sure,” Colvin will agree.

The minister will cast a disapproving eye upon this improvisation, then he will announce, “Now that Colvin and Tennessee have given themselves to each other by solemn vows, with the joining of hands, I pronounce that they are husband and wife, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Those whom God has joined together let no one put asunder.”

Tenny’s husband will bend down and give her a long kiss. And over the next few days, he will kiss her so frequently and so passionately that she will be moved to ask, “Are you trying to give yourself my disease?”

“Yeah,” he will admit “I reckon I am.”

Tenny’s last memory of the sanatorium will be not so much a memory as an awareness of the need for her last blur: Dr. Baker and Dr. Stewart, and another doctor too, whom she will not have recognized, still arguing with Colvin, continuing their controversy all the way out to the buggy, as Colvin will place her in it, and will climb into it himself and will say some final angry words at the doctors, and will cluck at Nessus and drive off.

She will never know just what the doctors were fighting about. Once the sanatorium is behind her, the blur will dissolve, and she will be able to see everything, to hear everything, to smell everything, all the way home to Stay More. Or almost.

Right away she will need to put on the smoked glasses she will have bought at the canteen with the money Colvin will have sent her.

When they reach the open highway, Colvin will say, “Now Tenny, I want you to tell me if the buggy’s bouncing hurts you at all. I want you to let me know whenever we’re going too fast, and I’ll take Nessus down from a trot to a walk.”

And when she will never complain about any discomfort of the buggy, he will say, “I want you to tell me any time you feel any pain, anywhere, and I’ll give you something for it.”

But she never will. Her only requests, infrequently, will be when she will need to “go,” not just to make water but to defecate, an awkward and embarrassing situation, and the only truly unpleasant aspect of the journey.

They will need to spend three nights to reach home. The first night, their honeymoon night, will be in Paris, and Colvin will not be able to avoid making a few jokes about the great romantic city of Europe and what an ideal place for a honeymoon it would be. He will have very little money; they will stay in a very cheap hotel. She will not expect, nor ask, that he do on the honeymoon night what husbands are supposed to do. She will remind him that in a way they’d already had their honeymoon night, that time in the Commercial Hotel in Jasper when she’d got married to Russ. She will be happy enough to go to sleep in his arms, although she will wake more than once to find him hooked up to her chest with his stethoscope. “Put that thing away and go to sleep,” she will say, and will realize how bossy, how wifely, it sounds, and she will think, Tenny Swain.

Their second night, in a hotel in Clarksville, she will have thought for a long time about having control of the future tense and what it implies, and how it’s something both powerful and dangerous, like dynamite: it can help build or it can help destroy. It will be easy, with the future tense, to get little things you want; for instance, she will ask Colvin, since he will be trying to go to sleep with his ear up against her chest anyway, if he would mind sucking on her breasts, and he will gladly oblige. Since she will never have been able to have a baby, she will want to know what it feels like, and Colvin will not mind, although he will admit he will never have done it before. She will discover that it will make her very horny, and she will wish that they were able to make love, because obviously it will have made Colvin somewhat horny too. The exquisiteness of the sensation will be something that she will be able to take with her, wherever it is that she is soon going, that Other Place perhaps. In the past tense, “He sucked her breasts,” and regardless of how well he did it, it was done, and all she had left was the memory of it. In the present tense, “He sucks her breasts,” and it is driving her wild, for the whole duration of the present moment, but the moment does not last. In the future tense, “He will suck her breasts,” and it will be a feeling that she will be able to have any time she will want it. For eternity.

Their third day on the road, she will begin to think a lot about dear old Grampaw McArtor and that Other Place that he talked about going to when he died, that place where every bird and bug went when their time was over, and the birds and bugs as well as the people didn’t have to breathe anymore, nor eat, nor take a shit. She will wonder what sort of place it really is, because Grampaw didn’t give her a very good description of it, and just suggested that perhaps folks could go fishing or fiddle and dance and sing even if they didn’t breathe nor eat nor take shits. Tenny will wonder if the place will look anything like this, for they will have reached the Ozarks now—“Not much further to the Newton County line,” Colvin will say—and she will want that Other Place to look as much as possible like this place. She will recall those old jests about how Ozarkers gone to Heaven break down and cry every springtime out of homesickness.

Fortunately for her husband, who will be broke, the proprietor of the tiny hotel in Fallsville will know Colvin, and will agree to let them have on credit the room for their last night. Tenny will not touch her supper. “You aren’t eating,” Colvin will observe.

“One out of three,” she will say.

And later, in bed, when he will do his thing with the stethoscope, and pressing his ear to her chest, he will observe, “You don’t seem to be breathing.”

“Two out of three,” she will take enough breath to say.

And all the next day, as they will drive the last miles over the hills and mountains toward Stay More, not once will she ask him to stop so that she can relieve herself. She will say to herself, “If all three of them things have done come to pass, I must already be there, but I sure caint tell that it’s no different.” She will so pleased and comforted to know that it does not look any different that she will snuggle up against Colvin and put her head on his shoulder.

“Thank you for bringing me home,” she will say to him.

“Thank ye for coming home,” he will say, and then, in the future tense, “We will soon be there.”

And in the future tense, they will always soon be there.

From that vantage point, with her corporeal head on his shoulder, she will cross forever from the world of eating and breathing and shitting to the world of…but we will have to let her, who will always remain in charge of this tense, to tell what she can.

She will be glad to discover that although she has surrendered heartbeat and breath and digestion and elimination and all that bodily business, she will not have surrendered her control of the future tense. They will pass a fisherman sitting on the bank of the creek, and she will be so certain that it will be Grampaw McArtor she will try to call this to Colvin’s attention, but will discover that she will have surrendered voice as well. She shall never again be able to “speak” to him. She will have surrendered all her senses: hearing, sight, touch, everything. So how then will she be able to perceive? Only she will be able to tell, but she will be able to tell this much: that all senses will be replaced by a single pervasive sense of tell, as in “How can you tell?” or “Can you tell what that thing is?” or “You can’t even tell the difference”—none of these implying speaking, informing, or narrating, but only perception, not necessarily visual. Tenny will find herself able to tell anything. She can tell the time of day without a watch, but will have no desire to. She can tell what Colvin is thinking, but will never be able to tell him that she can tell. She can tell that she will never again feel any pain nor hunger nor be required to toil. She can tell at once the answer to a question which has always bothered her about this Other Place: “Do people—or souls or whatever they become—ever go to sleep and have dreams?” She can tell that both sleeping and dreaming are parts of the living body’s functions, and thus she no longer will need them, nor have any further thought of them. Even if she will have wanted them, she will be too busy telling ever to have time for them.

She will become almost like a child with a new toy, discovering what-all she can tell, what-all she will be able to do: she will so easily rise and soar a thousand feet above the buggy and can tell its movements in relation to the winding road and landscape; she will be able to leap on ahead to Stay More and can tell that the town will be waiting there for their soon arrival. She can tell that the sense of humor will be the most powerful of all “living” qualities retained by the “dead,” and her playful sense of humor will think that it would be funny if she could just stand there on Colvin’s front porch waiting to welcome him. But while that impossible image will amuse her, she realizes that a much more serious moment will be occurring as soon as Colvin brings the buggy to a halt and discovers that his bride apparently asleep on his shoulder will no longer be alive.

She can tell there will be nothing she will be able to do about it. She will be able to be there, but she will not be able to make her presence known or felt or heard. But she can tell that just being there will make it much easier on Colvin. That, and his own knowledge that the duration of her life on earth could only be numbered in hours.

Still, he will be wracked with grief. He will simply remain in the buggy for a long time holding her body. Then he will carry her into his house and place her on a bed, her hands folded together over her stomach. He will go into his office and write the death certificate, and she can tell what he has written under “Cause of death:” Fibro-cavernous pulmonary tuberculosis.

Later he will take her to E.H. Ingledew, who is both the town’s dentist and its mortician. E.H. will embalm the body and prepare a casket for it.

Colvin will have to speak with several people about the matter of burying her in the Stay More cemetery. By ancient tradition, only native Stay Morons can be buried there. As you pointed out in the architecture novel, not even the great Eli Willard, the perennially returning peddler, who had spent enough of his very long life visiting Stay More to be considered at least an honorary Stay Moron, was permitted to be buried in Stay More cemetery. One had to be born in Stay More to be buried there. (Strictly speaking, as we recall, Colvin himself was not born in Stay More and thus had no right to be buried there, but all the dead Swains had always been buried there, so it was his right by default.)

After much deliberation and heated argument, the men of Stay More will agree upon one solution: if a double headstone would be erected, Tenny on one side waiting for Colvin’s eventual interment on the other side, that would be acceptable. And that will be what will happen. There will be few attending the graveside service, in a downpour, scarcely enough people to make up the four singing parts of the four-part harmony for “Farther Along”; indeed, there will be no soprano, but Tenny will provide it herself, delighted to note that the words of that old funeral hymn are in the future tense: “Farther along we’ll know all about it, farther along we’ll understand why…” But she will already understand why.

Tenny will always like to visit the spot, anytime she can tell, not that she will necessarily approve of the barbaric custom of sticking dead bodies into the earth. She will like that double headstone, an ultimate expression of bigeminality, if you will, even though it will be many years before Tenny will get a chance to tell your architecture novel. Once, years or so later, while she will be admiring the double headstone and dusting some debris off of it (for the one power of moving things which the dead retain is a certain control over the breezes), an automobile will drive up, and a woman will get out of it and stand for several long moments over the grave, which will not yet have received Colvin. Tenny can tell that it will be Piney. She can tell that Piney will be feeling some sadness, and just a tinge of jealousy, to be reading the name “Tennessee Tennison Swain” carved into the same block as “Colvin U Swain.” Piney will not remain long, and will visit nothing else, no one else.

Well, sir, you yourself will go back to that cemetery yourself the next chance you will get, tomorrow maybe, so that you will be able to confirm that it will be there like Tenny has been telling you. Tenny will be there when you will arrive, and although she will possibly not manifest her presence to you in any way, not even in the breeze, she will let you know that she will be fully in control of the future tense, and will never relinquish it. But if you will stand at that grave long enough, which now contains both of them, and if you will listen hard enough, with your hearing aid turned up as high as it will go, you might even be able to hear the lovely soprano voice singing that aria of pure notes, rising and falling, not meant to say anything but only to chant, or to carol, some wordless expression of that feeling of kindly melancholy, a mixture of yearning, wanting, hoping, desire, with maybe a tinge of loss and bewilderment. You will think you are being haunted by the last fading notes of the Ozarks.

She will never have haunted Colvin, let alone have appeared to him. But, having waited a decent, seemly length of time after the funeral, she will begin regularly to “do something” about his nocturnal erections. She will recall that information he’d given her about incubus and succubus, and she will even recall (she can tell anything that she ever said or was ever said to her) her exact words in proposing what they’d originally tried to do; “I’ll be your concubine and succubate you?” And of course she will recall as if it were only a moment ago (in fact it was) the night on Brushy Mountain she caused the sleeping Colvin to impregnate her. So it will be easy for her to begin the practice that she will continue for the rest of his life: entering his dream and giving his erection enough attention to detonate and defuse it.

Alas, it will be my mention of this which will lead to some ultimate ill-feeling between Colvin and myself, and to my departure from Stay More. Colvin will have been continuing, on a daily basis, to sit with me on his porch and relate the end, painful though it be, of the long story he will have been telling me. Almost by unspoken consent, I would cease being his house-guest as soon as his story will have ended. My typhoid fever will have been totally cleared up, I will have been fit as a fiddle, and there will have been no excuse, really, for me to stay more at Stay More except my love for the place and my desire to hear of what will have happened to him in the years after Tenny’s death.

But there is so much of what you have been learning that Colvin could not possibly have known: all the things that happened to Tenny on Brushy Mountain and in the sanatorium, all her thoughts and feelings that have come to us under her own point of view in the future tense. If I didn’t get any of this from Colvin, and I’m not just making it up, where does it come from? I wish I could give some “valid” explanation, such as that Tenny’s spirit visited me as I lay on that cot which had been her bed. Or that she will have told me all of this during the “visitations” when she comes to me if I close my eyes right.

But the truth will be that Tenny can not only tell, she can also tell.

At whatever point Tenny will have taken over the telling, and the “telling,” she will not only have made herself immortal but also have made her story not something which happened, or is happening, but will be happening, as long as she is still “around.” And believe me—or you know it, don’t you?—she’s very much around. Remember I told you how I can close my eyes to make someone disappear and be replaced by someone else? Don’t be offended, but I will be replacing you with Tenny, all the time. I will see her now.

One afternoon Colvin and I will be sitting on the porch, and Rowena will be quitting for the day. As Rowena will walk down the porch steps and out into the road, she’ll give her fine hips a jauntier swing than usual, and when she’ll be out of earshot, I’ll banter with Doc, “Did you ever git any of that?”

Doc will chuckle, and will blurt, “Never had no need of it.”

“Oh?” I will say, and before I can stop myself will ask, “Because Tenny takes care of you every night?”

Doc’s mouth will fall open, and he will stare at me, and then his face will grow very red. I will not be able to “tell” if the red is embarrassment or anger. Maybe some of both. Then he will demand, “How’d you know that?”

“It’s part of the story,” I will observe.

“But goshdang ye, it aint no story that I ever tole ye!” he’ll declare. “Where’d you hear it?”

“Did you ever tell it to anyone?” I will challenge him. “Even Latha?” He will shake his head. “Then how could I have heard it anywhere?”

“Have you been sneaking into my diary?” he will demand.

“You never told me you kept a diary,” I will say.

“I don’t,” he will admit. “But where in blazes did you learn about what Tenny does at night…unless you’re just making a wild guess?”

Well sir, we will have gotten ourselves into quite a flap or row over this matter, and, as such things will, it will escalate until we’re hurling epithets at each other which we will both regret the next day. Quite possibly I will have known that my time at Stay More will have come to an end and unconsciously I will have been picking a quarrel with him in order to make the parting easier. But as it will turn out, we will even argue over his bill. He will refuse to present me a bill, and will accept nothing. I will insist upon paying at least for the medical care if not for all the room and board or “hospitalization,” but he will act as if my money is tainted and won’t touch it.

I will not even be able to recall my last words to him, as I will be putting on my hat and lifting up my knapsack. But I will think they were: “Don’t you see, Doc? She will still be telling all of it, and always will.”

We will keep in touch, sporadically, over the years, with postcards. Doc will never have been much of a letter-writer. I will learn over the years how he will continue his obsession with the Great White Plague. Not from him will I learn the story of how, during the Second World War, one day in the heat of August, Colvin will discover some of his free-ranging chickens acting sick, having trouble breathing. Still being a veterinarian himself from way back, he will take cultures from the chicken’s throats and after incubating the plates for several days he will observe cultures of actinomycetes developing. He will excavate the soil in which the chickens will have been scratching, and will find that the organisms are resident in the soil, and he will continue working with these cultures until he feels he has discovered enough to send them off to other scientists who are working on the problem, one of whom, named Selman Waksman, will convert Colvin’s cultures into a powerful antibiotic called streptomycin, and will receive the credit for having discovered it. Colvin will not have been interested in any credit, anyway. He will simply have wanted, with all his heart, to wipe out the Great White Plague. And his streptomycin will have done it.

Will it be time for you to leave, now? Yes, soon; I will have only two things essentially left to say: how Colvin himself will have gone to join his beloved Tenny in the Land of Telling, which you will possibly already have known. I will forget the year; perhaps it will have been as late as 1957. They will say, as they will never tire of saying wondrous things about Colvin U Swain, that he will have had an opportunity to have done something that he had not quite been permitted to do that day on those rounds in the St. Louis hospital so many, many years before: he will restore a dead man to life. You will wonder, anyone will wonder: if he will have been capable of it, why will he not have done it to Tenny thirty some years before? We will never know. We will know only that this man, who will be clinically dead, and will have been so for a great number of hours, will be resurrected by Colvin. We will not even bother with the man’s name. The man will have meant nothing personally to Colvin; just one more Stay Moron with a terminal disease. But Colvin will have always believed: The patient need not mean anything whatsoever personally in order to receive the physician’s most devoted attention.

Anyway, the gods or Whoever will have been angry with Colvin for restoring life, because one day not long after, while he will have been walking fast to get out of a rainstorm, he will have been hit by a thunderbolt and reduced to a pile of ashes, just enough ashes to be placed in a cannister and interred beside Tenny at that double tombstone.

So much for Colvin. Recently, I will have written this simple note to Mary:

“Dear Mary Celestia: The VA people will attend to all the details of my burial—undertakers, coffin, grave diggers, etc. Even the flag on the coffin, the chaplain, and a government marker for a tombstone. ALL FREE. If anybody asks you for money, call your lawyer. Wommack, isn’t it? You don’t have to do ANYTHING. If you don’t feel like going out to the National Cemetery, Don’t Go. I am sorry I have no money to leave you, Mary Celestia. I love you, as always. Vance.”

I will not know, of course, how much more time Tenny will grant me in this future tense of hers. I might well be able to stick around for a few more years, but I’d just as soon get on over to the Fiddler’s Green in the Land of Telling as soon as they will be able to make room for me on the Liar’s Bench. I tell you, when I reach the Land of Telling, I intend to tell ’em a thing or two!

But all that telling, whether we mean knowing or narrating, is as immaterial and fugitive as those breezes bearing Tenny’s song, or the imagined choiring of trees. Her future tense may never come to an end, but it will pause for now, with the realization that the only way she will ever be able to give shape and substance and heart to it will be to transmit it to me in such a way that I will be able to pass it along to you, and you will be able, one of these years, to turn it into novel, giving the reader two whole handsful of Tenny’s future tense.

Which is exactly what I will have done, for Tenny no less than for you. Good-bye, my boy. Godspeed.

For Fred Chappell

old son

Contents

Part One

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Chapter six

Chapter seven

Chapter eight

Chapter nine

Chapter ten

Chapter eleven

Chapter twelve

Part two

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

Part One

Where children are,

there is the golden age.

—Novalis

In all the wild imaginings of mythology

a fanciful spirit is playing on the borderline between jest and earnest.

—Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens

Chapter one

When I was thoroughly eleven, working on twelve, I first met you. You were not part of the gang that beat me up, but you watched them do it. That was the first and only thing I knew about you for the longest time: you liked to watch. Of course you also liked to listen; did you hear it when the bone snapped in my arm? I did. And that was when I suddenly knew you were there. Probably, without even knowing it, I had been waiting for you a very long time.

Now that you were there, I was tempted to introduce my tormentors. I may as well. That was Sugrue “Sog” Alan who slammed the baseball bat down on my arm; Sog was not yet seventeen, too young to be drafted or even to join with his parents’ permission, but he was big enough, tough enough, not to have needed the baseball bat; he could’ve broken my arm with his bare hands if he’d tried. His best buddy, Larry Duckworth, was only fifteen, but already the handsomest man in Stay More since all the best-looking ones had been drafted or joined up. Maybe Larry was vain and even jealous of my nice face, for he chose not to break my arm but to blacken one of my eyes. The only one of them that I might have beaten in a fair fight was Jim John Whitter, who spelled it Witter and maybe was right but whose stupidity kept him a year behind me in school although he was a year older than me. He took advantage of how the other two had already defeated me to do something he couldn’t have done alone: kick me in the groin. I wondered if you could even imagine how that felt.

You looked the three of them over and betrayed no disdain, though I am trying to picture them for you as villains, which they were. Then you looked at me, on the ground, whimpering in pain and grunting not your name, which I didn’t know yet, but the name of Ernie Pyle, my hero. If Ernie could have come to my cries, even though he was frail and scrawny, he could have trounced all three of them together, he could have obliterated them, with his words, if not his fists. But he didn’t come. You did. I liked to think that you felt sympathy for me, if not much knowledge, certainly not yet any affection. I wasn’t fishing for your pity, nor did I hope you could rescue me, as I had prayed for Ernie’s aid. I wasn’t even, as some would argue, simply imagining you out of the desperation of the situation. You were there, as much as I am here. You couldn’t do anything. You couldn’t protect me from those bullies, but you could, and you did, give me to know that you were there.

That would sustain me for…a long time (I nearly said forever, but neither you nor I believe in that). You sat beside me when Doc Swain put the plaster cast on my arm. “Can you get out that newspaper of yours with only one hand?” Doc asked me. Sure, I said; it was my good arm, the right one, that peeled the pages from the press. He shook his head. “Who was it got on the wrong side of you, boy?” he asked me.

I winked at you and grinned manfully. “Oh, just some of them,” I said. I wasn’t going to name any names, except to you.

“Well, if they were out to kill ye, they did a right poor job of it,” he said. “I reckon you’ll live. But I was you, I’d cross the creek without a footbridge next time I seen them a-coming.”

When I was not yet six and had just the faintest idea who you were, not enough to keep me from it, I had run away from home and was lost in the spooky woods of Ledbetter Mountain for some time. Doc Swain had organized the search party—the entire populace, some hundred-odd Stay Morons—but he had not been the one who had found me, and I suppose it had frustrated him. Now that I come to think of it, now that I’d met you and had you beside me, now that I’d speculated interminably about just who it was who’d found me, I can only wonder: was it you?

During the exciting days following our first meeting (I was thrilled to see how readily and easily and cozily you shared my bed at night), I searched in vain for a good name for you. At school, the little one-room (white, not red) schoolhouse across Swains Creek from the village, I had sat alone since August at a desk meant for two. I didn’t have infectious cooties, not that I knew of, and I didn’t have B.O., not that anybody had ever told me, and I wasn’t the only fifth grader: Sammy Coe was also eleven, but he didn’t want to sit with me, or, rather, I didn’t want to sit with him, and he knew it. The only advantage of sitting alone was that during air-raid drills when we all had to get down under our desks, it was easier for me to get under the desk without bumping into and getting tangled up with a deskmate. Air-raid drills were ridiculous; we had never seen an airplane. Maybe Miss Jerram, a pretty but not terribly bright spinster of twenty-three or thirty-three (who could tell? and besides, any unmarried woman past nineteen was considered a spinster) had not assigned me a seatmate out of spite, because she knew I was smarter than she was. But now I could install you to share my desk, calling you, for want of a better name, Friend. Some of the other kids launched admiring glances at the white plaster cast on my arm, which would soon bear their inscriptions of good wishes, all of them except Sog’s, Larry’s, and Jim John’s, whose wishes would be bad. When Miss Jerram said, that first day afterwards, “Dawny, do you want to stand and tell us all what-all happened to ye?” I turned to my new seatmate and said to you, “Friend, why don’t you tell ’em?”

But of course you would not, or could not. It was Jim John across the aisle who blurted, bragging, “That stinkin Jap done went and told on us in that stupid newspaper of his’n, and we whomped the soup outen him!”

Did Miss Jerram understand that? She could not permit herself to believe that I was smart enough to be a newspaper editor, and therefore she refrained from reading my paper. Or if she snuck a glance at it she never told me. But she knew darn well that most of the student body had been divided, for going on four years, practically since the war started, into two factions, rival camps who opposed each other not only in baseball but in war games such as Dirt War and Dare Base and all-out Capture the Flag. With or without her knowledge and consent, these two factions occupied opposing sides of the schoolroom with the aisle as a divider, a demilitarized zone across which spitballs flew.

There were the top dogs, led by fat Burl Coe until he got drafted, and by Sog Alan in his absence, who called themselves Allies, from the privilege of feeling and sometimes being superior (most of them came from the “better” families of town, to the extent that the farms in the bottomlands were more productive than those on the mountains), and there were the underdogs, who did not choose to be called Axis but had no choice. I certainly did not elect to be an Axis, let alone a despised Jap, but it fell my lot by default. Most of the girls, except a few chosen as sweethearts or sycophants by the Allied generals, were also Axis by default. Before the war, we Axis had been required to be the redskins in games of cowboys-and-Indians, and bandits in games of sheriffs-and-outlaws. Somebody always has to be the bad guy.

They were the in-group; we were the out-group. Whether one was Ally or Axis had nothing to do with how dumb or smart one was, or even social status as such (in Stay More there were only two social classes anyhow, with hardly any distinction between them: the poor, and the dirt poor—or, from a different perspective, since none of us were starving and all of us were fairly happy, the rich, and the feeling-rich). And just as the Civil War had pitted brother against brother (including two historically famous brothers from Stay More), opposing members of the Allies and the Axis could be found in the same family. For example, early in the war years, when the sides were first drawn, there were the triplet sons, Earl, Burl, and Gerald, of Lawlor Coe, the blacksmith, who, before Miss Jerram organized her War Effort Scrap Drive to remove all of it, had an abundance of waste pieces of iron and steel from which both the Allies and the Axis fashioned their arsenals. Burl was the dominant triplet and thus insisted on being an Allied general, leaving his brothers to be the Axis: Earl the Nazi and Gerald the Jap. Dulcie Coe, the triplets’ mother, had given Burl’s tousled auburn locks a GI haircut at his request, had slicked and combed Earl’s hair into a Hitlerian flap, which he darkened with stove polish, adding a false mustache of horsehair, and she had made Gerald’s head look like a parody of the caricatures of Premier Hideki Tojo; when Gerald’s efforts to give himself buckteeth by gripping his lower lip with his upper teeth did not do the job, his friends—two of us—fashioned him a false set from a dead cow’s teeth.

The two friends of Gerald, including me, empathized with him by also wearing cow’s teeth during the battles, or even by slanting up the corners of our eyes with charcoal. The other friend was Willard Dinsmore, the smartest of us all, and when Gerald and Willard and I put our heads together in games requiring strategy, intelligence, and cunning, especially with the brawn provided by our Nazi conspirators, the Axis often routed the Allies. Before long, I’ll introduce you to Willard, and I think you may like him best of us all.

But for now, and for a while, it’s Gerald we’re looking at: pudgy, freckled, towheaded, the least and last of three insufferably identical and homely brothers whose names, you are quick to understand, rhymed, the way we all pronounced his as “Jerl.” But no one except his mother called him that. Nearly everyone had a nickname of sorts, as if it were bad luck to speak someone’s actual name. Even their pronunciation of my diminutive, “Dawny,” turned it into a kind of nickname, but ever since the war started all of the Axis and the Allies called me Ernie rather than Dawny because I had once in a moment of extravagance or enthusiasm blurted that I thought Ernie Pyle was a greater man than Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Likewise, Gerald Coe had once blurted that his ambition in life was someday to become mayor of Stay More. This little town, lost as it was in the remote fastnesses of the Ozark Mountains, had never had a mayor, unless you considered that in the old days, more than a century before, Jacob Ingledew, who’d founded the town with his brother Noah, had proclaimed himself Mayor, mostly just an honorific title. Being least and last always makes one a little more alert and sensitive than those who are first and foremost, and Gerald, or “Mayor Coe” as others began to call him in jest, perceived that Stay More might not continue its relentless decline and population loss if there was a responsible civic government to rescue it. Those who truly knew him, as few did (you and I among them), had every reason to believe that he might actually run for and be elected to the post someday, and, further, that he might actually save the dying town.

Of course mayor is pronounced simply “mare,” and that is what we all of us had come to call him, Mare Coe, a name that lent itself to further teasing (a nickname is by virtue of its bestowal a form of teasing) because of the association with female horses or nightmares or, as Sog Alan usually called him, Mary. Taunts could be easily made: “Mare smokes marijuana,” or “Stay Mare of Stay More,” and, prophetically, Mare would join the marines.

Despite his pudginess and his flaring freckles and the anonymity that comes from being identical to two nondescript brothers, Mare had qualities that not only made him the natural commander of the Axis but also, had he lived long enough, might actually have elevated him to mayor of what was left of the community of Stay More. He was smarter than his brothers. Until he graduated from the eighth grade at fourteen, he was Miss Jerram’s star pupil, her pet, and (some of the kids gossiped) her secret lover. Whether or not there was actually anything going on between them (and nobody ever testified the two had ever been seen together outside of school), it is a fact that she was the only one who could distinguish him readily from his brothers. The triplets not only looked exactly alike (they didn’t dress identically but wore an indistinguishable wardrobe of overalls and old shirts) but also talked identically, with the same inflections and only the subtlest differences in their choice of words, which did not escape Miss Jerram’s keen perception: she knew, for example, that Mare’s favorite negative was “Over my dead body,” and his favorite affirmative was “Fine and dandy,” and she smiled at him more often than she did at his brothers. Because she was nice to him, he went out of his way to please her, and even after he’d graduated he helped her conduct that great award-winning scrap drive and that great knit-off.

Paradoxically, as far as the War Effort was concerned, the members of the Axis were much more patriotic than the Allies. When the great knit-off began, I was still in the second grade, and a Red Cross lady came from the county seat, Jasper, to show all of us, including Miss Jerram, who didn’t know how, the art of knitting. We learned how to click those needles and loop those skeins for Our Boys Overseas. Soon all of us—except the Allies, who thought it was sissy, and refused—were adept at making knitted squares out of the khaki or olive drab yarn from the wool from the sheep of Stay More that had been dyed in advance. When enough squares were finished, they’d be stitched together into blankets, and although these blankets disappeared we’d be told how they’d become part of “Bundles for Britain” and thus warming and comforting to Our Boys Overseas.

The Axis girls, like Ella Jean Dinsmore, whom I secretly was crazy about from the second grade on, graduated from doing simple wool squares to knitting mittens, socks, and even sweaters for Our Boys Overseas, and the Stay More public school, thanks to the Axis, won the Newton County prize for Most Yarn Intertwined, a certificate that Miss Jerram dressed up with a frame trimmed with knitting and hung over the blackboard.

We did even better for her War Effort Scrap Drive, rounding up virtually everything metallic in the whole town, whether it was scrap or not. Mare Coe drove the hay wagon and mule team we used to load up with the collection—wagon-wheel rims, hoes, plow points, broken anvils, shovels, everything. We asked him, “What iffen they’re still a-using whatever piece of metal we want?” and he replied, “Jist ast ’em if they kin someways live without it.” Somehow we talked the few remaining menfolk out of their hammers, saws, and plowshares, the womenfolk out of their washtubs, pots, pans, and tableware, and all of the children sacrificed their jumping jacks, pocketknives, and any other play-pretties made out of metal. Doc Swain was permitted to keep his essential medical tools, but everything else metallic in the town had to go. As the result of our efforts, it was declared that we’d collected more scrap than any other rural school in the whole state of Arkansas, and Miss Jerram got the privilege of christening in absentia a liberty ship.

Doing things for the War Effort diverted us Axis from our constant battles with the Allies, and allowed us to feel truly superior to the Allies, who remained more interested in games and dirty tricks than in the patriotic activities of the War Effort. The Allies had commandeered as their clubhouse (“Operations Headquarters” they called it) an old house built up in a tree nearly a century before by Noah Ingledew. It couldn’t exactly be called a “tree house” because that conjures up an image of a jerry-built hovel constructed by children, and Noah Ingledew’s house had been an entire double-wing dwelling erected high up in a sycamore tree. The Allies always got the best of everything, and we Axis were consigned to using as our Operations Headquarters an unused back room in the old Ingledew General Store; nobody knew we were there. The Allies’ clubhouse in that sycamore tree was just north of the village, and they had dug foxholes all around the perimeter of it to protect it, and not even Mare Coe could lead a successful assault on those foxholes. Whenever we played War, the Axis usually had to defend the village proper, the main street along which we’d dug so many foxholes that the grown-ups complained. The Allies were usually victorious in assaulting and taking the village from us. The only times we truly beat the Allies were Saturday afternoon baseball games. With Mare’s help as pitcher, our Axis baseball team could sometimes beat the Allies, who always after a defeat vowed to get even in the trenches, but even there, hurling the old potatoes that we used as hand grenades, Mare could often defend us against the assault of the Allies. The Allies would rather play any sort of game than expend energy on behalf of Our Boys Overseas.

The only thing the Allies were willing to do to help the War Effort was collect grease, and they had an ulterior motive for that: it was a way to get into the movies. As his own contribution to the War Effort, Doc Swain offered to take whoever could collect a lard bucket of grease to the Saturday night movies at the only movie theater in Newton County, the Buffalo, on the square in Jasper. The Buffalo was our Rialto. Doc not only was one of the few people in Stay More who possessed an automobile, but also because he was a doctor he had a “C” sticker for it that permitted him to fill his tank at Dill’s Gas and Service. During the war there was a national speed limit of thirty-five miles per hour, and on the dirt road between Parthenon and Jasper there was one little level straightaway, where, if Doc floored the gas pedal on his old heap, he could get it up to thirty-three or thirty-four mph, almost the speed limit. Each Saturday night Doc took the winners of the grease-collection contest the distance of more than ten miles to the movies at the Buffalo, where the admission for kids was a lard-bucket of grease, meaning usually bacon fat or pork renderings. Often I was in the group of kids who crowded into Doc Swain’s car with their grease buckets, and I got to watch the Movietone News before the serial and the feature came on. That newsreel was always full of the latest thrilling shots of how we were winning the war in Germany and the Pacific. And I decided, for the benefit of all of those in Stay More who couldn’t go to the movies, to start a newspaper reporting the leading items from the Movietone News. Naturally my main motive was to start giving myself the experience I’d need to replace Ernie Pyle when he retired.

I mail-ordered for $1.98 plus postage (earned from my after-school job as stockboy and general factotum at Latha Bourne’s general store) a “hectograph,” or gelatin board, which was a simple wooden tray filled with hard purple gelatin on which a master sheet (hand-printed with purple pencil) could be impressed and duplicated up to a maximum of about fifty copies. My little newspaper, never running to more than four pages except at Christmas, had reached a circulation of not more than forty at the time I met you. I had decided to call it The Stay Morning Star, a clever play on the town’s name. Putting out the newspaper required me to get up before school every Monday and, after giving postmistress Latha Bourne twenty copies to put in the post office boxes, carry the other twenty around to the RFD mailboxes of those who didn’t have post office boxes. It was a long hike, up hill and down vale, in bitter weather that past winter, and sometimes I was tardy for the beginning of school and caught what-for from Miss Jerram. Then on Sunday afternoons I had to hike around to each of those places again and, after being announced by their barking dogs or knocking on their doors, I inquired whether any of them had anything to say that was worthy of being reported in the next day’s paper.

On these reportorial rounds I never stopped at the yellow house, out on the Butterchurn Holler road, occupied by the strange bearded old man known only as Dan. I wasn’t afraid of him, as most of both the Allies and Axis were. His house wasn’t scary; in fact, it was quite pleasant and, being painted yellow, was bright and cheerful. But somehow I sensed, or knew, or had once been told, that he did not want visitors, or company, or friends. Although he’d been there longer than I’d been alive, he was still a “furriner,” meaning not a native of these here mountains. He lived there with a girl, presumed to be his daughter, who was never seen in the village, who had never attended the Stay More school, who was reputed to be beautiful by those who claimed to have caught a glimpse of her. I left my little newspaper in their box each Monday morning, but I never even thought of stopping there on Sunday afternoons to ask for news. Keeping to themselves as they did, what news could they possibly have anyhow?

For that matter, few others had any news. The most common thing I heard, after all the effort to reach some of those remote cabins and houses, was “Nothin this week, Dawny, sorry to have to tell ye.” But occasionally, like fishing for hours without a nibble and then landing a lunker, I got something truly newsworthy: a son had been in the D-Day invasion and survived. A son had been killed on his ship in the Pacific by something called a kamikaze, fiendish, which is where a pilot dive-bombs his plane with himself still in it. A son had been in something called the Battle of the Bulge and was wounded. I reported all of this excitement in a style that Ernie Pyle would have admired, even if he’d have grinned at the way I imitated him. My stories never gave away any troop movements or sank any ships.

But usually my reportage was mild and limited to such things as sports (AXIS TAKE ALLIES 3–0 ON MARE COE’S NO-HITTER) and, the main source of news, visits. Sunday afternoons, the time of my news collecting, were by tradition the time of the week for people to visit one another, and I could usually fill a page with items like WHITTERS VISIT DUCKWORTHS, COES VISIT DILLS, or DINSMORES VISIT DINGLETOONS.

But one of the “visits,” I discovered, involved a man too old to serve with Our Boys Overseas who was visiting with a young woman whose husband was one of Our Boys Overseas. “She’s jist my little niece, didn’t ye know?” he said to me, and I reported that fact in my story about the visit, which, however, got me into trouble. When I was hurt and puzzled by the uproar, dear Latha Bourne tried to explain to me, “He’s not really her uncle. They’re not even any kin to each other, which is unusual for any two people in this town.”

The small costs of putting out The Stay Morning Star (mostly for the newsprint, in short supply) were borne by the advertisers: Latha Bourne’s General Store (“Limited Supply of Post Toasties Just In”), Dill’s Gas and Service (“Three Shade Trees, No Waiting”), and even now and again (although I later learned the AMA wouldn’t have approved) Doc Swain (“Come in and ask about what streptomycin can do for you”). I was still in love with Latha Bourne, which is what people kept on calling her although she was now Mrs. Every Dill, but I never made a nuisance of myself around her anymore; I worked as her stock-boy, janitor, and delivery boy for a little while after school each day, and once a week I took down her dictation for her ad in my paper, for which she paid me another fifteen or twenty-five cents, depending on whether it was a full-page ad or just a half-pager, although I protested that I could just consider those ad costs the rent on the little side room of her store that she let me use as my newspaper office.

No one, least of all myself, considered my newspaper to be in competition with the county’s weekly, published in Jasper and printed on a real press, which came out on Thursday afternoons and, to my pleasure, always carried the Scripps-Howard syndicated column of Ernie Pyle, which I read religiously. Ernie Pyle was my first experience of the writer whose life is almost as important as his work, and therefore an inspiration to become a writer, not just to entertain or inform people, not just to reach you, but to be admired as a writer. Ernie was just an old Indiana farm boy; like myself, he had been put to the plow at the age of nine, and like myself he had hated it. Now he was on the front lines, living and sweating with the troops, dodging enemy fire, risking his life to report in his homespun, folksy style the doings and dreams and daring of the enlisted men. He made heroes out of common men.

He always identified the soldiers he interviewed by their hometowns, even their street addresses, and I always watched closely to see which ones were from Arkansas. The very week after the Allies broke my arm, he wrote about some of the boys in Ordnance over in France (Ordnance is a branch of the Army, not a town in France), “The soldiers did a lot of kidding as they sat around taking rusted guns apart. Like soldiers everywhere they razzed each other constantly about their home states. A couple were from Arkansas, and of course they took a lot of hillbilly razzing about not wearing shoes till they got in the Army, and so on. One of them was Corporal Herschel Grimsley, of Springdale, Arkansas. He jokingly asked if I’d put his name in my dispatch. So I took a chance and joked back. ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘except I didn’t know anybody in Arkansas could read.’

“Gentle Reader, everybody laughed loudly at this scintillating wit, most of all Corporal Grimsley, who can stand anything.”

That column was a revelation, in more ways than one. It let me know, for the first time in my life, that the rest of the world thought there was something wrong with the fact that we preferred to go barefooted in Stay More, not that we didn’t know what shoes are, but because we didn’t need ’em. And there were some of my subscribers who couldn’t read The Stay Morning Star because they never needed to learn how.

But the main revelation of that column, startling me, was that it gave you a name. Gentle Reader. I had been calling you “Friend” just as a temporary handle until I found a better one. With Doc Swain and the others I had recently seen a movie at the Buffalo called The Thief of Bagdad, one of the ever-popular Arabian Nights films, and it had a fabulous genie in it, and I thought of calling you Genie, but there were a couple things wrong with that: a genie does one’s bidding, and you won’t ever do mine (even though I’ll try to make you, farther along); and Ella Jean Dinsmore, my secret passion, sometimes was called “Jeaner” or sometimes just “Jeannie,” which sounds just like Genie. So I had to give up that notion.

Gentle Reader, that would do just fine, and it would be many more years before I discovered to my dismay how promiscuous you are, reading not just me and Ernie Pyle but everybody else. Still, I’ll always like to remember my first meeting of you, and my first discovery of your name.

So when everyone in school, including Miss Jerram herself, was given the opportunity to inscribe my plaster cast, I remembered you. Most of them just wrote their names, or some stupid silly little thing like “Roses are red, Violets are blue…” or added clever variations, “…Sugar is sweet, but you stink ha ha!” Lack of originality was rampant: “When you get married and live like pigs, Don’t treat your wife like Maggie does Jiggs,” or “Yours till the Statue of Liberty sits down and the ocean wears rubber pants to keep its bottom dry.” Some were threatening: “Your leg next time,” wrote Sog Alan, “Dry up and blow away,” wrote Larry Duckworth, and “Go climb a weed,” wrote Jim John Whitter. Miss Jerram wrote “Here’s hoping someday you’ll discover that others aren’t as dumb as you think they are.” Ella Jean had little to say, but it was sweet: “Hope you go far with the Stay Morningstar.”

There were twenty-five people in the schoolhouse and their writings nearly covered my plaster cast, but I was careful to reserve one corner, where I put a dotted line. The expression “dotted line” isn’t quite accurate, because usually the line is dashed, not dotted. But it was for you, Gentle Reader:

Chapter two

When this story really got started, I hadn’t yet met you. One Saturday afternoon the summer before, Mare Coe (who’d never yet actually done anything about his declared intention to become mayor) came into my newspaper office at Latha’s store and, pointing at my hectograph, inquired, “Can you print up posters and such on that thing?” I explained to Mare that the gelatin board could print up to about fifty copies before it began to become illegible. “Shoot, that’s more than enough, I reckon,” he said, and he took from his pocket a folded sheet of paper that he showed me. I read it with great interest, because politics ought to be a newspaper editor’s first priority, even more than war news, but there’d never been any political news in the history of Stay More. “What sort of figure would ye charge me for printin it up?” he asked. We agreed on a penny a sheet. He counted his pocket change and decided he could afford to have twenty copies printed but wondered if that might not be too many, “just to tack up hither and yon.” We discussed the various places that the poster ought to be tacked up: both ends of Latha’s store porch, the three big trees at Dill’s Gas and Service, near the door of the old Ingledew General Store, the front of the schoolhouse, on the one remaining show window of the abandoned bank building, both sides of the lone pine tree that dominated the intersection of the main road and the road up Banty Creek, various other trees in “downtown” Stay More (there were of course no poles yet for telephone or electricity anywhere in the town), and even on the giant sycamore tree that served as the pedestal for the Allies’ clubhouse.

Mare and I calculated that twenty copies ought to be enough; he gave me a quarter and I gave him a nickel in change. I asked Mare if he’d be amenable to a few corrections in his grammar, spelling, and sentence structure. “Do it everhow you like,” he consented. I didn’t charge him anything for helping him tack up the posters:

COME ONE COME ALL!

Let’s Us Start Us A Goverment!

Seeing as how just about all the menfolk has had to leave town to serve our country against Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo, and Stay More is just awasting away on the vine, don’t you think we ought to get

organized

and see if we can’t do nothing about it! Let’s have a election, and put together a “slate” of town officials like mayor and aldermen and town marshal and all!

But first, let’s have a meeting to discuss what we need to do to have this election and get it all going!

NEXT SATTERDAY NIGHT, AT THE SCHOOLHOUSE! EVERBODY BE THERE! RIGHT AFTER SUPPER!

PER: GERALD A. COE (Candidate for Mayor and I sure would appresiate your support and I pledge to do my utmost to serve you and this here town!)

Well, we tacked those up everywhere, and we knocked on Estalee Jerram’s door, right across the road from the schoolhouse, to ask if we could put one up on the schoolhouse door and also to get permission to use the schoolhouse for the meeting. Miss Jerram was delighted to see her former star pupil, and the way she greeted him like a long-lost star pupil convinced me that, contrary to rumor, they hadn’t actually been seeing each other since he graduated. “You didn’t spell Saturday correct,” she pointed out to him. “Also I think you’ve spelled appreciate wrong too.”

“Dawny here printed that,” he said, as if it was my fault we’d misspelled a couple of words. Miss Jerram looked at me as if she were calculating whether to hold me back one grade or two. “You’ll come to the meetin too, I hope?” he asked her.

“Well, goodness gracious, Gerald, don’t ye know? That’s our knittin night!” Miss Jerram was the leader of the Axis girls who met every Saturday night at her house to have a knitting bee, fashioning the sweaters and mittens and socks that were going to Our Boys Overseas.

Mare clapped his brow, and then I clapped mine, not in imitation of him but because I’d thought of something else too: “It’s also the night Doc Swain is taking some of us to the movies!”

Somehow Fridays didn’t seem as important as Saturdays, and Mare didn’t like the idea, but he borrowed a black Crayola from Miss Jerram and we went around to all the posters we’d already tacked up, scratching out “Satterday” and writing in Friday.

That week’s issue of The Stay Morning Star, which I delivered to all those RFD and post office boxes, carried a front-page article about the big political event under the headline STAY MORE TO FORM CITY GOVERNMENT, and on an inside page I ran a sort of profile of Gerald A. “Mare” Coe, 18, son of the town’s blacksmith, Lawlor Coe, and triplet brother to Burl, recently sent to Army boot camp in Texas, and Earl, who like Gerald was classified I-A and expected to be drafted any day now. I even included an editorial, “Everybody who is a citizen or who wants to be a good citizen ought to come to this meeting. Besides, it will take our minds off the war.” And I couldn’t resist including these words, “Here is a good chance for the rival crowds that are called Allies and Axis to bury the hatchet and smoke the peace pipe.”

On Friday night after supper I met Mare at the schoolhouse and we waited to see who-all would come. We wondered if any of the Allies actually would show up—when Burl Coe was drafted into the Army his place as leader of that faction had been taken by Sog Alan, the meanest and surliest of all the Allies, who’d have been happy to shoot all of us Axis if he hadn’t donated his gun to the scrap drive. The third of the triplets, Earl, although he was one of us Axis (and the hard-hitting catcher of Mare’s pitches in our ball games), probably would not come, Mare explained. “I just caint persuade him that government is anything to get excited about,” Mare said.

Lots of people felt that way, apparently. We had a poor turnout: of Stay More’s grown-ups, the only one who came to the meeting was Miss Jerram. This set me to brooding about whether or not people actually did take the trouble to read The Stay Morning Star. Since all of those who did show up at the schoolhouse, except Mare himself, had been a pupil the previous term, the whole lot of us simply looked like another session of school, or, since we weren’t all there, like a session of school when many are out with measles, colds, or the flu.

Eventually some of the Dinsmore kids showed up (including Ella Jean!) led by seventh-grader Willard Dinsmore, who was Mare’s lieutenant, more or less, as leader of the Axis. “Aint there nothin to eat?” Willard politely inquired, disappointed. Did I say earlier that none of us in Stay More were starving? I’ll take that back. Willard, though he got just as much to eat as his brothers and sisters, all twelve of them, in the shack they lived in away back up on Dinsmore Mountain, which is to say, enough victuals to sustain them without making any of them fat, was always hungry. Food was on his mind all the time. This struck me as phenomenal because I myself never gave food a thought. Willard wasn’t a conspicuous sort of person, despite looking like a scarecrow, and that wasn’t like him to speak up, even mildly and politely. Maybe he wasn’t naturally the quiet type, but with six brothers and six sisters he probably never had a chance to get a word in edgewise. And in school, Miss Jerram wouldn’t let him talk. There was a rumor that one time back in the fourth grade he’d stolen her lunch, and when she’d accused him of it, he’d given her some back talk, and she’d never forgiven him, although it was hard to imagine Willard giving anybody any back talk, he was so pleasant and gentle. He wore eyeglasses, a cheap pair of wire-rimmed mail-order specs, and he seemed to be hiding behind them. He was tall for his age, fifteen, and so scrawny it was pitiful, although he was a great first baseman on our ball team. I sometimes thought that Abe Lincoln must have looked like Willard when he was that age and doing his reading around the fireplace. Willard didn’t have a fireplace, just an old stove to read by, if he read, and I suspected he did. I suspected Willard was the smartest feller in school, smarter even than me. Latha Bourne told me once that Willard probably had been named after an old traveling salesman who’d come to Stay More perennially since the days it had first been founded, but had died here before I was born. Eli Willard was his name, and he was from Connecticut, and while I know little about his personality, I picture him as resembling another native of Connecticut (who wound up in Sleepy Hollow, New York), named Ichabod Crane: “He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together.” Those words pretty well summed up the image of Willard Dinsmore as well as his namesake.

Altogether, we had a poorer turnout at that meeting than we’d have the following afternoon at our weekly ball game between the Axis and the Allies. There weren’t enough from either side to constitute the nine needed for a ball team. The three Allied thugs who months later would thrash me sauntered together through the schoolhouse door as if they were three Western outlaws entering a saloon in search of mischief. Each of them was carrying a copy of Mare’s poster that they’d ripped down, perhaps as a gesture of defiance, although it made it look as if they were each too stupid to remember what they were doing without the poster. Behind them came two of their girlfriends, and three other members of the Allies, but the Axis still outnumbered them by one, or two if you counted Miss Jerram, who was sort of an honorary Axis since she was leader of the Axis knitters.

From force of habit, each of us sat at the same school desk we’d ordinarily occupy during the school day, Allies on one side, Axis on the other, even though this was summertime and we hadn’t sat in those seats for many weeks. This prompted Miss Jerram to stand up and say, “Well, boys and girls, we may as well get started. Since this here is my schoolhouse, don’t ye reckon I ought to be in charge of this meetin?”

“Nome,” said Willard. “Mare’s the mare. It’s his gubberment, and he orter be in charge.”

“Willard Dinsmore, nobody gave you permission to speak,” Miss Jerram said, pouting. “And you, Dawny, take off that slingshot.” She pointed at my customary summertime necklace, a slingshot made from strips of an old inner tube and a fork of bow wood, without which I was never seen in the summer. Such a weapon was not allowed in school.

“This aint school,” I pointed out, setting the tone for the proceedings. “This is a town meeting.”

“All right,” she relented. “Gerald, this meeting was your idee, so you mought as well take charge of it. But you’d just better lead the Pledge of Allegiance anyhow.” She motioned for him to stand, but she did not sit down herself, not even after the Pledge of Allegiance.

Mare the mayor-to-be rose humbly, stooping his shoulders more than was necessary, and even blushing a little. He put his hand over his heart, so we all stood and put our hands over ours, and we faced the flag, furled on its pole and collecting dust in the corner. None of us tried to improve upon the version we’d first recited in the first grade: “Apple legions to deaf leg often knighted states of a merry can to the wee public for witches hands, one Asian in the vestibule with little tea and just rice for all.”

Then Mare rubbed his hands together as if to rinse the sweat from them. He coughed. He looked at us apologetically, as if he’d made a big mistake dragging us out here on Friday night. Then he cleared his throat noisily and said to Willard, “I aint the mare yet, ye know.” Then he glanced at Sog Alan and said, “First just let me say I’m mighty glad that you Allies was good enough to join us.”

“We aint jined ye yet, Mare,” Sog Alan said. “We’uns turned up, but we aint jined ye.”

“I’m just glad you’re here,” Mare said. “No sense in us being always at each other’s throats. The main purpose of this here meetin is to bring harmony to Stay More.”

“‘Harmony!?’” Larry Duckworth snickered, as if he’d never heard the word in his life, and he probably hadn’t.

“It means we need to agree with each other more often,” I pedantically defined the word for the poor fool.

“That’ll be the day!” Jim John Whitter declared. “The Allies won’t never agree with the Axis!”

“Boys, boys!” Miss Jerram said. “If you’uns aim to fight, I won’t be a party to this. I’ll march right out of here!”

We waited for her to march right out of there, but she didn’t. Maybe it was just as well. At that moment we could have demolished the Allies in a fair fight, outnumbered as they were.

“We don’t have to always agree,” Mare declared, and glanced at me as if to refute what I’d said. “Matter of fact, to be a government we’ve got to have opposing parties, like the Democrats and the Republicans, and we’ll keep each other on our toes by not agreeing. It’s called ‘checks and balances.’”

“Fair deal,” said Sog, “so what if I was to run for mare myself?”

“Fine and dandy,” said Mare. “That’s your right and your privilege, in a democracy.”

“Just what in heck is a mare anyhow?” Larry Duckworth wanted to know. “I never heared of ary such a bird till you started in to callin yourself one. What town do you know has got a mare? Has Jasper got one?”

As far as anyone knew, our county seat did not have a mayor. There was a county judge, which was an administrative position, not a judicial one, and the judge was in charge of everything.

“Most sizable towns has got mares,” Mare said. “Aint that right, Miss Jerram?”

“That’s what I’ve been told,” she declared. “But I never saw a mare myself.”

“So what does a mare git to do?” Sog wanted to know. “If I win the ’lection, can I boss folks around?”

“Sog, you boss ’em around anyway,” Willard Dinsmore observed. “But don’t worry none ’bout winnin the ’lection, because you aint got a dog’s chance.”

“What d’ye want to bet?” Sog challenged him.

“A mare,” said Mare, who ought to know, “is supposed to be the principal officer of the town, in charge of good works, and fixin what’s broke, and also he does ceremonies like presentin a ‘key to the city’ to important visitors.”

All of us stared at Mare as we contemplated these strange images. Ella Jean, my sweet, was the first to speak. “When’s the last time we had a important visitor?”

There was no answer, for not even Miss Jerram, who’d lived here for some years longer than anyone else, could remember any important visitors.

“Heck,” Mare protested, “I don’t have to give nobody no keys. It’s just sort of honorary anyhow.”

There followed a halfhearted discussion of just what a government might accomplish for Stay More. A few suggestions for civic improvement were proposed, but any idea the Axis offered was disputed by the Allies, and vice versa. One of the Allies submitted that the town could look a little better if we tore down the old gristmill, unused for many years but still towering above the town with its four-story bulk clad in rusty-red tin that had once been meant to imitate brick but never succeeded. But Willard said truthfully, “That’d leave a mighty big hole in the sky,” and naturally we Axis were protective of the building because it was part of our defended territory, the village. According to history or legend, Jesse James had once robbed that mill, and the Axis argued that it ought to be left standing just as a monument to the great outlaw.

I raised my hand and intimated that in the interests of beautification, how about painting some of the buildings? Both general stores and all of the houses (except the hermit Dan’s yellow house) were without paint, their natural wood a kind of dusty tan, and while I would grow up to realize that that color was absolutely appropriate for the rustic setting of the village, it seemed to me at that time, when my civic zeal was coming on, that we could use some white paint on some of them. We could apply the paint ourselves, if need be.

“Who’s gonna buy the paint, Ernie?” one of the Allies wanted to know, and another one said, “I aint never used a brush in my life and I aint about to start in to learnin how.”

Mare said, “I don’t reckon we want to change the town none. But if only there was something we could do to keep the town from gittin smaller and smaller. The way it’s shrinkin, there won’t be nothin left of it by and by.” He said these words mournfully, and, I have to admit, prophetically.

One of the Allied hussies, Betty June Alan, said to Mare, “Silly, the reason it’s gittin smaller is Uncle Sam keeps on takin all the menfolks Overseas!”

She had a point, although Stay More’s population had been declining long before the war broke out, and the Depression more than the war had probably cost us numbers of our people, lost to the California emigration.

“Yeah, Mare,” Betty June’s big brother Sog put in, “Just what d’ye aim to do to stop the war and bring all them daddies back home?” It was a rhetorical question, although I was tempted to throw the question back at Sog, if he was also going to be a candidate for mayor. When Mare could not answer the question, Sog said to him, “Aint it about time you went Over There yourself and did your part?”

“Any day now,” Mare acknowledged, mindful of his draft status. “But while I’m waitin to be called up, there’s a lot to be done to help this town.”

“Like what?” the Allies demanded, but none of the Axis could answer them.

Mare was moved as close to tears of frustration as I’d ever seen him, and I ached to reply on his behalf, on all our behalves, but I realized that I myself didn’t have much enthusiasm for politics. I sat there wondering if Ernie Pyle had ever been required to cover a town hall beat or do any kind of political reporting. He’d been a copyreader and a telegraph editor for the Washington Daily News before he’d started writing a regular column on aviation, the first ever. I wished that an airplane would fly over Stay More sometime, but I’d never seen one.

Willard Dinsmore tried to come to Mare’s rescue, to mine, to ours. “We could help some of the unfortunates.”

“Like who?” the Allies demanded.

“Let’s us start with the Dingletoons,” Willard proposed.

Chapter three

When the large family of Dingletoons first came to Stay More and simply took over an abandoned farmstead in a remote and rocky corner of Butterchurn Holler during an autumn early in the war, their reputation preceded them: they were known to have a habit of simply helping themselves to unoccupied real estate without paying rent or making any gesture of acquiring legal tenancy or ownership. They weren’t sharecroppers. E.H. Ingledew, our town’s retired dentist and mortician, who nominally owned the Stay More land they began to squat on, called them “the Starlings” out of his unwillingness to call them Dingletoons, a supposed corruption of his own family name, and because the starling is a bird who’ll move into and take over a woodpecker’s nest. After the woodpecker has gone to all that trouble to hack out the cavity and build a nest in it and call it home, it comes home one morning to find a bunch of starlings have usurped the place.

Supposedly Ace and Bliss Dingletoon had moved their seven children into the crude cabin of rounded logs—not one of the original old-time hewn-log cabins carefully crafted in the last century but one built hastily during the homesteader boom before the First World War and gradually rotting ever since—and had been subsisting there for quite some months before the owner, Ingledew, found out about it and rather halfheartedly accosted the father, Ace Dingletoon, and asked if he intended to pay any rent on the place. Ace tried to tell E.H. a story about how he’d run into an old lady one time who told him that she’d known Ace’s grandfather, who had actually been one of the Ingledews, but the grandfather had been a kind of outcast who couldn’t read nor write nor even pronounce the name correctly. “Mought we not even be cousins therefore?” Ace had said to E.H. Ingledew.

“Hell,” E.H. had observed correctly, “everbody in this here county is cousins anyhow.”

“If I was to learn my kids how to say our name correctly, so’s it’s Ingledew ’stead of Dingletoon, would ye be willin to let us keep on a-tendin this old run-down godforsaken place?”

“Stranger,” E.H. had replied, “ever fool knows you folks is always on the lookout for a empty place to move into, and if this aint the beatenest gimmick ever I heared to git yoreselfs another’n!”

The Ingledews had at least collected some token rent from the previous occupants for the forty acres of barely workable land. But Ace and Bliss Dingletoon could pay no rent; they had seven children and one mule and not much else. They had never owned land or property, had never paid rent to use a dwelling, had never cropped on shares or in any manner recognized that the land they used belonged to somebody else. Just where they came from originally was obscure. Just where they were going eventually was equally obscure. Only one thing was known for sure: they wouldn’t stay long in any place.

They were here today and gone tomorrow. They moved out as easily as they moved in. They were even known to catch wind that a family was planning to move out, whereupon they were ready to move into the house before the chimney was cool. Ace Dingletoon would check to see if the barbed wire fences were all in place and then turn his mule out to pasture, uncoop the chickens and give them free run of the yard, then check the corncrib and hayloft to see if anything had been left behind that could be fed to some stock. The oldest boy, Joe Don Dingletoon, would be sent to search the smokehouse and other outbuildings, if any; one time Joe Don had even found a good chunk of meat still hanging in the smokehouse. The girl Gypsy would be sent to see if there were any edible potatoes in the garden patch and to dig them up. Her little brothers Billy and Taylor, barely old enough to heft and tote a full pail, would be sent to fetch sufficient water from the well or spring or creek so that the mother, Bliss, could commence redding up the house.

If there wasn’t enough left behind on the place to make a meal, the kids would go off into the woods and set rabbit traps, or down to the creek to noodle fish. The whole family was trained to know what to do as soon as they moved in. Even the dogs would take off for the tall timber and have a coon or possum or mess of squirrels treed in time for supper. Their first evening in a new home was always marked by a groaning table at suppertime.

Once they had taken possession of a place, it was pretty hard to remove them without the help of the sheriff. They would get their crops planted as soon as the season allowed, so that they could claim nobody had any right to evict them until the crops were harvested. Or, if the season wasn’t right for that excuse, Bliss Dingletoon could claim to be imminently expecting, which she usually was, anyhow. One time they’d even painted all the kid’s faces with pokeberry juice so it would appear they had the smallpox and Ace Dingletoon had said to the landlord, “How can you talk about rent at a time like this?”

But if worse came to worst, and the landlord was insistent, and Sheriff Cheatham arrived, the Dingletoons were trained to move out just as efficiently as they had moved in. Legend grew up around their habits of departure, and the loafers at the country stores amused themselves by building upon the legend. When the moving day appeared inevitable, even before Sheriff Cheatham had turned his Ford into the yard, Ace would simply blow a horn and the kids, the dogs, the mule, the cow, would all come a-running. One fellow claimed the Dingletoons kept all of their belongings tied together with a rope so that if the moment of their eviction came, they simply pulled it all together into the wagon. Another said that even the chickens were trained to lie down in a row with their feet sticking up so Gypsy could tie them.

The Dingletoons wouldn’t allow their kids to go to school, in order to minimize public awareness of their existence and illegal tenancy. In their wanderings from place to place, the Dingletoon children had not only been denied any schooling but also had never been allowed to form any friendships with other children. They never left the premises except to go fishing, hunting, or, the way that Gypsy Dingletoon and Ella Jean Dinsmore discovered each other and became friends, bathing. Halfway between the place the Dingletoons were squatting on and the Dinsmore place was a spot on Banty Creek where Ella Jean liked to sneak away for a regular soak, weather permitting, and that’s how she came across Gypsy one evening. I’ll say more about this in a moment, but the point is that I hadn’t yet met any of the Dingletoon kids that summer, although Ella Jean and her brother Willard knew them.

E.H. Ingledew periodically sent Ace a bill for the rent, not much, but more than Ace had ever seen in cash money in his life, and E.H. periodically wrote “Overdue” on it, and indicated by how many months it was overdue, and then how many years it was overdue. Finally the accumulated rent was up in the hundreds, and E.H. decided he’d better make an attempt to collect. Braving the ferocious snarls of the Dingletoon dogs, he hiked into their (or rather his) yard.

“I’m afeared I’m a-gorn to have to ast ye to git gone,” E.H. told Ace.

“Aw shee-ut,” Ace protested. “Iffen I was to git off this place, ye’d never be able to find nobody else to rent it to.”

E.H. thought that over a minute before saying, “Wal, I’d as soon rent it for nothin to nobody as rent it for nothin to somebody.”

“I hate to tell ye this, sir, but I think my old womarn’s adyin.”

E.H., being only a retired dentist and mortician, not a doctor, decided to take a look at her anyway, and although Bliss Dingletoon had jumped into bed for the occasion and was doing her best to look pale and peaked, she didn’t look like a likely candidate for burial. “You folks’ll all live to the crack of doom,” E.H. declared, “but it won’t be on my proppity. Sherf Frank Cheatham will be here bright and early in the mornin to make shore you’uns aint left a trace behind.”

But when Sheriff Cheatham did take the trouble to drive all the way out from Jasper to help E.H. execute the eviction, he discovered that Ace Dingletoon had not performed the customary ritual of blowing his horn to round up the kids and the stock and pulling that legendary rope that would load all his possessions into the wagon. The stock, the kids, the possessions were still there. Bliss was still in her kitchen. But Ace had departed.

In an act of either desperation or courage, depending on whose opinion one heard, Ace had joined the service. As I reported it in a small news item in The Stay Morning Star, “Mr. Ace T. Dingletoon, 34, joined the army this week. This now makes nine Stay More men who are among Our Boys Overseas. Not many of them have left behind a family the size of his, though. We hope they are okay.”

They were okay, for a while. E.H. Ingledew couldn’t very easily evict a woman with seven kids whose husband was in the service. “Hail far, Each,” his brother Bevis said to him, “that wouldn’t be patriotic.” And Bevis’s wife Emelda even insisted on E.H. leaving a sack of flour and a turn of meal where the Dingletoons could find it (to offer such to them would be an insult; charity was totally unacceptable). Joe Don Dingletoon was old enough and strong enough to assume his father’s chores, which had been rather lackadaisical to begin with. Since they had had no income in the first place, nor any money anywhere around the house, Ace’s absence didn’t have any effect whatever on their cash flow situation. Of course they missed him, and the fact that he was illiterate meant that he couldn’t write letters home from the war, but for that matter Bliss couldn’t have read them if he had. Gypsy, now fourteen, had taught herself to read with the help of an old blueback speller that somebody had left behind in one of the houses they’d temporarily occupied, her main motive being to learn how to decipher the walls: the walls of that house, like the walls of all the houses they had lived in, had been papered with newspapers, magazines, and pages from Sears Roebuck catalogs. Such wallpaper served also as a primitive but helpful insulation in cold winter. Gypsy wanted to be able to read the comics, and she graduated from those to the feature stories, and from those to the news, and before long she was reading the lavish descriptions in the Sears catalog pages of all the clothes that she would never be able to have. Joe Don, two years older than Gypsy, could not help observing his sister standing for what seemed like hours facing the walls. She was peculiar sometimes, he thought. One day he was finally moved to ask her, “What ye up to, Sis?” and she answered, “Readin,” and offered to teach him how.

So she introduced him to that forbidden knowledge he’d never had before. She did not tell him that she’d recently started doing something that had also been forbidden: consorting with a neighbor, a nice girl named Ella Jean Dinsmore. It was June, and the creek was warm enough to use in place of the old tin tub for a bath. Girls somehow need to bathe more often than boys, and a galvanized tub doesn’t allow a real soak. With a creek of running water you can do all kinds of things.

Shortly before Gypsy Dingletoon discovered Ella Jean bathing in the creek, I had myself discovered Ella Jean bathing. I’d had a crush on her since the second grade, but she never spoke to me, probably because I’d never been able to get up my nerve and speak to her. One June evening after supper I was hiking along the banks of Banty Creek hunting for things to shoot with my slingshot, just getting target practice by popping dragonflies and wasps. I was real good with that slingshot. Well, there is a spot on that creek, a very secluded spot just down the hill a ways from the Dinsmore shack, where there is this sort of depression in the rock of the creekbed, some call it a “hog scald” because that’s what it was used for: filled with red-hot rocks and steaming, it’d scour the bristles off a slaughtered hog. But in summertime when there wasn’t any butchering, it made a fine bathtub. At least Ella Jean thought so.

Among all the things that were hard to come by during the war—sugar, elastic, gas, tin, chewing gum, coffee, and so on—one of the most precious was soap. Of course the womenfolk still rendered hog lard and ashes into a kind of crude lye soap that was okay, but not really suitable for sudsing and lathering and bathing. Latha Bourne could no longer stock the good store-boughten soaps—Ivory, Life-buoy, Lava, not to mention Cashmere Bouquet—which were scarce as hen’s teeth. And even if she had, the Dinsmores couldn’t have afforded to buy a bar. But Ella Jean, doing some housework that summer for Drussie Ingledew, who still lived in the old house that had once been Stay More’s hotel, found in the drawer of a washstand an overlooked cake of Palmolive. She hid it in her sunbonnet and took it home with her, never telling anybody about it. Twice a month she would permit herself the luxury of going down to that hog-scald depression in the rocks of that secret cove of Banty Creek, stripping naked, getting wet, running that cake of Palmolive over her body, over her swelling young breasts, ever so lightly, just enough of it to swab her skin and to fill the twilight air with the unique scent of that brand of soap, which my nostrils could detect from the distance of some thirty yards away in my hiding-place. What the madeleine was to Proust, that Palmolive was to me. The scent of Palmolive would always say to me: summertime; it would say: gloaming; it would say: creekwater; it would say: clean; it would say: fresh; it would say: Ella Jean.

Gentle Reader, you are saying to yourself, That Donny sure is a little snoop, a regular voyeur! But I wasn’t really trying to spy on people; it just happened in the course of events. For instance, I just stumbled upon Ella Jean, and I was so surprised to come across her that I wouldn’t have known what to say. I certainly didn’t want to say, “Hi there, Ella Jean, how’s the water?” so I had to conceal myself. Before you judge me too quickly, consider how you are concealing yourself: I shall never see you. You have the privilege of watching all of this, including my most private thoughts and deeds, without ever being seen or heard.

I’m not sure Ella Jean would have minded if she’d known I was spying on her. I’d often wondered: those big families living crowded together in those cabins and shacks, did they ever have any privacy? Ella Jean and Gypsy were ripe candidates for friendship because their families were equally impoverished. The Dinsmores may have been even worse off because there were more of them and there hadn’t been any father around since Jake Dinsmore had gone out to California during the Depression to seek his fortune, promising to send for his family after he got rich, but he had never again been heard from, and Selena had been trying to raise all those thirteen kids by herself in a shack of only two rooms. The house I lived in was neither a cabin nor a shack, and I was the only child in it. I could not imagine what it would be like to go to the outhouse with a brother or sister or one of both or six of both, nor could I imagine having to share not only the bathtub but the bathwater with a bunch of siblings. Ella Jean may have felt some need for privacy, now that her breasts were a-budding, and that’s why she preferred the seclusion of that spot on Banty Creek for her baths. I had never seen bare breasts before. Not a girl’s. I knew what they were. Of course I knew what they were for. Not mine. Mine were just a decoration on my chest, like medals, and nobody cared whether they were showing or not. But a girl’s were supposed to be in hiding, as you are hiding. If you were revealed, it would thrill me, as I was thrilled by the revealing of Ella Jean.

Every evening after supper thereafter, I stole away to the same spot, hoping for another glimpse of her, or even for the faintest whiff of that breathtaking Palmolive, but I discovered she didn’t want to use the precious soap more than twice a month. When she would not show up, I would roll up my trousers and wade out into the hog scald to the same spot she had occupied and stir the water with my hands, as if trying to stir up a hint of that scent of Palmolive. Once, doing this, I looked up to see her coming down through the forest path that led to her house. She didn’t see me, and I got out of there and concealed myself in a dense clump of brush where I could—and did—enjoy nearly a whole half hour of watching her take a bath. It was toward the end of this half hour that Gypsy Dingletoon appeared. Ella Jean did not betray any modesty in the presence of the stranger-girl. They exchanged howdies. From my concealment, I could barely hear their voices as they timidly and warily made known to each other their habitations, their full names, their ages, Gypsy two years older than Ella Jean but that difference not enough to keep them from intuiting, as only girls can grasp through mysterious feeling, that they had enough reasons to like each other to the point of trying to become friends.

At length, Ella Jean held up the white bar of Palmolive and said, “Lookee at what I’ve got.” By this point, Gypsy had hiked the hem of her dress and waded out into the water, so that Ella Jean could hold the bar of Palmolive right up to Gypsy’s nose.

Gypsy took a good sniff and said, “My! You must have a lot of money!”

“Aw, I’m pore as Job’s turkey,” Ella Jean said. “I found this some’ers, and sort of stole it. Do you want to try it out? I don’t keer if you was to use it a bit.”

Gypsy needed no urging. She simply pulled her dress up over her head, wadded it into a heap, and gave it a toss that landed it on the bank of the creek. It was her only garment. She could have made use of a brassiere, but she’d probably never seen one. If the sight of Ella Jean’s little welts excited me, I don’t know you well enough yet to tell you what the exposure of Gypsy’s bubbies did to me. Also, she had hips, which Ella Jean didn’t. She carefully accepted the precious bar of soap from Ella Jean, and with her other hand cupped and splashed water over her front and shoulders and face, and then ever so lightly applied the bar of Palmolive, whose fragrance, rising from both their bodies in aromatic concert with the smell of the creekwater and its traces of fish and of the evening air and its traces of all summer’s growing things, transported me out of the dull life in which I was usually imprisoned. I sighed so loudly it was a wonder they didn’t hear me.

From that night onward I had the awfullest time trying to decide whether or not I liked Gypsy even more than Ella Jean. In her way, Gypsy was prettier, more grown-up looking, like a movie star is pretty. Ella Jean remained just a beautiful child. Two more years and Ella Jean would be just as sightly, but meanwhile Gypsy had all the glamour.

Thus, at that meeting Mare called to try to organize a government, when Ella Jean’s brother Willard, who may also have been developing some powerful attraction for Gypsy, suggested that we ought to do something to help the poor Dingletoons, I was the first to take a flying leap onto the bandwagon.

Chapter four

When Willard Dinsmore, who, as I would learn, was even more powerfully smitten with Gypsy than I was (his hormones were four years in advance of mine), made his suggestion about some sort of aid for the unfortunate and now fatherless Dingletoons, the idea inspired little enthusiasm among the rest of the Axis and none at all among the Allies. Some of us, like myself, who were “in comfortable circumstances,” that is, weren’t living hand-to-mouth, admired Willard for his altruism: if any family in Stay More really deserved public assistance, it was the Dinsmores, who, after all, were native Stay More folk, not outlanders like the Dingletoons. But most of us on the “good” side, the Axis, knew very well that if we did anything for the Dingletoons it would have to be done in strictest secrecy and anonymity, not because the Dingletoons were too proud to accept any help but because it was bad manners even to think of offering help in a land where self-sufficiency was the way of life. Those on the “bad” side, the Allies, weren’t capable of charitable works anyhow; the notion of doing something for someone else was totally alien to their belligerent, authoritarian selfishness, and they made it clear that their purpose in life was not to help the Dingletoons or anybody else but to gratify their own desires for victory, mastery, revenge, and evildoing.

“But we ort to leastways do somethin to help ’em help themselves,” Willard argued.

“Old Blue, their mule, died the other night,” Ella Jean informed us of tidings recently learned from her new friend, Gypsy.

“You aim to buy ’em a new mule?” Sog Alan asked, not of her or of Willard, but of all of us Axis.

“Has anybody got a extry mule?” Miss Jerram put in.

None of us had extra mules, and none of us had any way of buying a new mule for the Dingletoons. “We could steal ’em a mule,” Sog suggested. It was the first constructive idea he had come up with, but his motive obviously was to recruit the Dingletoon kids to the Allied cadre.

“Who from?” we asked.

“Ole Dan,” Sog said, calling the strange reclusive man who lived in the yellow house by the only name we knew to call him.

“Ole Dan needs his mule, I reckon,” I observed.

“Not if he was locked away,” Sog said. “He ort to be put in jail.”

“For what?” I said.

“All kinds of things,” Sog said, and began to count them off on his fingers, naming the various wrongdoings that gossip had laid upon Dan in his mysterious past: escaping from prison; embezzling from some employer he’d worked for, maybe even a bank; killing a patient while a doctor; ruining a client while a lawyer; hiding out from the FBI; or abducting as a child the girl presumed to be his daughter. “But the main thing,” Sog said, grasping his big thumb, “is that he’s probably a Nazi spy.” He glanced around at those of us Axis who were doomed to be Nazis and added, “I mean the real Nazis. The ones in Germany. Hitler’s men.”

“Now where would you git a notion like that, Sog Alan?” Miss Jerram wanted to know, but there was a slight tremor in her voice, as if it were a distinct possibility that had never occurred to her before.

“Don’t you think he’s mighty suspicious?” Sog said. “He don’t never visit with nobody or nothin.”

“But why on earth,” Willard asked, “would Hitler want to plant a spy out here in Stay More, Arkansas?” It was just a rhetorical question, but it set us all to thinking. After all, to me and to most of us, Stay More was the center of the world. If I were Hitler I’d want to keep an eye on it.

“If we stole his mule and gave it to the Dingletoons,” Mare pointed out, “he’d just think they stole it from him, and he’d get it back.”

“Forget the mule,” Sog said. “I think if you want to be mare and get anything done for this town before you’re called up, the best thing to do would be let’s all spy on that spy! Let’s keep a good eye on him and if we catch him up to somethin, we could get him put away.”

“He aint no kind of a spy!” I said. “He’s just a ole feller tryin to mind his own business.”

Sog scowled at me as if the idea was already dawning on him to break my arm at some point in the future. Then he looked around at the rest of the small gathering. “Anybody with me?” he asked. “Who wants to do a good turn for this town and help get rid of ole Dan?” All of the Allies automatically held up their hands because Sog was their boss, but even the younger Axis, the littluns like Jim George Dinsmore and Troy Chism, first-graders, thrilled by the excitement of the idea, held up their hands.

Miss Jerram, bless her heart, rose to her feet and took a stand. “Boys and girls,” she said, “I’d advise all of you’uns to just leave that pore ole man alone. It sure seems to me that if you really and truly want to do something as a play-like government, you could do something more for the War Effort.”

“Catchin a Nazi spy would be War Effort,” the Allies contended.

“What more could we do?” the Axis asked. We had already collected all the scrap in town as well as stuff that wasn’t even scrap yet, we had knitted up the wool of all the sheep in Stay More, and we had collected enough grease to drown the Japs and the Germans in it.

“The milkweed is a-going to pod,” Miss Jerram said, smiling. We wondered if her brain was a-going to pod. But then she said, “Haven’t you never tore open a milkweed pod? It’s got all this white fluffy stuff inside, like cotton, that the War Plants are using to fill life preservers with.” The blank looks she was getting from her audience made Miss Jerram explain, “A life preserver is something that a soldier, sailor, or a marine straps around his chest when he’s out on the ocean so that it will hold him up if the ship sinks.” Enough of us showed signs of understanding that she was inspired to continue, “They call ’em Mae West life preservers because wearing ’em…well, I reckon, puttin one on makes ye look kind of busty like her. Anyhow, they’re collecting milkweed pods for the War Effort, if you boys and girls would care to go out and get some.”

In the weeks ahead, as all of the milkweed of Stay More (Asclepias syriaca, or silkweed, cousin to but not to be confused with Asclepias tuberosa, butterfly weed) reached maturity, we Axis got organized to hunt for it, each of us equipped with a tow sack (burlap bag) into which we stuffed our gatherings of pods, plucked all along the creek banks and the roadsides. This activity was some small consolation to Mare Coe, who could not hide his disappointment that the effort to organize a Stay More government had not only failed but been dismissed by Miss Jerram as “play-like.” In the next issue of The Stay Morning Star I dutifully reported, under the headline GOVERNMENT IDEA NOT SUCCESSFUL, that Mare’s efforts to organize a town government had met with “mostly indifference,” and that the only constructive thing to come out of the meeting was that we, at least the Axis faction, were now engaged in collecting milkweed pods for the War Effort and “if any of you readers has lots of milkweed on your property that we don’t know about, please let us know.”

Mare wasn’t very friendly to me after that, and I wondered if he held it against me for simply telling the truth, that the government meeting had not succeeded. But I also told the truth about the Allies, that instead of helping us collect milkweed pods they were “starting a secret watch to gather information about a suspected undercover agent.”

Somebody threw a rock through the window of the side room at Latha’s store where I had my newspaper office. Tied to the rock was a message: “Name eny names and your dead.” I wondered if Ernie Pyle ever had rocks thrown at him.

Willard Dinsmore suggested that we Axis ought to invite the Dingletoons to join us. The wasteland of the Dingletoon property—or rather the squatting they farmed—was overrun with milkweed, and they’d be glad to help us collect the pods. The Axis took a vote and decided to permit the Dingletoons, all four of the older kids, to become Axis and to allow them to decide for themselves whether they wanted to be Nazis or Japs. Ella Jean Dinsmore reported that her friend Gypsy had said there was a strong possibility, since Ace Dingletoon was in the service and couldn’t stop them from doing it, that the Dingletoon kids might enroll in school when it started. Not that they wanted to, having never been to school before. Willard thought that the best thing we could do as a public service for the Dingletoons, if we couldn’t find another mule for them, was to get them to go to school.

Ella Jean and Gypsy had, since that meeting at the creek when Ella Jean had shared the Palmolive, become the very best of friends, practically inseparable. They were seen together in the village, walking with their arms around each other. They spent the night at each other’s house, sharing their play-pretties, such as they were, and engaging in all manner of girl-talk, such as it was. Of course I did not eavesdrop on them, as I had snooped upon their bathing at the creek, but I could imagine, and my imagination, as you have already gathered, Gentle Reader, was beyond imagining. I could very easily hear the girl-talk of Ella Jean and Gypsy as they discussed their worries and dreams and dislikes, and their favorite subject, boys. I knew, from what Latha told me, that girls did superstitious things designed to identify their future husbands. They would put live snails in a Mason jar overnight, believing the snail would leave in a trail of its slime the initials of the man they’d marry. Or they would eat an over-salted hard-boiled egg before bedtime and have a dream of their future husband bringing them a gourd of water to wash it down with. Or they’d have a “dumb supper,” with a lot of ritual and mumbo-jumbo and spooky goings-on, during which the phantom husband appeared to take his place at the table beside the girl he’d wed.

But I had to imagine something more interesting that Gypsy and Ella Jean did as their superstitious divination for determining who their future husbands would be. I had to hope it would be something that would tell Ella Jean she would marry me some day, and I had to imagine it was an old-time superstition Ella Jean had learned from her grandmother: a girl who wishes to glimpse a sign of her future husband has to wait for a night when it’s the dark of the moon, and then urinate on her nightdress and hang it before the fireplace and go to bed all naked. The next morning, when the gown has dried, it will carry the image of the groom-to-be! Better yet, if they do it just right, the essence—not exactly a ghost and not exactly the real substance—of the future husband will visit the girl while she’s naked in bed and give her a foretaste of what their sleepings-together are going to be like, after which he always leaves something of his behind, such as a handkerchief or a gallus, as proof that he was actually there! Latha told me all about this.

Ella Jean was sleeping over at Gypsy’s house the next dark of the moon when they tried out this notion, not because Gypsy’s house had the requisite fireplace—the weather was much too warm for a fire anyhow—but because Gypsy’s house, unlike the two-room Dinsmore hovel, possessed an extra room where the girls could set up two pallets on the floor on which to sleep and on which to be visited by the phantoms or essences of their future husbands, if it came to that. According to the tradition, the girl is supposed to sleep alone in her own room, but that was simply a luxury that neither Gypsy nor Ella Jean, in their crowded households, could enjoy.

The two girls waited until everybody else had gone to sleep, and then they carried a couple of kitchen chairs into their room. They took off their nightgowns and spread them out on the floor, and squatted over them. Gypsy had no trouble peeing all over her nightdress, but Ella Jean discovered she had a bashful bladder and couldn’t do it, at least not while Gypsy was there beside her. So Gypsy had to close her eyes and turn her back, and even then Ella Jean didn’t manage much of a piddle, and lost her balance while squatting, and did a clumsy job of it. The girls draped their wet gowns over the backs of the chairs, and went to bed and, before falling asleep, talked awhile about who they’d really like to see show up during the night or in a two-dimensional image on their nightdresses in the morning. They agreed that the first thing they’d do in the morning, even before looking to see whose imprint was on their nightdresses, was to discuss who, if anybody, had appeared to them in their sleep, so they could match that person’s image with whatever image appeared on their nightgowns. Then they fell asleep. And dreamt. And were possibly visited by incubi or phantasma who cohabited with them.

“Well?” Gypsy said to Ella Jean, shaking her awake the next morning. “Did ye see ary a soul?”

Ella Jean was groggy from sleep and from whatever activities had drained her in her dreams, but she managed to blush and to say, “I aint so sure. What about you?”

“I hate to tell ye,” Gypsy said. “It was three of ’em, but I don’t rightly know which one of the three actually done it to me.”

“Three of ’em?!” Ella Jean said. “Couldn’t ye tell ’em apart?”

“Naw” Gypsy whined. “What I’m tryin to tell ye, they was all alike. Don’t ye know anybody hereabouts who’s three all one and the same?”

“Why, Gypsy!” Ella Jean exclaimed. “You don’t mean them Coe boys, do ye?”

Gypsy nodded, abashed, as if she’d done something very wrong. The two girls got up from their pallets and went to inspect their nightdresses, which had not completely dried, but were dry enough to bear the faint stains of some kind of design. I wanted to imagine that Ella Jean’s was a reasonably clear image of my own face, but it was an indistinct figure that might have been the head and neck of a gander or drake but on closer inspection revealed itself to be simply a large question mark.

But Gypsy’s was clearly a face, with freckles, and pudgy. “Sure looks like Burl Coe to me,” Ella Jean observed.

“How kin ye tell him apart from th’other two?” Gypsy wanted to know.

“Well, I don’t know, I guess. Maybe it’s Earl.”

“Or Jerl,” Gypsy suggested. She pondered, and then offered, “Maybe all three of ’em are gonna marry me, like your sisters done to Billy Bob.”

Gypsy was referring to two of Ella Jean’s many sisters, Jelena and Doris, who were twins (their names were Jelena Cloris and Helena Doris, but this confused their mother when she was yelling at them), and who had both fallen in love with the youngest of the eligible Ingledew brothers, William Robert, who was living with both of them in a modest shack he’d built on the side of Ingledew Mountain, unbothered by those who frowned upon the sinfulness of this bigamy. The twins had become identically pregnant, and I had recently reported in the Star that people were making bets on which of the two sisters would have her baby first.

Gypsy had no intention of marrying all three of the Coes. Any one of them would be one too many, as far as she was concerned. She was so upset by the outcome of her nightdress-peeing experiment that she neglected to pursue the matter of just who Ella Jean might have dreamed about or whose image lurked behind that question mark on her gown. Gypsy did not even report to her best friend a crucial fact: whichever one of the triplets had slept with her in her dream had, in the process of retrieving his britches afterward, let fall his pocketknife, which she had discovered in the bedclothes before she woke up Ella Jean.

Soon after that, unable to banish the memory of how exciting the dream had been (the Coe boy, whichever one he was, had been exactly the kind of lover who had anonymously made love to her many times before in dreams), Gypsy got up her nerve and went to the Coes’ house and boldly asked the mother, Dulcie Coe, “Whar’s yore boys?” Dulcie informed her that Burl was off in Texas somewhere being taught by the Army how to march and salute and all, that Earl was down to the shop a-helping his daddy, and Jerl—well, Jerl was real scarce these days, hardly even showing up for dinner or supper. Dulcie had no idea where he was. Dulcie winked and giggled and speculated that he might’ve found himself a girlfriend somewhere, although that wasn’t likely. More than likely he’d taken to brooding on account of not being able to start a government for Stay More so’s he could be mayor of it.

So Gypsy went down to the Coe blacksmith shop, where Lawlor Coe still managed to find something to keep him busy. Because the War Effort had removed not only all the scrap iron but also all of the in-use iron, there were horses wandering around without horseshoes. Sometimes Lawlor just went to his shop to pound his anvil for the music it made. And Earl, soon to go into the service himself, kept him company there, which is where Gypsy found him and showed him the pocketknife and stared him straight in the eye as if she could tell whether he was lying or not if he claimed never to have touched her before, and she demanded, “Earl Coe, is this here yore knife?”

He turned it over in his hand, opened a blade or two, peered close at the Barlow label on it. “Nope,” he said. “This here used to belong to ole Mare. Where’d ye git it?”

It was perhaps the first time she’d ever heard that nickname by which nearly all Stay Morons except Dulcie Coe now called him. “Mare?” she said.

“Yeah, that’s what we’ve took to a-callin him, on account of he thinks he’s the mayor of this town.” Earl could not suppress a guffaw.

“Him who?” she said.

“Jerl. But let me tell ye, this here Barlow of his’n was donated quite some time back to the War Effort. For the scrap drive, ye know.” Every man and boy of Stay More had reluctantly but dutifully contributed his personal pocketknife to that zealous scrap drive, which of course made impossible the traditional pastimes of whittling and mumble-de-peg, not to mention frog-sticking, apple-peeling, and toenail-cleaning. “Where’d ye git it?” Earl said again, more sternly, as if she’d stolen it from the War Effort.

“I found it in my bed,” she declared. “I don’t reckon you could tell me whar Jerl is off to?”

“For all I know, he’s done already gone to Californy.” As I had reported in that week’s issue of the Star, Mare had finally received his notice; he was to report to the marine office in Fort Smith, and would be sent to Camp Pendleton in California for his training. But he had not left yet.

Gypsy wandered around the village, asking anybody she met if they had seen Jerl, or Mare. She didn’t like the nickname because it suggested a female horse, and while her phantom lover may have been pudgy, freckled, and homely, there was nothing unmanly about him. He was a real man. The more she thought about him, defending him from his nickname in her mind, the more she liked him. Besides, what was wrong with wanting to be a mayor? She wasn’t quite sure just what a mayor was. None of the many, many towns or townships she had lived in during the Dingletoons’ peregrinations from one squatting to another had anything like a mayor, nor even a head man. Who, after all, was the head man of Stay More? Doc Swain? Doc was the Justice of the Peace, a seldom needed position, and he was everybody’s friend and healer, but he wasn’t the boss. Did Jerl Coe really want to become the boss of the town?

If so, she decided, it might be useful to get to know him better. But hadn’t she read something in that little paper that Dawny put out to the effect that Jerl had been drafted and would be leaving soon? And hadn’t Earl said something about California? She’d better find Jerl pretty quick.

She did not wash that nightdress she’d peed on, but carried it to bed each night without putting it on, preferring to sleep with the image of Mare beneath her or above her or beside her, as her position in bed may have dictated. I could easily see these positions in my mind’s eye.

Chapter five

When fourteen-year-old Gypsy Dingletoon and eighteen-year-old Mare Coe actually and spontaneously became lovers, I did not need to use my mind’s eye, because I was there. Nor were they the first couple I’d ever watched. They were, however—and this is what excites me most about it—practically strangers. They may have seen each other in the village, but as far as I know they’d never spoken. Apart from watching some of the baseball games in which Mare had pitched the Axis to victory over the Allies, she had scarcely noticed Mare before. Or, rather, since all three brothers were boring and practically invisible, she hadn’t seen them. Actually—as she had confided to her best friend Ella Jean when they were making girl-talk about boys—if she had her choice she would have chosen as a romantic interest Larry Duckworth, not exactly a handsome prince but certainly much better looking than Mare. Larry was the youngest son of Oren Duckworth, owner of the canning factory, which had been Stay More’s only industry before the war, shut down now on account of the tin shortage. But Ella Jean had been constrained to inform Gypsy that Larry, despite being such a dandy-looking feller, was one of the leaders of the Allies, the despised mob of rowdies who thought that Stay More belonged to them.

Although Gypsy and Mare were virtually strangers, I knew from careful observation that throughout the animal and vegetable kingdoms, male and female conjoin on the spur of the moment without prior intimacy or knowledge of each other. Any diligent student of nature, of the animals as well as the plants inferior to us, knows that mating happens everywhere from some built-in urge, without preamble or to-do, and certainly without the fuss and bother, the gifts and cajolery, that seem required to promote man’s fumbling efforts to find release of his natural inclination and hunger. While Mare and Gypsy were only the second couple I’d ever witnessed coupling, I had seen it happen more times than I could count between bull and cow, horse and mare, dog and bitch, rooster and hen, not to mention stamen and pistil everywhere.

You will prepare yourself to believe that I wasn’t deliberately out to watch any of that, that it all came to me as a passive, accidental spectator, just as I was not deliberately peeping on Mare and Gypsy, certainly not the way that the Allies had begun to spy on ole Dan and his daughter.

It just happened. The Dingletoons joined the Axis and began to help with the milkweed pod campaign. One evening after supper Gypsy took her burlap tow sacks and went out along the upper reaches of Banty Creek to gather milkweed pods. Ella Jean had to help her mother, so Gypsy was alone, except for me. Believe me, I wasn’t following her, and she didn’t know I was there. I was just out gathering milkweed pods myself, which was a patriotic thing to do, and besides I kept thinking of Mae West, since Miss Jerram had mentioned her. I wasn’t trying to keep myself hidden from Gypsy or anything, she simply didn’t see me. Believe me. She’d already filled a couple of the sacks, her nimble fingers real good at plucking the pods, and I’d scarcely filled one of my sacks. Before long, she just happened upon Mare Coe, who was sitting on a tree stump right alongside a deep hole of water, one of Banty Creek’s best fishing spots. He wasn’t fishing, though, nor had he heen collecting milkweed pods. He was just sitting there, lost in thought. From a distance I couldn’t hear what she said to him, so I had to try to creep up closer.

When I found a good spot where I could hide and listen, I could see that she was holding out that pocketknife to him, and I wondered if she had been carrying it around with her all the time just in case she came across him. Girls don’t have pockets. Like all the girls of the time, she was wearing simply a dress, a plain, faded gingham dress, with a hem just above her knees.

She was saying, “I found it in my bed when Ella Jean and me was havin a little magic test the other night…” Although these were the first words she’d ever spoken to him, she had seen him so often in her dreams and on that nightgown that he must have seemed to be an old friend of hers, or, better yet, a long-standing lover.

“Why this here’s Ole Stickum!” he exclaimed, turning the knife over in his hands. All of us had given affectionate names to our pocketknives, which made it even harder to sacrifice them to the War Effort. I sorely missed Ole Dirk. “Where’d ye say ye found it?”

“In my bed,” she said. “You must’ve dropped it that time you came and slept with me.”

He stared at her as if she were demented. I knew his mind well enough to know that he was wondering, since he didn’t know any of the Dingletoons, if the whole family might be retarded. “Well, gosh,” he said. “That wasn’t me who done that.” Then he added, “I mean, I couldn’t’ve dropped a knife I never had no more, but besides that, I couldn’t’ve dropped it even if I did have it in a bed I wasn’t never in, to start with! So it must’ve been somebody else, but I don’t know how he got ahold of my knife.”

“Are you certain, Gerald Coe?” she said, staring him in the eye. And although his eyes were kind and gentle, they were not totally innocent. The truth of the matter was that Mare had actually had a dream or two, or maybe half a dozen, involving an activity with pretty Gypsy Dingletoon that he had never experienced in waking life.

“Not that I rightly know of,” he hedged. The times he’d lain with her in his sleep had never been on an actual pallet in the actual spare room at the actual Dingletoon house.

She put her hands on her hips and drew back her shoulders. “There’s only one way to find out,” she declared boldly. “I reckon you better jist love me, Gerald Coe, and I can see if you do it jist like ye done it in my dreams.” And she reached out and put her hands on his shoulders.

“Right here?” he needed to clarify a point. There was no misunderstanding just what she meant: “love” in these here parts, alas, invariably was a transitive verb referring to intercourse, not a noun or verb of grand passion.

“Right here and now,” she said.

The very day after Gypsy and Mare had consecrated the sandy banks of Banty Creek, she went to Ella Jean to report that indeed he had done it the exact same way that her dream lover had done it. Ella Jean listened eagerly to her best friend’s account of the whole episode. She had to know all the details. When they did it, did they do it standing up with him behind her in order to keep from having a baby? No? Well, were they lying on the actual sand at the water’s edge? Or was it gravel? Did it hurt any? What did they talk about, if anything, during the act? Did he say sweet things to her? How long did the whole thing take? Did she have shivers and jerks and goose bumps? Afterwards, what did she do to keep from getting pregnant? Jump up and down repeatedly? Drink some ergot? Or take a douche with sody pop?

For three days running, Ella Jean kept thinking up new questions to ask Gypsy. When Gypsy had answered all the questions about the act itself, she began to narrate the hours afterwards, just hours, long after she’d finished jumping up and down to prevent pregnancy, when they had talked and talked way into the night, so that they had to find their way home by the light of the moon. By then they had told each other everything about themselves. He had talked at length about his wish to one day become mayor of the town, and his great sadness that the meeting to start a town government had not accomplished anything. She had talked about her wish that she might never again have to keep moving from place to place year after year but could settle down for good in a nice little town like Stay More. When they finally parted, it was almost a spontaneous agreement of theirs—at least neither of them could remember who proposed the idea first—that they ought to join forces, unite against time and the world and fate, and enjoy forevermore that closeness and pleasure they’d just had on that creek bank.

“But I have to tell ye, Gypsy hon,” Mare said to her, “I’m due to light out for Californy next Monday to start boot trainin for the marines.” He said that it would make him a little money, which he never had before, and when the war was over and they had licked the enemy and he could come home, he’d have a nest egg to get him started as the town’s mayor…and as her husband, if she’d have him. Oh, she’d have him, all right, she said.

“No tellin, though,” he observed, “how long it might take me to git back home.”

Gypsy’s nocturnal dreams were not all erotic; like all the children of Stay More whose fathers had gone Overseas, she had recurrent nightmares involving monstrous mayhem and the weapons in action, things she had never actually seen: howitzers, cannons, missile launchers, airplanes dropping bombs and cannonballs and elephants, catapults and crossbows and constant explosions mutilating the men who were falling down everywhere with their heads missing or huge holes in their chests. Now she had a synoptic flash of all that destruction, and she could not help but ask, in alarm, “But Gerald my darlin, what if ye don’t come back?”

“That,” he declared, “is percisely how come I caint ast ye to marry me afore I go, like all them other fellers is doing.” Mare referred to the fact that everywhere across this great land of ours the brave boys of our armed forces were wedding their sweethearts before they went into combat, just to be sure the girls would be waiting if they came home from the war. Hearts were breaking everywhere, and Mare Coe had the gumption to realize that his failure to come home would break enough of her heart without breaking the whole thing if he left her a widow.

As Gypsy narrated it to her, Ella Jean understood this part easily. A woman without a man is not a woman. She had been fatherless from her earliest memory, at the age of three, when Jake Dinsmore had just briefly paused at her bed to kiss her good-bye before running away to California, his last words to her “Gimme a li’l kiss, sugar.” She was just barely old enough to sense, if not to understand, that “Pa” means the pucker of the kiss to father. Just as everywhere “Ma” (or mama or mater or Mutter or mère or madre or mother) is the purse of the mouth to suck the breast, everywhere “Pa” (or papa or pater or pai or père or padre) is the peck of the puss to put on Paw’s profile. For nine years since, Ella Jean had been looking for a man to kiss. Her brothers, though there were many of them, would not suffice. Her doll—well, each of her four older sisters had owned it and used it before it came down to her, and although she renamed it Johnny and made pants for it, it no longer had a head, and she could only imagine Johnny’s face and Johnny’s mouth, which, however, she often imaginatively kissed. There had been a lot of men in Stay More, but now, with the war, one by one they had all been taken away. Ella Jean could not share the nightmares of monstrous destruction that all of the kids whose fathers were Overseas were having, because she had lost her father not to the service but to California. But she had an exceptional longing for males (which led me to have hope for myself), and when one of them came of age, like Mare Coe, and kissed not her but her best friend, and not only kissed her but also….

It was almost as if Mare belonged to Ella Jean too. Thus Ella Jean had to have Gypsy tell her everything that he had said and did on that creek bank that night.

But there was one thing Gypsy could not tell Ella Jean because Mare had made her promise to tell no one. Even though Ella Jean was not only Gypsy’s best friend but the only good friend she’d ever had, and even though you can prove your friendship to somebody by keeping nothing secret from them, Gypsy knew that her beloved had told her how awful it would be if anybody found out what he was telling her.

He had told her this, it seems, as a way of consoling her, or reassuring her that he would come home. He confessed to her that he harbored no animosity toward the enemy. He didn’t have a bellicose bone in his body. He explained to her the history and existence in Stay More of the Allies and the Axis, and how the latter were divided into Nazis and Japs, all for the sake of contests, baseball, war games, the play by which we find ourselves in the process of finding each other.

And then he said to her, “I been a Jap for years.” And waited to see if she would frown or scowl or pout or maybe even run away.

But she just smiled and said, “Then I’m one too, I reckon. Didn’t ye know us Dingletoons has joined the Axis? We aint decided whether to be Nazis or Japs, though. My brother Joe Don wants to be a Nazi. But if you’re a Jap, then I’m a Jap.”

“What I mean, though,” he said, “is I aint a bit sure I could kill a real Jap if they tole me to. Don’t you never tell a soul I said this, but I reckon Japs has got as much a right to this earth as anybody else. They may be smelly and slant-eyed and mean and yellow and caint talk plain, but that aint no reason to hate ’em. I used to have me a ole dog who was smelly and slant-eyed and mean and yellow and couldn’t talk atall, but me and him was the best of friends, I’m tellin ye, I never liked ary creature more than him…until I met you.”

“You’re a good man, Gerald Coe,” she said. “Maybe if you don’t kill any Japs, they won’t kill you either. And then you can come home to me.” She kissed him once more.

Chapter six

When Mare Coe left Stay More for Camp Pendleton to be inducted into the marines, the Axis were without a leader and in danger of ultimate defeat by the Allies. Joe Don Dingletoon, Gypsy’s Nazi brother, was a pretty fair pitcher but he couldn’t shut out the Allies, let alone pitch a no-hitter the way Mare could do. And he wasn’t very good at all in war games, in defending the village against the sneaky attacks by the Allies. Gypsy herself learned to play third base and would’ve been a great fielder except that occasionally she’d start crying and a ball would escape between her feet. Maybe I was the only one who observed that she’d start crying before she committed the error; everybody else supposed she was crying because of the error.

Ella Jean knew why Gypsy was crying, and I did, of course, but nobody else knew. The secret of her romance with Mare remained locked in her heart and his (Ella Jean and I had keys to the locks). Nobody else really cared why she was crying, except when she’d make a fielding error that would cost us a run or two.

Ella Jean’s big brother Willard was the natural candidate to take over as commander of the Axis, at least in terms of military strategy, if not baseball, where he remained our best slugger. But he was a reluctant leader. Not only did he lack the charisma that leaders must have (albeit Mare himself had none of it) but also he was not able to convince himself, let alone anyone else, that it was his destiny to replace Mare as chief of the Axis. In all his fifteen years, Willard had not yet encountered a sure manifestation of whatever was supposed to be his portion of fate, although for at least a dozen of those years he had known that he was foredestined to certain completions or closures that would represent his purpose in life. He knew for example that in three or four more years, somewhere around 1947 or 1948, he would be drafted into the armed forces to join Our Boys Overseas and help bring a conclusion to this bothersome war. But was that his destiny?

Willard had not shared Mare’s notion that Stay More needed a civic government, although Mare had offered to appoint Willard as vice mayor. Willard believed that government was a form of meddling. Government was the imposition of unnatural controls over things that ought to be left to their own devices. If you just leave everybody alone, they’ll somehow manage. No point in trying to manage them for them. If they wanted any help, they’d ask for it. Let well enough alone. Live and let live. “I reckon I don’t keer whether school keeps or not,” he told me when I interviewed him for a Star story about Mare’s replacement as chief of the Axis, and I quoted that in my story, but he wasn’t referring to school so much as to life itself.

The way to Willard’s mind was in a straight path through his stomach. If there was one thing that preoccupied Willard more than his destiny, it was his appetite. When he was three years old, Willard got into serious trouble stealing cornbread from the dogs. He had been doing it for some time before he was caught. Selena Dinsmore always made plenty of cornbread, cooking it in her one big black iron skillet at every noon dinner, where her man Jake and her ten kids enjoyed sopping their gravy with it and pouring honey or sorghum molasses over it for dessert. Often that was the only lunch they had. Corn at least was plentiful, if nothing else was, and there was always enough cornmeal left over after Jake took the most of it to his still to be converted into whiskey. Selena always made enough cornbread to feed not only the twelve people in the family but also the baby chicks, the pigs, and the dogs, who gobbled it with gusto.

Willard begrudged the dogs their share. After all, he said to himself at the age of three, observing the speed and ferocity of the dogs, a dog is capable of foraging for wild game or even tame sheep, but a three-year-old kid can’t forage for anything except poke salat. It wasn’t fair that the dogs got all that good cornbread. So Willard, whose chore was to throw the cornbread to the dogs and be rewarded by the entertainment of watching them leap in the air for it and swallow it in one gobble before landing, began covertly eating one piece for each piece he threw to the dogs. This almost cured the hunger that had ravaged his body since the day he was weaned.

But Selena, whose absentmindedness was the only reason she’d been so late in weaning him, began to wonder why the dogs continued to fidget and whine around the back stoop after they supposedly had been fed. “Willard, did ye feed them dawgs?” she would ask him, and “Yes’m” he would reply, and this went on for a long time before she decided to check up on him and see if he was really feeding them, and thus she discovered that he was bolting a chaunk of bread for every chaunk he tossed to the dogs. She not only took a switch to his little hide, but made him sleep with the dogs (the boys’ bed was becoming too crowded anyway, with Hubert, Tommy, and Vann getting bigger). The dogs were smart enough to know that Willard had been pilfering their cornbread ration, but, being dogs, they could just silently begrudge his sleeping with them. Willard, hearing the growls during the night, thought the dogs were complaining about his theft, and he was slow in realizing the growls came from his own stomach.

The chore of feeding the dogs was taken from him and given to one of his sisters, and Willard was appointed to the job of hoeing the corn and potatoes, although he was scarcely big enough to hold a hoe: the hoe-handle was simply too long for him. Jake Dinsmore suspected unknown pests were grubbing some of the potatoes and getting into the corn and gnawing bites out of the ears, until he caught Willard eating a raw potato. Willard was relieved of this duty and exempted from any chores involving foodstuffs. They made the mistake of not thinking of milk as a foodstuff, and allowed Willard to start milking Rosemary, the cow. Willard hid a gourd dipper in a hollow tree near the milking spot, and thus managed to assuage his hunger and his thirst. Rosemary was a free-ranging cow, not limited to the pasture but allowed to roam the woods, and on her wanderings she discovered Jake’s still and helped herself to the still-beer until she could hardly stagger home. Nor could she stand still while Willard milked her, so that he had the awfullest time trying to fill the pail, and Selena Dinsmore suspicioned that he had been drinking from it, her notion confirmed when he began tottering, reeling, and slurring his words. He was never allowed to go near Rosemary again.

That early experience with an altered state of consciousness may have been part of the reason that Willard began to think too deeply and freshly about the meaning of life, and to reach the conclusion that each of us has a position in the scheme of things, and each of us has a destiny. He never came to doubt free will, because he was never deprived entirely of the opportunity to exercise his, but he began to believe that he was foredestined for something, he knew not what, but something, perhaps something important or at least worthwhile enough to make life worth enduring.

Willard did not fully grasp that life is hard. But he knew it had to be taken, withstood, and survived. Born with the birth of the national Depression, he never had a chance to discover that there had been better times. He took it for granted that everybody’s breakfast consisted of soakies: crumbs of biscuit crusts sopped in coffee and milk. And that a great feast was when you could get your beans flavored by a piece of sowbelly. It was not the quality of the fare that was lacking, just the quantity of it. Willard could never get enough to eat. He was always hungry. His many brothers and sisters never seemed to suffer the way he did. Other kids at school didn’t suffer the way he did. I certainly didn’t, because I could go for days without a hunger pang. School dinners seemed sufficient for all but Willard. His older sisters Doris and Jelena, the twins, had the responsibility of packing and toting the school dinner, a galvanized tin pail holding sufficient cornbread and roasting ears and sometimes possum or rabbit meat or at least hard-boiled eggs, and Willard got the same share as his other brothers and sisters, but it was never enough, and that was why, once, in the fourth grade when he couldn’t stand it, he noticed that Miss Jerram’s dinner pail had in it two sandwiches, one of them made with real bacon, so…. But once again he was found out in his attempts to still his hunger, and when Miss Jerram asked him why he was eating her sandwich, he could only reply, “I figgered ye didn’t have need of the both of ’em.” She said he ought to have asked her first. He replied, “You’re kinder hard to ask.” She made him write on the board a hundred times, “I will always ask before eating somebody’s dinner.”

He had never eaten anybody’s dinner since then. Nor their breakfast or supper. But he had gone to great lengths to fend for himself. He ate anything he could find that didn’t exactly belong to somebody else. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he had learned how to cook, but like everybody else in the Ozarks, he felt that cooking was something that women and girls did. Men and boys didn’t cook. So Willard had to search and forage, and to eat his scroungings raw. But after all, most fruit and many vegetables are meant to be eaten raw anyway.

The remarkable thing about Willard Dinsmore, it almost goes without saying, is that somehow he managed, despite stuffing himself at every opportunity, to remain so skinny. Older people made jokes about it that filtered down to us, and the Allies used the jokes as taunts: not only the usual similes such as calling him skinny as a rail or a snake or a skeleton, but more extravagant likenings to the leg of a milking stool or the shadow of a hair and, now that the scarcity of elastic in the war required any of us who wore underclothes to use garments with drawstrings that were usually tied in a bow, “Willard has to double-knot his underpants to keep ’em from slippin off.”

Maybe it was sheer metabolism that kept him thin. He worked hard, he played hard, he fought hard in the battles and games against the Allies, and he thought hard. I never saw Willard with an empty mind. He was always thinking about something. If I had known him better, I would have yielded to my constant impulse to ask him, “What are you thinking about?” But the only one who knew him well enough to ask such a personal question was Mare.

Although Willard was Mare’s lieutenant in all the activities of the Axis, and the two spent many of their idle hours together (to the extent that Willard was ever idle: even when he and Mare went fishing, rather than recline on the creek bank with his hat pulled down over his face waiting for a bob of the cork that never came, he was constantly in motion, whipping his cane pole as if it were a fancy rod), Mare never confessed to Willard, as Gypsy confessed to Ella Jean, that he and Gypsy had become lovers and tacitly betrothed. Thus, when Mare was called up into the service and made into a marine (I liked that alliteration and even used it in the Star: “Mare the Marine”), Willard went on dreaming about Gypsy without any notion that such dreams were betrayals of his best friend. Not just involuntary night dreams but daydreams too. You could glance at Willard whenever Gypsy was around, on the ball field or in the trenches of warfare, and you could tell just by imagining what he was thinking that he was deeply taken with her.

Just in time for the cane harvest, when all of Stay More’s sugar cane would be collected and ground into sorghum molasses (we’d been doing this for years before the sugar shortage of the war), Willard got Gypsy a mule…or rather, he procured one for the Dingletoons to use. Nobody—except me, of course—knew exactly how he did it. He didn’t steal it, I can tell you, and of course he couldn’t have afforded to have bought it. He didn’t exactly borrow it, either. One morning the Dingletoons woke up and found a mule tethered to a tree beside the shed that passed for their barn. Bliss Dingletoon insisted that Joe Don and Gypsy canvas the town to ask if anybody was missing a mule. Nobody was. Somebody suggested to Joe Don that the Allies had proposed stealing ole Dan’s mule to give to the Dingletoons, and Joe Don, not knowing any better, actually went to ole Dan’s yellow house and asked the hermit if he was missing a mule. All of us were awestruck with admiration for Joe Don that he had bravely done that, and even after we’d tried to explain to Joe Don that ole Dan never had nothing to do with nobody, and that the Allies were investigating the possibility that he was a German spy, Joe Don was not fazed or even impressed. “He didn’t try to bite my head off,” Joe Don declared. “He gave me a real cigarette—well, he’d rolled it hisself but it was real tobacco and real cigarette papers. We had us a good little talk.”

Our mouths collectively gaped open and we insisted that Joe Don tell us everything that ole Dan had said.

Dan’s yellow house was up above the road that goes to Butterchurn Holler, the same road the Dingletoons’ place was on. So they were neighbors, almost, out there in the wildest part of town—well, not jungle-wild, but lush with growth, big trees with vines hanging from them and dense thickets of brush and all manner of wildflower and weed and bush: shady places further shadowed by the mountains. It wasn’t exactly spooky up in there, but whenever I was out on my rounds, delivering the Star or collecting news, it always gave me the fantods to hike along the Butterchurn Holler road.

“Well sir now,” Joe Don related, relishing the expectant reverence in our attitude toward him, “he jist ast me was I fixin to go to school now that time a books was nigh. And I ’lowed as how I’d never been to school afore but was hankerin to.” Without going into a detailed family history, Joe Don had explained to ole Dan that the Dingletoons had never “held still long enough” for any of them to go to school, but now that they seemed to be pretty well settled in Stay More, they were giving serious thought to it, even though Joe Don was unsettled by the idea, and worried about the competition.

“He tole me that when he’d been my age, he’d been a schoolmaster hisself, off up in a place called Vermont, and he tole me the story of that.” So already Joe Don was raking up information about the strange old man that we didn’t know. He hadn’t been a bank embezzler or a doctor or an escaped convict but just a schoolteacher! But starting at the age of sixteen? “Seventeen,” Joe Don said. “And he hadn’t never even finished school hisself. But it seems like this place where he was, Five Corners, was kind of hard up for schoolteachers. And in that day and age, he didn’t need a license or nothin to teach.”

Anyhow, Joe Don said, the point of all this was to reassure Joe Don that he wouldn’t have any trouble with school, as long as he could do what ole Dan had done: always stay a lesson ahead of everybody else. Joe Don grew musing and repeated this as if he’d have his mother make him a needlepoint of it to hang up as a personal motto: Stay a lesson ahead of everybody else.

We were eager to know if Joe Don had caught a glimpse of the hermit’s legendary daughter.

Joe Don’s eyes bulged. “Boy howdy, aint she a looker? I mean, did ye ever see such a scrumdoodle?”

We were obliged to confess that none of us had ever got a close look at her.

“Didn’t she never go to the school or nowheres?” Joe Don wanted to know. We shook our heads solemnly. “Well, heck, maybe there wasn’t no need? Him bein a schoolteacher hisself?” He thought for a long moment, and added, “Or maybe she was just too shy and afraid of folks?” Joe Don told us her name was Annie but said that Annie hadn’t been able to say a word to Joe Don.

When school resumed, the Dingletoon kids were there, all four of them. Joe Don was good enough at reading, and at sums, which he’d mastered on his own, to be placed into the seventh grade despite never having been to school before. Miss Jerram didn’t want to make such a big boy sit at desks with little kids. As long as Joe Don followed that new motto, and stayed a lesson ahead of everybody else, he deserved to sit with Willard at the seventh grade desk on the Axis side. And Miss Jerram figured that since his sister Gypsy was two years behind him in age, she should be two years behind in school, so she was placed in the fifth grade, my grade, but to my great disappointment she wasn’t assigned to my desk but to that of Sammy Coe, my only coeval and rival.

The fall term passed quickly. I continued to publish The Stay Morning Star without fail every week, with news taken from the newsreels at the Buffalo and from whatever was worth reporting around Stay More. Paris was liberated, and Miss Jerram explained to us that it wasn’t Paris, Arkansas, but a big city Overseas, the capital of France. The Allies thought they had liberated downtown Stay More but they were mistaken; with the help of potato grenades, the Axis drove them out of the three foxholes they’d captured. The U.S. Army invaded German soil for the first time. The Allies reported that they’d discovered a nocturnal visitor to ole Dan’s yellow house: none other than Doc Swain himself. Was Doc Swain also a German spy? The Axis tried to tell the Allies that they were full of beans, that possibly Doc Swain was visiting ole Dan either out of friendship or in order to fix something that was wrong with him. I did not report any of this in the Star. The Japanese (the real ones, not those among us Axis) had begun using suicide pilots, called kamikazes, at the Battle of Leyte in the Philippines, and Boden Whitter of Stay More, 19, a sailor on one of the ships hit by a kamikaze in that battle, was killed. Miss Jerram excused from school for two days his kid sister, Tildy Whitter, and his kid brother, Jim John. Jim John declared, looking at me, “I’m gonna kill all you dirty Japs.” Even though he was a member of the filthy Allies, we felt very sorry for him, and with Miss Jerram’s help the Axis made a card of sympathy lavishly inscribed with sentiments of sorrow and left it in the Whitter’s post office box. A few days later Stay More had a pie supper, a fund-raising auction of girls’ and women’s pies and their companionship during the eating of them, to raise money for a War Memorial in Boden Whitter’s memory, and I reported all the bids and the resulting visits in the Star. I lost fifty cents on a pie that I was certain had been baked by Ella Jean but had actually been made by Rosa Faye Duckworth, an Ally, and I could hardly speak to her—not that I would have been able to speak to Ella Jean either.

In one issue of the Star I gave the front page to the reelection of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and wrote an editorial, “He’s One of Us,” about the man newly elected to be his vice president, Harry S Truman, who came from a place up in Missouri not too far from the Ozarks and therefore we ought to be proud of Senator Truman, even if he wasn’t much to look at. The Allies reported that Doc Swain was often a visitor to ole Dan’s house, and that Doc wasn’t treating ole Dan for anything. The two men were just seen sitting together on the porch in the autumn chill talking to each other. On the front page of another issue of the Star, first asking myself, “What would Ernie Pyle have done?,” I ran a story under the headline, ALLIES STAKEOUT INNOCENT HERMIT UNDER SUSPICION AS NAZI SPY. And I named names. Willard himself was not happy with that, since I’d violated the policy that we never tell any adults about our activities. I protested that I hadn’t told any adults. “Your newspaper tells everbody, don’t it?” he pointed out, rightly. What was worse, three of those names I’d named ganged up on me and beat me up, breaking my arm. But I discovered you. I made true friends with you, Gentle Reader.

Joe Don reported to us about another visit he’d had with the hermit. This time ole Dan had offered him not only a cigarette but a glass of homemade dandelion wine. “Mighty fine stuff,” Joe Don boasted. He said that he and ole Dan had enjoyed a good laugh together over the idea that the Allies were reconnoitering ole Dan under suspicion of being a German spy. Ole Dan had often seen some kids sneaking around his property, but just figured they were either nosy or they were trying to get a look at Annie, “Who doesn’t like to be seen,” ole Dan said. Joe Don had explained to ole Dan how all the kids of Stay More were divided into the two camps, Allies and Axis. “Heck, I’m a Nazi myself!” Joe Don had told the hermit. And ole Dan had given him the Nazi salute and said “Sieg, Heil!” and Joe Don had returned the salute and said “Sieg, Heil, mein Führer!” and the two had nearly died laughing.

“But then,” Joe Don related, “but then he also says, ‘Was man nicht kann meiden, muss man willig leiden,’ and I says I’m sorry but I don’t know that’un, and he said it in English, ‘What one cannot avoid must be borne without complaint.’”

We stared at Joe Don. We stared at each other. We waited to see who would be the first to comment. It was Willard. “Maybe he really is a German.”

“He was born in a place called Connecticut,” Joe Don said. “Is that in Germany?”

“Connecticut’s part of America somewheres,” I informed them. “Maybe ole Dan just learnt the German language. Maybe his grandmother was German, or somebody.”

“I got to remind you,” Willard said to Joe Don, “we’uns has taken a solemn vow, Allies and Axis both, never to tell the grown-ups what we’re doing. You shouldn’t ort to’ve told ole Dan you was a Nazi.”

One day while my arm was healing in its cast, autographed by everybody including you, Latha told me I had a letter. In the tier of glass-fronted post office boxes inside her store/post office, she had reserved a box for The Stay Morning Star, but there was rarely anything in it, never a letter. But now there was a piece of what Latha explained was called V-mail, thin blue paper folded into its own envelope. It was from Mare Coe. He enclosed twelve three-cent stamps. The letter said: “Dear Donny, Here’s 12 stamps so you can send me a prescription to the newspaper. I sure do miss Stay More and everbody and even you, ha ha. They have sensors for the mail that black things out, so I can’t tell you where I am, or why, or what happens or anything. But I’m a ‘leatherneck’ now and I’m supposed to shoot the ‘enemy’ any day now. Say hi to everbody for me. Your pal, Gerald.”

I was so happy to have his letter that I ran a front-page story under the headline MARE OF THE MARINES ENTERS PACIFIC CAMPAIGN, even though there was nothing specific I could tell about his activities.

Ernie Pyle himself, I learned from his column, had entered the Pacific campaign. The war in Europe was almost over, and they didn’t need Ernie Over There as much as they needed him Way Out There in the Pacific. In my reply to Mare, enclosing the latest issue of the Star, I told him to keep his eye out for Ernie, and if he saw him to be sure and tell him he was from Stay More, Arkansas, which Ernie would of course mention in his column, and then we could all feel famous for just a little bit. I also told Mare about my broken arm, but pointed out that in general the Axis were conquering the Allies, thanks especially to Willard, and we even anticipated that the Allies might soon surrender. I told Mare how Willard had got a mule for the Dingletoons, but that nobody knew that he was the one who’d done it. “Gypsy named the mule Old Jarhead,” I wrote. I didn’t tell Mare that Willard was nuts about Gypsy.

When Doc Swain finally removed the cast from my arm, I wrote Mare and told him all about it.

I don’t know if Mare ever caught a glimpse of Ernie Pyle. The ship Ernie was on, the U.S.S. Cabot, was also the base for Captain John Henry “Hank” Ingledew of Stay More, who was in charge of all radio operations for the Pacific Fleet (even though back home in Stay More we still hadn’t seen our first radio). Hank Ingledew, the lucky dog, shook hands with Ernie Pyle, but as far as I know Ernie didn’t put his name and hometown into any of his columns.

If Ernie had met Mare, what would he have written about what happened to him? Of course, to tell Mare’s story, Ernie would have had to know Mare as well as I did. So what if Ernie and I had collaborated on Mare’s story? We would have needed a little help from you.

Chapter seven

When pudgy, freckled Gerald “Mare” Coe first caught sight of what was left of the village of Motoyama, it seemed to him that he might be foreglimpsing what his hometown of Stay More, Arkansas, could become if people didn’t take care of it and kept leaving it, and nature herself stripped it of its trees and grasses. It was an awful sight. He knew that this fighting had harmed it beyond repair. Before all the women and children had been evacuated back to the mainland, Motoyama had been a little town with a dusty main street like Stay More’s, a general store, a school, a geisha house, a beer hall, and about fifty of the flimsy, single-story houses, a foot off the ground, that the Japanese typically built. The people had mined the sulfur that gave the island its name, Sulfur Island, Iwo Jima, but they had also grown a lot of sugar cane and milled it into sugar, which was what people in Stay More still did. Now the village was reduced to rubble, denuded of even the coarse grasses and gnarled bushes and trees that had struggled for existence, and pocked with the pillboxes and foxholes from which a steady barrage of machine gun and rifle fire, artillery and grenades, filled the air with blasts and hisses and pops and sizzles and screams. There were even cockroaches all over the place, waiting to inherit what was left of the place after all the shelling and killing. These weren’t the same kind of cockroach that Stay More had, but cockroaches all the same.

To the best of his knowledge, Mare Coe had never killed anyone before, except of course in play. In the assault on Mount Suribachi, several days earlier, he had actually fired his rifle in the direction of an enemy soldier, and the man had fallen, hit not by Mare’s bullet but by several bullets from Mare’s comrades. Mare wouldn’t have pulled the trigger in the first place had not a friend yelled into his ear, “My damn gun’s jammed! You get the Nip!” But Mare, an expert marksman, had carefully aimed to miss.

In the early years of the war, before he was drafted, back home in Stay More, playing war games with his triplet brothers, Earl and Burl, he found himself delegated to be leader of the “Japs.” It was all in fun and play, and the “Allies” were always victorious in their games, except their baseball games, where Mare, pitching for the “Axis,” was unbeatable, almost as compensation for suffering defeat on the “battlefield” and ignominy as a despised Jap.

But Mare (who got his nickname from his aspiration to become “mayor” of his little town) had a thick hide, and the same altruism or goodwill or whatever fellow feeling that made him the first member of the rival gangs of “Allies” and “Axis” to become political rather than simply militaristic also made him somewhat sympathetic with the people whose representative he had been appointed and whose leader, Tojo, he had been impersonating. The kids of Stay More, like all Americans, despised the Japs, even more than the Nazis, because at least some Stay More families might have had remote Germanic ancestry or in any case they spoke a language that had largely derived from Anglo-Saxon, whereas the Japs were yellow-skinned, slant-eyed, smelly, and the most vicious bloodthirsty soldiers in the history of warfare, and what they uttered bore no resemblance on earth to anything that anybody could understand.

“Atama ga okashii!” exclaimed Hisao Fujida from his bunker as he watched Mare Coe rise up from his sniper’s crouch and begin to walk erect and casually into the village of Motoyama, or what little was left of it. What Hisao said may be translated as the equivalent of Mare’s having said “His head is plumb peculiar,” or “That feller has shore got nobody home upstairs.” Hisao added, not without admiration, “Ban-yu!” which means foolhardiness. Mare’s act was not bravery or recklessness but sheer brazen determination, although Hisao on reflection had a suspicion of the unthinkable goodwill that could have lain behind it.

Mare took off his helmet, all that preserved his consciousness from the hail of bullets and shrapnel that zipped and zinged all around him, and he began gently to sweep the path with his helmet as if trying to drive a herd of cows. So many of the watchful enemy were astounded by his behavior that they repeated Hisao’s exclamation of “Ban-yu!” and the machine gunner exclaimed “Yu-ki!,” or bravery, and took his finger off the trigger and one by one the others too ceased firing, so that enough of the raucous din had died down that they could hear him.

“Saw bossy,” Mare was saying, with the same mild and gentle ease with which he walked. His audience discussed among themselves the possible meaning of his words. In Japanese, “saw—” is a common prefatory or introductory expression, like our “Well—” as in “Well, how about that?,” or indicative of upbeat determination, as in “Well, let’s get going!” But “bossy”? Some of them thought he might have said “boshi” which just means hat. But “Well, hat?” No, it was more likely he’d said “basshi” which means youngest child. Was he therefore being insulting? Taunting them as babies? “Well, kiddo”? They looked at each other and repeated his expression among themselves, as they repeated Hisao’s ban-yu or the machine gunner’s yu-ki. But, one and all, they stopped firing.

Mare wondered if any of these hidden soldiers were actually natives of this town of Motoyama. Were they defending their own village, as he had defended the village of Stay More against the attacks of the “Allies” in their war games? There was scarcely anything here worth defending, but for that matter there hadn’t been much left of Stay More to defend.

Just because he had been required to take the part of the enemy in those war games, to become a Jap in play-like, did not mean that Mare Coe was still taking sides with the enemy. He was not lacking in patriotism. It had been he who, after the successful assault on Mount Suribachi and the raising of the first small flag, had gone back down the mountain to the beachhead and boarded a landing ship and saluted an ensign, and had said, “Sir, lookee up yonder,” and had called his attention to the small Stars and Stripes atop the mountain. Mare had been out of breath from running, and the ensign had had difficulty understanding him when he requested, “D’ye reckon ye mought have a bigger flaig than that’un hereabouts, that ye could lend us the borry of?” After Mare had repeated himself and had attempted a paraphrase, the ensign had understood. “Must be pretty rough up there,” the ensign had observed, and Mare had said “Yessir, it shore is, but we didn’t have a awful lot of trouble a-taking the mounting.” The ensign had fetched a folded large flag, which, by appropriate coincidence, had come originally from the salvage depot at Pearl Harbor. Where the first flag was a mere four feet by two feet, this new one was eight by four. Mare had thanked the ensign profusely for it, then had taken off at a dead run, back up the mountain. When he had reached the summit, he had had just enough breath left to lurch forward and place the folded flag into the hands of another marine, who attached it to a makeshift flagpole and, with the help of five other fellows, had begun to struggle to shove the staff of the flagpole into the rubble. Mare had wanted desperately to help them raise Old Glory, but he had been so tuckered out from his errand that he could only sit panting on the ground while the other six marines raised the flag as a photographer took their picture. By all rights, Pfc. Gerald Coe ought to have been in that picture. If he had, his image would eventually exist in a gigantic bronze sculpture in Washington and lesser replicas at Quantico Marine Base and elsewhere. As it was, there would be only a small bronze plaque in Mare’s memory on the wall of a hallway of the high school at Jasper, Newton County, Arkansas.

For his pains, Mare got to keep the first flag, the smaller one, and he now intended to plant that flag in the village of Motoyama, just as the boys had done in the game of Capture the Flag back home in Stay More. He did not see any Jap flags flying in the village, but if he found one, he would capture it.

Hisao Fujida began to laugh. It was the only sound except for the far-distant gunfire elsewhere on the island, as faint as a Ford way off up on the Butterchurn Holler road a-backfiring in the summer night. All of the enemy entrenched in Motoyama town had stopped firing. Like Hisao, like Mare himself, they had a touch of combat fatigue and needed a moment’s rest. They watched with amusement and interest as the pudgy, freckled American, perhaps possessed not so much with ban-yu nor yu-ki but with the atama ga okashii, dementia, put down his carbine and took from his backpack a folded red-white-and-blue flag, and began to look around for a pole of some kind to attach it to. All the trees and branches and shrubs had been reduced to splinters and flinders. Mare’s best hope was a length of the drainpipe that all the houses had had to catch the precious rainwater, which was the only source of fresh water. But all of these appeared to be gone.

Hisao Fujida’s superior, Lieutenant Toshinosuke Kaido, did not see any humor in the situation, and was seething over the implied insult in “Saw bossy.” He was tempted to shoot the American himself with his Nambu automatic, but the American had put down his carbine and was thus unarmed, and a gentleman does not shoot an unarmed man. So Lieutenant Kaido took his ceremonial sword, inherited from a samurai ancestor, and approached the American, ready to decapitate him. Hisao Fujida winced, and grieved.

Mare saw the Japanese lieutenant coming and said in his mild fashion, “You’uns had all best jist pack up and git on out. I aim to raise our flag over what’s left of this here town.” But as the lieutenant raised the sword overhead with both hands, Mare had the sense to back away from him. Backing, he tripped and fell into a shell crater.

Back behind the lines, where ninety other marines of Alpha Company, the Second Battalion, Twenty-eighth Regiment, Fifth Division, were watching with even less amusement than Lieutenant Kaido possessed, and where Mare’s platoon sergeant was cursing Mare’s sister and mother and all his ancestors because Mare had not waited for the “Move out!” command and was thus insubordinate, a sharpshooter stood up and fired at Lieutenant Kaido just at the moment that the latter raised his sword over Mare Coe’s head. The lieutenant fell, whereupon the air everywhere once again was filled with pows and pams and booms and bings and chattering pops. Mare did not dare lift his head above the rim of the shell crater and attempt to retrieve his carbine. He could only lie there, realizing that he might have lost the chance to raise Old Glory in Motoyama town. “Who’d want the place anyhow?” he said to himself, as if in consolation. In fact, the entire Twenty-eighth Regiment desperately wanted it, and had been trying all day to take it.

Pinned down, Mare could only lie there and reflect upon the town that he had wanted to be mayor of, and, while he was at it, allow his thoughts to drift to the girl he’d left behind, a lovely thing he’d met not too long before he had shipped out. Her name was Gypsy, appropriate for a girl whose family was always nomadic and had not been in Stay More very long. At fourteen, she was the oldest daughter in a large family of hardscrabble squatters who lived up in Butterchurn Holler. Mare had never had a girlfriend before, and it was almost by accident that he met her one night on the banks of the creek, and a passion hit them both, not because he was soon leaving to join the service but because of the chemistry of some old country superstition that made a pretty young vagabond girl fall in love with a pudgy, homely, awkward but infinitely kind young man. It must have been one of the quickest consummations of a courtship anybody had ever heard, seen, or dreamt.

Not long afterward, at Camp Pendleton where he trained for the marines, in his barracks the other guys talked about girls as if screwing and humping and balling and banging and plowing was the wickedest, nastiest, meanest, dirtiest thing a fellow could do, but that old time on that old sandbar with old Gypsy had been the nicest old thing that Mare could ever have imagined, the loveliest thing in all God’s thoughtful creation of this world. Even now, when the grenade came rolling alongside him, he was able to give himself over almost entirely to the memory of its beauty.

But he had the presence of mind, even while re-creating the vision and sensation of his first and only experience of a woman, to reach for the grenade and to give it a fling that sent it back whence it had come. His thoughts still lost to Gypsy, he did not have time to decide consciously just where to throw the grenade. Almost by accident, even though he had an accurate arm that could pitch a mean fast ball or a wicked curve ball, the grenade lobbed into a foxhole and destroyed its inhabitant. It was the first person Mare had ever killed. He had no time to reflect upon having killed a Jap before another grenade fell into his lap. By now he could no longer think about Gypsy. Having killed one man, he might as well kill another. He wound up and pitched the grenade into the vent of a bunker and annihilated its five occupants. Gypsy evaporated like dew on the sunstruck grass; had he actually told her that he would never kill the enemy? He began to give his full attention to the job before him. The third grenade exploded halfway back to its sender without hurting anybody. Then the enemy craftily delivered the fourth and fifth grenades simultaneously, one to his left, the other to his right. But he had two hands, didn’t he? And while the fourth grenade also detonated before completing its return journey to the enemy, the fifth, thrown with his good left arm, his pitching arm, landed in a machine gun nest and obliterated three of the enemy as well as their machine. The sixth grenade he actually leapt up and caught in the air, like a fly ball, and was thus able to aim, like a pitcher trying to throw a man out at third, and to impart such an unerring focus to its trajectory that it went through the gunport of the largest of the pillboxes, wreaking considerable loss of life and property therein.

One wonders why the Japanese were wasting so many grenades trying to kill an unarmed Ozark hillbilly whose only talent, apart from helping his father blacksmith while daydreaming of becoming the mayor of a town in its terminal demise, was pitching a pretty fair game of baseball, seldom losing. Hisao Fujida asked himself that question, or, rather, since he knew nothing of Mare Coe’s background, he wondered why his comrades were not saving their grenades for the imminent onslaught of the ninety other members of the Twenty-eighth Regiment, who were even now setting up mortars, bazookas and a 37 mm cannon in order to shell the daylights out of any Japanese who escaped the grenades returned from Mare Coe, a soldier possessed of ban-yu, yu-ki, and quite possibly atama ga okashii, but perhaps crafty enough to feign his eccentric behavior in order to lull the Japanese into a momentary but dangerous dropping of their tight security. In other words, this weird American had quite possibly been part of a clever scheme, a decoy, if you will, to trick and thus disarm the defenders of Motoyama. Back home in his own village in Shikoku, playing war games as a boy, Hisao had been similarly tricked. This thought somewhat disturbed Hisao, and whatever benevolence he had felt for the American vanished. His wits returned to him, and he used them.

Hisao Fujida calculated the amount of time it took the American to receive and return a grenade, and Hisao deliberately, after pulling the pin on a grenade, allowed three seconds to elapse before throwing it, counting aloud to himself, Fujibachi One, Fujibachi Two, Fujibachi Three.

When Mare Coe caught Hisao’s grenade, and started to throw it back, it exploded in his hand, taking off his arm, most of his face, and all of his life.

Chapter eight

When Miss Jerram saw Doc Swain’s old car pulling into the schoolyard that March morning, she wondered if one of us had took down sick that she didn’t know about. She looked around the room at all of us, but we all looked reasonably healthy. Maybe Doc Swain was coming to vaccinate everybody, she decided, but wondered why he couldn’t just do it at his office. Quickly she grabbed her purse and got out her compact and snapped it open and took a close look at her face. She already had on enough powder and rouge and lipstick and all to disguise her identity from anybody except her dog. She put some powder on her nose and had time to re-edge her mouth with the lipstick before Doc came into the schoolhouse. We all turned to look at him, a man in his middle sixties, thirty or more years older than Estalee Jerram, as if she cared—he was a man, wasn’t he? and there weren’t many of those left in Stay More. He gave us a forced smile, as if he had nothing to smile about. Then he crooked his finger at Miss Jerram, motioning her to come outside the schoolhouse so’s he could talk to her in private.

“You’uns keep yore seats and don’t go to chitterin and chatterin. I’ll be right back,” she said, as if she knew for a fact that she would.

But she didn’t come right back, and when she finally did, Doc came with her. He had his arm around her, which made us giggle and snicker and titter, until we all saw the reason he had his arm around her was not romantic but just sympathetic: she was sobbing and shaking. I whispered to my seatmate, you, to help you understand: nobody, in the history of her seven or eight years as a schoolteacher, had ever seen her betray any emotion before, any feeling of any kind—not humor, not anger, not sorrow, not anything.

“I reckon ye’d best let me tell ’em, Esty,” Doc Swain said to her. “You just sit down there at your desk and let me say it.” He helped her into her chair, where she buried her face in her hands and went on blubbering, and then he turned to face us. “Folks,” he addressed us, and I admired him for not calling us “boys and girls,” which we were, “I’ve got some sad news to tell ye. Lawlor and Dulcie Coe has just received word from the U.S. government that their boy Gerald has—” Doc, who betrayed emotion a good bit more readily than Miss Jerram but never wore his heart on his sleeve, began to moisten up a bit around the eyes. “Gerald, as most of y’uns know, was servin in the marines in the Pacific, and his outfit was involved in the American attempt to take Iwo Jima, a Japanese stronghold. The American effort has been victorious, and that island has been taken at the cost of over four thousand American boys’ lives. You heared me correct. Four thousand, five hundred marines killed dead. Don’t hardly seem worth it, does it? All that many for just a little ole sandpile out in the ocean. But Gerald Coe was one of ’em, I’m sorry to have to tell ye. He died a hero. He gave his life after slaying dozens of the enemy. We ort to be proud of him, I reckon.”

Doc, who’d pulled baby Gerald and his two brothers into this world nineteen years before, stopped then and waited for our response. Most of us were too shocked to see straight. When Boden Whitter had died in that kamikaze attack back in October, some months before, the news hadn’t been brought to the schoolhouse, and besides, Boden hadn’t been a member of either the Allies or the Axis. But the first to speak up was Jim John Whitter, Boden’s brother. “Goddamn you Japs all to hell!” He shook his fist at each of us.

“Don’t forget Mare was a Jap,” I pointed out.

Joe Don Dingletoon protested, “Not our Japs. Them real Japs.”

The two students most affected by the terrible news happened to be deskmates: Mare’s kid brother Sammy, my age, who seemed to be paralyzed with disbelief, and Gypsy Dingletoon, who, perhaps not even remembering that her deskmate was the deceased’s own brother, elbowed him so she could reach the aisle. She ran down the aisle and out of the room, slamming the door behind her. I wanted to suggest that you run after her, and help her, but you couldn’t have done that. So I got up to go after her myself.

“You, Dawny!” Miss Jerram hollered, having raised her soaked face to see who’d slammed the door, futile, since whoever had slammed it was already out. “Where d’ye think you’re off to?”

“Somebody better see to ole Gypsy,” I said. “Somebody ort to see if she’s okay.” It hit me that my fellow students were perhaps just as mystified as Miss Jerram about why I’d want to check up on old Gypsy. I glanced at Ella Jean, and she alone seemed to know why I was leaving. She obviously wanted to go with me, but couldn’t. I left.

Gypsy was out in the schoolyard, leaning against a tree, crying her heart out more eloquently than Miss Jerram had been doing. I didn’t know for sure what to say to her. Come to think of it, I had never spoken to her before, although of course she knew who I was. But come to think of it, I had never spoken to any girl, not just Gypsy. Although I had a great attraction to older women, I was not having much success understanding girls. Gypsy was three years older than me but she was still a girl. I couldn’t tell what girls wanted. They never could make up their minds. They were always changing their minds, and, worst of all, nothing ever seemed to please them. Nothing anybody could do would make them happy. Girls, I guess, were born to be sad, with or without a good reason. But now Gypsy Dingletoon had a very good reason. She had all the reason that anybody would ever need.

She didn’t know that I knew she had a good reason. She probably didn’t know I was standing there behind her, watching her drench the bark of that elm with her tears. I decided I had better speak very quietly and gently. “Gypsy,” I nearly whispered, but still it made her jump out of her skin so I even put my hand on her arm as if that magic might make her climb back into her skin. “He was my friend too,” I said. I wished I could cry too, but I couldn’t.

She stared at me and her whole face screwed up as if an invisible giant’s hand had twisted it, and she bawled harder than ever. Finally she mumbled, “Just leave me be.” And she motioned for me to exit her life.

It wasn’t a good situation to be in, for me as well as her. For something even as momentous as my first conversation with a girl, let alone something as dramatic as a pubescent boy trying to console an older girl on the death of the soldier who had been her boyfriend and lover, we needed a backdrop more spectacular than that drab gray March morning, although the first fragrances of springtime were already full in the air. What we needed was a gentle rain to match her tears, no, what we needed was a downpour to dramatize the awfulness of death, and to remind Gypsy that there were founts of water that could make her tear ducts seem like mere seeps. Friend Reader, could you help? Maybe a little thunderstorm, just enough to drown out her sobs with the crashes and peals, and to commence splattering us with big drops of rain? A well-controlled effort. Thank you.

When the rain hit, Gypsy glanced back toward the schoolhouse, as if to gauge the distance and to realize it was too far to make a dash, even if she could stand to return to her classmates, and then she glanced at the girls’ outhouse, right handy nearby, and started to leap for that, but stopped, stared at me forlornly as if, despite my impudence in following her in her misery, I was all she had in this sad world at this sad moment, and she reached out and grabbed my hand! Friend, are you still helping? She took my hand! And she led me into that outhouse with her. We did not close the door, which despite your possible preconception of it, did not have a crescent moon carved into it. (You should know that the Stay More school didn’t have a boys’ outhouse. The boys, like males everywhere in these parts, just preferred to go off into the bushes or woods somewhere.) Gypsy and I stood there in the shelter of that shed, watching the rain come down—perhaps it was getting even harder—and listening to the thunder, and smelling the rain-drenched fragrances of March grasses and weeds and the earliest flowers that obliterated the stale smells of girls’ body functions that pervaded the privy. By and by, Gypsy seemed to realize that her tears couldn’t compete with that rainfall, so she hushed her crying. And when she sat down, so did I, our posteriors not positioned over the two holes as if we were using them but on the wood beside them.

“How come ye to foller me out of the schoolhouse?” she asked quietly. “How didje even guess that it jist kills me to know pore Gerald’s dead?”

“You were his sweetheart,” I said. “I just wanted to see if I couldn’t give ye any comfort.”

“But I never tole nobody we was promised!” she said, then remembered that she had. “Exceptin Eller Jean. She didn’t tell ye, did she?”

I couldn’t help snorting. Whenever I laughed, I tried to avoid snorting, but it was involuntary, like sneezing. “Course not, silly,” I said. “What reason would Eller Jean ever have for even lookin at me, let alone tell me anything?”

My grumbling lament made Gypsy look at me as if she couldn’t quite remember having seen me before. “Why, Dawny,” she protested, looking me over, “I reckon Eller Jean has cast ye a glimpse or two. I’ve looked at ye. And ever week I’ve read that paper ye put in our mailbox. Cover to back.”

I was flattered because not many people in Stay More admitted to regular scrutiny of the Star. Gypsy’s acknowledgment of it made me realize that I might have had an ulterior motive for following her out of the schoolhouse: in the next issue of my newspaper I’d have to run a front-page story about the heroic death of Pfc. Gerald Coe in the taking of Iwo Jima, and it wouldn’t hurt if I could interview the girl he left behind, and possibly publish a few words of her feelings about the matter. Ernie Pyle taught me that reporters must be objective, cold, and even cynical during emotional moments.

“Gypsy,” I requested, bravely, “would ye mind too awful much if I jist tole in the next issue of the paper how you was fixin to marry Mare—Gerald—if he came home?”

My simple question set her to bawling again, and I could only sit there and wait it out, as we were both waiting out the storm. I stared through the open door of the privy at the schoolhouse. Then she abruptly quit crying and stared hard at me. “Was it Gerald tole ye? Was it? Did he go and tell on us?”

How could I answer, without revealing that I’d been prying and peeking? I decided I’d better lie, which I’m very good at. I nodded my head, and said, “I tole ye, he was my friend too. But he made me promise I’d never breathe a word of it to nobody else, and I never did.”

Gypsy sniffled and wiped her nose on the back of her hand, but she didn’t go on crying. We stared at the mountains that rose before us. Those hills seemed a kind of tangible metaphor for our condition: the hills cut us off from the outside world, the hills surrounded us and sheltered us and hugged us, but most of all they kept us private, they kept us privy to ourselves, our own deepest secrets which we need not ever reveal. But I needed to tell my newspaper subscribers the truth about our hero and his girl. Would it have been ghoulish of me to insist on it to her?

When we had been sitting in the shelter of that outhouse for what seemed a long time, Gypsy announced, “I gotta go.”

But it was still raining in buckets, and I pointed out, “You’ll git wetter’n a dog.”

She stared at me as if I’d insulted her. But then she understood that we weren’t talking about the same thing, although I didn’t understand. “Naw, I mean, I gotta go,” she said.

“Well, go on, then,” I said. “I’m gonna wait till the rain stops.”

“Silly, I’m tryin to tell ye I’ve got to mail a letter.”

“A letter?” I said. “The post office is way over yonder.” I gestured toward Latha Bourne’s store, where the post office was.

“Don’t you know nothin?” she said with exasperation, and sighed. Then she took a deep breath and said, “I’ve gotta go to the outhouse.”

“But you’re already in the outhouse,” I pointed out.

“Dawny, you are real dumb. Don’t ye know what this outhouse is for? Wal, I’ve got to use it!”

“Oh,” I said, and must have blushed at my slowness. I am told I blush readily but I’ve never been able to verify it by blushing in a mirror.

“Just to wee-wee,” she said. “That’s all.”

“Do ye want me to step outside?” I asked, over the sound of the thunder crashing and the downpour pounding the roof of the shed.

“Naw, but shet the door,” she requested.

Was anybody in the schoolhouse looking out the window? Doc Swain’s car was still in the yard. Was he still trying to comfort Miss Jerram? Or was he talking to all of them about heroism and devotion and sacrifice and all those fine things? Wouldn’t anyone who really did look out the window and see the outhouse door closed wonder what in tarnation we were doing? I pushed the door shut.

“Don’t turn around,” she requested. “Jist keep yore back turned till I tell ye.”

With the door closed and the sky totally beclouded, it was fairly dark in there, I couldn’t have seen her anyhow, but I kept my back to her, and could only imagine what she was doing, raising her dress and sitting over a hole. Minutes passed. When it seemed to me that she’d been sitting there long enough for number two too if she wanted to, I said over my shoulder in a gentle undertone just loud enough to reach beyond the crash of rain and thunder, “Aint ye done yit?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I was done a while back. I’m jist a-sittin here, thinkin about pore Gerald. I just caint believe we won’t never see him ever no more.”

The image of them together on that creek bank that night came back to me. I wondered at the truth of the rumors I’d heard that girls actually enjoy doing that. Was Gypsy going to miss that? If she really needed that, couldn’t some other boy do it with her for her?

Almost as if in response to these licentious and false-hearted thoughts, the door opened, and there was Ella Jean. She quickly entered, dripping wet from her dash through the downpour, the droplets falling from her hair and the hem of her dress. “Miss Jerram tole me to run out here,” Ella Jean said, “and see what become of y’uns.” Gypsy and Ella Jean hugged each other tightly and immediately the two of them began crying together.

“He aint never coming back!” Gypsy wailed.

“Never coming back!” Ella Jean sobbed, like an echo from the distant mountain. They wailed and sobbed. Again I wished I could cry too. I felt like it, but I just couldn’t do it. I wasn’t a girl, even if this was the girl’s outhouse. It was crowded in there, three people in an outhouse meant for two at most. “How come you’re here, Dawny?” Ella Jean asked me.

Her simple speaking of my name, which I don’t believe she’d done before, thrilled me. I told Ella Jean, “I just came out here to see if I couldn’t comfort her.”

“How did ye know she needed any comfort?” Ella Jean asked.

“Gerald told him,” Gypsy said.

“He never,” Ella Jean challenged me.

“Yeah,” I claimed, “I knew they were supposed to get married.”

“So you’re gonna put that in your newspaper?” Ella Jean wanted to know.

“I’d sure like to,” I admitted.

“Gypsy,” Ella Jean counseled her older friend, “ye mought as well git used to the idee. Folks is gonna know about it, one way or th’other.”

“I don’t want them Allies to know it,” Gypsy said. “They hated Gerald. They suspicioned it was Gerald who somehow got ahold of Old Jarhead for us.”

“But Doc said Mare died a hero,” I pointed out. “Nobody hates a hero.” That casual remark set the two girls to weeping again and holding each other, and I wished one or both of them would hold me too.

“Them Allies hate everbody who’s not Allies,” Gypsy observed. “And I’d as lief they never learnt me and Gerald was promised. So don’t go sayin it in your paper, Dawny.”

Ella Jean put in, “Miss Jerram’s gonna take the hickory to all three of us, lessen we git back in there soon.”

When we returned to the schoolhouse, Doc Swain was gone, taking Sammy Coe with him, excused because of the bad news about his big brother. Miss Jerram had regained her composure. Although the mood was still somber, as I went to my seat the Allies had fits of giggling, snickering, whispering, eye-bulging, mouth-twisting, cheek-popping, and catcalling, which required a reprimand from Miss Jerram, although she also reprimanded me for leaving without permission. “Dawny, do you want to stand and tell us all what-all you was doing in the girls’ outhouse?” That question set the Allies to guffawing and slapping their sides.

What to say? “Nome,” I refused.

“What do you mean, ‘nome,’ anyhow?” Miss Jerram said. “I’m tellin ye to get on your feet and declare what you ran out after Gypsy for.”

I stood. “She’s one of us,” I said. “Axis. We watch out for each other. It looked to me like she took sick or somethin.”

“Are you sick, Gypsy?” Miss Jerram asked.

“I was, but I’m okay now, I reckon,” Gypsy said.

Miss Jerram studied Gypsy for just a moment longer than was necessary, and I suspected she might have guessed the source of Gypsy’s sickness: her heart. “It’s a awful sad day for us all,” Miss Jerram observed.

Chapter nine

When thick March had not yet been given a fair chance to take off and bud and breathe, a pall fell upon Stay More, and with it the impossible rains. News traveled fast without any help from The Stay Morning Star, which I wanted to shut down, not only because everyone—except possibly the hermit Dan and his daughter—already knew that Mare Coe was dead, but also because I didn’t know what I could possibly print about the tragedy. Anything coming from me would be juvenile, meddling, and futile: it couldn’t have done anything to help the mood of the town. The shaggy mountains wanted to fluff with green; it was time for them to, but our dismal grief seemed to stun nature herself into dark, black, gray withdrawal. And then the impossible rains began.

What good were words, anyhow? I did not have, and could not get, an interview with Mare’s main survivor, Gypsy, nor could I even reveal that she was his main survivor. Besides, in the midst of this gloom, during a thunderstorm, another rock came crashing through the window of the Star office, with another note tied to it: “Youl wish you had of staid in the girls privvy if we catch you.” Whichever Ally had thrown it must have got awful wet for his pains. I told Latha I’d pay for a new piece of glass to put in the window (it wasn’t a big plate glass window, just an eight-light sash with small panes), but I didn’t show her the note.

Those rains, which may have started when Gypsy and I ran into the outhouse at the school, never let up but grew gradually harder in their intensity. Not even the oldest kids could recall ever having seen such rainfall; it lasted for days and days, as if—Gypsy said—the skies were going to have themselves a good long cry over Mare’s death. Later all of that toad-strangling downpour seemed only a rehearsal for the day of the big storm.

The day of the big storm was a sound-and-sight show of such intensity that we feared the noise itself would wipe us from the face of the earth if the deluge of water failed to sweep us away. I got caught at Latha’s store, where I was still trying halfheartedly to put together an issue of the Star that would say something about Mare’s heroic death. The storm was so terrible that Latha decided we’d better make a dash for her fraid-hole.

Everybody else in Stay More took refuge in their fraid-holes. Each house in town had a storm cellar in the back yard, an excavation roofed over with boards or bricks or rocks or sod, depending on the builder or the sense of architectural aesthetics, and large enough to contain the whole family in the event of a tornado, an event which had never happened hereabouts. No one could remember when anybody had ever been afraid enough actually to use the fraid-holes before. In the back of our minds, we knew the fraid-holes could now be used in case the enemy, the real Nazis or Japs, ever flew their bombers over us and dropped bombs on us, but just as we had never seen a tornado we had never seen a bomber or any other kind of airplane. Thus the fraid-holes were strictly for insurance: contingencies, possibilities, peace of mind. But into the bargain they provided storage space for the larder, the pantry: the fraid-holes were lined with shelves and shelves of each season’s garden produce put up in glass Mason jars, as well as jams and jellies and preserves made from peaches and grapes and muscadines and strawberries and blackberries, as well as bins of Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, apples, and such.

Latha’d had the presence of mind to snatch up a loaf of bread from her store shelves, and thus during our long stay in the fraid-hole waiting out the storm we had plenty of jelly sandwiches. She had also snatched up a parcel post package that she identified simply by saying, “It came today.” When we had eaten the sandwiches and night was coming on, and she had reassured me that my Aunt Rosie probably assumed that I was safe and sound in this fraid-hole, just as Latha’s husband Every Dill knew that she herself was probably here for the duration of the storm, I asked her what was in the parcel post package, and she just said, “Oh, it’s just for when we get restless or bored.”

I laughed and said, “Aw Latha, you know I’d never get restless or bored with you!”

She laughed too, and said, “In that case, I won’t open it.”

If there is either a quizzical or restless expression on your face, it may be because you are wondering why I have never before mentioned, in this story, my Aunt Rosie, with whom I lived. And I will never mention her again, if I can avoid it. Her house was just up the road a ways from Latha’s store, and I spent as little time there as I possibly could. I won’t even mention at all the man she was married to. The only thing to be said about Uncle Frank Murrison is that there were still rumors he had once upon a time been “carrying on” with our schoolteacher, Miss Jerram.

“Open it,” I said to Latha. “This storm won’t ever stop.”

When Latha finally opened the package, slowly, not as if she were teasing me but as if she were opening a present and deliberately teasing herself, it contained a thing made of plastic, looking very modern, with some knobs and a dial on it, and a name, Philco. And there was a large thing—“battery,” Latha said—which had to be put into it and attached to it. The importance of this moment was such that you may have decided to calm the thunder so that we could listen. Thank you. I may need to have you stop all the waterworks soon.

“What is it?” I asked. “And where’d you git it?”

“Sears Roebuck,” she said. “It’s a home radio.”

Of course I had heard of radios, although I’d never seen one. I knew that in the cities, where they had electricity, everybody had one. There was no electricity in Newton County, but apparently you could make a radio operate with one of these big batteries.

Latha got it to working, and my mouth must have fallen open. There were human voices coming from it, and then some kind of strange music! And then a lot of noises that Latha said was “static.” She played around with the knobs, turning the dial, and almost as if somebody was trying to tell her what to do, a guy said, “Ah! Ah! Ah! Don’t touch that dial! Listen to Fibber McGee and Molly!” She quit touching the dial. Then for a whole half of an hour, a story took place involving this man called Fibber and his wife. If you listened carefully, it was a funny story, but it wasn’t nearly as good a story as the ones Latha could tell, and I told her that, and she started crying. “No, really,” I said. “I like your stories a lot better.”

But if Latha was upset because the radio was going to be her competition at storytelling, I discovered that I was going to have some serious competition in the area of journalism. A program of world events came on, and there was instant news, right out of the man’s mouth, as if somebody were putting it easily into your ear instead of making you try to read the words. My newspaper couldn’t compete with that.

The biggest world event was about the firebombing of Tokyo, in which two hundred and seventy-nine B-29s dropped napalm all over the city, killing 140,000 people. Latha started crying over that too. “Women, children, and old folks,” she said.

But even though I was a Jap, and could identify with Latha’s pity and sorrow, I felt a kind of elation too, and I asked, “Won’t it hurry up the end of the war?” And she had to admit that it would.

A loud pounding came on the storm cellar’s thick wooden door, and, opening it and holding her lantern high, Latha discovered the Whitter family: the mother, Jim John, Tildy, and a littlun whose name I couldn’t recall. Yes: it was Suke. All of them were wet as dogs.

“Our fraid-hole is a-fillin up with water!” Ora Belle Whitter cried to Latha. The Whitter place was just north of Latha’s, but lower, closer to the creek, which must have begun overflowing its banks.

Latha invited them to share our fraid-hole, but Jim John, pointing at me, said “I aint a-gorn in thar, Maw! I din’t know he was here.”

“Boy, he aint got no disease I heared tell of,” his mother said.

“He’s a Jap!” Jim John said. “A dirty Jap.”

Ora Belle Whitter snorted a laugh. “Stay out in the storm then!” she said to her son, and ushered the rest of her family into the shelter.

But Jim John relented, and, being sure that I had a full view of every mean face he knew how to make, he came on in. I whispered to Latha, “I don’t want the Allies to know about our radio! Turn it off and cover it up.” She smiled, either at the conspiracy of it or her amusement at my hostility toward the Allies. Or maybe she liked, as I did, my referring to “our” radio. Hers and mine, though I hadn’t contributed a cent to its purchase. She put the radio back in its box before Jim John even got a good look at it.

Before long, there was another knock at the door, and there was the whole Alan family, who lived up above the Whitters but also along the creek, and their low-lying fraid-hole had also filled up with water. But we simply didn’t have any room for them. Latha’s storm cellar couldn’t contain any more people. She suggested that they try the Coes: Lawlor and Dulcie Coe lived nearby, up on the hillside above the village, and all three of their triplets had gone into the service, one of them killed, leaving only Sammy, so their fraid-hole probably wasn’t crowded. I was glad to see the Alans go. I might’ve been willing to share a fraid-hole with the despicable Jim John Whitter, but if Sog Alan had come into our fraid-hole I would’ve had to brave the storm and go elsewhere.

During the course of that night, the Duckworth family also showed up seeking shelter, and had to be turned away, sent along to the Coes. Their fraid-hole, they said, was completely under water, and the creek was lapping up against the front porch of their house.

It thus occurred to me, having seen in the space of a short time the three guys who’d broken my arm, that all of the Allies lived in the bottomlands of Stay More, while we Axis inhabited higher elevations. This set me to reflecting philosophically upon the fact that all of us Axis were not only outcasts but also upcasts, in the sense that all of our houses were up in the hills and on the ridges and in the mountains. The Allies were practically lowlanders! Or at least their domiciles were situated along the meadows in the floodplain of the creeks. What did this signify? That good people, that is, us, prefer elevations, while bad people, that is, them, would rather avoid the heights? No, probably all that it meant was that the better-off families of the town were those who owned the fertile fields along the watercourses, while the poor families had to content themselves with the rocky uplands. But it clearly revealed to my contemplative mind that there were actual geographical differences between Allies and Axis that I’d never even considered before.

Thus, when the sun actually appeared for the first time in a week, and I was able to wade to my little newspaper office, I began work on a special issue of the Star that would have three big stories on its front page. I’d never had that many before. The storm news, of course, and the fact that the village proper and all the roads were still under water. (It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t be able to deliver the paper to many of the subscribers without a boat, and nobody in Stay More had a boat.) But the two other main stories on the front page, side by side, were GERALD COE DIES A HERO ON IWO JIMA ISLAND, AND 140,000 PERISH IN TOKYO FIREBOMBING, the juxtaposition of the stories making it look as if all those Japanese were killed in retaliation for Mare’s death. There wasn’t much to say about either event apart from the bare facts, as I had heard the former from Doc Swain and the latter from Latha’s radio, which, I realized, was going to keep the Star in business. Latha let me listen to her radio anytime I wanted to, although she said, “If that battery wears out, you may have to find me another one.” She herself decided to tell no one else about “our” radio. “We don’t want everybody and his neighbor down here listening to Fibber McGee.” From what I’d heard on the radio, I knew the war in Europe was practically finished. I drew a map of Germany for a page of the Star, fanciful but fairly accurate, showing big arrows moving like pincers across Germany, closing in on Berlin. The war Over There was so close to being settled that my model and champion, Ernie Pyle, had already been removed from that theater of operations and was even now heading out onto those Pacific islands like Okinawa, the same kind of places where Mare and thousands of other American boys had been killed. “It don’t look to me,” Willard observed, when I gave him an advance copy of that issue of the Star, “like the war will last long enough for me to get drafted.”

I didn’t need a boat. By the time I had hand-lettered the text of all the stories and got the paper “put to bed” on my little gelatin press, the waters began to recede, revealing that not only all the low-lying fraid-holes had filled up with mud but also all the foxholes of the Axis. We called a meeting at our headquarters in the back room of the old Ingledew store in order to plan the laborious task of re-digging the foxholes. Willard suggested that a more worthy expenditure of our energy might be to volunteer to help the Allies clean the mud out of their fraid-holes. The Allies’ mothers had shackled all of the Allies with the big job of removing mud from the thousands of Mason jars of food, and shoveling mud from the floors of the fraid-holes. So we took a vote: five of us wanted to get the foxholes rebuilt; seven of us (I voted with Willard) wanted to help the Allies clean their stinking fraid-holes.

We had to invade them in order to do it. The Allies didn’t want us, at first. We made a whole exciting new war game out of pretending that the Allied fraid-holes were bunkers and pillboxes, and we combined the work of “liberating” the fraid-holes from their mud with the play of make-believe assault. Since so many of the stored apples, sweet potatoes, and suchlike had been ruined in the mud, they became hand grenades that the Allies tossed at us, and we, without knowing it, duplicated Mare’s fantastic deeds on Iwo Jima.

All of this work and play in constant proximity to the Allies had an effect on Sammy Coe. Or maybe his experience of the night the Coe’s fraid-hole had sheltered the two Allied leaders, Sog and Larry, with their families, had made him begin fraternizing with the enemy. Whatever the case, one day Sammy, who had emulated his big brother Mare in being a fierce Jap, announced that he didn’t want to be a Jap anymore. “I’m gonna jine th’other side,” he declared, defiantly. That was unheard-of. Nobody ever switched sides. Being Allies or Axis wasn’t a matter of choice, like being Republican or Democrat. It was more like being Baptist or Methodist: you didn’t choose your religion, you were born with it, not that any of us Axis were born Jap or Nazi, but we were born outcasts, born as members of the you-group as opposed to the lordly we-group.

My recent theory or observation that the Allies were bottom-landers while the Axis were uplanders didn’t apply very well to the Coes. They were in-between, the Coe house neither up the hill nor down in the dell, and thus the founders of both the Allies and the Axis, Earl and Gerald, had been Coes, and now Sammy wanted to switch.

We argued with Sammy, of course, trying to get him to see that there wasn’t any connection between our Japs and the Japs who had killed his brother. We also tried to get him to understand that the Allies probably wouldn’t be willing to accept him as a “convert” to their junta of the chosen. But Sammy’s mind was made up. “Any of you fellers tries to stop me,” he threatened, “will git knocked on your head.” One day he was seen climbing the wood rungs that made a ladder up the tall sycamore tree that led to the Allies’ aerial fortress. Since he was alone, they did not repulse his ascent. He entered into the house where Noah Ingledew had lived a century before, high up there in the twisting branches. The next school day, he requested of Miss Jerram permission to move from the desk he shared with Gypsy to sit at a vacant desk on the Allied side of the aisle.

One night we were sitting around in our headquarters grumbling about having lost the superiority we’d thought we’d gained over the Allies, and the distinct possibility that Sammy could reveal all of our military secrets to the enemy. If not that, there was the distinct possibility that, now the mud had dried in our baseball field and we could commence a new season of ball games, Sammy, who had been our able shortstop, would be playing for the Allies. With his help in the field and at the plate, they could beat us badly. Ella Jean could play shortstop but she simply wasn’t a hitter.

These lamentations were interrupted by a knock at the door: it was the code knock, four shorts and a long. We counted heads: there was nobody missing. Who could be out there? Maybe, we thought, the secret code knock had been given away to the enemy by Sammy, and the enemy was outside the door, ready to attack our headquarters! “Don’t open that yet!” Willard said, and he went to the door and asked, “Who’s there?” A voice answered “Sammy” but it wasn’t like his voice; too high and shaky. “Are ye alone?” Willard asked.

“Yeah, please let me in,” said the voice that didn’t sound like Sammy’s.

“If it’s all of ’em,” Joe Don said to Willard, “we’ll fight ’em man for man!”

We opened the door. It was only Sammy. We couldn’t let him in, because he was the enemy. He stood there in the doorway, whining, “Lookee at what they done to me,” and he pulled up his shirt to reveal the red welts on his chest: he had been branded. He told us what had happened. In an initiation ceremony, solemnizing his rite of passage into the Allies, because he had been a part of the enemy for years, he had been required to sit still while they took a nail, embedded in a long stick and held in the fire until it was glowing hot, and made three small marks in the skin of his chest in the form of the letter A.

“What’s the A stand for?” Willard asked Sammy.

“‘Allies,’ of course,” Sammy declared.

“Why, them Allies aint got the sense to pound sand in a rat hole!” Willard observed. “They couldn’t find their way to first base if there was signs all along the way.” He looked around at the rest of us to see if we also understood his estimate of the Allies’ stupidity, but, I’m ashamed to say, we were rather slow in getting it. “Hell’s bells,” Willard demanded of us, “caint you’uns think of anything else that A could stand for?”

“Arkansawyer?” I offered. Others suggested a variety of possibilities: “Angel?” “Adolescent?” “Asswipe?” and such.

“Lord have mercy,” Willard said in disgust.

It was Gypsy who offered “Axis?” and then the rest of us were saying, “Yeah!” and “That’s it!” and “She got it!”

Ella Jean was the only one who was mindful of poor Sammy’s condition. She touched him gently on his chest near the burns and asked, “Does it hurt real bad? Maybe you ought to have Doc Swain look at that.”

Sammy shook his head twice. Whatever pain he was still feeling was eased by Ella Jean’s touch and her solicitude. I would have gladly endured a branding like that to get her finger on my chest. Even though Sammy and I—same age, same size—had been rivals more than friends all our lives, I felt genuine compassion for him.

“Aint you told your folks?” Ella Jean asked.

“Heck naw,” Sammy said. “Paw would butcher ’em.”

“They need to be butchered,” I declared.

“But we don’t want nobody’s folks involved in this,” Willard said, reminding us of the long-standing policy that neither Allies nor Axis would ever inform any of the town’s adults—except possibly Miss Jerram—of any of our activities. Willard declared, “If the Allies ever get butchered, we’ll do it ourselfs.”

“Then let’s do it!” I said, and had the rare satisfaction of hearing all the others second the motion.

Chapter ten

When Sammy had answered all our questions (e.g., Which one of the Allies had actually applied the branding tool? Sog Alan), the business of the meeting focused upon Sammy’s request to be permitted to return to the fold, to forswear his defection to the enemy, renounce his apostasy, and become an Axis again. “I’ll be both a Jap and a Nazi if you’ll let me come back,” he offered.

After discussion, Willard suggested, “I got a better idea. Instead of you pullin out of the Allies, you could still pretend to be Allies but be a…one of them…Dawny, what do ye call them fellers?”

“Double agent,” I offered.

“Yeah,” Willard said. “You could be a double agent, and find out for us all their plans and secrets, and that way we’d always beat ’em.” Our night meetings were illuminated only by the light of a single-wick kerosene lantern, and in the light of that lantern Sammy’s face—all our faces—took on expressions of wicked anticipation. Willard concluded, “If they’re so dumb they don’t know that mark on ye could stand for us as well as them, you won’t have no problem.”

Thereafter, to our pleasure, and to the gradual erosion of the power of the Allies, Sammy pretended to be a steadfast member of the enemy and even ingratiated himself to the inner circle of tyrants—Sog, Larry, and Jim John—to the extent that he became not just an Ally but a member of their inner council. His undercover activities were subtle: in baseball games it looked like an honest error when he allowed a ball to miss his glove and score an Axis run or when he looked at a called third strike that just edged the plate and put him out. In trench warfare, the Allies could not understand how we knew their troop movements beforehand, or why none of their sneak invasions were truly sneaky.

The Allies, it goes almost without saying, were foul-minded and immoral. “Let me tell y’uns some of the real nasties,” Sammy said to us, and reported on various of the debaucheries that went on in the tree house, principally involving Betty June Alan, who was rather wayward and no better than she should be, even with her own brother, Sog. But all of the Allied girls, apparently, were required to participate in acts that Sammy had the decency not to describe in the presence of our good Axis girls. Learning all these things about the Allies’ private goings-on didn’t give us any advantage over them except a chance to feel morally superior to them. Certainly we had our own appreciation of risqué humor and the usual sexual braggadocio as only the inexperienced can spout it, but we never did anything.

Sammy’s greatest performance of double-agentry was when he learned of the Allies’ plan to abduct our Gypsy. It was a daring scheme hatched privately by Larry and Sog, and Sammy just happened to have been in the second of the two pens of the double tree house, and eavesdropped on Larry and Sog talking in the other pen. The essence of their conversation had been that they had become jaded with the charms of their Allied girls. Perhaps Betty June Alan was too readily available and had lost her mystique. They decided that capturing the prettiest of the Axis girls would not only be a coup for the Allies but would afford them some “fresh meat,” as Sog had been heard to express it.

Gypsy had developed such a fondness for Old Jarhead, the mule that Willard had mysteriously provided for the Dingletoons, that she had taken to using it as a riding animal whenever she went to visit her friend Ella Jean or even to “pick her up” for a ride to school. Not that any of us needed riding animals to get from one place to another; everything in Stay More, even the outlying hollers and districts, was within reasonable walking distance. Nobody had to walk as far as I did when I was on my rounds delivering the Star or collecting news for it, but everybody did a lot of walking. Gypsy wasn’t lazy by any means. She just grew so fond of Old Jarhead that she liked to ride the mule, bareback, no bridle, up the steep trail that was a shortcut between the Dingletoon place and the Dinsmore place, and there Ella Jean would climb up behind her and the two girls would ride Old Jarhead to school. Miss Jerram had a strict rule: no mule at school, but Gypsy would tether it out of sight along the bank of Swains Creek.

Gypsy was still in mourning for Mare, of course; she still would be, for months or even years or even forever. Nobody but Ella Jean and I knew that she was. She did her best to conceal her occasional crying spells. Willard Dinsmore was crazy about her, but a bit too shy to let her know. He was always polite and pleasant to her and doing little things for her, but he assumed that such a pretty girl wouldn’t be interested in a scrawny bespectacled plain and homely guy like him—not knowing that her only lover, Mare, had been even plainer and more homely. It was all I could do, sometimes, to keep myself from taking Willard aside and telling him the true facts of the matter in order to give him a goad to pursue his infatuation with her.

Sog Alan and Larry Duckworth planned to waylay Gypsy on the trail up to the Dinsmore house, before she was within earshot of the house in case she hollered. Sammy heard them talking about just how they’d do it: Sog would pull her off the mule, Larry would stuff a gag into her mouth, they’d tie her up with rope, leaving her legs untied, and make her walk off through the woods to the bluffs that rise above Banty Creek, low bluffs with ledges leading into caverns where the ancient Bluff Dwellers had made shelters.

Sammy reported the conversation between Larry and Sog, when Larry had wondered aloud, “But then what? How long d’ye aim to keep her in the cave?”

“As long as we wanter,” Sog had said. “Until we caint think of nothin else to do with her.”

“And then what? Just let her go? She’d be sure to tell on us.”

Sog had pondered this, as if it hadn’t occurred to him. “Maybe she’d like us so much by then,” he had boastfully suggested, “that she wouldn’t want to tell nobody.”

“What if she hates us instead?”

“Then I reckon we’d just have to do away with her.”

“You mean kill her? That’d bother some folks.”

“Naw, wouldn’t nobody miss her.”

But Willard, you can be sure, when he heard Sammy’s tale, was one person who would miss her. He was furious, and I thought he would lose his self-control and reveal to the others his true feelings for her. He had to take a while to calm himself down and plan a course of action.

First he had to make sure that Sammy had done his listening in secret, without any detection from the conspirators. He didn’t want to get Sammy into trouble if they knew who had tipped us off. Then he had to decide whether or not to tell Gypsy, and he decided not to tell her—not because he was too shy to talk to her, but because if he told her, she might not want to go through with our plan to foil the abduction. We kept the whole operation a secret from all except the inner council of the Axis: Willard, Joe Don, Sammy, and myself. We were each armed with a cane spear, and of course I had my slingshot. In view of the enormity of the crime we were going to foil, it would have been nice if we’d had firearms, but all such had disappeared in the War Effort Scrap Drive, even our trusty BB guns. We had a complete arsenal of wooden rifles, wooden pistols, wooden machine guns, wooden mortars, wooden flamethrowers, wooden bazookas, wooden bowie knives, wooden bayonets, and even a wooden howitzer, but while all of these were essential to our warfare with the Allies, they wouldn’t do any harm in a “real” situation. I did, however, prepare myself for the mission by filling my overall pockets with some good smooth stones for my slingshot. I was never allowed to use actual stones in my slingshot during our battles with the Allies, but had to content myself with stale biscuits, various berries, or peanuts.

Sammy could not find out for us just what particular morning the conspirators were planning to kidnap Gypsy. All we knew was that it would be a school morning. Willard recruited one of the Axis littluns, his kid brother Jim George, only seven but fleet of foot, to begin hiding out at the foot of the trail as it turns up the mountain from the Butterchurn Holler road. Willard himself would be concealed at the top of the trail, Joe Don and me spread out along the middle of the trail at strategic intervals. Whichever one of us caught sight or wind of the Allied captors would alert the others by the whistle of the bobwhite, which we practiced in advance to make sure that even Jim George knew how to pucker and whistle it. I had been hearing the same notes on Latha’s radio as part of a commercial for a soap, “Rinso White, Rinso Bright, Happy Little Washday Song.” Of course there actually were a good many bobwhites (Colinus virginianus, or quail) in our purlieus, so we hoped that no real bobwhite would be a-calling at the time we had to broadcast the signal. I hoped that I would have the privilege of being the first to use it.

Day after day we staked out that trail early in the morning before school, and had whatever fun there was in watching Gypsy atop Old Jarhead climbing the trail each morning on her way to pick up Ella Jean. We began to wonder—or Willard and I exchanged speculations—that Sammy might have either got his facts wrong or had made up the whole thing as some kind of hoax or even—dared we say it? Sammy might have been doubling back in his double-agentry, and was concocting the whole thing as part of an Allied plot.

Joe Don told us that Gypsy might soon have to stop riding Old Jarhead, because the Dingletoons would need the mule to do their spring plowing, a job that would fall mostly to Joe Don and leave the poor old mule too tired to furnish transportation for Gypsy and Ella Jean. We were just about ready to give up the vigil when, one morning, the bob-white whistle came from the post of Joe Don himself, and we gathered up our spears and sneaked to his post, where he announced, pointing, “Sog and them are a-hiding right down yonder.”

“Let’s get ’em!” I said, excited.

“No,” said Willard. “We have to catch ’em in the act. We caint just take for granted they’re gonna do it.” He turned to his kid brother Jim George and asked, “Did ye see her yet?”

“Yep, she’s on her way.”

We got as close as we could to the Allies’ ambush, and waited. We could see Sog and Larry hiding behind trees alongside the trail, Larry holding some rope and some cloth to gag her with.

She came into view, lazily perched on the slow mule. Gypsy was one beautiful girl, and the way her dress was hiked up her legs as she sat astride that old mule made her an easy temptation to a couple of lechers like Sog and Larry. They saw her and we could almost detect their evil drooling and panting.

We waited. Willard was going to give us the signal, and we couldn’t move until he did.

Sog and Larry jumped. Sog reached up and pulled Gypsy off of Old Jarhead, and Larry hit the mule with his rope to make the mule take off. But Old Jarhead just stayed there, wondering what was going on. Gypsy began cursing, and I was surprised she knew some of those words. I had a good rock in my slingshot, but Sog was holding Gypsy tight while Larry cut off her cursing by stuffing the rag in her mouth, and I couldn’t get a clear shot at either of them without hitting her. Half a dozen other Allies came out of the woods, armed with cane spears, but I was too busy to notice just who they were…except Sammy.

Willard made his signal, then sprang for Sog and pulled him away from Gypsy and threw him to the ground. Joe Don hit Larry on the face with one hand while plucking the gag from his sister’s mouth with the other. Then he hit Larry again, hard enough to knock him down. “Git Old Jarhead and git gone!” he said to Gypsy. She tried to climb back on the mule, but Sog shoved Willard down, and grabbed her. Willard got to his feet and pulled Sog away from Gypsy and wrestled him to the ground.

The other Allies rushed us, and even Sammy made a show of being on their side, and gave me a harmless poke with his spear, and grabbed for my slingshot. I remembered all the times when as much younger kids he and I used to throw rocks at each other. We were never friends. So I hit him on the shoulder with a mighty swing, pulling my punch at the last instant, the way I’d seen actors do in Western movie barroom brawls. I wasn’t a fighter, anyway, not for real, at least: in the play-like battles of the trenches and foxholes I could sham an affray with the best of them, but, as befits a newspaperman preferring the power of the pen over the sword, I didn’t have much experience with real fighting.

The Axis were outnumbered. While Willard was holding his own against the older and bigger and tougher Sog, and Joe Don was having little trouble with Larry, the Axis couldn’t handle those man-to-man combats when they had a bunch of Allies surrounding them with jabbing spears. Willard could only swat at the spears with one hand while trying to hit Sog with the other, and it wasn’t good enough: Sog knocked him down repeatedly. One of the Allies actually punctured Joe Don’s arm with a spear, and it was bleeding, and Larry was getting the best of him.

Two of the Allies were holding me on the ground while Sammy pretended to kick me. I lay there as if I were witnessing the whole thing from a distance, imagining a description of it in a news item for the Star: ALLIES FOILED IN KIDNAP PLOT BUT WIN FIGHT WITH AXIS. Gypsy had not succeeded in remounting Old Jarhead but was instead joining the fight herself, slapping any Ally who came within reach of her roundhouse palm. Four Allies had to use their spears from the four directions of the compass to keep her at bay long enough for Larry, who had conked her brother cold with a rock, to stuff the gag back in her mouth and tie her up.

Willard had lost his glasses and couldn’t see too well without them, and got his face in the way of a haymaker swing from Sog, which knocked him out. Little Jim George and I remained the only Axis still conscious. “Git help!” I urged him, and he took off up the trail, but two Allies ran him down.

It was all over for us, and for poor Gypsy, who was now bound and gagged and about to be taken off to some cave and subjected to unspeakable molestations.

“Leave her alone!” I said from my horizontal position on the ground.

Sog took time out from his preparations for departure to step over and kick me in the face. It hurt like hell, and I think his toenail gouged my cheek. “Hey Ernie,” he said to me, “didn’t that broken arm not learn you nothing?”

He drew back his foot to give me another, more vicious kick. The proverbial stars exploded in the blackness of my skull.

Chapter eleven

When I came to, I was staring up at Gypsy’s pretty face. She was no longer bound and gagged, and she was smiling at me. She was holding the reins to her mule, who was beside her. Joe Don and Willard were also sitting up, staring at her while they slowly got their bearings back. She waited patiently while the three of us regained consciousness, but it was clear she was bursting to tell us something. “The marveloustest thing happened!” she said. And finally she told us the story.

When the three of us had been rendered unconscious by the goons, who had then started off with their prize, Gypsy, a rifle had fired. Gypsy hadn’t known what it was at first, because it had been a long, long time since any of us had heard the sound of a rifle. But it had sounded right nearby, and then the owner of the rifle had appeared, standing in the trail with his feet planted as if he dared anybody to get past him, looming like some giant above mere mortals and mischievous kids, his long beard making him look like one of the Greek gods if not Zeus himself. Gypsy had recognized him from her brother Joe Don’s descriptions: he was a certain privacy-preferring old man known to the Allies as a Nazi spy.

“Howdy, boys,” he had said pleasantly to all of them, and had added, glancing at Gypsy, “and you too, young lady.” He had continued to stare at her, and at her friends flat out on the ground, including one, her brother, who was his friend also. He had continued speaking to Gypsy, “I don’t reckon ye could answer me with that rag in your mouth.”

He had pointed the Winchester at Larry and had said, politely, “Kindly take the rag out of her mouth, and undo those ropes.”

When the gag had been removed from Gypsy’s mouth, and Larry had been untying her, ole Dan had asked her, “Are you okay? Have ye been harmed any?” She had nodded her head to the first question and had shaken it to the second.

The old man had tickled Sog under the chin with the barrel end of the Winchester. “You,” he had said. “I reckon you’re the one started this whole mess, aren’t ye?” Sog had glowered at the old man but had said nothing. “I asked ye a question, boy,” Dan had told him, and had traced his Adam’s apple with the tip of the rifle.

“Yeah,” Sog had said proudly, “I started it.”

“You’re the same one,” Dan had observed, “who’s always snooping around my place, because you think I’m a Nazi spy. Aren’t ye the one?”

“That’s right,” Sog had said. “That’s me.”

“You’ve invaded my privacy,” Dan had said. “And my daughter’s privacy. Do you know, I could easily have shot you? If you weren’t careful, you could discover a bullet hole right there between your bushy eyebrows, and wonder how ye got it. So I’ll tell ye here and now: I have done had enough of you! I don’t want any more of you! Get gone and don’t let me see ye again.”

Sog had sullenly taken off, and his Allies had gone with him. And ole Dan had waited just long enough to see that the three of us were beginning to revive before he had bid her good day and disappeared himself.

When Gypsy finished telling this, I exclaimed, “It sure is great to have him on our side!”

“He aint on our side,” Joe Don corrected me. “He just aint got no use for no foolishness, no matter which side it comes from.”

Willard said, “Well, they’ll think twice before they try a stunt like that again.”

The Allies began to behave themselves, comparatively. At school that day Miss Jerram could not help noticing that all of us were dirty, scuffed, and disheveled, and that those of us on the Axis side of the aisle seemed to have gotten the worst of it. “Have you Armies been fighting again?” she asked.

“Yes’m,” Jim John Whitter admitted. “And we won, this time!”

“That’s a lie,” I yelled at him. “You lost, on account of—”

“Hush, Dawny,” Willard commanded me.

But the Allies smugly refused to accept the notion that the Battle of Dinsmore Trail, as we came to call it, had been an Allied rout. Just as other battles of ours had been inconclusive owing to forces beyond our control—baseball games had been rained out, or a crucial engagement in the trenches had been interrupted by mothers calling their children to do chores or to eat supper—the Battle of Dinsmore Trail had been suspended by divine intervention in the form of a Zeus-like god who sided with the Athenians against the Trojans. The Allies believed—and rightly so—that they had already won the battle until he came along.

But the Battle of Dinsmore Trail had differed from all our other battles in that the stakes were much higher, the spoils of war more serious. The only spoils of a ball game is the final score. The only spoils of trench warfare is a bit of territory that is given back sooner or later. But the spoils of Dinsmore Trail was the living, breathing, lovely body of a girl, who was spared from untold assault of a lascivious nature. Thus, the divine intervention was not only necessary but morally right.

Satisfied that they’d won the battle if not the outcome, the Allies behaved themselves only long enough to permit some very important things to happen outside our control, outside our world, things that would change our own little lives—or at least mine—forever. The first of these was revealed to us when Latha came into the office of the Star late one Thursday afternoon, carrying her radio, which was running, and said, “Dawny, listen here to the radio! The president is dead!”

“Which president?” I asked.

“Of our country,” she said. “President Roosevelt died.”

She fiddled with the dial, and picked up a station, but all of the stations were announcing the same thing: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aged sixty-three, had died of a cerebral hemorrhage at Warm Springs, Georgia, while sitting to have his portrait painted. Harry Truman of Missouri was going to be sworn in as the new president.

“What’s a cerebral hemorrhage?” I asked Latha.

“I think it’s where your brain just bursts from all the blood in it,” she said.

“And it killed him?” I asked incredulously, not willing to accept the fact that our president no longer existed.

“He’s dead,” she said.

Time stopped. Somehow it seemed as if this was the end of the world. I would learn that most other people felt the same way, but for me, who never had a father nor a grandfather, at least not worth mentioning, it seemed a personal loss beyond measure. THE PRESIDENT. He was the president when I was born and I was nearly twelve years old and expected him always to be president. I started crying, which I rarely did. I looked at Latha, and she was crying too, and then she reached out her arms and held me, and we both had a good long cry.

Upset as I was, I wanted to just take off running across the hills until I found a place where nobody ever died anymore. But I had the presence of mind to remember my duty: as a newspaperman, I had to bring out an Extra. The Stay Morning Star had never had an Extra before, not even when Mare died. But here it was late Thursday afternoon, and the next issue not due until Monday morning. Latha wanted to rush out and spread the news, but I asked her kindly to give me a chance to get my Extra out first, and I went right to work on that hectograph, penciling the magic purple master copy as fast as I could, with a headline that covered practically the whole front of the page: F.D.R. NO MORE. On the back side of the page I transcribed all of the meager facts that the radio was offering about the circumstances of his death, and I even included an editorial, “Much as we like our neighbor Harry Truman, we don’t see how he or anybody else could possibly know how to be president.” Then at the top of the first page I wrote “I¢” and drew a circle around it, and put the pages to bed in the gelatin, quickly printing fifty copies. I gave some to Latha to sell to anybody who came in the store, and then I said, “Go ahead and tell whoever you want.”

“We ought to ring the school bell,” she suggested. I looked at her as if she’d suggested we ought to fly to the moon. Nobody ever rang the school bell, certainly not for school. We knew there was an old bell up there in the little wooden cupola atop the ridge-pole of the schoolhouse, but I couldn’t remember ever having heard it ring. “If we ring the bell,” Latha offered, “everybody will come a-running, and you can sell the paper like hotcakes.”

“I never sold hotcakes,” I said. But she had a great idea, and we put it into effect. Without even stopping to ask Miss Jerram’s permission (she probably wouldn’t have granted it), we went into the foyer of the schoolhouse and I climbed the crude ladder nailed into the wall that led to the bell’s cupola, where an old rope was coiled. Latha explained that the rope used to be hanging down so you could just reach out and pull it to ring the bell, but the rope hadn’t been needed for years so it was stored away up there. I got it and pulled it, and Latha helped pull it, and sure enough that old bell commenced a-pealing, crashing these big round gongs that sounded like “bomb!” and “doom!” depending on whether the clapper was hitting one side or the other as the bell swung from the rope’s tug.

As Latha had predicted, people came running, starting with Miss Jerram, from just across the road. “Dawny!” she hollered. “That bell don’t never ring!”

I held out a paper. “Extra!” I hollered back at her. “Extra! Read all about it!” She took one of the sheets, and I added, “One cent only.”

“Do ye want me to have to run back over to the house to get a penny, or can you just extend my credit until the next time I see ye?” She took a look at the paper’s oversized headline, and asked Latha, as if she didn’t trust me, “Is this true?” and when Latha nodded, Miss Jerram burst into tears.

Other people were running up to see why the bell had been ringing, and I was collecting pennies right and left. All in all, I made twenty-eight cents that day, probably the most I’d ever earned in one day in my life, and I was beginning to believe that I was destined truly to follow in the footsteps of Ernie Pyle.

Miss Jerram canceled school for one day in Roosevelt’s memory. She had never missed a day of school before. Since that day was Friday, we didn’t meet again until Monday. It was a long weekend. Folks wanted to know how I had picked up the news of the president’s death so quickly, and while I refused to tell, Latha finally admitted to Doc Swain that she had a radio. Naturally she offered to let him listen to it, as her husband Every Dill was already doing, and their daughter Sonora, whose husband Captain Hank Ingledew was in the Pacific, and Sonora’s friends Doris and Jelena Dinsmore, whose husband Billy Bob Ingledew was fighting in Germany…and before long there was a huge crowd at Latha’s store wanting to hear the radio and listening not only to all the follow-ups and tributes on the death of FDR but also to the symphonic music and, after a while, the return to regular programming, with Let’s Pretend and Grand Central Station and Meet Corliss Archer, and even all of those endless commercials for Rinso and Lucky Strike and Wheaties. I realized the radio could very easily put my newspaper out of business, and I was sorry that the rest of the town knew that Latha had a radio and was willing to share the sounds coming from it.

But she had to impose restrictions. When folks started trying to hear shows by Jack Benny or Edgar Bergen that went on past her usual hour for shutting up the store, she told me to post in the next issue of the Star an announcement to the effect that the radio would be available for listening only for two hours before and after the usual time that the mail truck came in the morning and the mail was put up in the boxes. Even so, for four hours a day people crowded into the store to listen, and while they were there they often bought something from the store, particularly soda pop and candy when it was on some rare occasion available, and Latha realized the radio was good for business. Her restrictions didn’t apply to me: if I wanted to hear Captain Midnight or Hop Harrigan or Terry and the Pirates after the regular listening hours, she would let me, and I gladly donated the twenty-eight cents I’d earned from that Extra to the cost of helping replace her radio’s battery. Some of the other listeners chipped in also, and we began buying her a new battery pretty often.

Latha opened the store every morning (except Sundays) at six-thirty, as she had been doing ever since she’d bought the store from Bob Cluley back in 1932. Since the mail truck came about ten o’clock, she wouldn’t turn on her radio before eight for the benefit of any customers, and by then I was usually in school. But the Wednesday morning after the president’s tragic end, as I was on my way to school Latha came out on the store porch and said “Dawny” and beckoned to me. I climbed the porch. “Come inside,” she said, and held the door open for me. There weren’t any customers in the store yet; it was too early for the radio to go on. But the radio was on. “Sit down,” she said. I sat on one of the straight-backed chairs that were scattered here and there around the store. “I was listening to the news a while ago,” she said. “You know, sometimes before I unlock the store of a morning, I catch the six o’clock news.” She paused, took a deep breath, and I waited. “I don’t know how to tell you this, Dawny. If it breaks your heart, I’m going to hate myself for having to be the one who told you.”

“Please tell me, whatever it is,” I said. “I can take it.”

“Not this,” she said, shaking her head sadly. “This is going to keep you out of school. This is going to lay you lower than I’ve ever known you to be.”

“Am I going to have to bring out another Extra?” I asked, wondering what it could be. Had Harry Truman died too? Or been assassinated?

She smiled wanly and said, “Maybe you’ll want to, if you can.”

“Well, I’m a newspaperman. I’m brave. Like Ernie Pyle, I can put up with anything.”

Latha sobbed. She buried her face in her hands, and when she could finally raise her blurry eyes to me, she said, quietly, “That’s it. Ernie Pyle has been killed. On some island in the Pacific. The Japanese shot him.”

“Don’t tease me, Latha,” I said sternly.

“Oh, Dawny,” she said. “I wouldn’t tease you.” And she began fiddling with the radio, trying to find a station that might be broadcasting news. But unlike the day Roosevelt died, the stations apparently didn’t feel that Ernie Pyle’s death was worth constant announcement.

I was too stunned to have any immediate feeling at all. I had no feeling whatsoever. My mind couldn’t even manufacture some disbelief. I waited while Latha changed the dial from one station to another. There weren’t very many stations that could be picked up during the daytime. It was better at night. “Did they say if they checked his dogtags to be sure it was him?” I asked. She shook her head. “Did they say if he had any last words or anything?” I asked. She shook her head. “Did they say what the soldiers thought about it?” I asked.

“No, they just told what happened,” she said.

“Did they get the Jap who did it?” I asked.

“They didn’t say,” she said, fiddling with the dial.

Soon it was eight o’clock and people were wanting to get into the store to hear their favorite morning shows on the radio. Latha did something I’d never known her to do before during store hours: she turned the OPEN/CLOSED sign so that CLOSED was facing the world. People stood outside looking through the windows, and some of them knocked on the door, but Latha wouldn’t open it.

Finally, during the commercial break of some show, an announcer said, “This news bulletin came from Blue Network Correspondent Jack Hooley broadcasting from Ie Shima, four miles west of Okinawa, where at ten-fifteen A.M.—or last night U.S. time—Ernie Pyle, America’s greatest frontline war reporter, was killed by Jap machine-gun fire.

“Pyle was riding in a jeep with Colonel Joseph Coolidge of Arkansas, commanding officer, when a burst of fire sent them scrambling out of their jeep into a roadside ditch. After a few minutes they peered over the edge of the ditch, and the Jap machine gunner, concealed on a ridge, opened fire again. Colonel Coolidge ducked back to find Pyle dead beside him, shot three times through the temple. ‘He never knew what hit him,’” Coolidge said.

I yelled at the radio, “Did they git the Jap?”

“Just before Pyle had left to join the invasion of Ie Shima, he had told another correspondent that he didn’t want to go. But he said the GIs didn’t want to be there either, and that he was going along until the shooting was finished.

“Admiral Nimitz called him ‘one of the greatest heroes of the war,’ although Pyle never fired a shot. This message just in from the White House: President Truman said, ‘The nation is quickly saddened again by the death of Ernie Pyle…’”

I demanded of President Truman, “But did they kill the Jap that shot him?” And I began crying in frustration that I did not know. I would never know. For the first time, I was greatly ashamed to be a Jap. I didn’t want to be Jap any more. I didn’t want to be anything, I didn’t want to ship out across the Pacific and take Ernie Pyle’s place on the front lines. I didn’t want to run a newspaper. But it was as if two ghosts were returning from the dead to give me orders: Mare telling me that I had to be Jap for his sake, and Ernie telling me that I had to keep on putting out the newspaper for his sake.

“Thank you,” I said to Latha. “You might as well open the store.” And I went into my newspaper office and cleaned my hectograph and took my magic purple pencil and began hand-lettering another Extra. Out of respect for the late president, the letters of the headline weren’t nearly as large, but still they took up a good deal of the front page: ERNIE PYLE IS KILLED. My editorial was tearstained and blurry, but legible: “He died as he lived, with his boots on, in the front lines. Soldiers everywhere lost a buddy. Young newspapermen everywhere lost their finest ideal.” In the news story itself I further editorialized: “We should be proud that the person with him when he died, the last person he saw on this earth, was an Arkansawyer, Colonel Joseph Coolidge of Helena, commander of the 77th Infantry Division.”

Before I put the Extra to bed, another bulletin came in on the radio and Latha summoned me to listen to a transcription of an interview with Colonel Coolidge describing Ernie’s last moments. The Arkansawyer felt that the Jap sniper might have detected a glint from the antenna of the colonel’s radio and assumed this meant a commanding officer, and thus opened fire at the jeep after letting other vehicles pass. Colonel Coolidge reported that after they had ducked into their ditch, Ernie had raised his head and smiled and asked, “Are you all right?” The Jap fired again, and those were Ernie’s last words, directed to an officer near him but symbolically meant for me.

For the rest of my life, I would hear Ernie Pyle occasionally asking me, “Are you all right?”

I didn’t need Latha to go with me to ring the bell. School was still in session when I got there, and I was tempted to explain to Miss Jerram why I was absent, but I just went ahead and started ringing the bell. Miss Jerram was at the head of the pupils as they all rushed into the foyer to see who was doing it, and Miss Jerram hollered, “You again, Dawny! Now who’s the Extra for?”

I gave her a copy, and then, since I wasn’t going to give away Extras that were worth one cent each, I announced to all my classmates, “Anybody got a penny? Here’s another Extra.” But nobody had a penny on them. So I let them have one copy free, suggesting, “Pass it around.”

“Dawny,” Miss Jerram said sternly, “you can’t just go a-ringing the bell anytime you take a notion. This Pyle feller may not be as big a man to the rest of us as he was to you.”

“What do you know?” I demanded of her. “Just what in hell do you know?”

“You go stand in the corner!” she commanded me. “You caint talk to me like that!” She held out a long finger pointing to a corner of the schoolroom.

But the first customers summoned by the bell were arriving in the schoolyard, and I ignored her in order to peddle the Extra to them. They were, I was disappointed to discover, disappointed. The ones who paid a penny demanded their money back after finding out the reason for the Extra. Others had to know the reason for the Extra before making payment, and then refused to pay. Later I discovered that the dozen copies I’d left for Latha to sell in the store remained unsold. All told, only four copies of my second Extra were eventually purchased, not enough to pay for the paper it was printed on.

I don’t know which made me feel worse, Ernie Pyle’s death or the fact that nobody cared. It was hard for me to distinguish the two reasons for feeling miserable. I didn’t go back to school for the rest of the week. Latha didn’t mind me hanging around the store, and she even gave me a few chores to keep my mind and hands busy, but no doubt she was getting tired of the sight of me moping around all over the place.

Two days after the Jap killed Ernie, although it wasn’t on the radio and we wouldn’t know about it for another week or so, William Robert Ingledew was killed in the siege of Berlin. Billy Bob was Hank’s kid brother, a carpenter by trade, who was the husband of either Jelena or Doris Dinsmore, Ella Jean’s and Willard’s twin big sisters, or maybe the husband of both, and the father of a baby girl, Jelena, that one or the other of them gave birth to. It was ironic that the war in Europe was practically over—if it hadn’t been, Ernie Pyle would have still been there instead of on those stinking Japanese islands, but in one of the last battles necessary to take the German capital, Billy Bob, like Ernie, had been killed by sniper fire.

When the War Department notified us of Billy Bob’s death, there was pressure on me to bring out another Extra. But I had learned my lesson with the failure of the Pyle Extra. Some folks and kids thought that I was prejudiced against Billy Bob because he had been a member of the Allies before he’d taken up full time husbanding with Jelena and Doris. I didn’t hold his Allied views against him. I just had never known him very well, certainly not as I had known Mare, and I argued that since there hadn’t been an Extra for Mare Coe, there shouldn’t be one for Billy Bob.

As a concession, I devoted one regular issue of the Star to Billy Bob’s death, with his obituary and announcement of the memorial service, and stories about the collapse of Berlin and the way those Italians had killed their dictator, Mussolini, and his mistress and strung them up upside down. That regular four-page issue had gone to press and was waiting for delivery on Monday morning when, as I was delivering the copies for Latha to put in the post office boxes, she told me the six o’clock news had reported that Adolf Hitler and his wife Eva Braun had committed suicide in Berlin. Now that was cause for an Extra, but there I was with a regular issue about to go out, so I just folded an extra Extra sheet inside of it with a big headline HITLER QUITS. I sold a few of those, too, in addition to all the ones that went to all the subscribers anyhow. And most people didn’t know that the Extra wasn’t for Billy Bob.

All of these Extras, and all of this constant news coming from Washington, Europe, and the Pacific, gave all of us in sleepy, tranquil Stay More the sense of being caught up in some cosmic storm of events that threatened to stir each of us out of our ordinary selves and make us feel as if we were participating in history. History was a subject in school that bored most of us to death, no fault of Miss Jerram’s, but now we were eyewitnesses to it, learning how to live with the fact that history kills—it takes from us our heroes and our neighbors and our friends, and it takes from each of us that self who had dwelled in a Golden Age of innocence and idyllic harmony.

The onrush of that history thundered into our own little world of make-believe warfare and snatched us up. Whatever angels had been watching over our play decided they needed a vacation, a break from the chore of guardianship, and they went to sleep. The Allies, so-called, taking revenge upon Gypsy for their failure to kidnap her, kidnapped instead her mule, Old Jarhead, and drove it into the woods, and cornered it, and speared it, and beat it until it died.

Chapter twelve

When the rustling, the chasing, the trapping, the stabbing, and the brutal cudgeling of Old Jarhead were reported to us by Sammy, he was in a state of shock himself and had decided to quit the Allies forever. “If you’uns need a spy to find out their doings and their secrets, you’uns will jist have to git somebody else!” he declared, beginning to cry. “I don’t want nothing to do with them no more.”

Eight boys and four girls, ranging in age from seven to seventeen, had committed felony criminal mischief by terrorizing and beating to death an innocent thirty-year-old mule, who had worked hard all its life for its human masters and had trusted them to be kind to it. Larry Duckworth had opened the mule’s gate in the Dingletoon shed and attempted to capture the animal, which had escaped and fled into the woods, where all the other members of the heinous gang called “Allies” pursued it, piercing it with their cane spears, driving it ultimately into a barbed wire fence where it became entangled and broke its leg. The Allies then proceeded to hit the mule with baseball bats and sticks. Jim John Whitter even stuck a stick up the mule’s nostril, inflicting such pain that one of the Allied girls, Rosa Faye Duckworth, fainted. Two other girls helped put the mule out of its misery by clubbing it upon the brain, causing the mule to lose consciousness.

Nobody ever put out an Extra of a newspaper over the death of an animal, but I was tempted. That was my reaction, and the editorial was already writing itself in my head. Gypsy’s reaction to the loss of her mule and pet was greater grief than she had shown over the death of Mare; she was nearly hysterical in her sorrow and anger. Ella Jean’s reaction was to suggest that we ought to go to Jasper and get the sheriff and have all the Allies arrested and locked up—which, come to think of it, would probably have been the wisest legal course. Willard’s reaction puzzled me. He who had obtained the mule somehow somewhere in the first place as an anonymous act of charity for the Dingletoons, and who was seething with controlled rage not only because of that but because he was crazy about Gypsy and sharing her grief for her mule, said that we should leave the sheriff out of it, leave all of the grown-ups out of it, in accordance with our policy. I expected Willard, as commander of the Axis, to declare that we were now officially at war with the Allies. Never mind that we had been “at war” with them for years. All of that had been fun and games. We now existed in a state of real deliberate serious all-out wide-open take-no-prisoners War. But Willard just said, “Let’s not be hasty.”

“Hasty, hell,” Joe Don swore, and went off to see the old hermit Dan and request the loan of his Winchester, the one serviceable firearm in town. I think Joe Don actually intended to inflict bodily harm upon each and every one of the Allies. He was upset not so much over the loss of an animal necessary for the Dingletoons to earn their livelihood—although spring plowing was long finished and they really wouldn’t need a mule again until first haying, and they could borrow someone’s mule for that—as over the senseless cruelty of the mule’s murder.

But Joe Don returned from ole Dan to report that the hermit, after asking for and listening to Joe Don’s reasons for wanting to borrow the rifle, politely turned him down, arguing, quite rightly, that shooting any of the Allies would be criminal and would make Joe Don liable to imprisonment. And apart from the old saw that two wrongs never make a right, it wasn’t the best way of dealing with the matter, ole Dan counseled. “He just tole me,” Joe Don reported, “that his best advice was for us not to think about revenge but some kind of ‘victory that could be had through peace rather than war.’”

“Huh?” Sammy said.

“He tole me what ole Ben Franklin said one time,” Joe Don reported, “which is, ‘Whatever is begun in anger, ends in shame.’ He thought the best thing to do would be for us all to just cool off for a few days. He said that if we let our hatred make us violent, we sink below those we hate. We’d be worse than the Allies.”

“So what are we supposed to do?” I asked. “Just pretend nothing happened?”

“For a few days, anyhow,” Joe Don said.

“I’m for that,” Willard said, “but I reckon we’d best take a vote on it.” We summoned all the Axis together and spent hours arguing the advice of ole Dan. Some of us still wanted to go around to the houses of each of the Allies and drag them bodily out of their houses and string them up. Some of us, however, were impressed with the wisdom of the old hermit, and argued that there could be a greater victory through shaming the Allies instead of destroying them. Finally, the vote was not in favor of Peace rather than War so much as it was in favor of Patience rather than Immediate Bloodshed. I could live with that, and didn’t need to bring out an Extra to announce it.

“Just remember,” Willard concluded, “that the Allies don’t even know that we know about it. Not yet anyhow. Let’s not get Sammy in trouble by telling anybody we know.”

But apparently the Allies expected us to have found out about Old Jarhead, and they were expecting our instant retaliation. The next day, all the Allies came to school equipped not only with whatever weapons they could lay hands on—their spears, their slingshots, their baseball bats, and the same sticks they’d used to kill Old Jarhead—but also they came to school equipped with Sog, who was no longer a pupil, having graduated. As everybody took their seats, each of the Allies cast anxious glances across the aisle at us, but we tried our best to look innocently ignorant of whatever they’d done. It was hard, because we held all of them in such contempt.

“Well, Sugrue,” Miss Jerram said to the despot of the Allies, “I thought we got rid of you last year. To what do we owe the pleasure of this visit?” Her voice dripped with such sarcasm, particularly on that word “pleasure,” that I immediately suspected somebody may have told her about Old Jarhead.

“I’m just here to watch out for my friends,” Sog declared, and gestured expansively with both hands at his fellow Allies.

“How come you and all your friends is armed?” she asked, and stepped down from her platform to snatch up one of the sticks that an Allied littlun, second grader Troy Bullen, was carrying.

“Just to pertect us from our enemies,” Sog said.

“But looks to me like not none of your enemies is armed,” Miss Jerram observed. And for once in my life I had to admire the lady’s intelligence. She commanded, “I want each of you Allies to take your sticks and stones and such and pile ’em on my desk.” There was considerable hesitation and reluctance among the Allies, so she suggested, “You first, Sugrue. Put that ball bat on my desk now!”

“I aint your scholar no more,” he declared. “You caint boss me around.”

She narrowed her eyes at him, “Sugrue Alan, you never were my scholar! You never had the sense to be in school in the first place. But you’re in my schoolhouse, and I’m giving ye a choice: put your ball bat on my desk or git out of here!” She pointed to show him where the door was, as if he were too stupid to find it on his own.

Sog took his baseball bat and not-so-gently banged it down on top of her desk and left it there. One by one each of the other Allies deposited their weapons there, until they were spilling off onto the floor. I decided I’d had a secret crush on Miss Jerram all these years.

Then a strange thing happened. Rosa Faye Duckworth, Larry’s thirteen-year-old sister, who supposedly had fainted during the torture of Old Jarhead, stood up and requested of the teacher, “Ma’am, could I move to the other side?”

“Rosa Faye, you may,” Miss Jerram said, without meaning to rhyme.

“Sis!” Larry Duckworth hollered as she collected all her stuff and came across the aisle. “You jist wait till I git you up to the house!”

Miss Jerram informed him, “Larry, you have spoken out of turn without permission. Go stand in the corner.” Rosa Faye accompanied his progress there with the sticking out of her tongue at him.

The only empty place on the Axis side was at my desk. You were sitting there, but you gladly stood because you knew I didn’t mind her sitting with me. Rosa Faye wasn’t much to look at, and I wasn’t accustomed to having a seatmate, but I scooted over a little bit so she could sit here. “Hi,” she said to me, and I returned the greeting. She had gathered up all her stuff from her desk—books, thick pencils, Indian Chief tablet, her homework, a yellow chiffon scarf, a broken chain necklace with a heart locket, a comb with broken teeth, a moldy apple, a length of licorice, a piece of broken mirror, a red plastic hair barrette, a rose shade of lipstick in a beat-up tube, and a tiny empty coin purse with a snap fastener—and we opened the top of my desk so she could crowd all that stuff in among my stuff.

Two Allied littluns, Troy Bullen and his girl deskmate Suke Whitter, stood up and Troy said, “Ma’am, we’d like to move to the other side too.”

“Well, your desk is screwed to the floor,” Miss Jerram observed, “and we won’t take the time to unscrew it just now. But you can sit temporary at the recitation bench.”

So two more of the Allies defected. There were only nine of them left. “Heck,” Sog belittled the abandonment. “They aint nothin but two sissy gals and a yellow momma’s boy.”

Sog’s sister Betty June, the former slut, stood and said, “Ma’am, there’s one more sissy gal wants to step across the aisle.”

Sog grabbed her by the wrist and snarled, “Juner, you jist do that and I’ll kill ye.”

She did that.

He didn’t kill her.

But there weren’t any empty seats on the Axis side. Since Sammy Coe had already returned to his desk on our side, Betty June had to sit temporarily with the littluns on the recitation bench, which, we soon discovered, wouldn’t be needed for recitation that day.

“Well, boys and girls,” Miss Jerram said, and began rubbing her hands together. “We’ve taken up a lot of our time with this little business, so we’d best be a-movin on. We’ve got a lot to learn today. How would you’uns like to go on a little field trip?” It was an odd question, since we had never been on a field trip, not that anybody could recall, and weren’t quite sure just what a field trip was. Did she mean to have us tripping out across the meadow beside the schoolhouse? Or some other field? “It sure is a right nice day for it,” she observed, and grew lyrical. “It’s right sunny and warm and fresh and fragrant out there! The dogwood’s a-bloomin and the redbud’s still aflower, and all the world’s a-comin to bud and bloom and life! Let’s us just leave this musty old schoolhouse and traipsy off hither and yon up hill and down dale.” Her smile grew for a while longer, but then it disappeared. Her voice was elegiac: “But the purpose of our field trip is sorrowful as well as educational. We are going to conduct a funeral for a mule.”

How had she known? Who would have told her? I glanced at defector Rosa Faye beside me, but she was just as astonished as I was. I looked back behind me at Willard and Joe Don, and they both were sharing my curiosity and surprise. But I think the possible answer occurred to them about the time it hit me. Ole Dan had told her! Could it be, I wondered, that unbeknownst to all of us, the old bachelor or widowered hermit had been “friends” with this spinster schoolteacher? For years perhaps? Nobody had ever seen them together. Had they ever spoken to each other? The idea of it, that our pretty but lonely schoolmistress was secretly the mistress of the strange but heroic recluse, was a story that not even Ernie Pyle could have told.

Whatever the case, she knew that Old Jarhead lay brutally slain in the woods of Butterchurn Holler, and she conducted us on our very first field trip. “You lead, Sugrue,” she ordered Sog, and she walked beside him with the rest of us following two by two according to our classroom seating. Rosa Faye walked beside me; I didn’t mind, although she towered above me. As we made the trek, Miss Jerram talked continuously to us, including Sog, not about anything of interest seen along the route, not about tree identification or birds or the geology of the Stay More uplift, but about generosity of soul, kindness, and responsibility. “Nobody on this hike,” she said, “is Allied or Axis. Everybody on this little pilgrimage is a fair-minded human being without allegiance to any fellowship or creed or body or even desire. Even if we are naturally low and fell and dull—like you, Sugrue—we will pretend that we are wise and noble and kind. If we are so good at making believe that we are mighty warriors when we are not, then we can try with all our might to see ourselves as nice folk, seraphim and cherubim, angels, though we are not.” I decided that my crush on Miss Jerram all these years had not been secret, merely unexpressed.

Sog’s face never took on the lineaments of a seraph or a cherub but remained sullen and defiant, as he led us out the Butterchurn Holler road and up the mountain to the woods where, at the edge of a field, lay the grayish-brown corpse of a mule. Buzzards with their huge gliderish wings circled overhead and swooped down to join various other forms of life that would have any use for a dead mule and were eagerly at feast: flies, maggots, rodents. Possibly a coyote or possum had already visited during the night. The air was stinky. The littluns held back. Gypsy held back. Other girls would not approach. “My my,” Miss Jerram said, standing as close as she could bear, “did anybody imagine that it would be so terrible?” Then she looked around at us with the glance she used at school to see who had the answer to a question. “Who owns this land?” she asked.

Joe Don held up his hand and said, “Well, I don’t rightly believe it’s part of our forty, which we don’t own anyhow.”

No one else offered any theories about the ownership. “I was about to suggest that the Allies be responsible for digging the grave,” Miss Jerram said, “but then I realized that I have already declared that none of you are Allies or Axis. So I will put it this way: whoever feels partly to blame for the death of this animal should participate in the preparation of the grave, and anybody else who is good-hearted should assist.”

“Dig the grave with what?” Larry Duckworth wanted to know.

“What did you kill the mule with?” Miss Jerram asked, and answered her own question: “Your hands. Your sticks. Your stones. Whatever you can find that will excavate the earth.”

The ones formerly called Allies scouted around and found some rocks that were concavely shaped for scooping, and began digging. Those of us formerly called Axis pitched in and helped, taking turns. It was slow, and a lot of work. Ordinarily it would have been time for morning recess, but we didn’t take recess. We were hoping we could have it all done by noon dinnertime.

A mule requires a pretty big grave, to get its legs and all underground. The mound of gravelly earth grew higher and higher beside the hole. The grave didn’t go down six or eight feet or whatever depth they bury people; it was just deep enough to bury a mule and cover it up good.

Then came the tricky part. “Who will volunteer to help push the remains into the tomb?” Miss Jerram asked, and while she was trying not to discriminate between former Axis and former Allies, she directed these words primarily to the latter. But it required all of us—all who could bear to touch the infested corpse—to push and pull on that body until we got it up to the edge of the hole and needed just one more concerted shove and tug to get it into the grave. Three boys were standing down in the hole pulling the mule’s legs, and when Joe Don shouted a warning, “Here she goes!” two of them scrambled out in time; the third, who was Sog himself, did not get out in time, and the mule’s body toppled into the grave, knocking him down and landing on top of him. The weight of that mule nearly did him in. I wish it had. He lay there screaming in pain for help.

“Let’s just bury him too,” Joe Don suggested.

But after a struggle, and prying up parts of the mule’s body with poles, we managed to extricate Sog, who was as ugly as his heart: covered with dirt, maggots, some abrasions, sweat, and guilt.

“Are you all right, Sugrue?” Miss Jerram asked, and those were the first kind words she’d ever spoken to him. They were exactly what Ernie Pyle’s voice sometimes asked me. The gentle, caring tone of her voice tipped him over the edge, and he began crying uncontrollably. His own sister, Betty June, had to hold him until he could stop. I have never been able to decide whether Sog was crying because of the unexpected sympathy from Miss Jerram, because of his accident and the pain and chagrin of falling beneath the mule, or out of delayed remorse over killing the mule. Maybe it was an accumulation of all those plus a lifetime of being a holy terror. His fellow former Allies looked greatly embarrassed on his behalf, or, rather, they tried not to look.

When Sog finally ceased sniveling and whimpering, Miss Jerram said, “Now class, I think we should each and everyone take a handful of dirt and each and everyone say something fitting to the occasion and then sprinkle the dirt atop the remains. I’ll start off.” She reached down and filled her hand with fresh earth and held it over the grave. But she stopped. “I’m sorry,” she said. “What was the departed’s name?”

“Old Jarhead,” whispered Gypsy.

Miss Jerram turned back to the grave and said, “Old Jarhead was a beast of burden but not a dumb beast. I never had the privilege of living with a mule but I hear tell they are just about the smartest animal there is. Smarter even than pigs. For all what we might know, Old Jarhead might be smart enough to go on hearing us as we say some words over him. If he can hear us, I want him to know how very sorry we are about what we’ve done to him.” Miss Jerram sprinkled her handful of dirt into the grave.

“Her,” Willard said. “Old Jarhead was a female. Not that it makes no difference.” He reached down and got a handful of earth and held it out over the grave. “Mules is sterile, male or female. Mules can’t breed, maybe that’s why they’re such good workers. She was smart enough, like all mules, to know what she could do and couldn’t do. On a real hot day of work when a horse would wear itself out, a mule will just coast and become lazier to save itself. Mules may seem lazy but they know what they’re doing. Old Jarhead would never’ve fought with other mules the way horses fight among themselves. Mules has the sense not to fight.” He opened his hand and dropped the dirt into the grave.

Joe Don stepped up. “I never knew a horse as smart as you,” he said into the grave. “Horses will pull a load for all their might; mules’ll only use as much of their strength as they have to, and not a pound more. A mule will quit if the load is too heavy; a horse won’t have the sense to. Mules do everything the easy way. Old Jarhead, I wish I could be as easy as you.”

Joe Don’s sister Gypsy was beside him with her handful of dirt, although the tears were streaming down her face. “Good-bye, Old Jarhead,” she said. “I sure did enjoy having you as long as I could. Your little feet were handy in the garden ’cause they never trampled the plants. You got your small feet from your daddy, who also gave you your sure-footedness and your long ears and skinny legs and that silly bray of yours I could hear a mile off. Your momma gave you your shapely body and shapely neck and hard muscles and your height. When your daddy the jackass and your momma the mare got together, they never could’ve imagined that we’d be here right now pining over your death.” Her dirt fell into the grave.

“Anyone else?” Miss Jerram asked. I wanted to say something, but I felt it had all been said. Miss Jerram let her expectant glance fall upon the ringleaders of the Allies and then called them by name. “Larry? James John? Sugrue?” Larry and Jim John hung their heads and avoided her eyes.

Sog’s jaw and lip were still trembling, but he managed to say defiantly, “I never done nothin in my life that I was sorry for.” He looked around at all of us as if challenging anyone to defy that assertion. Then his voice broke. “Until now,” he added. “I wish this hadn’t never of happened. I wish I hadn’t let my pure meanness get the best of me. I wish that mule was still alive. But since she aint, I hope she will excuse me for what I done.” He reached down and lifted a handful of earth to scatter into the grave.

“Thank you, Sugrue,” Miss Jerram said. “Now class, how many of you’uns know the words to that good old hymn, ‘Farther Along’?”

Most of us raised our hands. We had recently sung it at the memorial service for Billy Bob Ingledew. People had been singing it at funerals in Stay More for as long as anybody could remember. So now we sang all the verses and repeated the chorus at the end of each one:

Farther along we’ll know all about it,

Farther along we’ll understand why;

Cheer up, my brother, live in the sunshine,

We’ll understand it, all by and by.

There was something about the words and music of that hymn, about its rhythm and accents, even apart from its message that promised us some ultimate comprehension of all these senseless deaths, that was truly of the country, truly rural, even pastoral: death too thrives in Arcadia.

The last “by” of that chorus is held, it endures almost in fermata: you can sustain it as long as you like. All our voices, charged with the emotion of the scene and the moment, were still holding the sound of that final note when suddenly its prolonged hum was overridden by another sound: from somewhere high up in the air, far off, came a peculiar drone.

Our mouths still open in the holding of that note, we turned our faces upward and beheld the first airplane that we had ever seen.

Part two

What a piece of work is a man!

How noble in reason!

…in action how like an angel!

—Hamlet

War and everything to do with it remains fast in the daemonic and magical bonds of play. Only by transcending that pitiable friend-foe relationship will mankind ever enter into the dignity of man’s estate.

—Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens

Chapter thirteen

When we had determined that it was indeed an airplane and not just one of the several buzzards circling overhead, it was Ella Jean who first voiced what we were looking at: “There’s two of ’em! And one’s chasing the other!”

“Lord have mercy!” Miss Jerram commented.

“Hot ziggety!” said one of the littluns.

“That front’un’s a B-29!” said Sammy Coe, who, like many of us, had seen those superfortresses in the newsreels at the Buffalo movie house, or in one of the movies we’d seen there, like Aerial Gunner or Practically Yours. But the many of us present who had seen those pictures shook our heads.

“That aint no B-29,” Larry Duckworth declared. “That’s some kind of a Jap bomber!”

“Is it Americans a-chasing him?”

“I sure hope so.”

“What if he drops his bomb before the Americans shoot him down?”

“Heck, if he was a Jap he’d have one of them big zeroes on his wings.”

“I don’t see no zeroes.”

“Looks like some kind of a star to me.”

“Hot ziggety.”

We stood, craning our necks, shielding our eyes with our hands, secretly hoping that the pursuit plane would catch the big plane and blow it up before it could drop its bombs. But again it was Ella Jean who first voiced what we had suddenly detected: “That second’un aint a-chasing the first’un! It’s just a-follering it.”

I had a chance to put in my two cents. “Look!” I said. “The second one doesn’t have any engines!” The first airplane had two big engines, as opposed to the B-29, which everybody who had seen one knew had four engines. The first airplane looked like a whale, with a sleek, rounded body. Not that I had ever seen a whale, either. But the second plane, though smaller, and not sleek at all, but clumsy, like a wooden crate, had much longer wings, huge wings, and no noticeable engines at all. It looked almost like a boxcar. Not that I had ever seen a boxcar, either, since there weren’t any railroads running through Newton County.

“What’s holding it up there?” someone asked.

“Maybe it’s one of them newfangled jet planes,” someone else speculated.

“Goodness gracious,” observed Miss Jerram, “I do believe the first airplane is pulling the second airplane.”

Sure enough, she was right. The second plane was not a jet. The whale was pulling the boxcar. There was a towrope strung out between them. I had once seen a newsreel of airplanes refueling in the sky, of a bomber attached by a gas line to a tanker, and I was about to offer that as a theory, but neither of these planes was a bomber or a tanker.

No sooner had we detected the towrope than it broke. Or rather the end attached to the boxcar-like plane became unattached. The whale-like plane kept on going, but the boxcar-like plane banked and began to circle. It slowed and drifted.

“It’s gliding!” said Ella Jean.

“It’s a glider!” said Sammy. “I’ve heared tell of them.”

“It caint go nowhere but down, now,” Willard observed.

“Where’s it gonna land?”

“Right here, maybe!”

“No, it aint. It’s fixin to try to land down in the valley.”

“Hot ziggety!”

“Boy-oh-boy!”

“Will wonders never cease!”

“Maybe it won’t land in Stay More. Maybe it’ll decide there aint nothin here worth landing for.”

“But it caint go nowheres else! It’s got to land, because it don’t have no engines!”

“Probably,” offered Miss Jerram, “it will have to land in that field above the schoolhouse.”

“Let’s go watch it land!”

We scattered ever which way. Some of the littluns took Miss Jerram’s hands and they started off at a trot back in the direction of the schoolhouse. Miss Jerram was a pretty good runner.

But some of us formerly called Axis did not follow, because our leader, Willard, wasn’t following. “I got a hunch,” he said to Joe Don, “that it aint a-lookin for a meader down in the valley. It’s lookin to land somewheres up high, maybe right over yon hill.”

“Yeah,” Joe Don agreed, “he’d need to land at a high place in case he ever took a notion to take off again.” None of us disputed the logic of this; a glider won’t ever take off again without a tow.

The group formerly called the Allies had a different idea. The glider would land in the vicinity of their sycamore tree clubhouse, the meadow known as the Field of Clover, now part of the hayfields of the Whitters. Jim John was convinced that no other field in Stay More would accommodate the landing of an aircraft, and he wanted to be there when it did, and he persuaded Sog and Larry to light out in that direction.

So the funeral cortege was split up into three or more groups, each heading in a different direction, everyone keeping their eyes on the sky, where the big glider endlessly circled over the whole countryside from edge to edge. Sorry to tell, we forgot all about Old Jarhead and never finished her funeral. “Thataway,” said Willard, and five of us followed him—Joe Don, Gypsy, Ella Jean, Sammy, and myself. He led us not far away from the funeral site, up over the next hill, through a thicket of trees to the edge of a long but narrow meadow that ran along the ridge of the mountain. “Here,” Willard said. “If I was lookin for a good place to land that thing, this here’s where I’d do it.” I trusted Willard but I was uneasy. What if his hunch was wrong? I didn’t want to miss the landing of the glider. I was already rehearsing my interview with the pilot for an Extra to appear this very afternoon.

The glider continued to make several slow circlings of all of Stay More, as if it knew that we were waiting for it at several possible landing sites and it wanted to decide which group of us was most favored. Then the big crate with its enormous wingspread began to lose altitude, and sure enough it looked as if it were straightening out to land in our meadow. “Told you,” said Willard, not boastfully but matter-of-factly. But as the glider began to descend toward us, we suddenly realized that a forest of tall trees was blocking the approach. Suddenly the glider nosedived, and we gasped and held our breath in anticipation that the plane would crash headfirst into the ground. The speed of its acceleration, however, enabled the pilot to use gravity to give the plane the extra push necessary so that, by yanking back on whatever yoke he was steering by, the pilot was able to hedgehop over the highest trees and set his course for our meadow. The big crate was close enough that we could see how it was covered not by aluminum but by some kind of fabric, and it did indeed have painted on its side a big five-pointed star inside a circle, an insignia of the United States of America. “Well, it’s one of ours, that’s for sure,” Joe Don remarked as it came in for its landing.

It was quite a show. The huge glider had two small wheels on struts sticking out from its belly, and another wheel on its nose, and this tricycle didn’t seem to be large enough to support the landing of that heavy body. The problem, though, was stopping the whole thing before it reached the end of the long meadow and the thick trees beyond. The glider touched down, hopped a few times with decreasing bounces like a rock skipped across the creek, and then kept on skidding down the meadow-runway. Did it have brakes?

“Aint it got brakes?” Willard wondered, using one foot to pump an imaginary brake pedal.

Whether it did or not, the glider couldn’t stop short of the treeline. Some of us (not me) covered our eyes with our hands as the big blunt front end of the glider smashed into the trunk of a walnut tree with a terrible rending, crashing sound, and the plane twisted so that one of its long wings slammed into other trees and splinters flew everywhere. The shuddery sounds of the crash were over in a second, but they seemed to explode on and on as the fragments settled and dust cleared. Those of us who had covered our faces (not me) slowly peeked through our fingers (not mine) to see if anything was left of the aircraft.

The nosewheel had been driven up through the fuselage, which was totally wrecked, and the flat floor of the plane was crumpled and buckled. There was a huge gaping hole in the side of craft, where the fabric had been torn asunder and the wooden structure splintered, and through this hole tottered the pilot, dressed in a shock helmet and a strange outfit, holding one arm as if he’d broken it. After him stumbled another man. And then another. And another. These men, each dressed in full combat uniforms with helmets and shoulder packs and bedrolls and gas masks and rifles and everything, were so formidable that the six of us as one dropped to the ground in the tall grass and tried to hide ourselves from their sight. The leader of the group made some motions and silent commands to his men, and two of them set up a machine gun pointed in our direction, while two others dropped to the ground with their carbines aimed our way, and two more stood beside the opening of the glider through which, one by one, more and more of these soldiers came lurching and limping out with their carbines ready for firing.

One time before the war I had gone to Jasper with Doc Swain and some others, not to watch a movie but to see the circus. A traveling circus had come to the little county seat, two nights only, and among all the other wonders of the spectacular show had been the unforgettable sight of a little automobile driving into the ring and no less than a dozen clowns climbing out of a vehicle that couldn’t possibly have held that many.

Now there were not merely a dozen clowns emerging from this glider, but, all told (as a newspaperman relishing the thought of the next Extra, I took the trouble to count with my finger), counting the pilot, there were thirteen combat-ready soldiers aboard that glider. And the last of these was leading a mule. I’m not kidding. A four-legged mule.

It was the handsomest mule any of us had ever seen. It was not old and gray like Old Jarhead—not until this moment did we realize how casually we had abandoned the funeral back down the hillside in Butterchurn Holler—but young and powerfully built, and if, as the eulogists at that funeral had claimed, the mule is the smartest of all animals, this mule was ready to graduate from college. Maybe he had already graduated from a service academy. He was wearing a bright brown horse blanket that said US ARMY on it, and he looked as if whoever was in charge of him had to spend a lot of time brushing and grooming him. Or even as if, like a good soldier, he was in the habit of keeping himself neat and clean and kempt.

For a moment there, some of us must have thought that this was Old Jarhead returned from heaven, or Old Jarhead reincarnated, but if so, she had been reincarnated as a male, for that was clearly what he was. This mule was the only creature on that plane who had not been shaken up by the crash. The twelve soldiers and the pilot looked as if they couldn’t believe their good luck in still being alive, and they could hardly stand straight, but the mule acted as if this whole experience were just another joyride, and he looked around at the terrain as if he didn’t really mind being here or at any rate was ready to take whatever orders were given him.

But as soon as the soldiers got their heads cleared and their bearings straight, the leader made some more sign language with his hands and pointed our way, and some of the soldiers ran out across the field in our direction, then dropped to their bellies in the grass with their carbines constantly pointed toward us.

“Maybe we ought to surrender,” Willard whispered. “Anybody got a white handkerchief?”

No one did. “Do you want my panties?” Gypsy whispered. I knew it was a rhetorical question; she didn’t wear panties.

Willard blushed scarlet. I was sure his color would give us away if any of those soldiers were looking directly at the clump of tall grass in which we were trying to conceal ourselves.

“I aint skeered,” declared Ella Jean, and she suddenly stood up. A rifle fired, and she dropped to the ground again, unhurt but terrified.

A voice yelled, “It’s just a girl, you fatheads! Hold your fire!”

The leader came running very close to our hiding place. We could see the silver bar on his collar. “Where are you, sweetheart?” he called. “Come out. We won’t hurt you.”

But Ella Jean had the sense not to show herself again. The leader was still holding his rifle as if he might want to use it. Two of his men came up beside him and those three began stomping around through the grass until they were right on top of us. Willard raised his two hands in surrender, so the rest of us imitated his gesture, and then the six of us got to our feet with our hands behind our heads.

“They’re all just kids,” the leader said. Then he asked Joe Don, perhaps because he was oldest, “Did we land in your pasture?”

“If you can call that landing,” ‘Joe Don said.

The men laughed. “You can put your hands down,” the leader said. “You’re prisoners, and you won’t try anything.”

Willard pointed east and said, “Germany’s a few more miles that-away. Aint you fellers in the wrong place?”

The men laughed again. One of them said, “We’re not bound for Germany. We’re getting ready to go to J—”

“Knock it off, Polacek!” the leader said to the soldier, then he said to Willard, “It’s just about all over in Germany. Haven’t you heard?”

“We’ve heard,” I said. “We’ve got radio, you know.”

“Shouldn’t you kids be in school?” the leader asked. “This is Wednesday, isn’t it?”

“Teacher let us out,” Gypsy said. “Matter a fact, she took us out. To bury a mule.”

“To what, pardon me?” the leader asked.

Two other soldiers joined us. “Perimeter’s secure, sir!” one of them said, saluting. “Sir, I think Lieutenant Bosco broke his arm in the landing.”

“I’ll look at it, Sergeant,” the leader said, and then he called toward the glider, “UNLOAD, DEPLOY, AND TORCH IT!” Then he pointed at us and said to the soldiers behind us, “Segregate ’em, search ’em, and silence ’em.” The men saluted him and he took off at a run.

The soldiers separated us, making us stand several feet apart with our hands raised on tree trunks while they patted us over, as if we’d have any weapons, which of course we didn’t, not even pocketknives. Two soldiers argued with each other over the privilege of searching Gypsy. I was brooding about the officer’s last command: I knew that “silence” was a euphemism for “put to death,” and I wondered if they could really get away with it, destroying innocent country kids.

“Do I look like I’ve got anything on me?” I demanded of the soldier who was patting me.

“Hush, kid!” he snapped. “No talking.” Then he fished the pencil out of my shirt pocket and asked, “What’s this?”

“A ray gun,” I said. “Deadly.”

He twisted his fingers into the collar of my shirt. “Don’t get smart, punk.”

“It’s my tool,” I said. “I write for the newspaper.”

The officer was back. “Private, didn’t I say ‘silence’?”

“Yessir but this squirt was giving me lip.”

“Son,” the officer said to me, “we’re going to ask for your full cooperation from now till our bivouac is fixed.”

I gave him a good military salute and said, “Yes sir!”

He looked at me kindly but a bit quizzically. “Do you know what a bivouac is?”

“You fellers is a-fixin to camp out,” I said.

He chuckled. “That’s right. And we can’t do it here.” He turned and spoke loudly enough for everyone to hear him, “Let’s MOVE OUT!” He gestured northward.

Those guys were efficient. The poor mule was loaded up with packs and packs and boxes and boxes of stuff that had to be all roped together, and then the mule was led away. I didn’t see how the mule could carry all that stuff, but he kept his head up like a good soldier.

Then a corporal with a flamethrower set the glider on fire. In no time at all the big crate was cinders.

“What kind of airship was that?” I asked the officer, walking rapidly beside him as he headed north.

“It was a Waco CG-4A,” he said. “It did its job. Now excuse me.”

He trotted away from me, to the head of the column of men and mule. Four soldiers marched ahead, behind, and in between us six Axis, keeping us apart from each other and hurrying us if we slowed down on the march. For some reason I was in front and the others behind me. Gypsy and Ella Jean were having a rough go of it, especially because of the way the soldiers were ogling them as if they hadn’t seen a female in months…and maybe they hadn’t.

I was thirsty and, I suddenly realized, very hungry. It was past time for what would’ve been our noon dinner at school, where my dinner pail and everyone else’s was still in the foyer. And poor Willard, always obsessed with his stomach, was visibly wilting from hunger.

We came out of the forest at the road that dissolves into a woodland trail not far up above the old dogtrot house, the Dill family place, where Latha lived with her husband Every Dill. As soon as we reached the road, the officer halted the column and silently made a bunch of hand gestures that strung his men out into two files along both sides of the road. The officer dropped back and asked me, “Where does this road go?”

“Well, pretty soon it comes to an old cabin where an auto mechanic lives with his beautiful wife who’s the town’s postmistress and storekeeper and—”

“What about the other way?” he asked.

“Oh, it just sort of peters out, up that way. There’s a deserted old house maybe half a mile up in those woods.”

“You know the country pretty well, don’t you?” he said with admiration.

“Lived here all my life,” I said. And I couldn’t resist adding, “I have to know all the roads real well in order to deliver my newspaper.”

“Are we keeping you from your paper route?” He pronounced it “root,” not “rowt.”

“Well, I wanted to bring out an Extra this afternoon to tell all about your landing and all, but it don’t look like I’m going to get a chance to do that, does it?”

He stared at me a while. Then he said, “Oh. I get it. You’re not just a paperboy. You publish a paper.”

“Yes, sir, and I sure would appreciate an interview.”

He smiled. “We call it ‘interrogation.’ And your turn will come. Now show us that deserted house.”

Chapter fourteen

When we climbed to the dark holler of the mountain forest containing the abandoned farmstead, one of several in the environs that were so run down that not even the squatting Dingletoons would have cared to use them, the first thing the officer wanted to do was test the water in the well. The well housing was of crumbling rock masonry, but its cap was a huge cement slab with a hole in it large enough to accommodate a bucket. There was no bucket, and only the frayed remains of a well rope dangling from the rusted iron pulley, but of course they had a bucket, possibly made from the very metal of our War Effort Scrap Drive, and they lowered it and brought up some water, and tested it with some kind of chemical strips. Then one of the men was told to step off the distance from the well to the outhouse, a teetering shack without its door. “Ninety-two and a half feet, sir,” he reported.

I understood what they were doing, and I spoke up. “I don’t believe anybody’s used that outhouse for a dozen years.”

“Were you here a dozen years ago?” the officer asked me.

I was not, but I could have assured him that the water in that well was perfectly potable, and I was dying for a few gulps of it. Still the officer had to be sure that some kind of tablets were dropped into the water before he could let us have any. Then he had the first drink himself, either from the privilege of seniority or perhaps he figured if he didn’t drop dead at once it would be all right for the rest of us to drink it.

When we’d all slaked our thirst, Ella Jean spoke up on behalf of our hunger. “Mister,” she said to the officer, “we’uns aint et our dinner yit.”

“Hoo!” said one of the soldiers, “‘We’uns aint et our dinner yit.’”

“Polacek!” the officer snapped at the soldier. “This young lady would probably think your Bronx accent is hilarious if she got a chance to hear it. Why don’t you say something for her?”

“Sorry, sir,” Polacek said.

“Say it to her, Polacek!”

“High big department, miss,” Polacek said to Ella Jean. Or something like that.

The officer said to us, “Isn’t it kind of early for dinner? We haven’t had lunch yet.”

“Hereabouts,” I told him, “the noon meal is always dinner. And it’s way past noon, I think.” The high sun had moved past its zenith, and was getting hotter.

“My mistake,” the officer apologized. “Well, let’s all have dinner, then. Rucker!” A soldier came up and saluted. “Rucker, give these people our best bash.”

The officer had a sense of humor. His idea of a bash was to let us share the soldier’s rations, an assortment of canned meat products, two types of biscuits, canned cheese, fruit bars, and chocolate bars. Willard astounded Rucker and the other men by consuming enough of the biscuits to feed the whole platoon. But the officer didn’t eat with us; he was too busy reconnoitering the farmstead and giving instructions to the men for the setting up of the bivouac.

“What do you think they’ll do with us?” I asked Willard.

“I don’t rightly keer, as long as they feed us,” Willard said, grinning. Then, more seriously, he said, “I reckon they’re bound to turn us loose directly.”

Corporal Rucker said, “Hey, you guys pipe down. Lieut says you gotta keep quiet till he’s finished.”

“Finished what?” I asked.

Rucker held up five fingers, and named each one. “Search. Segregate. Silence. Speed. Safeguard. That’s the rules. Doesn’t say feed. Says, ‘Do not give them cigarettes, food, or water.’ We’ve given you guys plenty of the last two. You need a cigarette?”

The officer, whom Rucker had called “Lieut,” returned to us. “Okay,” he said. “I guess I’ll take you one at a time in order of seniority. Who’s oldest?” The officer took Joe Don and they disappeared into the old house, whose floorboards, I knew, were mostly rotten. They were gone a while. What was happening to Joe Don? Gypsy and Ella Jean attempted to exchange nervous speculations, but Rucker silenced them. We waited anxiously to hear a scream.

Finally Joe Don returned. He was smiling as if he knew something the rest of us didn’t know. “I reckon you’re next,” he said to Willard, and Willard got up, belched, and went into the house.

“What was that all about?” I asked Joe Don.

“Kid!” Rucker yelled at me and wagged his finger. Joe Don simply made a gesture of crossing his lips with his finger as if to say they were sealed.

We sat in silence as, one by one, Willard, then Gypsy, then Ella Jean, and then Sammy, were interrogated, or regaled, or raped, or whatever was going on in there. I was terribly impatient, and increasingly nervous. As the youngest and last, I had to endure the waiting and wondering and not one of my friends—or fellow Axis, if they weren’t exactly friends—could give me even a hint as to what to expect.

It was midafternoon before my turn finally came, as Sammy emerged from the house, giggling. At least, I told myself as I entered, whatever was going on in there had some redeeming comic value. I exchanged glances with Sammy in passing, but he just rolled his eyes.

Inside the house, the officer had found a spot in what once must have been the kitchen where the floorboards weren’t completely rotted through, and he had set up two canvas folding chairs, the kind that movie stars and directors and Civil War generals sit in. The two chairs faced each other, closely; he gestured for me to sit in one, and then sat in the other himself.

“So,” he said to me, and then called me by my full name (I assumed any of the others could have told him my name). He held out his hand for a shake, and I shook it. “I have the honor of being interviewed personally by the editor-in-chief of The Stay Morning Star.” There was no sarcasm or condescension in his voice.

“Yessir,” I said. “I guess they told you all that.”

“Lieutenant McPherson at your service, sir,” he said. He took a real cigarette from a package in his pocket and then offered me one. “I don’t suppose you smoke?”

“Not yet,” I said.

“Good. Don’t start. It’s too hard to stop.” He lit his own cigarette with enormous pleasure, took a deep draught from it, and exhaled, careful to tilt his head so that the smoke didn’t come into my face. “How long have you been putting out the Star?”

“A year or so,” I said.

“Mimeograph?”

“Hectograph.”

“Ah!” he smiled. “I had one of those.”

“Really?” I said, warming to him. “Did you edit a newspaper?”

“Not when I was your age,” he said. “I wasn’t nearly as bright as you.”

I probably blushed. “I’m not very bright.”

“None of your friends,” he pointed out, “knows the meaning of ‘bivouac.’ Where’d you learn it?”

“I read a lot,” I said.

“So, in a way, you already know why we’re here, and I won’t have to answer any questions along that line.”

“Yes, you will,” I said. “Stay More isn’t enemy territory. Why are you here, when you ought to be invading Japan?”

He stared at me as if he might even have been asking himself the same question. Then he said, “Sore yori kore-ga yoi to omoi-masu.”

“’Scuse me?” I said. Polacek’s Bronxese I could figure out, but not this.

“I said I think this is better than that, that being here in Stay More is better than being in Japan. I said it in Japanese.”

“That’s funny,” I said. “You don’t look Japanese.”

He laughed. “Nor do you, Donny. But I’m told you’re the skibbiest of all the local Nips.” I must have screwed up my face in puzzlement, for he took the trouble to explain what “Nipponese” meant and to say, “I’m teasing. ‘Skibby’ is derogatory slang, originally meaning a Japanese prostitute who consorts with Occidental men but by extension it now means any Oriental man or woman.”

“What’s an ‘accidental man’?” I wanted to know. It sounded daring, like a man who couldn’t control all the exciting episodes that befell him.

“Occidental,” Lieutenant McPherson corrected me. “Means the western hemisphere, means us as opposed to the Orientals.”

“So they”—I gestured in the direction where my friends were waiting—“must have told you all about the Axis and the Allies.”

“I couldn’t get a word out of Willard Dinsmore about it,” the lieutenant said. “He’s a brilliant commander and strategist. If the real Japanese had a few generals like him, they wouldn’t be losing this wretched war.”

“So who told you?” I asked.

“I can’t answer that.”

“Okay. Did whoever told you also tell you how our schoolteacher, Miss Jerram, this very morning put a stop to us being Axis and Allies?”

“I know about Old Jarhead,” he said sympathetically, “and I’m sending a detail with shovels at nightfall to finish the burial.”

“That’s nice. What’s a detail?” He explained that word to me. I was expanding my vocabulary by leaps and bounds. “You’re not keeping us till nightfall?” I asked.

“I hope not,” he said. “It depends on you.”

“Me? How come?”

“Samuel Coe showed me his mark, his brand, his ‘A.’”

“How’d you get him to do that? And what’s it got to do with me?”

“I could require you to strip naked right now,” he said, with assurance. “And you’d do it. But I’m not going to. I don’t think you’re hiding anything, except your feelings. You really are inscrutable, you know? That’s good for a newspaperman…but not always so good for a young boy. So tell me. Why didn’t you report the Allies’ branding of Sammy in your little newspaper?”

“It wasn’t none of their business,” I declared.

“Who is ‘they’?”

“All the grown-ups,” I said. “Sammy’s daddy would totally exterminate the Allies if he knew about that.”

“So you exercised your prerogative as editor to censor the news?”

“Yeah.”

“And likewise you did not give any coverage to the attempted abduction of Gypsy Dingletoon in the Battle of Dinsmore Trail.”

“Wow. You know a lot!” I couldn’t conceal my admiration for his interrogative skills.

“And might I presume,” he went on, “that you aren’t even going to report the funeral of Old Jarhead?”

“Maybe not,” I admitted. “I haven’t really decided.”

“So it’s time for you to make some decisions,” he said. “I’m going to ask you to make a real big one: to honor my request that no news of our landing gets into your paper.”

“Heck,” I protested. “Probably everybody in town saw you come down.” I did not mean to make a poem, and the rhyme embarrassed me.

“But only you and your friends out there know that we survived the wreck and burning of the glider.”

“Why does it have to be such a big secret?”

“Himitsu to himitsu-ni suru,” he said. “If you will promise me to keep our presence here strictly a secret, I will tell you one or more of our secrets.”

“Such as? You could start off with telling me why you picked Stay More to invade.”

“We didn’t pick it. We don’t even have terrain maps. My men out there”—his hand swept the area—“don’t even know where we are. But I assure you we are not invading Stay More. We are not hostile.”

“Then how come you-all fired at Ella Jean when she stood up?”

“Are you ready for the first of the many secrets I’ll swap you for your secrecy? Will you promise me not to print anything in the Star about us?”

“Not ever? Not even after the war is all over?”

His expression became wistful, as if I had suggested the possibility that the war would eventually end, but he might not even be around to see it. Then he spoke quietly, “Donny, there will come a time, soon, I can’t tell you when because I don’t know myself, when you can have an exclusive on a really hot story. You can scoop the big dailies. And I’ll help you all I can with that, in return for your promise to keep everything quiet until I tell you.”

The prospect excited me. He was talking my language, journalism. I wanted to ask him what he thought of the late Ernie Pyle, but that could wait. “Okay,” I said. “Sure. I promise. Nothing in the Star until you tell me.” I offered him my hand, and we shook on the deal. “Well?” I said, waiting. “So what’s the first secret you’re gonna tell me?”

There was nobody anywhere near earshot, but he scooted his chair closer and feigned a conspiracy between us, hiding his mouth behind his hand and lowering his voice. “The bullet fired at Ella Jean,” he said, “was a blank. Each of our rifles, shoju, is Japanese, and is not loaded with a shojudan, bullet, but with a kuho, blank. The machine gun, kikanju, is a Japanese 7.7 mm copy of the French Hotchkiss, or hochikisu kikanju, loaded with blanks. The BAR, or Browning, which they pronounce burauningu kikanju, is loaded with blanks. Our mortar, a Japanese Stokes, which they pronounce sutoku-shiki kyokusha hoheiho, won’t hurt anybody. And of course all our hand grenades are just shuryudan training grenades without fillers or fuses: they will shatter on contact and leave a blob of red paint on whatever they hit. We have quite a lot of antitank rifle grenades, juyo tekidan, that are projectiles which will hit the target and cover it with the red paint. Our flares, shomei, will light, and our radio, musen tsushinki, has working batteries, but all our ammunition is fake.”

“Oh,” was all I could say. I think I was beginning to understand, but all I could think to ask was, “Do your men know they’re shooting blanks?”

“Of course,” he said. “Do you want to know another secret in return for your promise never to tell your parents about us?”

“I have no parents,” I said.

“Oh? You live with—?”

“My aunt.”

“Okay. She’ll want to know where you’ve been all afternoon and you can tell her—”

“She never asks me anything.”

“Okay. I see. You probably spend all your time with Latha Bourne.”

I was stunned. “How do you know about her?”

“You yourself told me that she and her husband are our closest neighbors down the mountain. Willard told me her name. Joe Don told me how nice she is. Sammy described her store and post office. Ella Jean told me how beautiful she is. Gypsy told me her store is where you have the office of The Stay Morning Star.”

“Why do you need to know all those things?”

“It’s called intelligence. Not this kind of intelligence,” he reached out and touched my cranium, “but the accumulation of information one needs to know, including but not limited to secrets.” He smiled. “Later you can tell me all the secrets about Latha Bourne. Right now I need your promise never to tell her about us. Not a word.”

That was a tough request. If I couldn’t tell Latha, who could I tell? But as long as I was making promises to this very sharp and kind army officer, I might as well keep on making them. “Okay,” I said. “I won’t tell her anything. So what’s your next secret?”

“Good,” he said. “Let’s shake on that promise too.” When we had shaken hands for the third time, he patted the pistol strapped to his belt. “This Nambu automatic, jido kenju” he said, “is not loaded with blanks. It has real .7 mm cartridges in its clip. But don’t you dare tell a soul.” I shook my head solemnly, a bit honored that he was sharing with me intelligence known only to himself. He laughed. “Maybe,” he said, “if we run completely out of K rations and have to shoot a cow for food, I’ll have to use my pistol!” I laughed with him. “No,” he said, “I’m not going to shoot any cows. But the time might come when I’ll have to ask you to buy some grub for us at Latha’s store.”

“Sure,” I said. “Any time.”

“Well, I guess that’s about it, for now.” He stood up, and I stood also. He put his hand on my shoulder. He was a tall man, and I really had to bend my neck to look up at him. “One more little himitsu to himitsu” he said. “And perhaps this one will hold us, for the nonce. Do you know the word nonce? English, not Japanese. No? It means the present, for the time being. Okay? Well, I need you to promise, for the nonce, that you will not discuss any of this even with your friends, your fellow Axis, let alone your enemies, the Allies. I know you will be curious to learn from each of your friends what I talked about with them, but each of them has already promised me not to discuss our presence here with each other, and therefore none of them will be willing—or should not be willing—to discuss it with you.”

“Did you have to bribe them with himitsu to himitsu?” I asked.

He laughed. “No, actually, it was threats more than bribes. But don’t even ask them about that.”

“Okay. So all of us Axis will just have to pretend that this whole day never happened.”

“Excellent! Can you do that? And give me your word?”

We shook hands for a fourth time. Shaking hands standing up was somewhat different from shaking hands sitting down. Our hands weren’t on the same level. I had to reach up. “So what’s the last secret?” I asked.

“You and your friends have been required to think of yourselves as Japanese, right? Even those of your Axis who have been Nazis, such as Joe Don, will now have to change into Japs as Germany surrenders.” He began walking me toward the door. “You know, your General Willard Dinsmore managed the tactical coup of guessing where we’d land, even though, I can tell you, our pilot, Second Lieutenant Bosco, who broke his arm in the process, was trying his best to land on a remote mountaintop where we wouldn’t be found.” We were at the open door, and I could see my fellow Axis waiting for me, sitting in the late afternoon sunlight as it filtered through the second-growth timber that grew up like dank weeds around the old farmstead. I doubt if we were close enough for them to hear these concluding words of Lieutenant Mc-Pherson: “What a coincidence, or accident of destiny, that we should land in the midst of a fine group of boys and girls who, like ourselves, have been given the role of pretending that they are Japanese!”

Chapter fifteen

When the six of us were safely out of sight of the bivouac, marching down the mountain trail back toward the village, I couldn’t stand it any longer. “Wow!” I said to them. “How about that guy?”

“What guy?” said Willard.

“Lieutenant McPherson,” I said. “Aint he something else again?”

“McPherson?” Willard said. “That don’t strike a bell with me.

You, Joe Don?”

“Never heared tell of nobody of that name,” Joe Don said.

“Hey! Come on, you-all!” I complained. “Caint we even say what we thought of him?”

“Him who?” Sammy said.

“The lieutenant!” I turned to Gypsy and appealed to her. “Didn’t you think he was the best-looking man you ever saw?”

Did I detect a faint spark of agreement in Gypsy’s eyes? But she just said, “Dawny, you’re the only good-lookin feller I’ve seen lately.”

I would have blushed if I hadn’t known she was just teasing me.

It took courage, but I spoke to my secret sweetheart, Ella Jean, “Didn’t you like him?”

“Hush, Dawny!” said my sweetheart.

So I hushed. I was dying to learn what prices he had paid to buy each of their silences, but it was obvious they weren’t going to talk, and I even grew abashed at myself, as if my attempt to make them talk was a violation of my promise to the lieutenant.

Walking past Dill’s Gas and Service, which of course wasn’t a conventional service station but just a shack with a gas pump out front and a yard in which the owner tinkered with cars, we casually waved at Every Dill, who was working on Doc Swain’s car under the big maple tree. “Howdy,” Every called to us. “Any of you’uns find where that gliding machine come down?”

Willard spoke on our behalf. “Howdy, Ev. Nope. Reckon it must’ve been over towards up yonder back around in there somewheres.”

We came to my house, or rather Aunt Murrison’s, but I didn’t see her, and I didn’t stop there. I might or might not show up for supper. We went on into the village. There we encountered a group of what was left of the former Allies, sitting on the porch of Latha’s store. We couldn’t just pass them by, and that store was my destination anyhow, regardless of whether I could say anything to Latha about our adventure.

“Any luck?” asked Jim John Whitter, who couldn’t hide his disappointment that the glider hadn’t come down in the Whitter meadow, the Field of Clover. All the Allies looked like they hadn’t been invited to somebody’s big birthday party.

“Nope,” said Willard, our spokesman as well as our general. “Didn’t it land down here in the bottoms?”

“Nope,” said Larry. “Looked like it landed somewhere back up that-away where you’uns was.”

“Saw it drift over a few times,” Joe Don said, “but couldn’t make out rightly just where it took a notion to light down.”

We sat in silence on the store porch for a while, as the afternoon waned. It was a situation for getting out our pocketknives and doing a little whittling of useless sticks, just to pass the time, but we didn’t have any pocketknives anymore. Gypsy and Ella Jean said they had to go help start supper, and they left together, their arms around each other. I was jealous, not of their arms, but of the almost sure chance that they would compare notes on their experience. After a time, Jim John said, offhand, “Don’t look to me like we’ll be able to put a ball game together this Saturday, since you Axis has got us so bad outnumbered now.”

“We aint Axis no more,” Willard said. “But we’ll make ye the loan of a few players, enough to help ye play us.” Sog, the former warlord, said glumly, “Aw, shee-ut, us Allies might just as well show the white flag, lay down our arms, and call it quits.”

“Yeah,” Larry agreed, “we might as well pull in our horns. But then it sure is going to get real dull and slow around this old town.”

The former Axis, the four of us, couldn’t help exchanging looks, and in their looks I caught enough to convince me that I hadn’t just been dreaming what had happened during this long day.

“Too bad,” Willard said sorrowfully. “It’ll sure enough just get real dull and slow hereabouts.” Even he, with his great strength, had to bear down and concentrate to avoid cracking a grin.

The next day in school, Miss Jerram declared that since we were no longer divided into Axis and Allies, she might as well reassign all of our seats, so that the aisle would no longer be the division between opposing factions. “But we don’t have only a short time left before school lets out for the summer,” she observed, “so we might as well just stay put where we are until next fall.” Then she conducted a postmortem on the hunt for the glider. Representatives of each of the parties who had scattered all over creation as the glider was landing were invited to report on their success, or rather their lack of success, and various speculations were made about just where the glider might have landed. Several students—not us—had seen the smoke billowing up from the mountain ridge where they assumed the glider may have crashed in flames. “Joseph Donald,” she said, “didn’t your group go up in that direction?” Yes’m, Joe Don reported, and they tromped all over the mountain a-lookin for that durn thing, but all they found was a pile of ashes. “Then whoever was flying it must’ve burnt to a crisp!” Miss Jerram said. “That’s just awful. Maybe we ought to notify the sheriff or somebody.” Willard suggested that if the Army Air Force or whoever had sent the glider was missing one of their men they’d probably be sending somebody out to look for it. Miss Jerram used up a good chunk of our “time o’ books” for the discussion of the glider, which was just as well with me, because I had no enthusiasm or patience for the day’s lessons in geography, history, mathematics, or even English. Then Miss Jerram said, “I hate to say it, but all of us got so wrapped up with that glider yesterday that we forgot all about the poor mule’s funeral, and we didn’t finish filling in the grave.”

Gypsy said, “That’s okay, Teacher. I went up there last night and saw to it.”

“Saw to it?”

“I filled in the grave,” Gypsy declared. Was she wearing a touch of rouge? Had she painted her mouth too?

“By yourself?”

“No’m,” said Gypsy. “Ella Jean went with me.”

“What did you use for a shovel?”

“Well, uh—” Gypsy struggled, and for a moment there I thought she might say, “A folding U.S. Army shovel made from the War Effort Scrap Drive,” but she said in fact, “We just sort of kicked a lot of that pile of dirt back into the hole, ye know, and then we just sort of drug the rest of it in with sticks and rocks, ye know.”

I couldn’t wait for recess. At recess, the divisions had never been Allies on one side of the schoolhouse yard, Axis on the other, but rather boys on one side, girls on the other. I crossed over, and grabbed Gypsy by the arm, and asked, “Did you run into that detail that McPherson was sending to finish the burial?”

“What’s a ‘detail’?” Gypsy wanted to know.

“One or more troops of soldiers sent out for a particular duty,” I defined it for her.

“Soldiers?” Gypsy said, and I thought she was doing a splendid job of pretending she’d never heard that word either.

“Didn’t some men help you and Ella Jean fill in the grave?” I insisted. “Or didn’t you help some men do it? Or watch ’em do it? Or anyhow take ’em to show ’em where the grave was, which they wouldn’t’ve known to begin with?”

“Dawny, have you been readin them comic books again?”

I was exasperated. It was true that I sometimes read comic books, when I could get them, and I was partial to the military activities of the various captains: Captain America, Captain Marvel, Captain Wings, Captain Midnight, and The Captain and the Kids, but even my thorough familiarity with those comics would not have goaded my hyperactive imagination into fabricating the adventures I—and Gypsy—had just had. Or would it have? Needless to say, the rest of the school day was agony for me. Whatever fondness I had discovered I had for Miss Jerram was reversed when she sent me to the blackboard to do some arithmetic problems and then jumped on me. “Dawny, you’re not marking up sums. You’re drawing pitchers of airplanes!”

The minute school was out, without so much as a word attempting to coordinate the agenda with the other former Axis, I took off lickety-split for the bivouac, not stopping at Latha’s store, not stopping at my house, not stopping period. My bare feet were red and sore and my lungs were trying to leave my chest when I arrived panting at the old farmstead in the dark holler up above the Dill place.

There was nobody there. There was no trace of anybody having been there. I mean, there were no footprints in the dirt nor prints of a mule’s horseshoes. Nothing. I went inside the old house, walking carefully on the rotting floorboards, to the place where Lieutenant McPherson had set up the two director’s chairs for my interview or interrogation or whatever it had been. I found the place where the chairs would have been and where our feet would have touched the floor, but the dust and debris were thick and untouched. Nobody had sat there. Or not for a dozen years. I stepped my foot into that dust, and it left a clear print, which seemed to mock me, as if to say, “I’m the only footprint in all this dust.” It occurred to me: why would anybody have bothered to bring director’s chairs into this place?

I was reeling. I went back outside the house and yelled, “HELLO?” My voice, higher and less manly than I’d thought, traveled way up into the dark holler and faintly echoed back to me. Pleading, I yelled, “WHERE IS EVERYBODY?” Some birds flew up from a distant tree, and that was all.

I sat down on the edge of the porch, alone except for you. I needed you to tell me that I had not lost my mind. I needed you to forgive me for not paying much attention to you except in times of need. More than anything, I wanted you to help me sort through my head about the day before in an effort to discover where I had gone off the track. Even if you could not explain to me why there was no trace whatsoever of anybody having been at that house for twelve years, perhaps you could explain what actually had happened yesterday.

I was certain that I had gone up into the mountain forest with my friends Willard, his sister Ella Jean, Joe Don, his sister Gypsy, and Sammy, kid brother of my only local hero, the late Mare Coe. I had thought that we were hunting for the place where a glider would come down out of the sky. I had thought that we had actually seen the glider come in for a crash landing, and that everything as I have written it for the past many pages actually happened. But—and this was my first new thought—was it possible that I, having lost all of a heap my local hero Mare, my national hero President Roosevelt, and then my all-time hero Ernie Pyle, was driven to create a wonderful new hero, Lieutenant McPherson? Okay, granted that I did that. So why couldn’t I keep him? For pity sakes, if McPherson was only the product of my pubertal fancy, like a mental image of a voluptuous but impossibly tantalizing woman summoned up to promote the most extravagant erotic thoughts, why couldn’t I make him come back again? When I dreamed of Ella Jean, either at night or whenever my conscious reveries needed her, the loss of her at the end of the episode was always softened by the thought that she’d return whenever I wanted.

Could you let him come back again? Gentle Reader, one thing I know about you, if nothing else, is that you possess certain powers, even a kind of magic: you could snap shut this book right now and obliterate me, just as you opened it in the first place to create me. Could you kindly let the soldiers come back again? Or, if they had to leave and go into hiding somewhere else, could you help me find them? If you will, I promise you the most exciting story you’ve ever read.

I stood up. I remembered one little thing that had happened here yesterday: the business of the well water. A soldier had been required to step off the distance from the outhouse to the well, to make sure that the former could not have contaminated the latter. I went to the well, where the old fragment of rope still hung from the rusted iron pulley, untouched. The soldiers had produced their own rope and bucket and pulled up several bucketsful of good clean pure well water, and refilled their canteens with it, and everybody had had a good drink, but there was no trace of this activity around the well. I looked up at the outhouse, and walked slowly toward it, bent over, studying the ground closely, until, finally, halfway to the outhouse, I spotted in the dirt the unmistakable imprint of the heel of a soldier’s boot. There was just that one, but it was clear, and it was enough. “Ha!” I exclaimed, with exultation.

“Very good, Donny,” you said.

“Thank you,” I said to you. Thank you for restoring my faith and convincing me I wasn’t crazy. I even looked around for you, but you weren’t there. In your place was simply a bush, speaking, not unlike that burning bush that spoke to Moses. The bush spoke again, repeating the same words, “Very good, Donny.” And then the bush raised one of its limbs and brushed some leaves away from its head, and I could see the face. The bush was my new hero. The bush turned its head and spoke louder, “Rucker!” Another bush appeared before my bush and its limb snapped up in a salute. “Goddamn it, Rucker! You missed a spot! Look! Is that a heelprint or isn’t it?”

“Sorry, sir!” Rucker said, and the bush fell to his knees, and with his bare hands began scratching at the dirt around the heelprint until it was obliterated.

“Otherwise, wouldn’t you say?” McPherson asked me. “We covered our traces pretty well.”

“You sure did,” I said, beaming to find him again. “Where are you?” I asked, and realized it sounded as if I couldn’t even see him inside his bush when there he was, right before me! and the other bush Rucker still groveling in the earth. But Rucker finished the job and got to his feet and began looking for other places where he hadn’t covered his tracks. “I mean,” I clarified, “where is your bivouac?”

“Where are we?” McPherson repeated my question with a chuckle. “We’re all around you. See if you can find us.” He swept the grounds with his hands as if challenging me to find the bivouac. I looked all around, and saw nothing. The lieutenant took my arm and guided me, and we walked until we came to the first tent. The tent was covered with branches, totally concealed. The second tent also. At each of the tents, bushes turned into soldiers before my eyes, grinning at me. All the tents and soldiers were virtually invisible from a distance.

“Camouflage,” I said.

“That’s it, Donny,” he said, and showed me where several foxholes had been dug and carefully covered up with shrubbery, and even the excavated soil, lighter in color, had been evenly distributed and covered with topsoil. He showed where emplacements had been constructed for mortars, machine guns, and antitank guns, each concealed in a foxhole covered with branches that looked like natural bushes or weeds.

“You guys have been busy,” I remarked.

“What else is there to do?” he said. “But when you were hunting for us, just now,” he said, “you forgot something. You forgot one of us.”

I thought and thought. Then I remembered. “The mule! Where’d you hide the mule?”

“Where would you hide something as big as a mule?” he asked.

I looked around, and saw the old barn. It wasn’t actually a barn, not one of those gambrel-roof warehouses for storing hay but just a dilapidated cowshed with a rusty tin roof. It looked as if it hadn’t been opened in years, and there were still spiderwebs all over it, but, as McPherson showed me, it had a mule inside it. “Young Jarhead,” McPherson declared, grinning. “Formerly known as ASM 147, Army Special Mule. GI Moe, the men called him. Gypsy let us rename him.” He gave Young Jarhead an appreciative pat on the head, and Jarhead looked as if he wished he could raise a hoof in salute. “Speaking of which, the others will be here soon. Let’s see how they take it. Here, let’s get you ready.”

McPherson gathered up some assorted vegetation and netting and made me into a bush, and then we covered our tracks. His bush and my bush stood side by side near the old house, waiting, and sure enough before long Sammy Coe showed up. Sammy’s mouth dropped open in astonishment at finding that the bivouac had disappeared, and he began looking wildly around him, almost in panic. I wondered if my own face and attitude had conveyed such desperate surprise and disappointment minutes earlier. I started to giggle, but the bush next to me clamped its limb end over my mouth. Sammy looked up as if he had heard the beginning of my giggle and stared right at me for a brief moment before his eyes continued to wander all over creation in search of the bivouac. Sammy went inside the house, just as I had done, and I knew he might find the prints of my bare feet in the dust but nothing else. Soon he came back out, looking as if he were about to cry. Had I looked so forlorn and tragic? Just as I had done, he sat down on the edge of the porch, with his head in his hands. I knew he did not have the advantage I’d had, of being able to appeal to you. To whom then was he appealing? Maybe he was praying.

Soon Gypsy and Ella Jean came up the trail, arms around each other as usual. But their arms fell to their sides as they saw the place and then saw Sammy sitting in dejection on the edge of the porch. Gypsy shrieked and cried, “Lord have mercy! They’ve all done gone and gone!”

“It caint be!” Ella Jean cried. “They couldn’t’ve just cleared out dead and gone without no word!”

I had to raise two limbs to cover my mouth.

Sammy said woefully, “They aint nobody ever been here to begin with!” And I had a wave of fellow feeling for his sense of having dreamt it all.

Willard and Joe Don weren’t far behind. “What in the Sam Hill!?” said Joe Don.

“I’ll be jig swiggered!” said Willard, who glowered at Sammy as if Sammy had scared them all off, and demanded, “Where in tarnation is everbody?” I knew that Willard was smart enough to do what I had done: search for any remaining footprint on the path to the outhouse. But before he could think to do that, it was Gypsy who thought to call out for her new friend.

“JAARRRHEADDD!” Gypsy hollered.

And from the old barn came the loud bray of a mule.

Gypsy laughed and started for the barn.

But a bush stood in her way, and behold, the bush decreed loudly, “FALL IN!” And behold, twelve other bushes, thirteen if you count me, lined themselves up in formation before the commanding bush. We stood at attention, like good bushes. “AT EASE, SHRUBS!” ordered McPherson, and we not only relaxed but broke up in laughter.

Chapter sixteen

When all of us who had been woodland plants shed our vegetation and looked like human beings again, McPherson said, “Something will have to be done about Jarhead. He gave us away.”

“If you don’t want him, I’ll take him,” Gypsy said, and, I swear, batted her eyelashes at the lieutenant.

“No, I’d rather you had a talk with him and explain that he can’t just sound off whenever he wants.”

“He was just answerin me when I called him,” Gypsy said.

“Well, I hope the enemy doesn’t try to call him,” McPherson said.

“Are ye a-fixin to take him to Jay-pan with y’uns?” Joe Don asked.

“Joe Don,” McPherson said sternly, dropping his jovial tone, “you don’t know that we’re going to Japan.”

“Naw, but I can sure guess,” Joe Don said.

“Maybe that’s not the enemy he’s talkin about,” Willard said to Joe Don, then he said to the lieutenant, “Maybe the enemy is the one that you’re a-fixin to hide out from, right here. The play-like enemy.”

“Good boy,” McPherson said.

Willard bristled at the “boy.” He asked, “How big do they grow men where you come from?”

McPherson studied him as if trying to determine if Willard was being insubordinate. Or, since Willard wasn’t his subordinate and he couldn’t put him on KP duty or whatever you do to punish a soldier, he was trying to analyze the note of unfriendliness. It suddenly occurred to me: Willard was jealous of McPherson because Gypsy had developed a powerful attraction toward the lieutenant! Why does it take me so long to realize these things?

The lieutenant knew the way to Willard’s heart. “Would you people like a snack?” he offered.

While we were sitting around munching the fruit bars and chocolate bars, and Willard was working on his second helping, the other lieutenant, the one with the gold bar on his collar (and thus just a second lieutenant, although I couldn’t understand why gold was considered inferior to silver), came up and said “Mac, I’m sorry but this damn thing is killing me.” He was painfully clutching his arm, which had been broken when he piloted the glider to its crash landing.

I spoke up. “I broke my arm just like that not very long ago, and Doc Swain put a plaster cast on it, which I had to wear for several weeks, but it’s good as new now.” I held up my arm and twisted it every which way to demonstrate its flexibility and soundness.

McPherson addressed not me personally but the group at large. “You have a doctor in this town?”

Sammy said, “Doc Swain can fix anything what’s wrong with man or beast.”

I nodded, in rare agreement with Sammy, and added, “Besides, he’s the justice of the peace,” as if that helped matters.

McPherson was thinking. Finally he asked, again not of me personally, “What would he charge to set Bosco’s arm and put it in a cast?”

“Heck,” I said, “oftentimes if you can’t pay him, he’ll take produce or livestock or something in trade.”

McPherson smiled. “Would he take Jarhead?”

“You just better not, mister!” Gypsy said.

“I was teasing you, Gypsy,” McPherson said. “I could pay the good doctor whatever he wants. But the problem is, of course, we don’t want any of the adults to—” he hesitated, realizing that he might be hurting our feelings by implying that we weren’t adults. “It’s crucial we keep our presence here a secret from all but you good people.”

“Doc won’t tell nobody, if we ask him not to,” I affirmed.

“He’ll tell his wife,” McPherson said, “and she’ll tell a friend, and that friend will tell—”

“Doc don’t have a wife,” I said. “He don’t have nobody. He lives all alone. He’s an old man,” I added, as if being old is a guarantee of being either alone or not gossipy.

McPherson was addressing me now instead of the group at large. “Would Bosco have to visit his office? Or could the doctor come out here?”

“He makes house calls,” I said, “if you got a house.” I grinned and pointed at the deserted building.

“Okay. Volunteers for a detail to go after Dr. Swain?” All six of us held up our hands. “Hmmm,” McPherson said. “We don’t need that many. You do it, Donny.” I saluted, and turned to go, pleased with the assignment. He called after me, “Himitsu! Shikyu no himitsu!”

I ran all the way to Doc Swain’s. He was sitting on his porch, no customers…or rather no clients…patients is the word. Patience. I was all out of breath. “Doc, there’s another broke arm needs fixed!”

“Didn’t I tell ye to play hide-and-go-seek from them Allies?” he said.

“It’s not mine,” I said. I looked up and down the main road of the village. Old Lola Ingledew was sitting on the front porch of her store, but she was too far off to hear us. “It’s a Army Air Force lieutenant. Can you keep a secret?”

“If I don’t have nothing better to do, I can,” he said.

“You know that glider that come down yesterday?”

“The one that burnt all up?”

“Yes, but the pilot lived. His arm is broke, though. He needs you.”

“His arm or his leg? Caint he walk? Why don’t he come to me?”

“That’s part of the secret,” I said.

“Let me get my bag and all,” Doc Swain said. He went into his house and returned quickly, carrying his bag and whatever plaster and stuff he needed to set and cast an arm. “Where’s my damn car?” he demanded, as if I’d stolen it.

“Every’s still workin on it, I reckon,” I said.

So we walked. Passing Dill’s Gas and Service, Doc called to Every, “Don’t tell me if the news is bad.”

“Piston ring is shot,” Every said. “You need it right now?”

“I can walk,” Doc said. “It will do me good.”

“Who’s ailing?” Every called.

“Nobody you know, I reckon,” Doc said. “Nor me neither.”

We walked on. Lieutenant Bosco wasn’t going to die before we got there. I wondered how much I could tell Doc about everything, but decided that any talking ought to be left to McPherson. At least I could say, without sounding too self-important, “This is all very secret.”

“You done told me that,” Doc said.

The last half mile was hardest for him, uphill and slow. We arrived at the old farmstead. As before, everything was camouflaged. There was no one in sight. “They’re hiding,” I said. “But they’re here.”

“Or else you got the wrong house, Dawny,” he said. “This is the old Stapleton place. Aint nobody lived here since—howdy!” McPherson came out of the house, and approached us.

I introduced them. “Doc Swain, Lieutenant McPherson, United States Army.”

“Should I salute or shake hands?” Doc Swain asked. “Not if it’s the broken one.”

McPherson laughed and shook Doc’s hand. “It’s not me. Could you come inside? Donny, the other Axis are out behind the barn, learning judo, if you’d like to join them.”

While McPherson was taking Doc Swain to fix Lieutenant Bosco’s arm, I moseyed out behind the barn to see what judo was. I’d heard of it. In the pasture, the soldiers were sitting on the ground in a circle with Gypsy and Ella Jean, watching Sergeant Harris and Corporal Rucker demonstrate the holds and armlocks and takedowns and strangles of elementary judo. They motioned for me to join them. I removed my slingshot from my neck. “Let me hold that for you, Scout,” one of the sitting soldiers requested, but he didn’t merely hold it; he tried it out, with pebbles. I didn’t mind. Harris and Rucker were experts at judo, and before having Willard, Joe Don, Sammy, and me try something on each other, they demonstrated. I could see why Harris outranked Rucker: there wasn’t any sort of stranglehold that Rucker could make on Harris that Harris couldn’t break loose from, and not only break loose from it but in the process trip Rucker up and throw him down and disable him. It was fun to watch, but not such fun to copy. Willard and Joe Don were paired off, and Sammy and I were paired off; Sergeant Harris would demonstrate an armlock on Corporal Rucker, and then Sammy would try to do it to me. Although Sammy and I were about the same size, he was tougher, I guess. There’s something about being a newspaperman, using one’s wits and one’s words to report a world, that keeps one from being athletic. I was embarrassed to have Gypsy and especially Ella Jean watching me get thrown and twisted and clobbered. But they never giggled, and after a while Sergeant Harris suggested that they ought to start learning these things too. “Women are better at judo than men,” the sergeant said, “because their arms are limber and they have a natural talent for pulling hair.” He started them off with all the various finger holds: wrist press, thumb lock, counter, and rear hammerlock with wrist pressure, but they graduated quickly from those simple holds to the various armlocks and then to “hacking.” Their hacking, the sergeant said, had to be mostly play-like, because they could easily hurt each other.

“Judo is serious business,” the sergeant told us. “It’s not a game of sportsmanship and play. Its purpose is to keep from being killed by killing. So you have to be careful in practice, because you could gouge an eye out, choke your opponent, make him deaf, paralyze him, give him a blackout as well as a black eye.”

We got so caught up in learning judo that we forgot what had been going on in the house. At one point when Sammy had thrown me over his back and I landed on mine, knocking the breath out of me, I looked up to see that our audience had increased: both lieutenants and Doc Swain were watching us. Lieutenant Bosco’s arm was in a plaster cast almost identical to the one I’d had. I wanted to tell him that as soon as the plaster hardened we would all sign our names on his cast.

“Somebody could get hurt, doing them things,” Doc Swain remarked about our activities. He stepped forward and grabbed Joe Don’s hand as he was strangling Willard and said, “You’ve got your thumb right smack on his sternoclavicular joint. You could kill him.”

“I’m jist doing what I was learnt, Doc,” Joe Don said. “But I wouldn’t do it real enough to kill him.”

From that point on, Doc’s kibitzing took some of the fun out of our judo practice. We got a whole lesson in anatomy from his intrusion. He showed where my kidney was located and warned against causing it pain. He said if Ella Jean hit Gypsy above her belly button it would make her puke. He pointed out the solar plexus and the carotid artery and larynx and cautioned against any blows to these vulnerable parts.

Eventually McPherson said to him, “Doctor, we need to talk,” and led him away. I assumed he was simply trying to remove him from interfering with the judo lessons, but that wasn’t it. McPherson needed, I eventually realized, to give Doc Swain the same kind of little chat he’d had with each of us the day before, to impress the need for secrecy on him, perhaps even to bribe Doc Swain to keep this bivouac a secret. But what would he bribe him with?

It was getting on to suppertime but we were having so much fun with judo that we didn’t want to go home to eat. At least I didn’t, and I was probably having less fun than my more athletic friends. Eventually McPherson returned to us. Doc Swain was gone. Speaking on our behalf, Gypsy said, “Captain, can we just stay for supper?”

“I’m not a captain, Gypsy,” he said. “You can call me Mac if you like. We’d love to have you for supper, but our supply of rations could run out, especially in view of Willard’s fondness for them.”

“Could we just come back after supper, then, Mac?” she asked sweetly. And added: “Like last night?” I was jealous. I hadn’t come back the previous night.

“Don’t you think your mothers are going to wonder what you’re doing?” Mac asked. He grinned. “Where I come from, a good girl wouldn’t be out after dark.”

“How do you know I’m a good girl?” Gypsy said.

“Where do you come from?” I asked him.

He didn’t answer either of our questions. “After supper,” he declared, “my men have to practice their night movement and their night fighting.”

“Couldn’t we watch?” Gypsy asked.

Mac laughed. “The whole point of our exercises is to be invisible!”

So we had to wait for another day. It was impossible getting through school Friday, not simply because it was Friday but because we were impatient to return to the soldiers’ bivouac for more judo lessons or, as it turned out that afternoon when we got there, not simply more judo lessons but also what the lieutenant called “mass combatives” and his men thought of as “taking a break”: rough-and-tumble games. These games were even more dangerous than judo, and Gypsy and Ella Jean weren’t allowed to participate in some of them. The lieutenant explained that jungle fighting and Japanese trickery had been the mother of the invention of many of these free-for-all and team games. Only one of these games had we ever played before, Foxhole Fight, when Allies had tried to pull the Axis out of our foxholes and take our place. At the end of two minutes the winner was whoever had the most foxholes. But the way these soldiers played it, using their actual “official” foxholes excavated in the yards and fields of the old Stapleton place, there was a lot more pushing, shoving, pulling, and general hand tricks than we Axis or Allies had ever imagined.

One of the funniest, as well as the most fun, was the Crouch Bout, wherein we formed a circle and each of us hunkered down with our hands on our hips. The object was to push each other to the ground without rising up from the hunkered squat. Whoever touches the ground with his hands or gets pushed outside the circle is eliminated, one by one until only one is left. We looked like a bunch of ducks fighting, and the girls laughed constantly. Sergeant Harris usually was the last one left hunkered.

Then there was Climb the Trees. We divided into two groups of eight each, arbitrarily called Allies and Axis: Willard and Sammy were Allies while Joe Don and I were Axis. (Lieutenant McPherson himself joined the Axis, but Lieutenant Bosco, disabled, had to sit with Gypsy and Ella Jean and watch, so he served as referee, giving the command climb the tree and blowing his whistle after ten minutes). Each team tried to prevent the other team from getting up in the tree. When the whistle blew, the team with the most men up in a tree was the winner.

For other games the “Allies” and “Axis” turned themselves into “horses” and “riders” with we younger or smaller guys riding on the shoulders of the larger ones, and I had the privilege of having Mac himself as my horse. One game was called “Pickaback,” which was the way Mac pronounced piggyback, and involved starting twenty feet apart, and when Bosco gave the signal, the horse-and-rider teams would try to get to the opposite side without being knocked over by the other horse-and-riders. It hurt like hell to get knocked off my “horse” (his shoulders were just as high as a horse’s back) but the more we played this game the better I became at jousting and the better Mac became as my trusty steed, so that eventually we were unbeatable.

Saturday there was no school, so we could look forward to a whole day at the bivouac. Unfortunately, the other Axis (of the town, not of the rough-and-tumble soldier’s games) wanted to go with us. Or, rather, since they didn’t know where we were going, they wanted to know why we were abandoning them on Saturday, the best of all play-days. How could we tell them that we’d discovered a new kind of play that was far more fun than anything we’d ever done before but that we couldn’t allow any more Axis to join us there? How could we get away from them? The littluns, especially, were pathetic, and a problem. And those who had defected from the Allies, like Rosa Faye Duckworth and Betty June Alan, had assumed that their defection would allow them to become members in good standing of the Axis and to participate in all our activities.

“I got to make hay while the sun shines,” Willard gave as an excuse, but later some of the other Axis had gone to visit the Dinsmore hay field to volunteer to help him with haying, and he wasn’t there! Where was he?

“Maw’s feeling porely, and I got to stay home and keer fer her,” Gypsy gave as her excuse, and Betty June Alan took a casserole of food to the Dingletoon house as a get-well gift, and found that Gypsy wasn’t there! Where was she?

“I got to work real hard on next Monday’s Star,” I gave as my excuse, and later Latha reported that several of the Axis had brought in news items for me, but I wasn’t there! Where was I?

“Aw, I’ve just been out tracking down a news story,” I told her. “Turned out it was a false alarm anyhow.” I hated to lie to Latha, but it wasn’t exactly lying.

Still, without being able to ask my close Axis colleagues how they felt about it, I felt rather guilty, having such fun to the exclusion of all the Axis except us privileged few. If the situation was dull for the Axis left behind, it was even worse for the Allies, who had no one to play with, no one to fight with, except each other. I heard that Jim John and Larry had actually got into a fistfight with each other. I wished I’d been there to watch it, but I was watching—and participating in—far more interesting spectacles.

All of that activity in those judo practices and mass combatives was leaving us drenched with sweat and sore all over, but the worst was yet to come. On Saturday Sergeant Harris put us through what he called “calisthenics,” which sounded like some kind of disease, or something taken for a disease. He said we needed it because we “weren’t worth diddly squat” in the rough-and-tumble exercises. I think “diddly squat” was a euphemism for something nastier. Sergeant Harris often chewed us out. Ella Jean cried. Both she and Gypsy eventually dropped out of the calisthenics, but, as I discovered, not because the exercises were too strenuous for them, nor because Sergeant Harris chewed us out, nor even because the sergeant called his men, and us, “ladies” when we didn’t do something right. The reason Gypsy and Ella Jean had to drop out was that all of us were becoming too gamy for them to tolerate. I mean, all of us smelled really awful. For that matter, Gypsy and Ella Jean didn’t exactly smell like roses, but at least they could run down to their secret swimming hole on Banty Creek and smear that wonderful Palmolive all over themselves. These soldiers hadn’t had a bath and needed one in the worst way. Well, they were each given a daily ration of one helmetful of well water for cleaning, but they had to shave, and brush their teeth, and if there was any left over they just sort of dabbed at their armpits.

“Could we rent a washtub from anybody?” McPherson asked us. I told him that I could get ahold of one rent-free, and I volunteered to go get it. That was characteristic of my desire to leave a constant good impression on the lieutenant. There was a good galvanized tin washtub on the back porch at Aunt Murrison’s that had somehow escaped the War Effort Scrap Drive because, after all, my aunt and uncle needed it for a monthly bath and they made me use it for a weekly bath. It was time for my weekly bath, which I usually had on Saturday afternoons anyhow, before getting ready to—. I suddenly realized that tonight, as usual, Doc Swain was going to take some kids to Jasper to see the picture show. I’d forgotten all about that, but I guess it wasn’t going to hurt me to miss one of them, even though I wouldn’t be able to use the newsreel as source material for my—. I suddenly realized that I had done nothing to get Monday’s issue of the Star ready for press. Oh well, I could work extra hard on Sunday, couldn’t I? Then I realized Doc Swain wouldn’t be going to Jasper anyway, because his car was still in the shop at Every’s.

I had no trouble sneaking around the back way to my aunt’s house and stealing that washtub off the back porch. I had no trouble carrying it, one hand at a time until that hand got tired, for most of the way back to the bivouac. But for the last stretch of the trail, uphill and rough, I had to try carrying the washtub upside down on top of my head, staring at the ground and oblivious to whatever was around me.

Thus I didn’t see the sentry until he stopped me. The soldiers usually posted a sentry, hiding in the brush, near the place where the trail arrives at the bivouac. This one rapped me on top of the tub, and I quickly took the tub off my head and looked up at him. His name was Private Crowder.

“You know me,” I said. “I’m just taking this tub so everybody can have a bath.”

“Yeah, I know you,” he said. “But I don’t know her.”

He pointed. There, close behind me, was Rosa Faye Duckworth.

Chapter seventeen

When McPherson finished with her and came out of the house, he summoned me into the house. He did not send Rosa Faye back to town. He sent her off to join the others.

“Is there another girl you’d like to invite?” he asked me, with clear exasperation, as we sat down in the director’s chairs. “One more girl, and then you’d have an equal number of boys and girls, four of each.”

“I didn’t invite her, sir,” I said. “She must’ve just been following me.”

“Yes, I know what she was doing. She had been sitting on the front porch of your aunt’s house, waiting for you in hopes of being able to tell you in her own way, I suppose, that she’d like to become better friends, that she’d like to work for the Star, that she’d like to do anything if only you and the other Axis did not exclude her from whatever you’ve been doing lately. When she saw you come and make off with the washtub, she followed you, trying to find out where you were going. And sure enough, you led her right into our lair.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” I said. I had learned from the other men that you always put “sir” into whatever you say to him.

He sighed. “Are you interested in her?”

“Oh no!” I said. “No, sir. She has to sit with me in school because she’s now on the Axis side instead of the Allied side. Heck, she’s at least a year older’n me, sir. And besides, sir, the only girl I’m interested in is Ella Jean. But she’s just not interested in me, sir.”

He smiled. “You want to bet?” And then he dropped the smile. “You needn’t call me ‘sir,’ Donny. Rosa Faye’s brother remains a chief of the enemy, the Allies.”

“But she’s on our side. When the Allies killed Old Jarhead, you see, she switched over. I’m sure she wouldn’t tell Larry anything. Not if you talked to her the same way you talked to the rest of us. You could talk a kid out of a piece of cake. Heck, you could even talk Willard out of wanting a piece of cake.”

He laughed at the compliment. “I’m not sure I was totally successful in my little talk with Rosa Faye. But there’s no way I can keep her from joining us—unless I banish the whole lot of you.”

“She’d probably be real good at learning judo,” I suggested.

“You’ve all had a lot of fun with judo, haven’t you?” he asked. “But it isn’t a game. As Sergeant Harris tried to tell you, it’s meant to kill. These men are all killers. I am a killer.” He said these last words almost threateningly, as if I were going to be his next victim. I couldn’t help trembling. “Sometimes I think that I’ve been incredibly derelict in my duty, letting a bunch of kids hang around with a pack of coldhearted killers, and even showing you how to kill with judo,” he went on, as if he were talking to himself, severely criticizing himself. I wondered if being licked by a deer was some kind of folksy talk where he came from, wherever that was. “You don’t need to learn judo. But we’ve enjoyed your company, and you’ve helped our morale: you’ve been a nice diversion for my men while we sit out this stupid wait, but—”

“What are you waiting for?” I interrupted his conversation with himself, in my newspaper-reporter voice.

“There’s a war game about to begin,” he said. “That’s all I can tell you. I don’t know when. I wish I did. That’s one little thing they forgot to tell me.”

“Do you mean the ‘enemy’ could show up any minute?” I asked, continuing my reportorial questioning.

“Or next month,” he said. “But yes, maybe any minute. Maybe they’re on their damn way right now. Who knows?”

“Could we help you watch out for ’em?” I offered.

He thought about that, and smiled. “That could be very helpful, but probably it wouldn’t be kosher, because in a real situation we wouldn’t be getting any such cooperation from the natives.”

After I got his definition of kosher and in the process learned that he wasn’t a Jew himself, I asked, “How do you know you wouldn’t get any help from the natives? When you land in Japan, you might discover that all the country people are sick and tired of the war and they want to help you beat the Jap army.”

McPherson really cut loose with a laugh that must have carried out to all the others, who probably thought we were sitting around telling our favorite jokes. Then he said, “What a dream, Donny! But you might even be right. We’re not counting on it, though. Not one of us expects to come out of that mission alive.”

“There!” I said. “You just admitted that you are going to Japan.”

“Apparently all of you kids have already guessed that,” he said, “and it’s one more of our secrets you’ll have to keep to yourselves.”

“Are they just going to drop you there in a big glider the same way they did here?”

“Don’t pester me for troop movements, Donny,” he cautioned.

“Okay, but there’s just one thing I don’t understand. When they drop you there, you’ll be out to kill the Japs with judo and guns and whatever, right? But here, for this war game, you’ve got to pretend you’re the Japs? That don’t make sense.”

“Maybe it doesn’t. But the ‘enemy’ that’s coming to get us is a crack battalion of armored troops whose ultimate mission will be to drive their tanks into the mountain country of Kyushu. That’s mainland Japan, or the southernmost of four main islands of the country. Supposedly the terrain of their objective is very similar to your mountains, which is why these maneuvers are being inflicted upon you people.”

“So you-all have to play like you’re their target, and in reward you get to go and help ’em do the real job and get yourself killed doing it.”

His smile was wan. “That’s about it. My men have been trained in senjutsu, a Japanese tactical doctrine that will allow us to expose the tank battalion to the same tactics they’ll expect in their invasion of Kyushu. I like to think of my men as samurai, the ancient warrior class, who possess the seven virtues of Bushido—but I’ll bore you with those some other time.”

“These guys of the ‘enemy’ are coming to Stay More in tanks?”

“All kinds of tanks. There will be really big M-10s, and M-4 Shermans, and a thing called the M-7, open at the top but mounted with a 105 mm howitzer,” he said. “It has anti-aircraft defense in the form of what they call the ‘pulpit,’ a mount with a .50 caliber machine gun in it, but they won’t be able to try that out against actual air assault during the war games. All of the assault will come from my men on the ground, each of those different tanks will require a different method of destroying it.”

“And you’re supposed to lose?” I needed his confirmation of my suspicion.

“Ultimately, yes. We’re Japs, remember? But there will be an umpire, and my men are the pick of the lot, crack troops chosen from the Army’s best, selected for their wits and their strength as well as the seven virtues of Bushido, and also for their willingness to give up their lives for the cause, and I haven’t given them any instructions to lie down and surrender.”

“So you’re really going to fight?”

“Not to kill, this time,” he said. “But it will be a fight. And you’ll have a ringside seat. You should get a press card to stick in your hat.”

“I don’t have a hat.”

“Behind your ear, then,” he said, and reached out and gave me a little swat on my ear. “Now let’s go join the others. Sergeant Harris has chosen an activity that will allow the girls to remain out of nose-shot of our stinky bodies, until we have the privacy to use your washtub.” He put his hand on my shoulder and led me to where the others were. Sergeant Harris was in the process of explaining to the kids the General Alertness Drill, which involved developing instantaneous responses to spoken commands, for example, everybody freezes when he says stop! He was explaining that this is what’d you do if an enemy flare caught you on a patrol in no man’s land: if you tried to duck or make any movement at all you’d get shot, but if you just froze completely you’d either not get noticed or be mistaken for a tree.

McPherson and I both joined in the alertness drill. I learned how to respond properly: not just to stop but also to SIT DOWN, STAND UP, GET OUT OF MY SIGHT, JUMP IN THE BUSHES, ROLL ON YOUR BACK, and SCATTER. Some of these were almost like playing hide-and-go-seek, and Rosa Faye participated in all of these, and she didn’t even seem to have to keep her distance from the men the way the other girls were doing. None of the movements in this drill required a lot of exertion, so we weren’t getting any more stinky than we were to begin with. After we’d practiced the alertness drill for an hour, and had come back from the SCATTER command, the lieutenant made a motion to the sergeant and then gave a command of his own—FALL IN—and we all lined up in front of him. Rosa Faye was just a little late because she hadn’t heard FALL IN before and her first reaction to it was to fall down. But she quickly got up, blushing, and stood at attention in a line with the rest of us.

“Now it’s time we rehearsed a few situations,” Lieutenant McPherson said. “Supposing we’re down behind enemy lines, and taking assessment of our condition. Straighten up there, Coe!” Sammy had lazily allowed himself to get into the at-ease position instead of attention. Then, when the lieutenant snapped “Bosco!” poor Sammy thought at first that we were being told to “boss” or something.

“Sir?” Sammy said.

But “Sir?” said the other lieutenant, stepping forward smartly and clicking his heels as he came to stop at rigid attention. I still didn’t quite understand this rank business, why Bosco would be subordinate to McPherson and why silver was more important than gold. But then as I stared at Bosco standing there with his arm in a cast suspended from a cloth triangle around his neck, I realized that the bar on Bosco’s collar was not gold but brass. Also I got a good look at the wings over his shirt pocket: a pair of brass wings on either side of a large letter “G.” That wasn’t his initial. What did it stand for?

“Eyes front, Donny!” McPherson said to me, and I aped the other men, who were rigidly at attention, staring straight ahead. Then McPherson addressed the brass lieutenant. “Bosco, you are useless to this mission,” McPherson declared. “With your broken arm, you’re just holding us back.”

“Sorry, sir!” Bosco said, even if he wasn’t required to say ‘sir’ to a fellow lieutenant.

“Since we are behind enemy lines, your job of piloting the craft to a landing is successfully completed, but you are incapacitated and therefore a liability to the mission. Do you understand what we have to do to you?”

“Yes, sir,” Bosco said. “They shoot horses, don’t they?” He said this matter-of-factly without any intended humor.

McPherson unfastened the strap of his Nambu automatic and drew the pistol out. “If you fell into the hands of the enemy, they could torture you and you’d give away our secrets.” He slowly raised the pistol and pointed it at Bosco. I hoped he remembered that it was loaded with real bullets.

“I realize that, sir,” Bosco said. “My only regret is that I didn’t get everybody to sign my cast.” He lifted his arm. The cast had been signed by a few of the men, but I hadn’t had a chance to inscribe it.

“Sorry about that,” McPherson said. “Thanks for landing us.” Then he fired. It was a terrible burden of knowledge, to be the only one who knew that McPherson’s automatic didn’t have blanks in it, and I must have jumped a foot or two. McPherson fired a second time, and then a third, and Second Lieutenant Bosco, glider pilot of the Army Air Force, clutched his stomach with his one usable hand and crumpled up on the ground. I looked around bewildered at the other men. Not one of them was betraying any emotion! Each one of them continued to stare straight ahead like zombies, as if this were something they hadn’t even noticed, or as if it were something they did every day right after breakfast. By contrast, Gypsy and Ella Jean and Rosa Faye were screaming their heads off and dancing around like they had to go to the outhouse badly, and then they were holding each other. Willard was trying to copy the impassive attention of the soldiers but he was doing a bad job of it, and was shaking like a leaf. Joe Don was the only one capable of speech.

“Hey!” he yelled at the lieutenant, “now what did ye have to go and do that for?”

“Can it, Dingletoon!” McPherson snapped at him, and pointed the pistol at Joe Don. “Do you want to be next, for making so much noise? You’re giving away our location.”

I was about to protest, myself, because I was the only one who knew the bullets were real. But I was too scared to speak.

McPherson put the pistol back in his holster. “Well, you men passed that drill. You kids flunked it. Why don’t you go back to town and play your Allied buddies in a game of baseball or something? My men want to use the washtub after they’ve buried poor Bosco.”

The girls didn’t need to be told twice, and they scampered away from there. But before they got very far, here came Doc Swain, carrying his black doctor’s bag. “Finally got my car fixed,” he said. “So I can take the corpse for an autopsy.” He gave the body a kick like kicking a car’s tire. “Looks like he’s pretty dead. Are you dead completely, son?” he asked the corpse.

“Yes sir,” Bosco replied, motionless. “I’m dead as a dodo.”

All the men started laughing. “FALL OUT!” McPherson said. Bosco got up off the ground, and some of the men started hugging him.

“Anybody else want to see the pitcher show?” Doc Swain asked.

“Doctor Swain has kindly consented to drive Lieutenant Bosco to the county seat, Jasper,” McPherson announced, “where he can catch a bus and eventually get back to Camp Chaffee. So any of you who want to sign his cast had better do it now.”

“I can take two or three more to the pitcher show tonight,” Doc said. “It’s The Mummy’s Curse with Lon Chaney.”

All of the men raised their hands. None of us Japs did. I personally couldn’t stand movies with Egyptian mummies who moved around, and anyhow I didn’t want to go to Jasper when there was more to watch in Stay More.

Gypsy said, “Us gals wants to sign Bosco’s cast, and then we’re gonna go fix a nice supper to bring for all of you’uns.”

Doc Swain said to me, “Dawny, you’ll miss the newsreel.”

“Those things are weeks old anyhow,” I said. “I’ll just use the radio.”

“Sorry, men,” McPherson said. “Jasper is off-limits to anybody except Bosco, and he’s dressing in civvies, thanks to the good doctor.” He turned to Gypsy and said, “We appreciate the offer of supper, especially because our supply of K rations is very low, and we’re sure that you girls are wonderful cooks, but I don’t see how you could slip some food past your mothers.”

“You just leave that to us, captain!” Gypsy said.

The girls each signed Lieutenant Bosco’s cast, and then they each gave him a kiss on the cheek, which caused the other men to howl and whistle and make remarks, and Rucker said, “Hey, Doc, my arm is broken too!” After the rest of us had signed the cast, mostly with expressions of “Good luck” and “Nice knowing you,” Bosco gathered up his gear and Doc Swain drove him away.

“See you in Okinawa!” McPherson called after him.

The girls each returned to their homes, where Gypsy told her mother that all the Dinsmores had took sick, and Ella Jean told her mother that all the Dingletoons had took sick, and Rosa Faye told her mother that both the Dinsmores and the Dingletoons were laid up with something awful, and the three girls got busy with their mothers’ help cooking up three large pots of, respectively, pork and beans, boiled greens (mixed turnip, mustard, collards, and poke salat), and enough chicken-and-dumplings to feed an army (or a small part of one).

Their efforts were hugely appreciated by the soldiers, six of whom proposed offers of marriage on the spot to the three girls, who declined on the grounds they couldn’t decide which one to marry. We had a real banquet. The soldiers had each taken a good bath in my washtub, and put on fresh clothes, and spruced themselves up a bit. After we’d made pigs of ourselves, and Willard was obviously in paradise, Sammy Coe furnished the dessert: he had persuaded his mother that he needed to take blackberry cobbler to both the Dinsmores and the Dingletoons, families with a total of thirteen sick members, all of whom would need seconds, and thus he needed enough to feed ’em all. Polacek claimed he’d never had chicken and dumplings before, which we found hard to believe, but I don’t think any of those men had had blackberry cobbler before. Willard brought the cream, and had three helpings himself. There wasn’t a speck of food left over.

The soldiers offered their cigarettes to us, and we accepted—or rather Ella Jean declined, so I declined too, but Gypsy actually smoked one, and so did Rosa Faye. By the time I had changed my mind and wanted one, it was too late to ask. We lighted a nice campfire, which helped a little to keep the mosquitoes away. All of these men had known mosquitoes before, but they hadn’t learned that there’s only two things you can do about mosquitoes, if the smoke doesn’t keep them off: one, you can be so alert, as in the General Alertness Drill, that as you soon you detect the faintest touch of one of them lighting down on your arm and hear the STINGER! command, you slap down and kill the bastard; or, two, you can be so tough that all those stings don’t bother you at all.

Stuffed as we were with all that good food, most of us didn’t mind the mosquitoes. We sat around as it grew dark talking about anything, even mosquitoes. Joe Don remarked, “Back when we’uns had our guns, it used to take two of us to have a squirrel hunt, one of us to fire off small shot to clean away the skeeters so th’other’n could see to shoot the squirrels.”

After the men had stopped laughing, Willard said, “Shoot, I never could get that far on a squirrel hunt, because three or four of these here skeeters would rassle my dog down and suck all his blood until he was dead.”

“I heard from Latha Bourne,” I contributed, “that when they finally got window screens on the houses, it got the skeeters flummoxed. But then the skeeters started in to carrying little bitty skeeters that they could push through the mesh, and then when the little skeeters got through and sucked the blood of those in the house and grew and grew, they’d come and unhook the screen door so the others could get in.” This little windy drew such appreciative laughter from my audience that I started racking my brain for other stories. But all I could think to add was, “Have you-all seen any lightning bugs yet? Well, those are just skeeters with flashlights!” This crack didn’t get quite as much response, and I decided maybe most of these men didn’t know what a lightning bug was, or hadn’t seen one.

“My Vermont grandfather,” McPherson himself put in, “used to tell one about being caught by a swarm of huge mosquitoes, and he shot three or four with his revolver but had to crawl under a big iron wash kettle to get away from the others. But the mosquitoes began drilling right through the sides of the kettle. So he took his pistol butt and clinched over the beaks of any that penetrated. That held them for a while, but after a few more had been riveted to the kettle like that, they just flew off with the kettle!”

“Vermont grandfather?” said Sammy. “Heck, I heard the same story from my grandpa, only it wasn’t no kettle, it was a tent, and after he’d clinched ten or twelve of the skeeters, they just put too much strain on the tent-pegs and flew away with the whole camp.”

“Vermont grandfather?” said Joe Don. “Are you from Vermont?”

I had been wanting to find out where McPherson was from; in fact, I had asked him once but he’d ignored me. Was he ashamed of his birthplace or did he just want to keep it a secret?

McPherson nodded but we couldn’t see him in the dark. We waited, and eventually Joe Don said “Sir?” and finally McPherson said, “Yes, my hometown is Brattleboro, Vermont.”

“What do ye know?” Joe Don said. And then he told everybody about the old hermit Dan, who lived in the yellow house down the mountain, and everything he knew to tell about him: how he was a legendary fiddler and renowned marksman with a rifle, how he knew German even, how he’d stopped the Battle of Dinsmore Trail and everything. “He’s an old man now,” Joe Don said, “but when he wasn’t hardly no older’n me, he was a schoolteacher in Vermont.”

“Really?” said McPherson. “I wish I could meet him.”

“I’d be mighty glad to take you,” Joe Don offered. “His house is right down through the woods yonder, probably not more’n a mile. If you’re from Vermont, he’d likely hanker to talk your own language with you.”

“You know,” McPherson reminded him, “we can’t have any contact with the population.”

“He prowls these hills all by hisself,” Joe Don said, and looked all around in the growing darkness. “For all what we know, he’s right out there watchin us, right now.”

Chapter eighteen

When the Germans surrendered and V-E day was declared, Tuesday, May 8, it was a day too late for that week’s issue of The Stay Morning Star, which I had managed to bring out at the usual time on Monday morning by forcing myself to stay away from the bivouac all of Sunday. I thought of bringing out an Extra for V-E Day, and later learned that all of the other newspapers in the world except mine had brought out Extras for the occasion, but at least I had already, in the regular issue the day before, had a story, GERMANY SURRENDERS, which, while it didn’t exactly predict V-E Day, made it pretty clear that victory was at hand. That was my lead story; I deliberately played down on the back page a small article, FLYING CRATE’S LANDING NOT CERTAIN, which said, “Reports of some kind of flying apparatus floating down to the ridges east of town last Wednesday have not been confirmed. No one has been able to say they actually saw any landing, while others say they saw only some smoke which indicated the machine may have crashed and burned.” The rest of the issue was pretty dull. I hadn’t had time to get out on my usual rounds to gather news, and while eager Japs had left a few items about visits in my basket at Latha’s store, there wasn’t much of real interest to report. Thus, I wasn’t too happy about showing this issue of the Star to the soldiers as an example of my talents, but I printed up an extra dozen copies anyhow, and on my early Monday morning delivery rounds before school I gave the copies to the sentry at the camp and asked him to be sure the lieutenant got one.

“I’m proud of you, Donny,” McPherson said the next time I saw him. “The Star is a splendid little piece of journalism.” Maybe I got kind of damp around the eyes. It had been a long, long time since anybody had said they were proud of me. “I like the clever punning way you’ve incorporated the town’s name into the name of the paper,” he went on. “And of course I’m terribly appreciative and admiring of the way you handled—or deliberately mishandled—the news of our landing.”

I didn’t know what to say. “Thanks,” I said. “I figured you’d like that.”

“Have you thought about a career in newspaper work?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said. “I’ve always wanted to be the next Ernie Pyle.”

His expression saddened. “A great man,” he said. “A very great man.”

“All you soldiers loved him, didn’t you?” I asked.

“I loved him not as a soldier but as a fellow journalist.” When I lifted my eyebrows at this statement, he said, “I haven’t told you I belong to the same fraternity of Fourth Estaters that you do.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve heard of the Columbia Spectator?” It sounded like the name of a ship, but I knew he must be referring to some newspaper. I shook my head. “It’s just a college paper, but one of the best. I had the privilege of editing it a couple of years ago, but then when I went into graduate school I switched from journalism as a major to Japanese literature, because one of my friends at Columbia—” He stopped and chuckled and said, “I’m boring you with all these things about me.” I shook my head vehemently, but he said, “Let’s talk about your career. For college, you ought to go to one or the other of the Two Columbias. Columbia University in New York City, where I went to school, has a top-notch journalism department, but the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, which would probably be easier for you if you couldn’t get to New York, has one of the best. So one or the other.”

I had never given a thought to the fantastic idea of going to college, and I told him that. I was just in the fifth grade. Nobody in Stay More, as far as I knew, had ever been to college. Anyhow, I said, I did want to hear about him and what he’d done. “Why did you get interested in Japanese literature?” I asked.

He made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “Oh, there was another Donald in my life then, Donald Keene, my classmate at Columbia, who was a fanatic about Japanese writing. Don introduced me to the work of a fabulous seventeenth-century novelist named Ihara Saikaku, and when I read his Koshoku ichidai otoko, which might be translated as The Man Who Spent His Life in Love, I was hooked. It was the first of a whole new genre of fictions called ukiyo-zoshi, or tales of the floating world, which are bawdy, some would say pornographic, yet more irresistible than sex itself…. But I’m rambling. Back to you. Do you keep all the back issues of the Star? You should. Don’t ever throw anything away. You’ll regret it when you get older. Anyway, I’d appreciate it if, next time you come up here, you bring me the back issue that has your story on old Dan, the hermit in the yellow house.” I told him I’d never written a story about ole Dan. He expressed great astonishment. “Possibly the most interesting person you could ever have interviewed!”

And then he told me some unsettling news: the evening before, while I was slaving to get out the issue of the Star, Joe Don had taken McPherson to the yellow house! Joe Don had first stopped at the hermit’s house to ask the old man if he would care to meet a fellow Vermonter and had tried to persuade the old man to go with him up to the bivouac. That was against the rules for Joe Don. He wasn’t supposed to tell any adults; he wasn’t supposed to show the bivouac’s location to anybody. But it didn’t matter, because the old man had said, politely, that he didn’t want to “intrude.” The old man revealed that, just as Joe Don suspected, he had known about the bivouac all along, and had covertly watched from the woods, and had even been present Saturday night for the banquet. Joe Don had asked the old man if it would be all right if he brought the Vermont lieutenant to meet him, and Dan had graciously agreed. Of course McPherson was rather put out with Joe Don when he heard about all this, but he really was so homesick for Vermont that he was eager to meet the old man, especially after Joe Don assured him that it was possible to hike through the woods from the bivouac to the yellow house without crossing any roads or trails or passing any other houses. In other words (as I knew myself), there was a kind of direct link between the yellow house and the bivouac, topographically, and now there was a direct link between the two Vermonters, who had gotten along famously together.

“Good Lord, have you seen his daughter?” McPherson asked me. No, but I’d heard about her, I said, and I explained how she’d never been to school. “Yes, I know,” he said. “But she’s just as bright as you are!”

“Well, at least you don’t have to worry about either one of them telling anybody about you,” I said, “because they don’t talk to folks.”

“They talked to me,” he said. “Both of them.”

I began to suspect that the lieutenant, like Joe Don himself, had become infatuated with ole Dan’s daughter. There was nothing wrong with that, and I enjoyed the fantasy of Stay More providing a girlfriend for this smart, handsome hero of mine. But if McPherson was going on a suicide mission to Japan he didn’t want to leave any broken hearts behind. It was already bad enough that Gypsy was so goofy about the lieutenant that she seemed to have forgotten Mare.

There was another thing I had to ask McPherson. Apart from the thought of his hitting it off with the old hermit, I was dizzy from the discovery that he had been a journalist himself and a fellow admirer of Ernie Pyle, and I liked him more than ever, but sometimes he puzzled me. “When you shot Bosco,” I wanted to know, “did you want me to think that you had real bullets in your pistol? You told me you did. You said it was a secret just between you and me.”

“That was a situation, Donny,” he said. “I was testing your reaction, and I was testing my men.”

I pointed at the Nambu pistol in his holster. “But now you’ve put the real bullets back in?”

He nodded. “You never know when you might need them. These woods have bears and wolves and panthers in them.”

I shook my head. “Nobody has seen any of those for many years. I’ve never seen one. I saw a coyote once, but you don’t need to worry about coyotes.”

“Well, there are some strange creatures out there. Last night we saw some sort of snout-nosed animal that looked like an overgrown rat with a long tail. He had real sharp teeth.”

“Sounds like a possum,” I said. “They’re harmless. They’re real good to eat, though, if you want to shoot one.”

“But then this morning we saw the same creature again, and he had put on a suit of armor!”

I laughed uproariously, but self-consciously wondered when was the last time I had really laughed. “Oh, that wasn’t the same creature. That was an armadillo,” I explained to him. “Come to think of it, they do sort of look like possums with armor.” He joined in my laughter. “There’s no telling what kind of weird creatures you’ll find when you get to Japan.”

“Oh, they’ve prepared us for that,” he said. “The Japanese wolf was exterminated in 1920, but we’ll see the wild boar with monstrous tusks, and sika deer, and the macaque, most northerly of all monkeys, the same creature who illustrates the Buddhist wisdom, ‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” McPherson demonstrated with his two hands. Then he said, “But they just didn’t prepare us for Stay More, for possums and armadillos. My men joked about the armadillo, wondering if that was the best tank the Sixteenth Armored Division could send to attack us.” After he had quit chuckling over that, his expression grew serious and he said, “It’s good they can still joke. Good for morale. But I know they’re bored, and tired, and a little scared. They can’t have leave, and they can’t get mail, and they feel cut off from the world. They’re getting kind of starved for women, if you know what I mean. Hell, so am I. But I think we all understand that we may never have a woman again. Some of the men have developed this horrible red rash they’re scratching all the time, and at first I wondered if it’s some kind of venereal disease, you know, from sexual contact. But I got a little of it myself, and I haven’t had a woman in a very long time.”

“Is it around your…thing?” I asked.

“Some. Mostly around my calves and ankles.” He rolled up his trouser leg and showed me.

“Those are chigger bites,” I said.

“Chiggers?” he said.

“They don’t have chiggers in Vermont?” I explained to him just what a chigger was: a fierce little red mite that usually doesn’t start appearing until late May or early June but was early this year because of the heat. In its larval stage it attacks anything that moves—man, mouse, bird, or reptile. They don’t burrow, like ticks, or jab, like mosquitoes, but inject something that makes you scratch like mad and thereby do the digging for them. Then after you’ve scratched a little hole with your fingernails, they crawl in and have a feast.

“It sounds like the Japanese mite,” he said, “which causes tsu-tsuga-mushi, or Japanese river fever, often fatal.”

“Nobody has ever died of a chigger bite that I know of,” I said. “But it sure causes a lot of torment.” I explained that, as with mosquitoes, there were only two things you could do about them, but neither one involved smacking ’em or ignoring ’em. One was, you could pick some pennyroyal, a common little mintlike ground cover, and crush it up and smear it on your skin, and that would keep them off; they couldn’t stand the smell of pennyroyal. Or, if you’ve already got ’em, and already scratched ’em, you can kill ’em by dabbing a little bit of Chism’s Dew on the spot. Chism’s Dew was a locally manufactured whiskey; Luther Chism, the proprietor, lived just beyond Butterchurn Holler. No, I couldn’t buy some for McPherson and the soldiers, because I was underage, but Luther would probably be willing to sell a jug to Joe Don, who was his closest neighbor. Joe Don wasn’t of a legal age either but he wasn’t just an innocent kid like me.

Whatever displeasure McPherson may have felt for Joe Don because of his violating the rules in order to introduce the lieutenant to the old hermit was forgotten by Tuesday, when Joe Don showed up after school at the bivouac with a demijohn of Chism’s Dew, which the men (being the pick of the Army’s brightest) discovered was not only good for treating chigger bites but had another, livelier use. It was V-E Day in Europe, and the soldiers made a kind of celebration/ceremony of converting Joe Don from being a Nazi into becoming a Jap, like all the rest of us. We made a hilarious game out of it. Joe Don was given a Hitlerian mustache with charcoal and sent off to hide as in a game of hide-and-seek, and each of us, armed with a shoju (loaded with blanks of course), went out searching for him. Whoever found him would have the privilege of “shooting” him in the ceremony. It was such fun that I wasn’t too jealous that Sammy was the one who found him. Joe Don was marched into camp, holding his hands up in surrender, while we yelled whatever taunts we could think of—“Kill the Kraut!” “To hell, Heinie!” “Farewell, Führer!” “Futz to Fritz!” “Junk the Jerry!” Sergeant Harris then boomed at him, “ANY LAST WORDS, ADOLF?” and poor Joe Don struggled to say something appropriate, finally coming up with, “Mein only regret is I got just one ball to give for mein country!” Then he was blindfolded and the firing-squad-of-one, Sammy, was allowed actually to fire the burauningu at him. The Japanese BAR made a lot of noise, and I wondered if it carried all the way to the Dills’ house. Joe Don, having watched the convincing death throes of Bosco a few days before, attempted to duplicate them. Then Corporal Rucker took over for the resurrection and transformation, presenting Joe Don with an actual Japanese soldier’s uniform, and the girls were required to turn their backs while Joe Don took off his clothes and put on the uniform. Rucker explained to us that Joe Don was a gunso, sergeant, and he pointed out the erisho on his collar that indicated his rank. He now outranked all of us, including Gunso Harris, but not of course the chui, McPherson. The latter delivered the main speech in Japanese, not bothering to offer a translation for our benefit, but I could assume from some of the grins and smirks on the faces of his men that he was saying something funny. Then Joe Don saluted, but Chui McPherson had to show him how the Japanese salute is different from the American. I really regretted that I would not be able to write a report of the ceremony for the next issue of the Star. At least I would be able to report that henceforward the former Axis would now be called Japs, and the former Allies could call themselves Yanks.

In the final part of the ceremony, Willard, acting on behalf of Mare Coe as vice mayor of Stay More, presented to Lieutenant McPherson a “key to the city,” made of wood but looking like a big key, with a red ribbon on it, and he explained that Mare had always wanted to present a key to the city to an important visitor, “but we never had none afore.” Who was this Mare Coe? McPherson asked. Willard said to me, “You tell ’em, Dawny,” so I proudly told the story of Mare Coe and Iwo Jima.

Throughout all this ceremony and celebration, I noticed the demijohn of Chism’s Dew circulating from hand to hand, and the men were pouring more into their cups than they needed to put on their chigger bites. Before the day was over I came as close as I ever had to actually sampling the stuff myself, but I was chicken.

On Wednesday after school as I was rushing to get to the bivouac, Latha came out on the porch of her store and stopped me. She said she hadn’t had much of a chance to speak with me lately. Not that it was so important, but I hadn’t swept the store in over a week, and that was part of my job. Nor dusted the merchandise. “Every day after school, you rush right home,” she pointed out. “Is your Aunt Rosie punishing you for something?”

“Aw, I’m not going home!” I said. And realized too late that perhaps I should have used that as an excuse. Why else would I be heading in that direction? “I mean, yeah, I’ve got to go home but not because she’s punishing me. I’ve just got a lot of stuff to do.”

“Oh?” she said. “I’ve never known you to spend so much time at home.” I felt real bad about lying to Latha, and I tried to think of a more innocent lie to replace it, but I couldn’t. “I couldn’t help but notice,” she went on, “that your Axis friends have also been going that-away pretty often. The older ones, at least. The younger ones just mope around my store or Lola’s, and complain like the Allies do, ‘I aint got nothin to do!’ Well, why is it, I wonder, that they don’t have anything to do and you’ve got so much to do I never see you anymore?”

I hung my head in remorse, but couldn’t even think of a proper apology. “I’ll go in and sweep the store,” I offered.

“It can wait,” she said. “You go on and join your friends in whatever mischief you’ve cooked up.”

“I’ll try to come around more, I promise,” I said. And I escaped from her just in time to catch up with Gypsy and Ella Jean and Rosa Faye, who were on their way.

There was no way of knowing that I’d see Latha again sooner than I expected. When we got to the bivouac, and the others showed up, Lieutenant McPherson called us all together with his men. He didn’t yell “FALL IN” or anything, he didn’t make us stand at attention, he just got us all together and said he had some things to say. “The party’s over,” he said, and I was afraid he was about to announce that the bivouac was off-limits to us kids. But it was his men he was talking about. They’d consumed that whole demijohn of Chism’s Dew, and even with a little help from the older kids that was a lot of dew. They were happy to be relieved from the itching of their chigger bites but they were suffering the notorious aftereffects of too much alcohol. But that wasn’t what McPherson was concerned about. He announced that their K rations were exhausted. A whole week had gone by since their landing, and they hadn’t anticipated they’d have to wait that long for the damn exercise to begin. Since each package of K rations also included four cigarettes, a stick of chewing gum, and a candy bar, they were also out of those things, and starting to die for a smoke. Their training had included some wilderness survival lessons but they did not really know how to forage for food. “I shot that opossum last night,” McPherson said, “but what do we do with it?” Even though it was just a rhetorical question, Gypsy and Ella Jean each offered conflicting recipes on how to cook a possum. Rosa Faye said that of course she’d be glad to raid the Duckworth fraid-hole and bring up a lot of jars of canned goods. Sammy said he’d raid the Coe fraid-hole too. McPherson had to wait patiently for an explanation of what a fraid-hole is, and then he said he didn’t want any of us robbing our family larders. “You people have a struggle just to feed yourselves, don’t you?” he asked, again just rhetorically, but Willard insisted that it was a struggle that had been going on so constantly for so long that it never bothered him any more; he took it for granted as a way of life. Joe Don, whose experiences moving from place to place and living hand-to-mouth had qualified him as an authority on the subject, said that there was no reason why anybody with any wits or sense should ever have to go hungry. “Friends,” McPherson said, “listen. We can pay for our food. You say there are two stores in town? All right, but how we do shop at those stores? We can’t go down into the village.”

I spoke up and said that I’d be glad to go get anything they wanted at Latha’s store. “And how do you explain to her where you got the money?” McPherson asked. “Or why you’re buying enough of everything to feed a dozen hungry men? And she’s not going to sell you cigarettes, is she?”

“She don’t sell cigarettes anyhow,” I said. “Just the makings. Duke’s Mixture and Prince Albert and Bull Durham and papers.”

“If I did have the makings, I wouldn’t know how to—Harris, what’s the expression?”

“Twist a dizzy, sir,” Sergeant Harris offered.

“I wouldn’t know how to twist my own dizzy,” McPherson said. “Even if I did, Latha’s not going to sell tobacco in any form to you, Donny.”

“She’d sell ’em to me,” Joe Don said, “if I had the money.”

Gypsy said to her brother, “Joe Don, if you had any money, she’d really get suspicious!”

“Same here,” Willard admitted. None of us, really, except possibly Rosa Faye, whose dad owned the canning factory even if it wasn’t running anymore, might have had any money of our own to spend in the stores. Then Willard asked of the lieutenant, “Couldn’t you use your radio to reach somebody at your camp and tell ’em to send you some more k rations?”

McPherson sighed. “Apparently the signal won’t carry that far. We can pick up some distant stations, but we can’t make contact with Camp Chaffee. If we could, you may be sure that I’d give ’em hell for stranding us out here in the middle of nowhere! I asked Bosco to tell headquarters of our situation, but I’m not sure he could tell them how to find us.”

Although my feelings were a little hurt that he thought of Stay More as “nowhere,” I was about to offer the suggestion that each of us kids could put extra food in our dinner pails for school and bring it afterwards to the soldiers, which would be better than nothing. But before I could say this, the sentry Private Crowder came up and saluted McPherson and said, “Sir, there’s a bunch of ladies out there.”

“Ladies?” said McPherson. He turned to Harris and snapped, “Sergeant, you didn’t go through with your harebrained scheme to find some prostitutes, did you?”

“No, sir!” Harris said. “We were just drunk when we said that.”

“These aren’t whores, sir,” Private Crowder said. “They’re mothers, mostly. These kids’ mothers. And the lady who runs the store.”

Chapter nineteen

When the delegation of womenfolk came into the bivouac, my favorite woman addressed my favorite man. “Excuse us if we’re interrupting anything real important,” Latha said. “But we just had to see what all these young’uns have been up to lately.” She looked all around her—the other ladies looked all around them—there was Willard and Ella Jean’s mother, Selena Dinsmore; and Joe Don and Gypsy’s mother, Bliss Dingletoon; and Sammy’s mother, Dulcie Coe; and Rosa Faye’s mother—I was sorry I couldn’t remember what Mrs. Duckworth’s first name was. I guess I was happy my aunt wasn’t there. What they saw looking all around them was only an old abandoned farmstead temporarily populated by soldiers and kids. There was no sign of the bivouac.

Selena Dinsmore wagged her finger at Willard and Ella Jean. “You’uns told me a big fib the other evenin, when ye said all them greens was for the pore Dingletoons. And Bliss says she wasn’t sick atall!”

Bliss Dingletoon said, “And these two o’ mine used the same story on me!” She grabbed Joe Don and Gypsy by their ears.

And Dulcie Coe said, “So this is where all my blackberry cobbler ended up!”

“It sure was good, ma’am,” said Corporal Rucker.

“Best dessert I ever had the privilege of sinking my teeth into,” Sergeant Harris said.

“Those chickens and their dumplings,” said Polacek, “were positively de-lish, believe me.”

And all the other men made murmurs of “Mmmm-mmmm!” and “Oh, man!” and “Whatta life!” and a few of them began drooling in the memory of the banquet…or the expectation of further dishes.

The women of Stay More were temporarily charmed out of their anger, but Mrs. Duckworth said, “Aw, Rosa Faye made them chick’n dumplins all by herself!” and each of the other mothers protested that her daughter had done the cooking.

“But surely,” Lieutenant McPherson said, “they learned how to cook from their mothers, didn’t they?”

And the women allowed as how they might have learnt the girls a lesson or two in the kitchen.

Selena Dinsmore, making polite conversation, asked, “Where are you fellers from?”

The men looked at one another, as if waiting for someone else to name his hometown. “We are all stationed at Camp Chaffee,” McPherson said. And when he got blank looks, he explained, “That’s an army base near Fort Smith, here in Arkansas. Individually we come from all parts of the country. Sergeant Harris here is from Wisconsin. Corporal Rucker, Oregon. Corporal Quigg, Virginia. Private Polacek, New York. Private Crowder, California. Private Keough, Pennsylvania. Private Rogalski, New Jersey. Privates Nilson and Hewes are both from Michigan. Private Macklin, Florida. Private Lambert, South Dakota. And myself, Lieutenant McPherson, from Vermont. At your service, ladies.” Mac saluted, then bowed from the waist. Then he said, “I forgot someone. Gypsy, get Jarhead.” Gypsy ran to the mule’s shed and returned riding atop the animal. “And this is Corporal Jarhead,” McPherson concluded. “From Tennessee, I believe.” When the ladies had stopped laughing, McPherson looked at them and said, “And you are—?”

The women of Stay More introduced themselves, and I relearned Mrs. Duckworth’s name. Gladys. I would remember all these names, because they were going into my next big story in the Star.

Latha said, “It’s not every day we get even one visitor to Stay More, let alone a dozen soldiers. Did you boys somehow miss the main road to Fort Smith?”

I blurted, “They came on that glider!” Then I looked sheepishly at McPherson, cringing in anticipation of his frown or his reprimand. But he was just smiling.

“So,” said Latha, “why have you boys been hiding up here in the woods for a week?”

McPherson sighed. I had known him long enough to know that his sigh meant, “I hate this, but I guess I have to.” Then he took a deep breath and glanced at Sergeant Harris and said, “Our orders are to pretend that we are a hostile force in a training exercise. The training has two purposes: we serve as sparring partners—or as punching bags—for a select armored battalion on maneuvers, and, in the process, we sharpen our skills as an elite corps of commandos, rangers, marauders—we prefer to call ourselves samurai. Collectively and individually, we are a mean bunch of dogfaces. Each man is a sharpshooter with a rifle, and an expert at judo. Some of the men are the Fourth Army champions in the use of certain weapons: Corporal Quigg with the Browning Automatic, Corporal Rucker with the 81 mm mortar, Private Crowder with the 60 mm mortar, Sergeant Harris with antitank grenade, Private Polacek with machine gun. Privates Nilson and Hewes with the bazooka can hit a target a mile away.”

Latha pointed her finger at him and asked, “And what are you the champion at?”

McPherson grinned. “Shooting off my mouth, mostly.”

“Lady,” said Sergeant Harris, “the tank hasn’t been built that he can’t destroy.”

“Sergeant,” said the lieutenant.

“So when is this contest supposed to start?” Latha asked.

“Who knows?” McPherson shrugged. “I expected it to begin soon after we landed, but our opposition may have lost their way trying to find us.”

“Well, there’s no sense in you boys starving to death up here and making all these kids into storytellers,” Latha said. “Come on down to our fair hamlet and get you some decent food.”

McPherson glanced at his men, each one of whom was eagerly nodding his head. Jarhead the mule was nodding his head. All of us kids were nodding our heads. McPherson sighed again. Then he said to Harris, “All right, Sergeant.”

“FALL IN!” Sergeant Harris said. We all lined up. “DIS—” added the Sergeant, “MISSED!”

Everybody headed for town, Gypsy riding Jarhead at the front of the column. The mule seemed happy to get away from the confines of the bivouac, and his step was lively. The soldiers weren’t marching at all, but sauntering. McPherson carried the large wooden beribboned “key to the city” that Willard had given him, as if he might be able to use it to unlock something in town. He walked not as if he were the commander but just one of us, and from time to time he would walk alongside one of us, talking to us. When my turn came, he simply said that we ought to continue to keep the location of the bivouac a secret. Later he might need my advice on a new location for a bivouac. I said I knew he was going to like Stay More.

The first house we reached down the mountain road was Latha’s own, and she pointed it out to the soldiers and told them that was where she’d be serving supper as soon as she got the store closed. Dulcie Coe said she was awfully sorry but the supper this evening was going to be at her place, whereupon Gladys Duckworth, Selena Dinsmore, and Bliss Dingletoon each claimed that they were each going to serve the supper to these soldiers. McPherson solved the dispute by suggesting that the men could be divided into groups of two or three each to dine at the available eating places.

At Latha’s store (which she hadn’t bothered to lock up, trusting anyone during her absence to help themselves and leave the money for it), she sold the soldiers smoking tobacco and cigarette papers. Most of them twisted a dizzy and, Latha’s post office still being open, they bought postcards and V-mail stationery and composed notes or letters to distant mothers and lovers. Then they sat on the edge of the porch to loaf and smoke and take a good look at the town. They were glad to be looking at architecture again after looking at nothing but trees. I appointed myself tour guide and I indicated the empty stone building across the road and explained it had been a bank that had never reopened since being robbed many years before. I thought it best not to get into the complications of just how it was that the robber of the bank was the same Every Dill who years later would come back and marry Latha. Next door to the old bank, I pointed out, was Doc Swain’s house and clinic; directly across from it the house and clinic of Doc Plowright, who was retired. Just beyond Doc Plowright’s was the big old Ingledew General Store, still in business, but losing most of its business to Latha’s. That woman yonder sitting on the store’s porch by herself was Lola Ingledew, who kept it open. Behind the Ingledew store rose the hulk of the old gristmill, four stories of red tin in imitation of brick. Behind that, across Swains Creek, was the old sawmill and wagon-bow factory, where they used to make bows for the Conestoga wagons that had headed west. I pointed out the little canning factory, shut down for the duration of the war’s tin shortage, and, in the far distance, the schoolhouse. That was all of Stay More, not counting the Jacob Ingledew house across from the Ingledew store, which had once been a hotel, and in a sense still was, because it had rooms that were never used. Up the hill behind the hotel was the Coe blacksmith shop.

“What are those pits or craters all over the place?” McPherson asked, gesturing here and there.

“Those are our foxholes,” I said proudly. “The Jap foxholes. We have to defend the village from the Yanks. You ought to see their foxholes.”

One of the soldiers pointed and asked me if that river was safe for swimming. I told him it wasn’t a river, just a creek, which emptied, miles downstream, into the Little Buffalo River. The soldier and a few others asked McPherson for permission to run down there and take a dip.

“When we’re off the bivouac,” McPherson said, “you don’t need my permission for anything.” He himself abandoned the others and took a stroll down the main road, looking at the houses and buildings and our network of foxholes and other defensive emplacements. I followed, telling him if there was anything he wanted to know about anything, just to ask me. He said he thought it was a nice little town, although it was much smaller than he had been thinking it was. He said that the town and the countryside reminded him a lot of Vermont. He told me that the old hermit Dan had told him that was one of the reasons Dan had settled here, because it reminded him of Vermont. He asked me if it was true that Dan and his daughter never came into the village. I said I’d never seen them here.

Our stroll and conversation was interrupted by an encounter with a group of the Yanks, who surrounded us but kept a respectful distance from the man in a lieutenant’s combat uniform. I wasn’t about to introduce McPherson to Larry or Jim John or Sog; I simply whispered to him that those were Yanks, formerly Allies, and he nodded his head as if acknowledging that I had pointed out a species of poisonous snake. And they weren’t going to introduce themselves. They scattered in three different directions, probably to alert their friends and families to this “invasion” of Stay More.

In pointing out the various parts of town to the soldiers, I had neglected to identify Miss Jerram’s little cottage, across the road from the schoolhouse, within sight of the very place on Swains Creek where the soldiers had chosen to go swimming. Of course none of them had bathing suits, and they seemed oblivious to the woman standing on her back porch observing them as they frolicked naked in the water, diving and bullfrogging and splashing.

News traveled faster than the Star could ever do, and before nightfall everybody in Stay More knew that we had a dozen soldiers in our midst. At school the next day, Miss Jerram practically canceled the usual order of lessons in order to have everybody who knew anything report on whatever was going on. Ella Jean told about the soldiers who went home with her and Willard so that Selena Dinsmore could feed them. Gypsy told about the three who went to the Dingletoon house, Rosa Faye reported on the three who came to the Duckworth’s, and Sammy on the two, Lieutenant McPherson and Sergeant Harris, who ate at the Coes. I suspected they hadn’t chosen Sammy’s house out of favoritism toward him, nor because his late brother had been an Iwo Jima hero, but because the Coe house overlooked the village and was more centrally located. Still I was jealous, and I considered asking my aunt if she would be willing to feed a few soldiers that night, or the next night. None of the Japs reporting on our affiliation with the military (of which the Yanks were obviously insane with envy) revealed that the soldiers were Japs like ourselves or that they were destined to invade mainland Japan. But it was made clear that “our” soldiers were going to be involved shortly in a simulated battle with an invading force that would include big tanks and artillery and maybe hundreds of additional soldiers. Miss Jerram said she wanted to remind us that there were just a few days of school remaining and that she hoped none of this warlike activity would distract us from our studies.

I never did learn (as if I could have used it in the Star anyhow) just how Miss Estalee Jerram, our nice schoolteacher, met Sergeant Rodney Harris of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Most people thought it probably happened at the pie supper, but at least I did know that they had already met somewhere, somehow, before the pie supper, and that it was a sheer accident of destiny that the pie that Sergeant Harris successfully bid on was the pie that Miss Jerram made. Some folks said that the idea for the pie supper started with Miss Jerram herself, but I know it was Latha’s idea.

Pie suppers didn’t happen very often, and we’d had only two of them since the war started, both as fund-raisers for a War Memorial when a Stay More boy was killed, most recently Boden Whitter in that kamikaze attack on his ship. Pie suppers always appeared to be for the purpose of raising money for some worthy cause, but the real purpose is to promote friendship between male and female, who pair off together (not too privately) for the eating of the pie. Each of the women and girls of the town would bake a pie, their favorite kind, and wrap it fancifully, in a pretty box or a woven basket (some girls could even make baskets out of cornstalks in the shape of log cabins), and these would be auctioned off to the highest bidder among the men and boys. Whoever bought your pie had the privilege of sitting with you while he ate it; he would give you a piece, or two, or three, but you were supposed to flirt with him or at least listen sympathetically while he courted you. It was chancy, because there was no way of knowing in advance which girls had done which pies. That was the reason I’d been stuck with Rosa Faye Duckworth in the previous pie supper.

A pie usually went for not more than fifty cents, but with all these soldiers bidding on them (Doc Swain agreed to serve as auctioneer), the winning bid sometimes got as high as two or even three dollars! Sergeant Harris paid two seventy-five for Miss Jerram’s pie. None of us realized that she even knew how to bake pies. Did he betray any disappointment when he discovered that the baker was not one of the younger ladies but a schoolteacher? No, maybe because Miss Jerram had for the occasion dolled herself up so much she looked like, as Willard put it, “a ten-dollar whore,” although I doubt Willard had ever seen a whore of even five dollars. Anyhow, Miss Jerram and Sergeant Harris went off to sit on a rock together and eat that pie, and that was the beginning of their beautiful romance.

McPherson pestered me in advance for tips on how to identify or even guess the baker of the pie, but he didn’t tell me his motive: his heart was set on making the successful bid on a pie by hermit Dan’s daughter Annie. I could have told him there wasn’t any chance in the world that Annie would show up. And she didn’t. Everyone nodded in sympathy and understanding when McPherson’s pie turned out to have been made jointly by the twins Helena Doris and Jelena Cloris, Ella Jean’s older sisters, just recently widowed when their joint husband Billy Bob Ingledew was shot in the siege of Berlin. Come to think of it, according to the stories, Doris and Jelena had first met Billy Bob when he had bid on and won both their pies at the War Memorial pie supper held when the first Stay Moron was killed early during the war. Now, the town was divided between those who thought Doris and Jelena ought to remain in mourning and seclusion during this pie supper, and those who felt it would help them overcome their grief to get out and be sociable. Willard had already told McPherson the story of his twin sisters. McPherson had suggested to me that I ought to start keeping a journal to record such stories for future reference, and I had got myself an Indian Chief tablet from Latha’s store, writing on the first page “Article Ideas,” and had already recorded two: (1) an interview with the old hermit Dan; (2) the strange story of Jelena and Doris Dinsmore. I knew very little about either of those subjects, and was determined to find out more.

Whatever gods there be who manipulate our luck and our lot were having themselves a party the night of the pie supper. Not only did Sergeant Harris wind up with Miss Jerram, but Gypsy, who was nearly overcome with disappointment when the lieutenant bought Jelena’s and Doris’ pie instead of the egg custard pie she’d hoped he would bid on, wasn’t too unhappy when the lucky bidder on her egg custard was Willard, who, according to rumor (I didn’t see them), got not only a pie but eventually a kiss for his money, thirty-five cents. Best of all, I myself had not bid on any of the pies until a certain one that had been wrapped or concealed inside what appeared to be a girl’s nightdress still bearing a faint stain resembling a question mark: “?” I don’t know what made me bid my quarter (which was all I had) on that pie. Destiny maybe. I wouldn’t have got the pie in competition with the soldiers except for the fact that all of them had already obtained their pies. My pie turned out to be a sweet potato, of which I was not awfully fond, but the baker of it turned out to be Ella Jean Dinsmore, of whom I was uncommonly fond.

It was a good thing I had taken to carrying that Indian Chief tablet with me everywhere because Ella Jean, once we both had overcome our shyness toward each other and had eaten that pie (or at least a piece apiece, perfunctorily), began to talk about her sisters Doris and Jelena, and I needed to take notes. We watched them sitting on either side of the lieutenant, who was doing all the talking, and we imagined that he was charming them just as he had charmed us, and Ella Jean was happy about this, because her sisters, she said, were totally heartbroken over Billy Bob’s death. She did not see them much, since they kept to themselves in the house that Billy Bob had built for them, where they were raising the baby, named Jelena too. Ella Jean herself did not know which of the twin sisters was the actual mother of Jelena the baby. But every time Ella Jean had stopped by her sisters’ house, she had found the gloom to be so thick it frightened her.

“How come you’re a-writing down ever thing I say?” Ella Jean asked me.

“Every word you say I want to keep,” I said. There wasn’t any coy flirtation in this, and I went on to explain the lieutenant’s recommendation that I keep a journal of ideas for articles.

“Would ye care if I worked on the Star for ye?” she offered.

I was overcome with joy. “I haven’t never had nobody helping me with it yet,” I pointed out.

“I caint write stories,” she said. “But they’s bound to be some ways I could help ye.”

“Oh, I’m sure there is,” I said.

Before the evening was over, we had, ever so briefly, held hands. I don’t mean shook hands over my decision to hire her as assistant editor of the Star, but held hands in the romantic sense, if only for a few seconds. I had got up my nerve and asked her to explain the wrapping the pie had been in. Was that really her nightdress? What was the significance of the “?” dimly stained into it? In answer, Ella Jean took my Indian Chief tablet, and on the page where already I’d written down ideas for stories on ole Dan and on Jelena and Doris, she wrote: “(3) What’s the picture on Ella Jean’s nightie?” And left me to think about that.

The next issue of the Star was an Extra, you may be sure (McPherson told me that in Japan for years the newspapers liked to bring out Extras, and “Gogwai! Gogwai!” was the cry of newsboys). The masthead had a new name, the only one after my own. There was even a little story on the back page, “Star Staff Doubles,” with the announcement of her taking on the responsibilities for “society news,” “births and deaths,” “page layout,” “punctuation,” and “drinking water.” The latter was her idea: she kept us both supplied with cups of cool well water while we worked on the paper. That Extra, with her help, was twice as long as usual, what with the full story on the soldiers, the pie supper, and so on. I cleared the copy with McPherson, who made only a few minor changes to censor information on the soldiers that he didn’t want revealed; he thought I was very clever to write “their bivouac is in a farmyard, and since the word ‘farmyard’ encloses the word ‘army’ they are safely enclosed there,” but he didn’t want even that much given away about their location. He also objected, in my story about the pie supper, to my sentence, “The lieutenant cheered up Doris and Jelena enormously.” He said he hadn’t been able to cheer them up at all.

I was glad later that I had cut any mention of Doris and Jelena from that Extra of the Star. Private Macklin, on a detail to reconnoiter the terrain west of Swains Creek, came upon their bodies lying together holding hands on the blood-stained earth hundreds of feet beneath the crag known as Leapin Rock.

Chapter twenty

When we buried Doris and Jelena Dinsmore, an airplane flew over. Much later, I would ask McPherson if there wasn’t some kind of word or expression for such a thing happening that seems somehow to have already happened. He would tell me the words, which I would have occasion to use again and am using now: “day shave you” it sounded like, not Japanese, meaning “already seen.” The only time an airplane had ever flown over Stay More previously, we had been burying a mule, and we hadn’t finished the job. Now the job was not only finished, but had honors: McPherson’s seven best riflemen lined up smartly at the graveside and pointed their weapons at the sky and fired. Blanks, of course, or else the volley might have hit that airplane. McPherson told me that military funerals are often accompanied by aviation, but this airplane wasn’t part of the plan. He said it was a Piper Cub, and it was “obviously a scout, for aerial reconnaissance.” It could fly very slowly, around and around, so that the cameraman could take many photographs.

McPherson was plunged into disconsolate sorrow by the suicides of Doris and Jelena, feeling (wrongly!) that he might even have said something to them that drove them to it. I couldn’t say anything to make him feel better. Even though I put in my Indian Chief another article idea: “(4) The History of Leapin Rock,” and interviewed Latha on the subject and tried to explain to McPherson that Jelena and Doris were by no means the first persons to avail themselves of that crag’s lofty lethality, he was not comforted. Sweet Ella Jean, even though racked with sorrow over her sisters’ deaths, tried to explain to McPherson the circumstances of her sisters’ having already been plunged into hopeless despair by the death in Berlin of their joint husband Billy Bob Ingledew, but her words could not relieve McPherson of whatever horrible guilt he was feeling. At the funeral, when everybody usually sings “Farther Along,” wherein we try to tell each other that we’ll understand it all by and by, Doc Swain (who had signed the death certificates and listed cause of death as “broken heart”) stopped the singing before it could begin and protested, “Farther along, hell! We done already understood it.” But McPherson did not understand it, and farther along he was still so disconsolate that the situation, according to Sergeant Harris, had degenerated from a SNAFU into a FUBAR (Corporal Rucker offered a translation, from “Situation Normal All Fucked Up” into “Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition”). His men became concerned that McPherson was ready to call it quits, to abandon the bivouac and “resign” from the forthcoming maneuvers, and maybe even go AWOL (which Rucker claimed stood for “Absentmindedly Walking Out Legless”). All pretense of being in an orderly bivouac was dropped; the men were permitted to come and go as they pleased, and it pleased them to feel that they were on some kind of furlough, free to go fishing or just to loaf, free to pursue the girls or women whose pies they’d eaten and whose hearts (and beds) were emptied by all the able menfolk going overseas to fight the war. There was a rumor that Sergeant Harris was even staying overnight at Miss Jerram’s house! The discipline of the daily calisthenics under his direction was lost, and the men began to get fat from what they were fed by the ladies.

Nobody’s life returned to “normal” after the lives of Doris and Jelena were ended. Doc Swain withdrew into a kind of depression that no one could explain other than speculating that in his long experience of signing death certificates he had signed one too many. I wrote in my Indian Chief: “(5) The History of Doc Swain” but when I tried to get started on that, Latha just said, “Now why would you want to be thinking about that at a time like this?” I didn’t see my new assistant editor for several days after the funeral, so I assumed she had withdrawn into some kind of depression too. Each evening after supper I made a pilgrimage to that sacred hidden spot on Banty Creek where she took her bar of Palmolive for baths, but she was never there. Perhaps she and Gypsy had used up all of that bar of Palmolive. Gypsy, too, had tried to cheer up McPherson, but he had said to her irritably, “Gypsy, will you please stop calling me Captain?” And she had withdrawn into her own kind of depression. Her brother Joe Don somehow persuaded the hermit’s lovely daughter Annie to invite the lieutenant to dinner, and Joe Don personally carried the invitation to McPherson but, since Joe Don himself wasn’t invited, we had nobody to report to us on the success of that endeavor.

Miss Jerram was the only person who seemed to be not unhappy, and that must have been because of Sergeant Harris, who was waiting for her every day after school and was seen walking with her on the roads and sitting with her on her porch, and, according to the rumors, not coming out of her house after suppertime. She canceled school for the day of the funeral, and the next day too, and the following week was the last week anyhow, so she gave all of us some tests and then said “Have a happy summer,” and that was the end of school.

A postcard came addressed c/o General Delivery to McPherson, and Latha let me deliver it to him. Of course I read it first: “Hey, Mac! Hope I didn’t get your Irish up telling them your coordinates. They tortured the info out of me. Figured what the hell, they couldn’t get any good pix of your installation anyhow. Stoving and those chumps in the tank corps can’t even find the place! They want me to show ’em. See you in Okinawa, hell. See you in Staymore! Bosco.” When I gave this card to McPherson and he read it, I was happy to see him smile for the first time in days.

In fact, he not only smiled but laughed over the thought of just what those reconnaissance photos would reveal to the “enemy.” They would show the soldiers firing their funeral salute, of course, but not their well-concealed bivouac up on the mountain. They would show a hundred-odd (some very odd) Stay Morons surrounding the grave (there was but one, and only one coffin, in which the sisters lay enfolded). The sleepy, decaying village, with numerous foxholes. A double-pen house high up in a sycamore tree in a broad meadow, surrounded by foxholes. McPherson said those photographs were going to be “our best possible ammunition.”

“You know those wings he wears?” I asked McPherson, realizing the question made Bosco into some kind of angel. “I just wondered what that ‘G’ stands for, between the wings, you know?”

“Guts,” said McPherson. “Sheer guts. I hope when our glider lands on a mountain in Kyushu that Bosco will be at the controls.” Then McPherson picked himself up out of his gloom and summoned his men to him and said, “Time to get ready.” Later he clapped me on the back as if I’d written the postcard myself and said expansively, “Good job, Donny. No, the ‘G’ just stands for ‘glider’ because Lieutenant Bosco is an Army Air Force glider pilot. But you can let it stand for anything you like.”

The postcard was just a day ahead of its author. We heard the trucks and the jeep long before we saw them, coming up the twisting road from Parthenon. By the time the trucks and car arrived in the village, a good crowd of us were assembled on and around the porch of Latha’s store. None of the soldiers were there. Miss Jerram was abandoned. It could have been any early summer’s afternoon on a country store porch, except for the absence of menfolk. There were a lot of boys, Yanks and Japs both, and several girls. Ella Jean and Gypsy had both emerged from their sadness, at least enough to pay attention to what was going on in the world. Gypsy had given up on her flirtation with McPherson and had started spending time with Willard, which of course left poor Ella Jean feeling lonely.

The jeep and the trucks came into view and pulled to a stop right in front of the store. The jeep wasn’t black like all the cars I’d seen but a kind of greenish brown. So were the trucks, three of them, but the trucks had tops of canvas. Then three more trucks came in behind, one of them with metal sides and top and two flatbed trucks carrying a bulldozer and road grader.

The driver of the jeep was a private first class, and sitting beside him was Second Lieutenant Bosco. Sitting in the back seat were two men with officer’s service caps on their heads, and on his shoulders one man was wearing the double silver bars of a real captain (did Gypsy realize?) and the other some kind of gold ornament in the shape of a leaf.

Lieutenant Bosco turned in his seat and addressed the latter, “This is it, sir.”

The gold-leaf man looked at us. “Who’s in charge of this burg?” he asked. When no one answered, he looked around at the village, the deserted bank across the road, a vacant house north of Doc Plowright’s, whatever he could see. “This town,” he said. “This place. Is there a headman or somebody?” When this too was met with silence, he asked, “You people do speak English, don’t you?”

I spoke up. “Hanashimásu Nippon-no. Kore-wa yoi hon-de su.”

“What?” said the gold-leaf. “Is that some kind of redskin lingo?”

“Japanese,” said Willard. “He’s trying to tell you that we’re Japanese. But I reckon you caint speak it.”

The gold-leaf turned to the captain and said, “I thought all the Japs in Arkansas were kept at Rohwer or Jerome.”

“I think they’re just kidding, sir,” the captain said.

“Bosco?” the gold-leaf said. “You said they were just hillbillies.”

“Yes sir,” said Bosco. “But they’re real smart hillbillies, and for the duration of this exercise they are Japanese.”

Larry Duckworth spoke up. “I aint no Jap! I’m two hunurd percent American.” And the rest of the Yanks nodded their heads in agreement. “Three hunurd,” Jim John added.

“Well,” said the gold-leaf, “which of you can tell me how to find a squad of soldiers who are camping out somewhere around here?”

None of us answered, until finally Larry said, “I don’t rightly know but they’re some’ers hereabouts, I can tell ye. I seen ’em.”

“Bosco?” the gold-leaf said. “Why don’t you just take us and show us their bivouac?”

“Sir, I agreed to bring you to the town,” Bosco said. “But I don’t have any obligation to show you where the bivouac is located.”

“Are you disobeying orders, lieutenant?”

“If this were an actual situation, sir,” Bosco said, “my loyalties would be with the aggressor force.”

“Goddamn it, Bosco!” the gold-leaf said. “We’re not the strike team. I’m the umpire, for godsakes, and Captain Billings’s men are the engineers. I assume they’re just as neutral as I am, right, Billings?”

“Yes sir,” Captain Billings said. “We’re not taking sides in this fray. Or rather, we’re working for both sides.”

“Okay, Bosco!” the gold-leaf yelled. “So why don’t you show us the fucking bivouac?”

Lieutenant Bosco, whose arm was still in a cast, crooked the finger of his good hand at me, and when I approached, he said, “Donny, how about you go down the road that way”—he pointed in the opposite direction from the bivouac—“and see if you can’t find Mac, and tell him that Major Evans, the exercise umpire, is here?”

So the gold leaf indicated a major, which was a cut above a captain. Major Evans said, “So the kid doesn’t really speak Japanese, huh?”

“As much as he pals around with McPherson,” Bosco said, “he could probably talk Hirohito into surrendering. Well, Donny?”

I saluted and took off, running down the main road until I was around the bend beyond Banty Creek and then leaving the road and cutting back through the woods, along a trail that would return me to the road that led eastward from the village up the mountain to the bivouac. I knew all these trails like the palm of my hand. And in no time at all I had reached the bivouac.

To my surprise, my hero had changed clothes. He was dressed in what I quickly supposed was the combat uniform of a Japanese chui, or lieutenant, complete with ceremonial sword. Or maybe it wasn’t just ceremonial; he probably knew how to use it.

“They’re here!” I said. “Bosco is back! And a whole bunch of others. There’s a Major Evans, who says he’s the umpire. And a Captain Billings with six trucks full of engineers and stuff.”

“I heard trucks. I didn’t hear tanks,” he said.

“No tanks. These guys say they’re all neutral,” I said. “The strike force comes later, I guess.”

“Harris!” McPherson summoned his top noncom. “If I don’t come back, if I’m taken prisoner, you know what to do.”

“Yes sir!” The sergeant saluted.

But McPherson was not taken prisoner, and all of those other soldiers really were neutral. Captain Billings and his company of engineer corps were already establishing their bivouac near the same place where the WPA boys had camped out back in 1939 to build their little cement bridge over Banty Creek, and some of them were already taking measurements of that bridge. To make sure it would support heavy tanks, McPherson explained, as we approached the village from the same circuitous direction I had left it.

Major Evans had set up his headquarters at the old Ingledew hotel, and was sitting in a rocker on its broad front porch. McPherson saluted him, but with the same Japanese salute he had demonstrated to Joe Don.

“Cut the crap, McPherson!” Major Evans said, with a dismissive American salute. “You don’t have to be a Jap, for godsakes!”

“You want realism, we got realism,” McPherson said, and added, “Sir.”

“If that’s the case, why can’t you do a better job of digging foxholes?” The major swept his arm to indicate all of our pits and craters.

“Those aren’t ours, sir,” McPherson said. “We didn’t invent war games, you know. The local kids have been playing War for years.” He smiled at me.

“Oh? Well, I can’t tell you anything about your opponent’s strategy, but I can tell you that they are expecting you to defend the village.”

“Defend the village?” McPherson said. “That wasn’t discussed. I don’t have the personnel for that. I’ve just got one platoon, you know, and the enemy is supposed to find us, and they won’t find us anywhere near this village.”

“But if they ‘take’ the village,” Major Evans said, “I’ve got to score points for them. You can’t expect to win in the ninth inning if the score is already impossible.”

“I’d need to lay a minefield, sir,” McPherson said. “We weren’t issued mines.”

“We can give you mines,” Major Evans said. “Tell the engineers what you want, and let’s get ready.”

“We will defend the village,” I said. The thought of laying a minefield around Stay More, even with fake explosives, made me angry. The Japs could keep the tanks out without any mines.

Both men looked at me, McPherson with pride, Evans with annoyance. “Get lost, kid,” the latter said.

“Sir,” McPherson said, “this gentleman is the editor of the local newspaper, and I would watch my tongue if I were you, sir.”

“Oh, shit, lieutenant,” the major said. “And you’ve taught him how to speak Jap too, huh? Well, listen, your job was to make a beachhead here, not to civilize the natives. You and I have a few things to discuss in private and I’m asking the kid to beat it.”

“Donny, would you mind?” McPherson said.

“Okay, I think I’ll go watch those guys trying to blow up our bridge.” I turned to go, but said one more thing to McPherson, a thing I’d heard around the bivouac: “Don’t let him pull rank on you.”

I went to watch the engineers measuring the WPA bridge, which I had watched the construction of in the summer of 1939. It wasn’t much of a bridge, six concrete tunnels just large enough to let the water of Banty Creek flow under the roadbed, and often not large enough for that because already the annual floods had jammed driftwood against the side of the bridge so that the cement crenelation along its side had to be sledgehammered away. But one pier of that crenelation remained, with its cement stamped like a tombstone forever: BUILT BY W.P.A. 1939.

I went up to Captain Billings and asked, “Think it will hold an M-6? Or just M-4 Shermans?”

“Oh, hi, Donny is it?” he said. “Where’d you learn about tanks? From McPherson?”

I quoted Sergeant Harris, “The tank hasn’t been built that he can’t destroy.”

The captain laughed. “That’s what I hear. But you’re a Jap, right? So the strength of this bridge is classified information.”

“You said you’re working for both sides,” I reminded him.

“That we are, son,” the captain said. “And we’re also working for you people. We aren’t going to let the tanks tear down your bridge if your bridge won’t hold ’em.”

“You’re going to lay mines all over,” I said.

“We are? I haven’t heard that yet. But if we lay mines, they won’t hurt anybody when they blow. Might scare a few dogs and cats and cows.” He chuckled at the image, but I didn’t think it was funny. “Our main job is bridges, though. We may have to get up into those hills and put some bridges across the brooks and streams.” He was pointing toward the south.

“Is that the direction the tanks are coming from?” I asked.

“Now there you go!” he said, quickly sticking his pointing hand into his pocket. “Trying to get information out of me. No, as far as I know, the tanks might come from that way.” He took out his pointing hand and pointed it toward the west.

“How will they get across Swains Creek?” I asked. It was my turn to point, at the water that separated us from the schoolhouse, the road that went westward up to Sidehill. There had never been a bridge across that creek other than footbridges.

“Guess we’ll have to put a pontoon on it. No trouble at all.” But he shook his head. “That doesn’t mean the tanks are coming from that direction.”

They put a pontoon bridge across Swains Creek, which was just a temporary floating bridge, on the tops of boatlike things, but mighty enough to support at least an M-3 if not an M-6. The Japs and the Yanks revived our neglected pastimes in order to stage a battle over that pontoon bridge, with the Japs attempting to prevent the Yanks from crossing it. Since we outnumbered them so much now, our defense of the bridge was successful. We generously allowed the Yanks to run back and forth across the bridge after we had secured it.

The grown-ups of Stay More congregated on the porch of Latha’s store to talk about the forthcoming invasion of the town, or, as far as most of them were concerned, the invasion that had already occurred—although the engineers and the umpire’s staff were polite, respectful of property, and eager to have our goodwill. Doc Swain came out of his funk to serve as “headman” of the village for discussions with Major Evans, although Oren Duckworth, father of Larry and Rosa Faye and the town’s lone industrialist when his canning factory was operating before the war, felt that he ought to be considered the headman, and insisted on participating in the discussions. Of course all of us Japs felt that Willard, who was vice mayor when Mare was still here and therefore now the mayor since Mare’s death, ought to be considered the headman, but he wasn’t quite yet a man, and he didn’t insist on participating. It was Oren Duckworth who grabbed the privilege of reporting to all of us on the discussions, of telling us not to be alarmed by the presence of all the soldiers or the coming of the tanks, to stay in our homes and not get in their way, to understand that all of this activity was intended for a good cause, the training of U.S. soldiers, and to remember that if any damage occurred the U.S. Army would reimburse us. He didn’t say a word about defending the village.

I told Willard and Joe Don that McPherson’s samurai might have to defend the village and we ought to do whatever we could to help, starting with this: we would find out just which of the roads leading southward or westward out of the village were being “improved” by the engineers, with bridges or grading or widening or whatever, and we’d let McPherson know. Spying on those roads, the three of us determined that the enemy was definitely coming from the south, from the old road that meandered through the forests to Demijohn and Swain along the upper course of Swains Creek.

It took the engineers several days to get that road ready to support tanks.

Chapter twenty-one

When the road to Swain was ready, we were ready to tell McPherson, and the three of us reported to him at the bivouac. He said it stood to reason that the invaders would come from the south, since that was the direction, at a great distance, of their base, Camp Chaffee. But since Major Evans and all the engineers and their convoy had arrived from the north, and McPherson had requested a minefield be laid with the northern direction in mind, the mines weren’t going to help anyhow. “Who needs mines?” Sergeant Harris asked.

We Japs volunteered to patrol inconspicuously that “improved” road to the south, and to notify McPherson the instant we saw or heard any approaching tanks. There was one lofty spot on the Swain road known as Piney Gap where you could not only see the road as it continued a mile farther south but you could hear any engines coming along that road for miles away. This patrol gave me another sense of déjà vu, reminding me of that time we’d staked out the Dinsmore trail to prevent the Allies’ abduction of Gypsy. But like that time, day after day went by without any sign of anybody coming on that road. I took advantage of the lull to consider bringing out an Extra of the Star. Ella Jean, my assistant, urged me to. But I realized that when the actual battle began, we might have to bring out an Extra every day. In an inspired stroke of genius, Ella Jean and I decided that for the duration of the “occupation” of Stay More, our newspaper would become a daily, and we even put that into the title: The Stay Morning Daily Star. I couldn’t have done it without her, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that she was better at lettering the copy onto the master sheets than I was, because her hand was neater. She also lettered for me a card that boldly proclaimed PRESS and I took to wearing it pinned to my shirt everywhere I went, especially when I was interviewing engineers for stories. Just as Ernie Pyle would have done, I made a point of finding out those engineers’ hometowns and even their street addresses, and whenever I wrote a story about one I included such information. At first the soldiers weren’t too cooperative, or they teased me, poking my press card and saying things like, “Well, I pressed but nothing happened.” But once they’d seen an issue of the Daily Star, they changed their tune, and some of them bought extra copies to send to friends and relatives back home. I wasn’t the only one getting rich; the whole economy of Stay More was surging, and even Lola Ingledew’s old store, hardly ever patronized any more, was selling out its dusty remaining merchandise.

It was during Willard’s shift patrolling the south road at Piney Gap that he detected the first far-distant sound of some big machine one evening after supper. I was on my way to relieve him when he came running hard and didn’t even pause when he panted at me, “They’re coming!” and I tried to keep up with him as he ran all the way to the samurai’s bivouac.

McPherson and his men were ready to go, as they had been for days. Ever since the arrival of Major Evans and the engineers, who had brought along a good supply of K rations for them, they had abandoned their pleasurable habits of dining with the Stay Morons and had remained in their bivouac, where Sergeant Harris, who had had to tell poor Miss Jerram he couldn’t see her again until the fighting stopped, led them in constant calisthenics, judo practice, alertness drills, whatever. Now they were all dressed in Japanese combat uniforms, complete with those funny Jap caps and amiage kyahan, laced leggings. They didn’t need any commands, spoken or signed, to move out.

Because they didn’t want to pass through the village, Willard and I led them on a shortcut that crossed Dinsmore Hill east of the hermit Dan’s place and then crossed Banty Creek at a spot where stepping-stones kept your feet dry, and gained the Banty Creek road to move westward to its intersection with the Swain road south. At that intersection, McPherson thanked us but told us we couldn’t go any further with them. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “If I have my way about it, there won’t be any of this that you’ll be able to watch. But you’ll hear it. Go find yourself a good seat. The front porch of the hotel would be the best place.” And then they were gone into the gathering dusk.

Willard and I moseyed over to the porch of the Ingledew house that had been the hotel and was now headquarters for Major Evans, who was sitting in a rocker after supper smoking his fancy briar pipe with a couple of his staff, a sergeant and a corporal. Our old friend Lieutenant Bosco was also there. “Hey, Japs,” Major Evans said to Willard and me. “What’s up?”

“Nanimo,” I said: nothing, and Willard also said “Nanimo” although he didn’t quite pronounce it correctly. We sat on the porch too; there were plenty of chairs. We watched the lightning bugs coming out, and I considered telling the major that those were mosquitoes with flashlights, but decided he didn’t have any sense of humor at all. After a while, I said, “We were wondering, could you tell us, since all the ammunition is fake and doesn’t hurt anybody, how does the umpire know when one of the tanks is hit by a shell or something that would have blown it up but didn’t really blow it up. I mean—”

“A good hit,” said Major Evans with exaggerated patience, “will leave a temporary yellow mark if it’s antipersonnel, and a temporary red mark if it’s antimateriel. Does that make any sense? Instead of real bullets or shells, there’s some soaplike stuff with colored dye in it.”

“Yellow if it hits people, red if it hits tanks?” Willard said. “Okay, but how does a grenade know whether it’s hitting people or tanks?”

“Different kinds of training grenades,” the major said. He was slouched in his rocker in a bored attitude. But suddenly he snapped into an upright, alert position. “Speak of the devil! Was that a grenade?” He looked at his men.

“Sounded like one, sir,” the sergeant said. “Far off.”

All of us listened, and slowly but increasingly other sounds drifted out of the distance through the gloom. “Browning fire,” the major said. “And another grenade. Rifles. Was that a bazooka? Hey, mortar!”

We were all looking toward the south, and the sky down that way, or rather the mountainside, was illuminated by the light of a flare. And then another flare. It was spectacular, almost like watching fireworks exploding in the sky. Not that I had ever seen fireworks. But I had watched meteor showers.

“Jesus!” the major said, and then his ears really perked up and he said, “Do you hear tanks?”

“Yes sir,” said the sergeant, and the corporal nodded too, and Willard and I both nodded also. Not that I had ever heard tanks, but Willard had, earlier this night.

“Get the jeep!” the major said, and the corporal ran around behind the hotel and returned with the jeep. The soldiers piled into it and took off down the south road. Bosco stayed behind.

“I sure do wish we could mosey down thataway too,” Willard said.

But we just had to sit there, for a long time, listening to all of that gunfire and the explosions and the rumbling of the tanks. The noise had alerted everybody in Stay More. The whole platoon of engineers were out of their tents, Doc Swain was on his porch, and kids were approaching from every direction, along with Miss Jerram and many others.

Sammy Coe ran up, asking, “Has it started?”

“Sounds like it,” Willard said. “But it’s still a long way up the road yonder. I thought it was supposed to happen right here in the village.”

“McPherson ambushed ’em,” I said, with more exultation than I’d felt in a long time. “He wouldn’t let ’em get anywhere near the village.”

My analysis, I was pleased to discover and to report in the next day’s Daily Star, was right on target. McPherson’s samurai had indeed ambushed the whole convoy of tanks, jeeps, and trucks coming from Camp Chaffee, the elite troops of the 715th Tank Batallion, 16th Armored Division.

When all the shooting stopped, the jeep returned to the hotel. Major Evans was swearing obscenely as he got out of the jeep and just stood there in the road with both of his hands on his hips as if somebody had stolen his favorite toy.

“Who won?” Willard had the audacity to ask.

“Won?” Major Evans said. “It’s still top of the first inning, and the score is already twelve to nothing, Japs.”

Another jeep pulled up, and a captain got out. He saluted the major and said, “They caught us by complete surprise, sir. We couldn’t get a shot off. That wasn’t in the script.”

“Fuck the script!” said the major. “If this were really Kyushu, Stoving, your whole outfit would be wiped out. The Japs won’t take prisoners. At least McPherson was nice enough to take prisoners. Here he comes.”

Another jeep pulled up, driven by our friend Corporal Rucker, with the lieutenant in the back. I assumed they had commandeered the jeep from the enemy.

McPherson jumped out, saluted the major (with a Japanese salute) and then offered his hand to the captain. “Good game, Burt. Kind of short, but I like them that way.”

“Fuck you, Mac,” Captain Stoving shot back. “The game hasn’t started. That was just a warm-up, and you haven’t scored a point yet.”

Major Evans said to Captain Stoving, “I’m afraid he has. Quite a few points. In fact, according to the rules, you are so dead you’ll have to wait two days for replacements.”

“That’s not fair, sir!” Captain Stoving was nearly whining. “If I’d had any idea we’d get waylaid before arrival, I’d have sent scouts on ahead. And if I’d used my scouts, there’s no way Mac could have taken us.”

“Let’s do it over again,” McPherson suggested, “and you can use your scouts this time.”

“We’re already here!” Stoving said. “We’ve finally arrived to start the exercise, which is all we were trying to do! Do you know how many days it took just to find this place? If the visiting team is arriving for the game, you don’t send out the home team to beat them up while their bus is coming into town!”

Major Evans said, “Gentlemen, you’re both forgetting this isn’t a game. You can’t do anything over again. This is war. And as in love, all is fair.”

A long column of soldiers was coming across the Banty Creek bridge, their hands raised behind their necks while McPherson’s men with rifles escorted them. Dozens of them. No, hundreds. Corporal Rucker turned his jeep so its headlights illuminated their arrival. Most of the prisoners had blobs of yellow on their uniforms, which meant they were dead, or wounded, or at least captured, one and all. Sergeant Harris stopped the column in front of the hotel, and ordered them to stand at attention in rows with their hands still raised. Some of those guys looked really scared, as if their captors actually were Japanese. Sergeant Harris certainly looked like a terrible vicious rempei gakari gunso in his uniform. He gave McPherson the Japanese salute and said, “One hundred eighty-three POWs sir. What shall we do with them?”

McPherson turned to Major Evans. “When we invade Kyushu, sir, the Japanese will take no prisoners.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell Burt,” Major Evans jerked his thumb at Captain Stoving.

“Okay, Sergeant,” McPherson said, “Jusatsu suni. Shoot ’em.” Sergeant Harris summoned his BAR man, Corporal Quigg, and they prepared to mow down the rows of POWs. “No, wait,” McPherson said. “Burt, I’ll make you a deal. How about a pack of cigarettes per hostage.”

“Aw hell, Mac,” Captain Stoving said. “Even if you shoot ’em all, I get ’em back tomorrow, don’t I, Major Evans sir?”

I had never seen Major Evans smile before, and what he was wearing now was more like a smirk. But he said, “Day after tomorrow, according to the rules. And when you get ’em back, they’re not these men, who are dead, but ‘replacements.’ And you lost every one of your fucking tanks, didn’t you?”

“He didn’t hit my M-7,” Stoving pointed out, but he was hanging his head.

“Excuse me,” Major Evans said. “You lost eleven out of your twelve tanks. Take your two dead companies and bury ’em, and when you get ’em exhumed, tell ’em a thing or two about defense.”

“Better luck in the second inning, Burt,” McPherson said. “I’d invite you up to my place for a sip of Chism’s Dew, the best whiskey on earth. But you won’t ever find my place.”

“Wanna bet?” Stoving said, and turned on his heel and got back into his jeep. Then he noticed his one hundred and eighty-three dead men, still standing with their hands behind their necks. He turned to Major Evans. “Can I have my men back? Is the exercise over for tonight?”

“A pack of cigarettes per man, is it?” said Major Evans.

Later McPherson told me that actually he and Captain Stoving were pretty good friends. They’d known each other for more than a year, and had once roomed together in BOQ at Camp Chaffee. BOQ, he said, stood for Bawdy Oldmen’s Quonset, but when I asked if I could quote that in tomorrow’s Daily Star he said actually it just stood for bachelor officers’ quarters. McPherson and Stoving had started out together as second lieutenants, but Stoving had been promoted to captain because he was a “brownnose.” I didn’t know that word, and wondered if the brown was like the red or yellow marks used in fake ammunition. Stoving was from Arkansas; his father owned an insurance company in Little Rock. That ought to have made me proud of him, as I was proud of all the Arkansas soldiers that Ernie Pyle had mentioned in his columns. But I was a Jap and Stoving was a Yank and I was rooting for McPherson’s samurai to win the exercise that they were supposed to lose. The company of engineers, who had been making bets among themselves on the outcome, with the odds heavily in favor of the Yanks and their tanks, were so overawed by McPherson’s ambush of the Yanks’ arrival that they were now betting on the Jap rangers. I posted the betting odds in my daily.

Actually, the exercise was not exactly in the singular, McPherson explained to me; it wasn’t to be thought of as a single battle won or lost. Rather, it was a series of “problems,” and he was careful that I understood that a problem is not necessarily a difficulty but a question to be solved, as in a math problem, just as “exercise” is not necessarily calisthenics but an engagement between two opposing teams in a war game. The ultimate problem for the Yanks, and the final inning of the game, was to find and destroy the Japs’ bivouac. But before then, the Japs had to defend the village not just once but repeatedly, from each direction of the compass, and during the night as well as in broad day, and also in the middle of a hard rain, if we could only get one. It had been dry for a long spell.

Larry Duckworth was having fits of glee because the Yanks had chosen for their bivouac the broad meadow across the road from the Duckworth’s house, south alongside Swains Creek. It had once been the site of an Osage Indian camp, and in the days before we became Allies and Axis we had played cowboys and Indians in that big meadow. Now the field, which had already had its first mowing of hay, was the home for two companies of the 715th Tank Batallion under Captain Burton Stoving. There were twelve enormous tanks parked there, mostly M-4 Shermans, some of them with howitzers in tow, but also a huge M-6, and the peculiar M-7. There were also jeeps and trucks and a few motorcycles. There were three dozen tents, and latrines, and everything. During the two days that they were required by the umpire’s rules to remain dead or regroup or whatever they were supposed to do, those two companies of armored troops had built themselves a little city on the south edge of Stay More, and all of us kids, Yanks and Japs alike, spent a lot of time watching them in wonder. That first day we watched them give their tanks a bath in Swains Creek to wash off the red marks that indicated they’d been hit and destroyed by grenades, mortar, or the bazooka.

Before the next problem was due to start, which was an assault on the village from the south by the battalion of the Yanks and their tanks, Captain Stoving met with Major Evans and Lieutenant McPherson to protest the Japs’ use of the bazooka. He claimed that the Japanese did not yet have the bazooka in their arsenal, and therefore if McPherson wanted to be strictly “realistic,” he could not use a weapon that the Japanese did not possess. McPherson claimed that the bazooka was his “handicap” against the vastly superior forces of Stoving’s tank companies. But Major Evans ruled in Stoving’s favor, and McPherson was required to stow the bazooka and give his champion bazookamen, Privates Nilson and Hewes, the Japanese .80 antitank rifles instead. McPherson told me an extra reason he was peeved by the decision: the bazooka had got its name because a radio comedian of the 1930s, Bob Burns of Van Buren, Arkansas (not far from Camp Chaffee), had had a weird musical instrument of that name and shape. “It may not be Japanese,” McPherson said, “but it certainly is Arkansas,” I quoted those words in my editorial in the next issue of the Daily Star in which I protested Major Evans’ decision, and I titled the editorial “Japs Unfairly Deprived of Best Weapon,” and I made sure that Major Evans got a copy of that issue.

With the total population of Stay More now running close to four hundred, with all the soldiers, I had a rough time printing enough copies of my paper to meet the demand. One “press run” on a gelatin board could not exceed fifty copies before it started dimming out. But sweet Ella Jean solved the problem by simply making duplicates, or rather quadruplicates, of each of the hand-lettered purple master sheets. That was a lot of extra work for her, and, since we were now rolling in loose change from the sale of all those copies, I insisted on paying her a salary.

“I don’t need ary salary,” she said, unmindful of the rhyme. “But I sure could use a kiss.”

I was stunned. No, at first I just thought she’d said something hilarious, and I laughed uproariously, but then, when I determined she was serious, I was speechless with the wonder of it. I stared at her. There was nothing on earth I’d rather do than kiss her. I had never kissed a girl before, but I had imagined it, I had dreamed of it, I had even licked a couple of my fingers and pretended they were lips and pressed my mouth against them. Now here we were, in the newspaper office, nobody else around, Latha somewhere out on the porch, and all I had to do was do it. “Are you all right?” a voice asked me, and I had to shake my head to clear it to realize that a real voice hadn’t spoken, it was just good old Ernie Pyle taking care of me again.

“Do you mean me?” I stupidly asked Ella Jean.

She ought to have said—she had every right to have said—something dismissive, like “No, I was just a-talking to myself,” or “Actually I was thinking of Cary Grant,” or even “I’d druther kiss a frog than you.” But she did not speak at all, which was the beauty of it. She simply gave her lovely head the slightest but clearest of nods.

And I could have compounded my stupidity by continuing to babble something like, “That’s a swell idea, honeypot,” or “Okay, if you insist,” or “Well, ready or not here I come,” but I was inspired by her example to say nothing, to let silence have its eloquence as a setting for a head movement. I moved my head close to hers. I took a keen look at her mouth. Just being that near to it shook me. When I could still the tremble of my head I had to consider how to hold it. It would not be seemly to tilt it so much to get our noses out of the way of bumping. I should keep my head proudly upright but somehow in moving my mouth forward I should allow the noses to pass.

Then as we made contact—hers were mildly pursed, mine were not—I was hit with the uncertainty of how long I should maintain the contact. It did not occur to me just to wait and let her break the contact after a suitable duration; that, I assumed, was my responsibility. But I didn’t know what to do. I think she did, though. She had put her two hands on the sides of my two arms, as if to pull me closer to her. She held me like that, with our lips mashed together, as if she couldn’t let go, for a very long time.

Chapter twenty-two

When the defense of Stay More began, I had a ringside seat, as McPherson had said I would. Not only that, but the evening before the battle he attempted to give me a private lesson in just what I would be watching, so I could understand and even appreciate the various things I would see. Using blank pages of my Indian Chief, he drew maps with arrows and symbols representing tanks and troops and his own arsenal of weapons, and rectangles representing the various buildings of “downtown” Stay More, and squiggles representing the two creeks and their confluence. I tried to pay attention. Not only did I have great difficulty grasping terms or concepts like displacement and retrograde operation and point targets but also many of the words he used were neither English nor Japanese but French—echelon, defilade, abatis, melee—and I didn’t bother to ask him what they meant, not because I didn’t want to expose my ignorance but because I truly didn’t care. I simply could not concentrate because my mind was elsewhere, namely, the office of the Daily Star during the long moments of that kiss. “Are you all right?” McPherson asked me, and I realized I must not have been paying close attention. “Do you understand this flanking maneuver?”

“I guess so,” I said.

“I realize it’s confusing,” he said. “I’m not sure my men understand it, and we’ve rehearsed it a dozen times.” He took out his cigarette lighter and set fire to the sheets of the Indian Chief on which he’d made his maps. “But trust me, it’s the only way to keep the tanks out of the village, and I’m not at all sure it will work.”

“How are you doing with Annie?” I suddenly asked.

Did I detect a blush? “I didn’t realize you knew about me and Annie,” he said.

“I didn’t realize you knew about me and Ella Jean,” I said.

He studied me for several moments. Then he smiled and said, “I didn’t. But it doesn’t take much to guess. So. How are you doing with Ella Jean?”

“I asked you first.”

“As a matter of fact,” he looked at his watch, “in just a little while I’m supposed to take my pal Burt Stoving over to meet her.”

“He must really be your pal, if you’re doing that,” I said.

“I was being a bit sarcastic,” he said, and reached out and rumpled my hair. “You’re my only pal. But Burt and I are not simply rivals on the battlefield, we’re also competitors in the game of life. At Camp Chaffee, he was always parading his dates in front of me. So now I’m giving him a good look at mine. I think I’m really falling for that girl. I wish you could tell me more about her. But nobody seems to know anything about her. Except her father. And how do I ask him? Vermonters are notoriously taciturn, and here I am running off at the mouth again. So tell me: how are you doing with Ella Jean?”

“I think I’m really falling for that girl,” I said.

Falling, hell. I had already fallen about as far as you can get before hitting bottom. Naturally I was just a little suspicious that the reason she had, after all these years, suddenly taken a shine to me was because her bosom companion, Gypsy, had more or less abandoned her in favor of her brother Willard, who, ever since that famous pie supper when she’d kissed him, was allowing his keen analytic mind to be diluted by daydreams of Gypsy.

It was almost pathetic. Sammy Coe invited all his Jap friends to use the front porch of the Coe house as the grandstand to watch the great battle, because it commanded a view of downtown Stay More, and it was also safely out of the way of any stray bullets, fake and soapy though they were. All the kids were more excited than they’d ever been, except for four of them: not only were Gypsy and Willard sitting with their heads and their hands together, but also Ella Jean and I were so caught up in each other that none of us was really going to be able to play close attention to the battle. At least Willard had enough sense of the occasion to offer periodic analysis of what was happening on the battlefield, but Ella Jean and I were lost in each other. It is a wonder that I had the presence of mind to remember to save a seat for you, Gentle Reader.

But which, after all, is more exciting, love or war? As I sat there, scarcely noticing the tanks coming into town from the south or observing McPherson’s samurai as they took cover in the old mill, behind the canning factory, or even in some of our leftover foxholes, and paying more attention to what Ella Jean was saying (she was relating some gossip about Rosa Faye Duckworth, who had been fooling around with one—or more—of the soldiers bivouacked in the Duckworth meadow), my mind was dwelling neither upon the deployment of the combat nor upon sweet Ella Jean’s breathy chatter but philosophically upon the power of passion to banish one’s interest in more important things, like armed conflict. Knowing him as I did, I knew that McPherson himself would much rather be walking in the woods with Annie than trying to keep a dozen tanks out of Stay More. And I suddenly realized how much Mare Coe would have preferred being with Gypsy on the banks of Banty Creek to facing the Japanese on Iwo Jima. Was fighting a substitute for loving? Or a counter for it? A remedy to it? Or what?

These profound thoughts were scarcely interrupted by the sound of the tank corps’ battle cry, “Hang it in and let ’er go!” or the answering (and rhyming) battle cry of the samurai, “Mare Coe!” I reflected with just a little pride that McPherson and his men had chosen that battle cry after I had told them the story of our town’s boy at Iwo Jima. Both battle cries were soon accompanied by the ringing of the schoolhouse bell, sounding its mournful “BOMB!” and “DOOM!” repeatedly. I wondered who was ringing it. That elegiac, almost pastoral chiming was soon drowned out by the beginning of Major Evan’s sound effects. He had brought with him a recording of the actual sounds of battle, and these were now being played at full volume from loudspeakers the engineers had set up around the village, for the sake of realism, as if all the fake ammunition were not enough, or as if the actual tanks and guns might be induced to sally and volley and battery by the artificial noise. I tried to explain to Ella Jean how funny the idea was: that fake sounds were being used to prompt fake ammunition. But I’m not sure she got it. Or quite possibly she was so wrapped up in me that it didn’t matter. The schoolhouse bell stopped ringing, unable to compete with that noise. The ringer stepped out of the building. It was Miss Jerram.

I thought of all the kids of Stay More whose fathers had gone to the war and who had had those identical recurrent nightmares involving monstrous mayhem and the weapons in action, things they’d never actually seen but could now watch: tanks, howitzers, missile launchers, machine guns, mortars, if not the banished bazooka. What they couldn’t see they could hear, and between Major Evans’ sound effects and the actual implements of war they could hear enough battle noise to last them for the rest of their lives.

As journalists, Ella Jean and I had a responsibility to report to our readers just what happened on that day. While Ella Jean was probably more interested in reporting the spectators’ reactions, I was somewhat interested in being able to detect just who was winning that battle and how. When the smoke cleared and Major Evans turned off the sound effects, I examined the notes in my Indian Chief, based more on Willard’s running commentary than on my own observation of the fighting, and discovered that I had just the bare outlines for the lead story in the next daily: YANKS AND TANKS TAKE TOWN FROM JAPS. McPherson had prepared me to accept that outcome, but what bothered me most was that I didn’t really seem to care. What did it matter that Japs had destroyed two tanks in the middle of the WPA bridge so that the others couldn’t cross Banty Creek and had to shell the town from the schoolhouse road? Who really cared that Sergeant Harris and Corporal Rucker were both killed in the engagement? The town’s own Yanks, led by Sog Alan, were overcome with the joy of victory and were acting like maniacs, while the town’s Japs were despondent, but I really and truly didn’t think it was anything to get excited about. After all, there were still going to be more battles, weren’t there?

But dutifully I went to interview Major Evans afterward, sending Ella Jean away from me for a little while by assigning her to the story of the effect the battle had had on the town physically (her story would report that a post holding up the porch roof of the Ingledew store had suffered a direct hit from a fake grenade and had broken, collapsing the porch roof, but the engineers were already at work repairing it to better than new). Major Evans was too busy or simply didn’t have time for me. His staff sergeant gave me the “casualty figures”: thirty-two dead Yanks, three destroyed tanks; eight dead Japs, the remaining four taken prisoner, including McPherson. The sergeant would not give me the present score, if there was one, but he said the village was “secure” in Yank hands, and “the utter rout of the enemy more than makes up for the enemy’s opening ambush.” I told him he sounded like he had been rooting for the Yanks. “Well, what do you think I am?” he replied.

With Ella Jean’s stories on the parties of the town’s kids and grownups who watched the battle and made a picnic of it, and my story on the battle itself, we discovered that we still didn’t have enough news to fill the four pages of the issue. Ella Jean put her hand on top of mine. “You can just make things up,” she said, and winked at me. And so I embellished the news a bit, which one shouldn’t do. I added a story about the wholesaler’s truck bringing orders to Latha’s store right in the middle of the battle, and the truck driver being scared out of his wits and hightailing it out of town. Actually, the wholesaler’s truck had arrived during the battle, but the driver just calmly watched the action along with everybody else on Latha’s store porch.

Among the merchandise the wholesaler had sent to replenish Latha’s rapidly sold-out stock (and which it remained my job to arrange on the shelves) was a box of twenty-four bars of Palmolive soap! I eagerly bought a bar from Latha with my own newly earned riches, and, since Ella Jean wouldn’t accept a salary (other than kisses, in which she was now overpaid), I presented her with the bar.

“Why, Dawny!” Ella Jean exclaimed. “This is my favorite of all the soap there is!”

“I know,” I let slip.

“How did ye know?” she asked.

I groped for evasion. “Well, sometimes you just smell like it,” and I buried my nose in her hair.

That evening once again I made my pilgrimage to the sacred spot on Banty Creek, and my effort was rewarded: Ella Jean came down the hill to take her bath with the new bar of Palmolive. I was tempted to reveal my presence to her. After all, I was her boyfriend now. Would she mind? But I was afraid of offending her. I was glad enough, as it was, to have the privilege of the marvelous sight and the more exquisite privilege of the fragrance, and to reflect that this part of Banty Creek was remotely over the mountain from where all the soldiers were, so that none of them could ever share the sight or the fragrance.

It was hard for us to keep apart from each other, and early the next morning she came to walk with me on my rounds delivering the new issue of the Daily Star, the issue that had two of her stories in it. We held hands and talked. She told me the latest gossip about Rosa Faye, who had actually been seen jumping up and down after one of her “dates” with a soldier. And everybody knew what she was jumping up and down for: it was the best known contraceptive. I asked Ella Jean if she’d ever have any notion of going with a soldier. “Not as long as I got you,” she said, and I was so moved I had to stop walking and give her a kiss. Walking on, a little while later, she looked at me sidelong and said, “You were watching me down on Banty Creek yester evening, weren’t you?” At first I shook my head and got ready to deny it vigorously, but I saw it was no use, and I nodded. “Why didn’t ye just come and jump in too?” she asked.

“Next time I sure will!” I said. And I hoped she might even want to take another bath that very night, which would have been exceptional: I’d never known her to take one more often than biweekly. Did I have to wait two more weeks before we could bathe together?

But even if she’d wanted to bathe that very night, we wouldn’t have, because it was time for the soldiers to have their Night Exercise. In this part of the maneuvers, the village would be “given back” to the Japs, and the tanks would once again attack it, but this time from the west, over the pontoon bridge, and under cover of darkness. Major Evans decreed that the pontoon bridge itself could be neither “destroyed” nor blocked during the exercise. Tanks crossing it could be targets but not disabled on the bridge. Once again the town’s Japs congregated in the front yard of Sammy Coe’s house to watch the exercise. We couldn’t see very much because it was dark, but we could hear plenty. Ella Jean caught a lightning bug and crushed it on my nose, and I caught one and crushed it on her nose, and we both had glowing noses for a while, although a squashed lightning bug is pretty stinky.

Sergeant Harris was killed again, hiding behind Miss Jerram’s house, but not before he had destroyed three tanks with his juyo tekidan. He “expired” in Miss Jerram’s arms, while Captain Stoving stopped the exercise to protest to Major Evans that none of the Japs were supposed to be on the west side of Swains Creek. Major Evans ruled that the Japs could be anywhere they damn well pleased, and, as the exercise continued, the Japs were everywhere, and this time they successfully defended the village against the attack. An occasional flare would be sent up, or in the headlights of the tanks we’d catch a glimpse of the action, although not enough to suit Willard and his analysis, so most of the civilians had to wait until the next morning’s issue of the Daily Star to find out just what had happened. Because it had been mostly dark, I could easily follow Ella Jean’s advice to “just make things up,” and I embellished the stories right and left: not only Sergeant Harris’ brave deeds at Miss Jerram’s (five tanks instead of three) but also his dramatic death in her arms and I even gave him some last words, “I can’t stay any more in Stay More.” Major Evans summoned me to his headquarters after the issue appeared and protested that the casualty figures I had posted were not those his staff sergeant had given me. Only fifty-two Yanks had been killed, not a hundred and fifty-two. I told him I was glad to know that he was reading my newspaper. And then I asked him, since he liked the metaphor of the baseball game, what inning we were in, and what the score was. He said it was the bottom of the third, and the Japs were leading, eighteen to eleven. “But don’t quote me on that,” he admonished me. Did this mean we still had six more innings to play? I wanted to know. “More or less,” he said.

I began to wonder if the Daily Star could continue to be interesting. The game, and the score, seesawed back and forth for several days. The town was taken and lost, and retaken. One of the big windows on the front of Latha’s store got shattered, but the engineers went to Harrison to get a new piece of glass, and replaced it. A soldier nearly drowned in Swains Creek but Doc Swain revived him. A dog was hit by a fake bullet and had not been seen since. Major Evans hoped for a torrential downpour to test the troops’ mud-fighting abilities, but the weather continued dry and hot. One advantage the Japs had over the Yanks: the latter didn’t know about the former’s use of pennyroyal to prevent chigger bites and the use of Chism’s Dew to cure chigger bites. The Yanks were suffering, and scratching so much they couldn’t keep their tanks on track. Luther Chism had completely sold out his stock of Dew, indiscriminately to Japs and Yanks alike, and the first new corn wouldn’t be ready for picking for several more weeks. Since Major Evans couldn’t have the fifth and sixth innings in a downpour, as he’d hoped, he held the sixth inning with smoke bombs that obscured the battle even more than darkness could do. The smoke was so thick it nearly drowned the sound effects, and two Sherman tanks crashed into each other, wrecking one.

Every Dill offered to see if he couldn’t repair the busted tank. Just as legend had it that the disease hadn’t been invented that Doc Swain couldn’t cure (and, now, the new legend that the tank hadn’t been built that McPherson couldn’t destroy), the legend was that there was no mechanical apparatus devised by the hand of man that Every Dill couldn’t repair. I livened up the tedious Daily Star with a story on Every, whose garage was enjoying the greatest period of prosperity ever, with so many jobs servicing and repairing the various army jeeps and trucks that he had to hire Lawlor Coe, Sammy’s dad, to give up blacksmithing and learn auto mechanics. I was able to report that Every successfully repaired that Sherman tank. Latha and Every both made so much money that they were going to enjoy a happy retirement.

Major Evans called a meeting between Captain Stoving and Lieutenant McPherson and reminded them that the main purpose of this entire exercise was to train both of their outfits for the invasion of the mountain country of Kyushu. “Here we are in the seventh inning stretch, and everything we’ve done so far has been down here in these bottomlands.” Major Evans pointed at the mountains to the north and east. “So let’s leave the village and get up into those hills.”

“That’s exactly what I have been waiting for,” McPherson said. And just barely remembered to add, “Sir.”

I wanted to talk with McPherson. I hadn’t had a word with him since that night before the first battle, when we’d exchanged confidences about our girlfriends. We’d both spent all our free time since then in the company of those girlfriends. I missed him.

So one afternoon I decided to return to the bivouac and apologize to him for having spent so much of my time with Ella Jean. As it turned out, however, Ella Jean insisted on going with me up to the bivouac. “Just for old time’s sake,” she said, reminding me that the bivouac had been as much a campground or playground for her as it had been for me. I let her go with me, I held her hand along the way, but I warned her in advance that I wanted to have just some private “boy talk” with Mac.

“That’s okay,” she said. “While you’re chawing with him, I’ll just socialize with Emil.”

“Emil who?” I asked.

“Polacek.” She looked at me sideways. “Didn’t ye know he was sweet on me?”

“I didn’t even know that was his name,” I declared.

As we neared the bivouac, we came to the turning in the climbing trail where it had always been our custom to look over our shoulder—which I had not been able to do the time Rosa Faye followed me because I had a washtub over my head. I glanced over my shoulder and my heart stopped when I beheld a figure behind me. Ella Jean caught a glimpse of him too before he dashed into the woods.

“Was that Sog Alan?” I asked her.

“Looked like it,” she said.

“Darn. Let’s not go to the bivouac then, in case he’s following us.”

We took a logging trail that cut off up the mountain to the south, almost toward that remote pasture where the glider had landed, and then we cut back and approached the old farmstead from a different angle, making sure that we didn’t see anyone following us.

Chapter twenty-three

When I was alone with McPherson, I felt obliged to tell him that we had been followed part of the way by Sog Alan, who, I suspected, was trying to find out the location of the bivouac so he could tattle to the Yanks—not his own Yanks but Stoving’s. I said I hoped McPherson wouldn’t be upset: Ella Jean and I had deliberately taken that diversionary route so that Sog couldn’t follow us to the bivouac, but still he might have detected the general location of it.

But McPherson was not upset at all. I was surprised at his indifference. I wondered—but stopped short of asking him—if he was getting bored with the exercise himself and maybe even wanted the bivouac to be discovered so the exercise would be over. Or possibly his mind, like mine, had concluded that the pursuit of the opposite sex was a more worthy mission than warfare.

“I guess Annie is all that matters to you.” I was just thinking out loud.

And as he had often done, he needed to study my face for a while to understand just what I was intending with what I’d said. While he was looking at me, I suddenly realized how tired he was. Unlike Captain Stoving, who could drive all over creation in one of his jeeps, McPherson had to go on foot, and his feet were tired. But out of his exhaustion he managed to smile and say, “There’s no way you could have prevented Sog or one of his Yank buddies from finding the bivouac.” He rubbed his forehead with his hand as if to wipe away the weariness. “But yes, you’re right. I’m not thinking about much other than Annie. That’s dangerous, and not fair to my men. Fighting and loving simply don’t mix. Probably Mare Coe understood that when he was on Iwo Jima. I suspect that he had to put Gypsy out of his mind before he could return those grenades that were thrown at him.”

His mention of Gypsy reminded me of her favorite animal. “Maybe,” I suggested, “you ought to load up Jarhead and move on out of here to a different spot.”

“Roger,” he said. “We’ve got that contingency in mind. But first we want to see if the enemy is able to find us here, and, if they can, we want to defend it. It’s our home, and right now we’re taking a little rest in it.”

“When you’re done resting,” I offered, “I could show you a good place to go, where nobody would ever find you.”

“On Ledbetter Mountain?” he said. “The hollow with the waterfalls and bluff shelters?”

“It’s so far back up in those coves you have to keep wiping at the shadows,” I said, as close to poetry as I ever got. I did not tell him that I myself had been lost up there at the age of almost six. “How did you find it?”

“Macklin found it. He’s my reconnaissance man. Remember he was the one who found the bodies of Ella Jean’s sisters below Leapin Rock.” McPherson’s face became very sad once again. But it passed. “Did you know we were using Leapin Rock when we beat Stoving in that northern assault problem yesterday? I was up there with a couple of the men firing the juyo tekidan and from that vantage point we knocked out five tanks.”

“I wondered if you would think to use Leapin Rock,” I said. “And I was about to suggest it to you, but I didn’t want to remind you of—you know.”

“Your Ella Jean seems to be over that,” he observed. I really liked his using that “your.” She was really mine.

“She’s real strong and brave,” I said proudly. And then I chuckled. “It didn’t even bother her when we learned that you were killed yesterday!”

He laughed too. “Yeah! I stood up on the edge of Leaping Rock and a sharpshooter got me. I nearly fell off.”

We both went on laughing, but I think we were both also whistling in the dark. McPherson and I often had the same kind of thoughts at the same time. So when I said what I did next, and he nodded, I knew he’d been thinking the same thing at the same moment. “But a sharpshooter might really get you when you invade Japan.” There was of course nothing he could say to that, except to nod. “Or maybe not,” I quickly added. “Maybe you guys will be lucky. And you can come back to Stay More and marry Annie!”

He hit me mildly on the shoulder with his fist. “Hey, I’d like that. And you know, maybe we will be lucky. But it’s not just luck, it’s also skill. Those tank guys are good, let me tell you. I mean, really good. They’ll make mincemeat out of Kyushu.” The thought made him happy, even though the “tank guys” were currently his enemy. “But one reason they’ll make mincemeat out of Kyushu is that my men will soften it up beforehand. And probably we’ll all be killed doing it. So that’s why I can’t even hint to Annie that I’ll be coming back to marry her.”

“That’s the same way Mare felt about Gypsy before he had to leave her and go into the marines,” I said. “But are you going to ask her to wait for you?”

“Not even that,” he said, and hung his head. But then he raised his head and gave it a shake, and said, “I’ve got to stop thinking about her! I’ve got a job to do. Tonight the mountain fighting begins.”

“I wish you guys didn’t have to keep having battles for three more innings.”

He laughed again. “You’ve been standing too close to Major Evans! But he’s right, I guess. From now on, the Yanks will be searching for us, and we’ll be defending this place against them, and then, if they take it, we’ll take it back from them. And finally, we’ll escape to the lost hollow of the waterfall on Ledbetter Mountain and see if they can find us up there. If they can’t, the exercise is over.”

“And then everybody goes back to Chaffee?” I wanted to ask, “And I won’t ever see you again?” but I could not.

“Yes, but say, listen. When the exercise is all over, we’ll all have a short leave before we have to report back to Chaffee. How about I borrow a jeep and we’ll have a double date? You and me and Ella Jean and Annie will go to the movies in Jasper. Did you know Annie has never seen a movie?”

“I don’t think Ella Jean has either.”

“Okay, so let’s count on that!”

“I can’t wait,” I said.

“Sayonara,” he said.

“Sayonara.”

Walking back to the village with Ella Jean, I told her right away what McPherson had suggested about a double date to see the movies in Jasper. I thought she’d be tickled to pieces by the idea, but she just gave me another one of those sideways looks and said, “Emil has already asked me.”

“To the picture show?” I demanded. She nodded. “How’s he going to take you to Jasper? He couldn’t borrow a jeep like McPherson could!”

“He says he can get a jeep.”

“And you’re going to go with him?”

“I reckon I might.”

I lost my temper. The thought of that made me really angry, not so much the idea that a grown man from some weird foreign place like the Bronx would try to take my girlfriend away from me, but the fact that she would let him do it. “You’re just another one of these V-girls!” I yelled at her. “No better than Rosa Faye!”

“What’s a V-girl?”

“Victory girl. Mac says the army camps and the cities have lots of girls under sixteen who fool around with the servicemen.”

“I’d just let Emil take me to the pitcher show,” she said. “I wouldn’t jump up and down afterwards.”

It took me a moment to realize what she was referring to. In the moment of my realizing what she meant, I couldn’t avoid a mental image of her and Polacek lying together. It looked awful, and it really got my dander up. “Well—” I groped for some good words but found none. “I sure hope you sure enjoy yourself!” And then I ran away from her. I left her on that trail and went back to town by myself, and I put the next issue of the Daily Star to bed all by myself, without any help from her, although the fourth time I slowly hand-lettered the master sheets I was running out of energy and patience and I made a bunch of dumb mistakes. It wasn’t a very good issue anyway. To fill up the increasing empty space in the daily, I’d started a “Letters to the Editor” column, but there were only two: E.H. Ingledew wrote to say he sure would be glad when these here soldiers went back to wherever they came from. And Oren Duckworth wrote to say that he was missing three dozen chickens and he wasn’t going to sue the Army for them but he wanted some kind of guarantee that the Army would leave his remaining chickens alone. In a foul mood, I added, “Editor’s Note: It’s not your chickens you ought to worry about. It’s your daughter.” Good sense prevailed, and I scratched that out.

I didn’t feel like hiking up to the bivouac again to cover the action of that night’s exercise, so I simply asked Major Evans (or rather his staff sergeant) what had happened. “The Yanks found it, and took it,” he said simply but proudly. That was, after all, what McPherson had predicted would happen but it struck me as further fuel for my foul mood. My story wasn’t an important story, and I gave it a small-lettered headline: JAP BIVOUAC SEIZED BY YANKS.

With the action of the maneuvers shifting to the mountains, Stay More became practically a ghost town again, which it had been working hard at doing for all the years I’d known it. It was littered with the soldiers’ cigarette butts, and with spent cartridges and casings here and there, and there were tank tracks all over the place, but otherwise you’d never have known that such hectic operations had been going on here. It was peaceful. After cleaning up the mess, and even smoothing out those tank tracks, the engineers went fishing and swimming. Then they took down the pontoon bridge and once again Swains Creek had to be crossed by ford or footbridge.

Major Evans’s staff sergeant informed me that in a bold night raid the Japs had attempted to retake their bivouac and had killed sixty-one Yanks before being totally wiped out themselves. Chui McPherson had committed hara-kiri with his samurai sword. Celebrating, the Yanks had accidentally set fire to the old farmhouse, and it had burned to the ground. Latha told me I ought to write in my Indian Chief: “(6) The Story of Long Jack Stapleton and His House.” I did, but I think I was getting bored with my Indian Chief. And it was all used up.

Major Evans and Captain Stoving and the dead chui had an argument, in which Stoving argued that the spoils of victory ought to include the mule belonging to the Japs. The dead chui countered that Corporal Jarhead was not simply a necessary pack animal for the samurai platoon but also a mascot, and it would demoralize his men in the ninth inning to be without it. Major Evans pointed out that in the bottom of the ninth the home team had a chance to pull out and win, although the Japs were now so far behind it didn’t look likely. He ruled that the Japs could keep Jarhead, and further that the Yanks would have to evacuate the Japs’ bivouac and remain out of sight while the Japs loaded up all their gear onto Jarhead and fled to their new secret bivouac.

I was tempted to go up to that glen of the waterfall and see McPherson and his samurai in their new location. I wanted to tell him something about mules, what Joe Don had said at Old Jarhead’s funeral about how mules do everything the easy way: “Horses will pull a load for all their might; mules’ll only use as much of their strength as they have to, and not a pound more.” Maybe that could be a lesson for McPherson’s samurai in defending that lost hollow: take it easy, and let the Yanks wear themselves out. But it was so spooky up there in those woods, and I hadn’t been back to them since the time I’d been lost six years before. Willard and Joe Don and Sammy wanted me to tell them where the Japs had moved, but I would not. I simply wrote a story, JAPS NOW DUG IN AT SECLUDED HIDEOUT.

We thought the Yanks would never find them. Patrols of the Yanks went out into every holler and ravine of Stay More, well beyond Butterchurn Holler in one direction and almost to Parthenon in the other direction, on foot, by jeep and by motorcycle, but the tanks remained idle. And the Japs remained concealed. There was nothing to report in the Daily Star. I decided that I was going to have to convert my paper from a daily back to a weekly, especially because I didn’t have my assistant any more. I missed her. It was small comfort that she too did not know where the Japs were now hiding, and thus she couldn’t go “socialize” with old Emil.

For the final daily issue of the Star, I had to make up most of the news, such as it was. The only real news to animate its moribund pages was an announcement that I picked up by listening to Latha’s radio. Now that the town had reverted to its drowsy lethargy and I had no girlfriend to take up my time, I spent most of my hours at Latha’s store again. I even resumed listening to my old favorite shows, Captain Midnight and Hop Harrigan and Terry and the Pirates. During a news broadcast, the announcer said that for the first time during the war some Americans had been killed on American soil. The War and Navy Departments had disclosed that during the past several months Japanese paper balloons carrying bombs had reached the North American mainland, and although “these attacks are so scattered and aimless that they constitute no military threat,” there was one reported incident of a woman and five children on an outing in Wyoming or Oregon or one of those western states who had been killed by a Japanese balloon-bomb.

So the final daily issue of The Stay Morning Star, with no more stories about the “occupation” of Stay More, had as its only headline, JAPANESE BALLOON-BOMB KILLS FIVE KIDS IN OREGON OR WYOMING. My editorial for that issue said that if we were all bored with the military activities being conducted around town, or rather the absence of any further military activities, we might shift our attention to the skies and start watching out for balloons.

I didn’t anticipate the effect it would have on the town. Not just kids but grownups too started walking around with their eyes anxiously scanning the heavens. I even caught myself casting a glance upward, but it was infectious: if other people are looking at something, you look too.

Ella Jean showed up again, and it was her turn to be angry. “Dawny! When I told ye just to make things up, I didn’t mean horrible things like that!”

“I hate to tell ye,” I was obliged to inform her, “but I didn’t make that up. I got it off the radio!” When she threw me another one of those maddening sidelong glances, I added, “Ask Latha if you don’t believe me! She heard it too.”

“Well,” Ella Jean said. That’s all she said, but she didn’t go away. After a while she added, “I reckon it’s harder to believe the truth than what’s made up.”

“Yeah. And it’s harder to tell the truth than make something up.”

Another of her sidelong looks. “You don’t believe me about Emil?”

That hadn’t occurred to me. But I was quick enough to put in, “What if I don’t?”

She hung her head. “I was just trying to see if I could make ye jealous,” she confessed. “Emil never asked me to the pitcher show. I was just making that up.”

“Why would ye want to make me jealous?”

“You don’t have much feelings,” she said. “Leastways, you don’t show much feelings. Sometimes I wonder if you really care about anything.”

“I cared about you,” I said.

“Sometimes it was hard to tell.”

“Well I don’t mind saying I still care about you.”

“I care a lot about you too,” she said. “A whole lot. I would jump up and down for you.”

Once again I was slow in getting her meaning, and as if to demonstrate, she jumped up and down a little bit. It was cute. It was also ardent and devoted and sexy.

All I could think to say was, “When?”

“Tonight,” she said. “Would you like to share my Palmolive with me?”

“Oh, that would be fine and dandy,” I said, borrowing a long-lost favorite expression of Mare Coe’s, probably because I was thinking of what Mare and Gypsy had done on the banks of Banty Creek.

“You’ll be there?” she asked. “You won’t be hiding?”

“I’ll come out of hiding,” I promised.

“All right then,” she said. “I can’t wait.”

“Sayonara,” I said.

“What’s that mean?”

“I’ll be seeing you,” I translated, with a stress on “seeing.”

“Sayonara,” she said.

If she couldn’t wait, just think, Gentle Reader, of what I couldn’t do. There were still hours to kill before twilight. I went to Latha’s store and tried to sit on the porch, but I couldn’t sit still. I gave the whole store a good sweeping and even tidied up the office of the Star, which I hadn’t done for months. I arranged and rearranged merchandise on the shelves. “Dawny, you’re going to wear yourself out,” Latha said to me. And she observed, “You’re just covered with sweat all over.”

“That’s okay, I’ll be washing it off directly,” I announced. I was almost tempted to tell her where and how I would be washing it off. All afternoon while I worked I thought of who would be the best person to talk to about my important upcoming tryst. I could really stand some advice. McPherson would have been my first choice, if he’d been accessible, but for all I knew he didn’t have much experience in such matters himself. I’d never been able to ask him just how far he had managed to get with Annie. I thought about Willard, and I had every reason to suspect that Gypsy had introduced him to the mysteries and pleasures, but he was Ella Jean’s own brother and I couldn’t ask for advice on how to handle his sister, and besides I wasn’t going to go up to his house looking for him, because that’s where Ella Jean was, and I wasn’t going to lay eyes on her again until we laid eyes on each other in our birthday suits. Thinking of that, I had a big doubt: what would she think when she saw me naked? I wasn’t even sure what I looked like naked. I needed a big mirror. The only one I knew of was in that side room of Latha’s store that had once been her bedroom when the store had still been her house too before she married Every and moved into the Dill dogtrot. So I waited until she’d gone home to start supper for her and Every and then I sneaked into that side room where the long mirror was. There I took off all my clothes and had a good look at myself, pretending I was Ella Jean…I mean pretending it was Ella Jean doing the looking at myself being me naked. While I had my clothes off, I suddenly had a déjà vu of the previous time in that room, when I was only five-going-on-six, when Latha, before Every had come back to Stay More to take her away from me, had let me sleep one night with her, and, because she never slept with a stitch on, had let me sleep naked too. And I had told her, without even knowing for sure what the word meant, that I loved her. I really had loved her, and I still did, but now I knew that it’s better to love someone your own age. Naked in that room, I remembered what Latha had replied when I’d told her that. “Oh, Dawny,” she’d said, “I love you too, and if you were a growed-up man I would marry you right this minute.”

Later, as dusk gathered and I headed for the sacred spot on Banty Creek, I reflected on how appropriate it was that Latha had been the last person I had seen while I was still “normal.” I wished I could have told her that, and told her that I was on my way to being no longer a child.

I reached the spot on Banty Creek, the idyllic spot of hogscalds and willows and music in the rippling water, but Ella Jean was not there. I was abashed at myself for being so overeager that I’d probably got there a long time before her, although the world was certainly already enfolded in twilight. All I could do was sit down on a rock and wait for her.

Sitting there waiting and wondering when she’d come, I caught a whiff of that delectable Palmolive. My first thought was that she was coming down the hill and I could already smell it in her hand. But I waited and she did not appear. Could I possibly be smelling the remnants of Palmolive left over from her previous bath? No, nor was I simply wishing that I could smell it. It was in the air.

I stood up. I sniffed. I moved around, sniffing, and turned, and moved the other way. I began to follow my nose. Not far. Just a little way upstream, into a thicket of thorny locust trees, a level open place beside the bank. Where she lay. My first thought was: she’s playing with me. I wanted to hold that thought, but it got entirely away.

Chapter twenty-four

When? Now. Summertime gloaming creekwater clean fresh Ella Jean. She lies still. I call her name. She does not move. “Don’t play,” I ask of her. Now I see the blood on her thigh. Crickets cicadas katydids tree frogs and a whippoorwill. She has no dress. She holds the bar of Palmolive clenched tightly in one fist as if it’s all she has in this world, and I think what a brave and strong girl she was to hold onto that Palmolive while she was being raped and strangled. I drop to my knees beside her, and tell myself I must touch her. She is still warm. I reach for the wrist of the hand holding the Palmolive. I have been crazy about this wrist since the second grade. I have been crazy about all of this, this whole human, since I was seven. My sweet, my secret passion. I try to feel for her pulse. Surely blood still pumps and throbs through this real strong and brave girl. But it does not. If it does, I cannot feel it. Can I never take her to the movies? You can just make things up. Can I make up for her a pulse she does not have? Ernie Pyle? Every Dill? Anybody? Gentle, oh Gentle Reader…

I stand. I look around, hoping to see Emil Polacek lurking in the shadows. I will kill him with my bare hands, as he has killed her with his bare hands. But he is not there. There is nobody there. I am the only one there. Crickets cicadas katydids tree frogs and a whippoorwill. You don’t have much feelings, leastways you don’t show much feelings. I scream. With feelings I scream. At the top of my lungs I scream, loud enough for you to hear me, a thousand miles away or right here beside me, wherever you are, who can only watch and listen, who cannot bring this girl back to life to me to here to now to stay more forever. I scream loud enough for everyone in my town to hear me. I scream so that McPherson in his faraway hiding place at the glen of the waterfall can hear me. I scream so deafeningly that I deafen myself. I scream and scream and scream until I can no longer hear myself screaming. I can still hear crickets cicadas katydids tree frogs and a whippoorwill but only inside my head; I cannot hear myself. Am I making me up? I have a voice, a screaming voice, but I cannot hear it. Can you? You who have listened through all this, are you listening now? Can you hear what I cannot? Can you do anything? Gentle Reader with your magic that can make things go away or come again, can you not at least remind me that once I said to you When I dream of Ella Jean, either at night or whenever my conscious reveries need her, the loss of her at the end of the episode is always softened by the thought that she’ll return whenever I want? I scream because you cannot, you cannot, you can neither tell me that she’ll return nor that she is gone forever.

I scream and scream, remembering Ella Jean saying I aint skeered as she stood up from hiding after the glider landed and they shot at her, even with blanks. My real strong and brave secret girl. Sweet potato pie, made with her own hands, even if the taste isn’t my favorite. I go on screaming even though I cannot hear myself. “Every word you say I want to keep,” I’d told her and now I have so few words of hers to keep, and none more to hear. Even if I could hear. Mister we’uns aint et our dinner yit and Polacek had poked fun at her voice. Where is the bastard?

Here he comes. I am ready for him. I will sink my fingernails into that thick neck as he has sunk his into her little neck, and I will never let go, even when it thunders, because I will never hear the thunder. Even though his thick neck is covered with a beard. How has he grown such a beard so fast? Is he trying to disguise himself as murderer? And it is a grizzled beard. And the rifle he carries is not a shoju but a Winchester. And the clothes he wears are not a Japanese soldier’s uniform but faded denim overalls. I go on screaming although I go on not hearing myself. He holds out his hand as if to stop my scream. He helplessly motions with his hand to stop my screaming. Then he is shaking me with both hands to make me stop screaming. Finally I stop screaming not because he is shaking me but because I realize that I am continuing to scream even though I cannot hear myself. He is speaking to me. I am not hearing him. He is speaking to me over and over and I am not hearing him over and over. He looks at Ella Jean and seems to speak to her but he is speaking to me words I cannot hear. I am beginning to understand that he is not Polacek in disguise. I am beginning to believe who he is, though I have not seen him so close in longer than I can remember. I wish I could hear him, what words of comfort he seems to be trying to say with his mouth that moves but does not make any sound. Now he drops to his knees beside her and does what I have already done, lifts the frail lovely wrist and tries to find a pulse. He stands again and shakes his head and speaks to me again, and again I cannot detect any sound of any sort except all the crickets cicadas katydids tree frogs and a whippoor will, which is only in my head. He slides the straps of his overalls down from his shoulders, unbuttons and removes his shirt. What is he doing? I ask him what he is doing but no sound comes from my mouth so I do not know if I have spoken or not. He shows me what he is doing: he is covering Ella Jean’s nakedness as best he can with his shirt.

Now comes the angel to take Ella Jean’s soul to heaven. But no, she only looks like an angel: it is this man’s daughter, following him, not able to keep up with him as he runs to find the source of the screaming. It is McPherson’s own living breathing true love, as mine is no longer living breathing. She holds both hands over her mouth as she looks at Ella Jean. She looks at me with revulsion as if I am responsible for this crime. She speaks to her father. He answers her but I can hear neither of them. Then he speaks to me again. I shake my head and whine I caint hear you! but do not know if I have uttered at all.

Now comes a bunch of kids I should know, but I cannot convince myself I know them—friends maybe, Dinsmores maybe. Is one of them Willard? He speaks to me, and then he too must drop to his knees and feel for a pulse. Ole Dan speaks to him. The others speak, each to each. I speak, I speak, I speak, but do I? Willard yells at me, I can tell he is yelling because of the muscles in his neck and the look in his eyes and his mouth being open enough to eat a horse. But I can only wait until he has finished all the yelling and then I can only whine again, I caint hear you! He puts his mouth up against my ear and yells again, and I feel the hot rush of his breath into my ear but no sound at all.

Ole Dan puts his hand on Willard’s shoulder and stops his yelling and then speaks to him again. The other Dinsmore children collapse upon their sister’s body. They are howling with sobs I cannot hear. Then Willard begins running, in the direction of town. I start after him, but ole Dan stops me. He tries to tell me what Willard is doing, where he is going, and finally I have enough sense returning to me to realize that in my hip pocket, folded, is a new Indian Chief tablet and in my shirt pocket is a pencil stub and I offer these to ole Dan, saying, whining I caint hear you could you please write down whatever you’re saying.

And ole Dan takes my tablet and writes on it. He seems to write slowly as if he is having trouble making letters, but he is only trying to compose what he has to say. When he hands it back to me I am surprised at the elegance of his script. Willard must fetch Doc Swain. We mustn’t move her until Doc Swain has seen her, not that he can do anything for her, but he is the justice of the peace, after all. I am so thrilled to see these words. I have heard nothing yet, it is almost as if these written words are speaking to me, at last. Thank you, I cry, thank you so much!

He holds out his hand for the tablet, and wants to write one more thing: There are many questions I’d like to ask you, but I’ll just wait and see if Doc Swain asks them.

So there is nothing to do but wait. Now appears Ella Jean’s mother, Selena, who is holding her hands high above her head as if to catch Ella Jean’s soul before the angels can lift it to heaven.

The angels may not be taking Ella Jean’s soul to heaven, but I think they have roused themselves up from whatever rest and recuperation they have been taking.

Finally here comes a car on the Banty Creek road that goes to Spunkwater. It stops, then here is the sight of Doc Swain coming down to the creek. He is carrying his black bag, as if it contains anything that could save her. He talks to ole Dan. Ole Dan talks to him, and points at me, and talks some more. Doc gives me a look, but there is no accusation or suspicion in it. Doc does not lift her wrist but uses his stethoscope, briefly. Then he comes and I give him the Indian Chief and hold his flashlight for him while he writes down quite a lot of questions which I try to answer although I cannot tell if my voice is whining or calm or pleading or unruffled or what. Then he writes that he wants me and all the others present to turn our backs for just a moment while he completes his examination of the body. He says this aloud to them after I have read it. We turn our backs and wait, a long while. He touches my shoulder to let me know the wait is over. Then he examines me. He uses his stethoscope on me, and his hands, and tries to determine if I am feverish or ill in any way. He takes a thing from his bag and pokes it into each of my ears, and looks through the thing into my ears.

It is full dark now. Annie has returned to their house and brought a kerosene lantern. More people continue to arrive. There is now a soldier there, one of the engineers, and soon two jeeps arrive behind Doc Swain’s car on the Banty Creek road, and there is Captain Billings of the engineers. And Major Evans, the umpire. These men stand around talking with Doc Swain and ole Dan. A soldier covers Ella Jean completely with an army blanket, including her face. I am tired of standing and wish I could sit down but I dare not. After a while there comes another car with a flashing light atop it, and here comes Sheriff Frank Cheatham all the way from Jasper, with two of his deputies. They talk to Doc Swain, they talk to Major Evans, they try to talk to me but Doc Swain talks to them and they stop trying to talk to me.

There is a large crowd on the banks of Banty Creek. Willard is holding Gypsy while she cries, but his face is all soaked with tears too. Sammy Coe is also crying. Joe Don is asking questions of everybody. Two more jeeps come down the road, and there is Captain Stoving, and then there is Lieutenant McPherson, who rushes right to me, ignoring all the others, not saluting the major or anybody, not even looking at the sheriff, and puts his hands on my shoulders and starts talking real fast, and I would give anything to be able to hear him but I cannot. Doc Swain talks to him. I offer him the Indian Chief. He takes it and writes, Are you all right? I shake my head. I cannot hear my voice saying, “I am sorry I am deaf. I am so sad I caint tell you.” He writes furiously on the Indian Chief, This is terrible beyond belief. We will find the murderer and destroy him!

“It was Polacek,” I inform him.

His face is astonished. He writes, It couldn’t have been. Polacek has been with me up in the lost hollow all day and evening. He hasn’t been out of my sight.

The sheriff talks to McPherson. McPherson answers him, then yells something at Captain Stoving. Everyone is yelling, except Gypsy, who cries and cries and cries.

It is late. It gets later. I am so tired. McPherson writes in my Indian Chief, Come on. I’ll drive you home. I am so grateful for his offer. But first I must go and kneel and pull back the army blanket and give Ella Jean a kiss goodnight, a last kiss. Sayonara, I whisper to her, which is the last thing I’d said when she could hear me and now I cannot even hear myself nor can she. Then I tell McPherson I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to see my aunt and uncle. I want to spend the night with Latha. I’ll explain to your aunt, he writes, and she had better accept my explanation. In a jeep he takes me to Latha’s house. Latha and Every have already heard from others, and they embrace me. McPherson says he’ll see me first thing in the morning. Latha and Every put me to bed. Sometime away along in the night with no night sounds at all except the crickets in my head I finally finally finally drift into the arms of sleep.

In the days that follow, McPherson is with me often. He becomes my ears and writes in my Indian Chief everything that is going on. The exercise is over. The Yanks never have found the lost glen of the waterfall, and therefore the Japs have won by default. Major Evans has wanted to continue the exercise but McPherson has refused. Another captain has arrived from Chaffee, a Military Police investigator, with a staff of MP lieutenants and sergeants, and they are questioning every man of the Yanks, the Japs, and the engineers. Private Polacek is heartbroken. At Ella Jean’s funeral he appears with an armful of wildflowers he has picked from all over. When they sing “Farther Along” he tries to join in. I cannot hear them singing it but I know they are singing it. Even if I could hear myself singing, which I cannot, I would not join the singing because I do not believe anymore that farther along anybody will ever understand anything, that farther along anybody will ever know all about it, that any one of us will ever understand it all by and by. I watch McPherson during the singing, and afterward I say to him, “You can’t believe this! Farther along we’re not going to understand anything!” He takes my Indian Chief and writes, Donny, the point of the hymn is not that we will ever have any final answers farther along but that there will be a farther along to look forward to.

I tell him I don’t believe that either. What is there to look forward to? The army investigator cannot find the murderer, the sheriff cannot find the murderer, McPherson cannot, Willard cannot, I cannot, although I have tried: at my suggestion, since I have considered that if the rape occurred in that grove of thorny locusts there was a chance the culprit got himself scratched and blooded by thorns if Ella Jean put up any sort of struggle, every man in Stay More has been examined for thorn scratches. They have examined me too, and found none. None of the soldiers have any. Sog Alan has a bad scratch on his back but there are witnesses who can testify that Sog got the scratch from a nail in his barn. McPherson himself has had a serious talk with Sog and doesn’t think he’s guilty. The sheriff tells McPherson that there doesn’t appear to be any chance of finding a suspect among any residents of Stay More. The investigating MP captain tells McPherson that none of the soldiers can be held as suspects. So what is there to look forward to?

Nor do I have a newspaper to publish anymore. McPherson offers to help me put out an issue of The Stay Morning Star, at least to carry the story that the “occupation” of Stay More is about to end, that the tanks have already returned to Chaffee and that the engineers and all the other soldiers will leave soon. I remember what Ella Jean had written on my plaster arm cast: Hope you go far with the Stay Morning-star, and I break down in sobs, not just from thoughts of sweet Ella Jean but also because I know I will not go anywhere any more, far or near, with my newspaper. Doc Swain has examined me twice again, once with what he writes are “tuning forks,” and he has written into my Indian Chief: It seems you must have howled away your hearing. He has told my aunt and uncle that they should take me to St. Louis to see a specialist, but they have no money for that. I am not going to be able to interview anybody, ever again. The Star is dead.

When I am very sad, McPherson snatches my Indian Chief and fiercely begins a new page: “(7) The Story of the Lost Glen of the Waterfall, including (a) how Bluff-Dweller Indians inhabited it for generations; (b) how Sewell Jerram was assassinated there in 1914; (c) how Nail Chism hid out there following Jerram’s assassination; (d) how I myself was lost there at the age of almost six; (e) how the samurai under Chui McPherson successfully hid themselves there at the conclusion of the War Games, and (f) whatever else may yet happen there in years to come.” Then on another page he writes: You don’t have to be able to hear to write about all of that! Nor do you need to have a newspaper!

Then he tells me that he must go. The jeeps are ready, the trucks are loaded, all of the soldiers are set to go back to Chaffee. McPherson writes that all of us are probably glad, or should be glad, to see them go. We may never know, he writes, if it was one of us, but it might as well have been. We are the anonymous instruments of death. He tells me that I have been the only real friend he’s ever had, and that he is going to miss me terribly, and that he will write to me from wherever he is, and that he will always hope, against hope, that he will survive the invasion of Japan and be able to come back to Stay More, where he will stay more and marry Annie and be my friend forever. Then he gives me a big hug and writes one more thing: I have arranged for Gypsy to keep Jarhead. That strikes me as very funny, and I laugh, the first time I’ve laughed in a long long time. Then he takes a stick and scratches deeply into the dirt the four figures that make up the word sayonara in Japanese letters. He says the word aloud, though I cannot hear him.

But I cannot say sayonara to him. Not because I cannot hear myself. Nor because I cannot tolerate the thought of good-bye. But because it was the last thing I said to Ella Jean, and is hers alone. So I try to smile. He salutes me, at full attention. He executes a smart about-face and is gone. Gone.

I have already decided this, I have already thought about this a lot and have made up my mind: I will watch the evacuation of Stay More from the vantage of Leapin Rock. Though I have never been atop it before, I know how to get there, where the trail is, and I go there now. Now I sit on Leapin Rock, not too close to the edge but close enough to look over and see how very far it is to the place where Ella Jean’s sisters landed. I wonder which is worse, hitting the earth from this height or being raped and strangled. I open my Indian Chief and on the page where I had written “(4) The History of Leapin Rock,” I write a few things, I write several things while watching the jeeps and the trucks far below like mindless bugs doing whatever they have to do, lining up to leave town. I write a note for Latha. I really have loved her more than anyone.

I flip back a page to “(3) What’s the picture on Ella Jean’s nightie?” written in her own lovely hand, asking the question about the Question Mark, which will always remain that, Whoever killed her, or Whoever was meant to be her lover but never got a chance. The jeeps and the trucks are moving along the road to Parthenon, heading north out of town. From this height I cannot tell which ones have McPherson and his samurai in them. I write a few things for Ella Jean on that page, and finally I answer aloud her question: “It was me in that picture on your nightie, Ella Jean! And here I come!”

I stand up, and need only a moment to decide whether to keep my eyes open or to close them. Probably with them closed I can see her better.

Two hands clamp my shoulders and jerk me away from the edge. It is McPherson. He is talking up a storm but then remembers that I cannot hear. He shoves me into a sitting position far from the rock’s lip and sits down beside me and takes the Indian Chief and begins writing. I notice there is something different about him: the silver bar on his collar has doubled. He’s a captain now.

He hands me what he has written: I suspected I’d find you up here. And it’s a good thing I did, isn’t it? Well, I’m sorry to interrupt you but you’re needed for a few more jobs in this world. One is that you’ll have to sit at the Press table during the ceremony for the posthumous awarding of the Congressional Medal of Honor to Mare Coe. It looks like I’m going to be around for several more days at least. And you’re going to be around for many more years.

“I thought all of you were gone,” I say.

We almost were, he writes. We were all set to stay no more in Stay More when the radio message came from the brass at Chaffee telling us that the big brass in Washington want us to stay more. And we’re all mighty proud to do that.

Chapter twenty-five

When will the soldiers leave Stay More? A second invasion will happen, not just by the army but also the navy and marines and press corps and politicians. I will not reveal to anyone, not even Captain McPherson, my suspicion that the memory of Mare Coe and his heroism at Iwo Jima will be given such recognition because the army will be trying to cover up or at least apologize for its rape and strangling of a young girl. Throughout the days of this second invasion, Captain McPherson will give everyone to think that he is my personal aide-de-camp, as he will have written yet another French military expression. He will hardly ever let me out of his sight, not, he will assure me, because he will fear that I would run back up to Leapin Rock, but because he will want to make absolutely certain that my deafness will not prevent me from knowing everything that is going on. I think he will not want me to be left alone with all of the reporters who will have come to town.

McPherson and his samurai will no longer be wearing either their Japanese combat uniforms or their army fatigues, but full dress uniforms, which will have been brought to them by a truck sent from Chaffee, the same truck which will have contained an item Captain McPherson will have obtained through calling in a favor owed him by a supply lieutenant: an Underwood upright typewriter. McPherson will spend too much of his time trying to teach me to use it, when he himself will have known only the hunt-and-peck system, whose rudiments, however, I will pick up sufficiently to pretend to be using when McPherson will set the Underwood up at my place at the Press table, facing the rostrum set up out in the schoolyard.

Other tables all along one edge of the schoolyard will be covered with the best linen tablecloths, upon which all the ladies of Stay More (and many other parts of Newton County) will have deposited innumerable sumptuous dishes, just as if it will have been a funeral feast, or at least a dinner-on-the-grounds: huge platters of fried chicken and such pies and cakes that even the sight of them will have brought to the mouth of poor starving Willard Dinsmore the first smile he will have managed since the recent tragedy. His hands will itch. But Miss Jerram will have appointed herself to the job of standing guard over the tables, with the assistance of Sergeant Rodney Harris of Wisconsin, and they will keep kids and dogs away from the tables until the ceremony will be all over.

My colleagues at the Press table will include reporters from the Jasper weekly, the dailies of Harrison, Fayetteville, Fort Smith, and Little Rock, and even one from Kansas City, as well as several photographers. Although they will have attempted to tease me in the beginning because I am so young and small, they will quickly cease their teasing when they notice how deferential the army captain standing behind my chair will be—or maybe he will have told them to lay off. Once, one of them will attempt to pass me a note with a question on it, but my captain will intercept it, and I will always after wonder if it sought to question me about Ella Jean.

My captain will hand to me a prepared typescript of the main part of the ceremony: the actual awarding of the medal. After the navy chaplain will offer the benediction, after Every Dill as the closest thing to a local preacher will offer a brief obituary of Gerald Coe, after Doc Swain will speak a few words in support of this boy’s character, after United States Congressman J.W. Trimble will be introduced longwindedly by County Judge Will Jones of Jasper and will give a long speech (my captain will hand me a note: I’m not writing any of this down for you because none of it is very important), finally a colonel of the marines will summon Lawlor and Dulcie Coe to stand before him, and the colonel will present Lawlor with medal after medal, which my captain will explain for me: The Purple Heart, the Presidential Unit Citation with an Iwo Jima star, and the Asiatic-Pacific Area Campaign Medal with an Iwo Jima star. Then the colonel will hold up a medal in the form of a golden star as big as the sheriff’s badge with the fanciest blue silk ribbon anyone has ever seen. He will hand it not to Lawlor but to Congressman Trimble, who will present it on behalf of President Harry S Truman and the United States Congress, while the colonel will read the citation, a typescript of which McPherson has placed before me so that I can follow it: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty…in action against enemy Japanese forces during the seizure of Iwo Jima…he boldly defied shattering Japanese machine-gun fire and knee mortars as well as small-arms fire…the colonel will read on and on, covering in detail Mare’s throwing back all those grenades at the enemy, killing an estimated sixty Japanese before he was mortally wounded…. His dauntless initiative, unfaltering courage, indomitable determination during a critical period of action, and valiant spirit of self-sacrifice in the face of certain death reflected the highest credit upon Private First Class Coe and sustained and enhanced the highest tradition of the United States Naval Service. He gallantly gave his life for his comrades and his country.

Squeezed into the overpopulated schoolyard, there will be a band of musicians, a small but loud marine corps band of buglers, saxophonists, and drummers, and they will strike up a rousing number that I will not hear. My captain will write for me: It’s just as well you can’t hear them. They’re playing some nonsense about the halls of Montezuma and the shores of Tripoli.

Lawlor Coe will receive the fancy medal on behalf of his son, thanking Congressman Trimble and thanking the colonel. They will direct him to the microphone but he will say only a few words. My captain will write them down for me: He was a good boy.

A cannon will be fired—the very last shot in the occupation of Stay More. The smoke from it will take a long time to drift out of the valley.

While we all will be filling our plates at those groaning tables, my captain will hand me another note: Excuse me a second. Burt’s trying to beat my time again. I will watch as he goes to rescue Annie from the attentions of Captain Burton Stoving, who, although his tank companies will have returned to Chaffee, will have insisted on staying more in Stay More, possibly because he will have become smitten with the hermit’s daughter, or possibly will just want the challenge of taking her away from McPherson. I will not be the only one interested in watching them. Everybody will be curious because this will be the first public appearance of Annie. And of her father too.

McPherson will never get me to agree to interview ole Dan, even with his help. I will somehow not be able to banish the image of him as the first to appear after Ella Jean’s death, and that unreasonable prejudice will further contribute to my fall as a newspaperman. McPherson will insist that I allow him to help me put out one more issue of The Stay Morning Star, devoted almost entirely to the Medal of Honor ceremony, but with a small box in one corner: IN MEMORIAM, ELLA JEAN DINSMORE, 1933–1945.

My captain will fail in his good-intentioned effort to persuade me to continue the newspaper. A journalist without ears, I will have to tell him, is like a doctor without hands. Let others do the reporting, he will suggest, on a final page of my Indian Chief. You could just be the editor. “What others?” I will want to know. “Nobody but Ella Jean was ever interested in helping out around here.” Trying to cheer him up and let him know that I will not be a totally hopeless case, I will say, “Well, she once told me I ought to just make up the news. And I did, sometimes. But that’s not such a good idea, is it?”

No, that’s not allowed, he will write, but nobody’s ever going to stop you from writing things that don’t pretend to be news. Besides, news gets old. News never lasts. Good writing stays new and lasts forever.

And that will be practically the last thing of consequence that he will write in that Indian Chief, which will be filled up anyhow. There will be just a few other words written there, attempts to say goodbye. I will tell him how I can’t say sayonara because that is only for her. So he will tell me there is simply ja ne! which means just “See ya!” I will, you know, he will write, I will see you.

But he will be wrong about that too. I will not watch the jeep carrying him away from Stay More; there is a superstition, old as the hills, that you should never watch anybody going out of sight; to do so is to doom them.

I will never see him again. He will not be killed in the invasion of Kyushu, because that invasion will never occur. I will no longer be able to listen to the radio, but I will have outgrown those silly shows, Captain Midnight, Hop Harrigan, and Terry and the Pirates, and will no longer have any use for the news, but if there is anything important on the air that she thinks I ought to know, dear Latha will write it down for me. It will be in her handwriting, in August, that I will learn that an incredible bomb, made from atoms, unimaginable in its power, will have been dropped on a city called Hiroshima. So many people will have been killed that, when another bomb like a deathly echo is dropped on another city, Nagasaki, the Japanese will surrender. While I will be stunned and will share with Latha her sorrow and her tears over the senseless deaths of all those hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, I will be rapturous that the worst war in the history of mankind is finally over—and that McPherson’s samurai will not be needed after all.

In time, McPherson will write to me from the Kyushu city of Kagoshima, where he will have been promoted to major and will be serving as the chief interpreter for the occupation of Kyushu. I will imagine that he will be as polite and kind to the Japanese people as he had been to us, but I will not imagine that he will meet and befriend a twelve-year-old Japanese boy who edits a newspaper. Later he will be promoted to colonel and established in the occupation headquarters in Tokyo, where he will remain for several years. He will mail to me a photograph of Yoshino Hijiya, a beautiful girl he will intend to marry. Perhaps because of his love for her, I will not hear from him much anymore after that. I will eventually get a letter from Rutland, Vermont, where he will be working for an American publisher, Charles E. Tuttle, who specializes in the printing of Japanese books and will soon be sending him to work permanently in the Tokyo office. There will be a photograph of the two children born to him and Yoshino.

One samurai will return to Stay More after the war, and one Yank. Using a map he had drawn on the flyleaf of his Bible, Rodney Harris will find his way back here to persuade Estalee Jerram to accompany him to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to meet his family. She will argue with him over her desire to stay in Stay More, and they will spend a month here, and a month there, and a month here, before finally settling for good there. I will regret that, for throughout the sixth grade Miss Jerram will have helped me avoid being sent away to Little Rock to attend the Arkansas School for the Deaf, as my aunt and uncle will have tried to make me do. Miss Jerram will write things down for me, and make it possible for me to stay in the Stay More school. When Miss Jerram will move permanently to Wisconsin, her replacement as Stay More schoolteacher, a young woman named Jane Harrison from Valley Springs in neighboring Boone County, will write in my Indian Chief on my first day in the seventh grade, “(8) The Story of How Boone Harrison Became the First Schoolmaster of Stay More.” She will write He was my great-grandfather, and you don’t have to have ears to learn the history of Stay More and write about it, and besides Estalee Jerram wrote me a long letter about you and I cant tell you how glad I am you’re going to be my pupil. Between Latha and Miss Harrison, I will learn enough to write the first story in my book called Stay Morons, which will never be published but will serve as the wellspring for many that will.

Burton Stoving will not be as bright as Rodney Harris, and will not have a Bible with a flyleaf map showing how to find Stay More. Just as it had taken his tank battalion forever to find us in the first place, he will get lost several times and will go back to Little Rock in frustration. But he will be nothing if not persistent, which is why he will be a rising executive in the insurance business. Burton Stoving will no longer be trying to steal McPherson’s girlfriend because he will not know that McPherson will have a Japanese wife; he will only be trying to steal a girl away from her hermit father, and he will succeed, like Rodney Harris reducing the female population of Stay More by one more. Not without considerable trouble. Ole Dan will not like Burton Stoving. Ole Dan will never have liked Burton Stoving. And, now that Burton Stoving will no longer be in a captain’s uniform but just civilian clothes, I will wonder why Annie likes him. He will be good-looking, and rich. He will drive a nice car. I will have to wonder if McPherson will have written Annie to tell her that he will be marrying Yoshino. As always, I will know nothing about Annie. And I will write in the Indian Chief: “(9) Why Did Annie Elope with Burton Stoving?” It will be years before I get around to learning the answer to that.

Annie will spend the rest of her life in Little Rock. But nearly everybody else in Stay More will move to California. A very few of them, like John Henry “Hank” Ingledew, will come back, but there will be so many other Stay Morons in Orange County, California, that the towns of Fullerton and Anaheim will have colonies of Stay-Morons-in-exile.

Time and the rains and the flooding creeks will fill with silt our foxholes until, in time, no one will know that we ever played here. Sometimes when it will be raining very hard and no one will be watching me or hearing me, I will let myself cry, for a little while. But once Doc Swain will catch me crying and will take my Indian Chief and write something in it, but then he will scratch it out, black it out, think better of it and delete it. Later I will hold it to the light in just such a way that I can make out the effaced letters: You will find another Ella Jean. Latha will tell me a little about Doc’s own story, enough to suggest that he himself had once had his own Ella Jean, a girl named Tenny, whom he had lost and never again found a replacement for, and thus I will understand why he will have had second thoughts about leaving that sentence in my old Indian Chief. But before I can ever get old enough to ask him about his Tenny, he will be killed by lightning, and at his funeral I will watch him being interred beneath a double headstone beside Tennessee Tennison Swain, his long lost love. “Are you still there?” I will ask, not of either of them but of you, and on the spot will solemnly promise to learn their story and tell it to you, farther along, all by and by.

Among the men of Stay More who had been Our Boys Overseas and who will return after the war long enough to pack up their families and take them to California will be Ace Dingletoon, returning alive and unhurt but without medals or promotion. He will be evicted from his rent-free farm and will resume his former habit of instant evacuation, blowing his horn to summon his family into removal. Eyewitnesses will give the lie to the hoary legend about his pulling a rope tied to all their belongings but will report that it will indeed be true that the chickens will lie down with their feet in the air so that Gypsy can tie their legs. And with the help of her trophy Corporal Jarhead, they will escape a step ahead of the sheriff to some other unoccupied farmstead at a far remove from Stay More. We will miss them.

Willard Dinsmore will miss Gypsy so much that in time he will go off on a heroic quest in search of her, only to learn that the Dingletoons too will have been rumored to have joined the endless emigration of Ozarkers to the promised land of California. He himself will go to California, only to discover that California has no abandoned farmsteads because of its incredible growth and prosperity. Unoccupied farms in California are as rare as mansions in Stay More. But by persistent search, and the exceptional sense of tactics that had once made McPherson call him “General Willard Dinsmore,” he will in time locate, not an abandoned farm but at least an abandoned shack out in the middle of a vast grove of orange trees near Mission Viejo, where the Dingletoons will be squatting. I will wish desperately to have seen Gypsy’s face at the moment Willard will appear, but I will just have to be content in the hope that he will convey to her the message that we will all have missed her and will continue to hope that after she and Willard are married they might want to come back to Stay More on a visit out of nostalgia. But they never will.

Even my aunt and uncle will move to California, good riddance. But I will not go with them. I will rather have committed myself to the Deaf School than go with them. Latha will let me convert the office of the Star back to its original function: it had once been the bedroom of her daughter Sonora, who will be gone to California. The Stay More school, for lack of enrollment, will shut down and its few remaining pupils will be bused to Parthenon.

My seatmate on those yellow bus rides to and from Parthenon will be Sammy Coe. Of all the original members of the Axis and Allies, Japs and Yanks, only Sammy Coe and I will remain—and Sog Alan, the miscreant, when he will come back from a stint in the Korean War. Sammy and I will grow out of the rivalry of our childhood and become good friends. I will even take him with me when I go to explore the lost glen of the waterfall, not telling him that the place still spooks me, not looking for traces of the samurai but for traces of the Indians who made a community there hundreds of years before or for anything else we can find in that cornucopia of splendid stories.

You will come too. On every visit to the lost glen of the waterfall, I will find it not with Sammy’s help but with yours, Gentle Reader. We will find what we will be certain is the spot where Sewell Jerram was assassinated in 1914, and the cavern where Nail Chism hid out with his true love Viridis Monday, as sung by the choiring of the trees. We will find the spot where I at the age of nearly six spent a night lost, haunted by lightning bugs, alone except for my dog Gumper. And we will find, although we will not yet know it as such because it will not yet have happened, the spot where ole Dan will be shot and killed by State Police Corporal Sog Alan, a story to be told in some other place, which will become one of your favorite stories.

From that moment when you watched and heard and identified with that breaking of my arm on the first page of this writing, you have kept the faith that all things of this world have become, for a while, your world too. But that while, that time, will draw now to its closing although the future tense of this closing will suggest that it might never end.

Just as McPherson and I exchanged all those promises and secrets when first we met, I’ll need in return a promise and a secret from you, Gentle Reader, himitsu to himitsu-ni suru, in return for mine: you have had the privilege, throughout all of this, of sitting there silently, noticing everything, missing nothing, and you have unquestionably noticed things that have escaped my attention. If I could see all of this story through your eyes, with the power of your imagination, how grand it would be!

So this story, this world, if it will exist at all, will exist only in your mind, for as long as you can hold onto it. That will be your promise. Mine will be to find all the stories of Stay More. We will conspire: my secret to you is that you will be, as you have been, the real creator of this world. Your secret to me is that you will have known that, all along.

Ja ne!

For Jacque and Micky Gunn

Perfect folks-in-law

Some of the backwoods farms in the Ozarks are pretty steep, and steep also are the stories that the natives tell about them. Many of the wildest of these tales are true, at that. The old gag about the farmer falling out of his cornfield sounds like a tall tale, but people who live in the Ozarks know that such accidents are not uncommon.

—Vance Randolph,

We Always Lie to Strangers

ex•tir•pate tr.v.

1. To pull up by the roots.

2. To destroy totally; exterminate.

—American Heritage Dictionary

Contents

First part: Primary

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Chapter six

Chapter seven

Chapter eight

Chapter nine

Chapter ten

Second part: Election

Chapter eleven

Chapter twelve

Chapter thirteen

Chapter fourteen

Chapter fifteen

Chapter sixteen

Chapter seventeen

Chapter eighteen

Chapter nineteen

Chapter twenty

Acknowledgments to the First Edition

First part: Primary

Chapter one

You’ve never heard of Vernon Ingledew unless you’ve read a book by the name of The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, but that’s not essential. That book, under the cover of being a scholarly examination of the vernacular buildings of a lost but pastoral backwater, was a chronicle of generations of Ingledews in a village called Stay More, founded by the first of them, Jacob, and still inhabited by the last of them, Vernon, who was last for several reasons, most particularly because the woman he loved could not conceive a child if she’d wanted to and she didn’t want to for several reasons, most particularly because Vernon was her first cousin.

Now that book ends when Vernon becomes so wealthy from raising razorback hogs and processing them into the Ingledew Ham that is sold in gourmet shops everywhere that he and Jelena, his cousin, whose last name is also Ingledew, build themselves a fabulous house on a mountaintop above Stay More and set out to live happily ever after.

That book appeared twenty-seven years ago, when Vernon was just turning twenty-one and Jelena was eight years older than he, and sure enough they had been living as happily as June bugs, happier than Heaven, ever since. I never heard a word about any afflictions or problems or even stresses that bothered them. Jelena had a lovely garden that I’d heard a lot about but never seen. I’d remarked at the end of the architecture novel, “I will hope that on my next visit to Stay More I will be invited to sit with them in that garden.” But I never had. I didn’t visit Stay More very often. Neither Vernon nor Jelena had anything happening to them that would have merited even a good short story, let alone a novel. Happiness doesn’t inspire books, although books can cause a lot of happiness.

Speaking of books, that’s supposedly how they spent most of their time, reading them. And supposedly it was one or more books he read which gave Vernon the peculiar notion to run for governor.

He had no political experience whatsoever when he made his romantic decision to run for governor. He had few friends; not one of them was an elective official on the local, state, or national level. His only qualification for office was that he was the great-great-great-grandson of Jacob Ingledew, who had been governor of Arkansas during Reconstruction, and was remembered as a courageous Unionist in a hotbed of the Confederacy. While Vernon Ingledew had inherited his ancestor’s courage and independence and sense of ethics, as well as his mountaineer’s fierce pride and native wit, he ran for governor in spite of an avowed disparagement of politics. In addition, he had no experience at all in law (a fact which would earn him a lot of votes) and indeed he was not even a college graduate. As for Jelena, she was not only eight years older than Vernon but was also a mother of two sons by her divorced husband, and even if she were not Vernon’s first cousin he could not have married her, not because of his pathological woman-shyness (somehow he was never shy with Jelena) but because it was his destiny never to marry. Yet he chose to live with her (or cohabit, if he’d ever learned a legal word), and he was still living with her almost thirty years later when he decided to run for governor, and one of his first all-night sessions with his campaign manager (or political consultant, as they’re called nowadays) concerned the best “spin” to put on the relationship he had with Jelena. Never mind the jokes about Ozark hillbillies loving their cousins. Never mind the fact that Jelena had been the valedictorian of her high school class and, if she’d ever had her IQ measured, was possibly as much a genius as Vernon himself. Never mind that she had not borne children to Vernon (she’d requested a tubal ligation following the birth of her second son). Never mind, even, the fact that handsome Vernon and beautiful Jelena had created the most gorgeous love story that a specialist in the field could have ever imagined. There was simply going to be no getting around the fact that, as incumbent Governor Bradfield put it (somewhat desperately), “Those two have been living in incestuous sin long enough that God ought to blast ’em both with plague upon plague.”

When Vernon Ingledew made his decision to seek the governor’s office, the first person he told, apart from Jelena, was his best friend of many years, a forester living in Stay More named Day Whittacker. Although Day, who was the same age as Vernon, the same age as my wife Kim, had lived in Stay More for most of his life, he was a native of New Jersey and possessed an outsider’s perspective on the ways of the Ozarks. He and his wife Diana had been back-to-the-landers years before the influx of hippies had hit the Ozarks, and they had not permitted themselves to be caught up in the turned-on and tuned-out lifestyle nor the drug culture that briefly tainted the lovely mountains and left a lingering odor into the Eighties. They were an eminently sensible couple, and their son Danny had gone away to college and was now living and working in Rome.

On the average of once every two years, Day and Diana drove the two hours from isolated Stay More to Fayetteville, the shopping and cultural Mecca of the Ozarks, and my home for the past couple of decades. Naturally on these trips they stopped by to say hello and bring me up to date on what little news the languishing village of Stay More managed to generate. My wife Kim was always delighted to see them, because in fact it was their story in my early novel called Some Other Place. The Right Place. which had first made her aware of the obscure novelist who wrote it and which had led, indirectly, to our meeting and eventual marriage. We exchanged Christmas cards with Day and Diana and on those very rare occasions when we could find time and incentive and nerve to take ourselves to Stay More, we always stayed at their house, a 1930s cottage painted a fading yellow, up Banty Creek a mile or so from the remains of the once-thriving but now defunct village. The house had been built by Diana’s grand-sire—or sire, too—a strange hermit by the name of Daniel Lyam Montross, who has appeared in several other of my novels and even narrated one of them, and who might even turn up in this one too.

Unlike Vernon and Jelena, who may have borne me some resentment for laying bare their history for all the world to see, Day and Diana knew that all the world was too busy to pay much attention to them, and thus they’d never complained about my invasion of their privacy, not even my shocking revelation of who Diana’s real father had been, not even my mention of Day’s youthful habits of prodigious masturbation, nor any of the other details of their private lives. I once asked them if they’d ever had any strangers knocking at their door who had been inspired to seek them out by having read Some Other Place. The Right Place. Their answer, which on one hand was an unpleasant reminder that that novel had never really enjoyed a large audience but on the other hand reassured me that I had not caused Day and Diana any real embarrassment or inconvenience by revealing their story, was that once in a blue moon somebody would turn around in their driveway after having satisfied themselves that that yellow house did in fact exist. But nobody stopped to inquire if it was really true that they’d been to all the ghost towns the novel said they had and done all the strange things it said they’d done.

I served a supper of my barbecued butterflied leg of lamb (with parsleyed new potatoes and asparagus) to Day and Diana on that particular visit when, after I’d broken out the second bottle of Merlot, Day said, “Did you know that Vernon plans to enter the gubernatorial primary?”

Since I’m very hard of hearing, he may as well have been telling me that Vernon was entering a monastery or a psychiatric hospital.

Kim helped by giving me the sign-language gesture for “governor,” a circling of the temple with the index finger, just a few inches removed from the common gesture for “crazy.” She said, “It’s about time. When I first moved in with Don, he was writing a novel about Vernon Ingledew as governor of Arkansas. That was seventeen years ago. He couldn’t finish it.” She turned to me. “What was the title of that novel?”

“All the King’s Horses,” I said. It was loosely based upon Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. But Vernon was just thirty then, too young to be governor, and naturally I wasn’t going to get any cooperation from him in the project. “You tried to talk Vernon out of it, of course,” I remarked to Day.

“Of course,” Day said. “I still can’t imagine what’s possessed him.”

“Jelena hates the whole idea,” Diana said. “She told me that if Vernon runs into problems because they’re first cousins and not married, she will be only too happy to ‘leave the country.’ She doesn’t want to be a politician’s consort. Not if she has to live at the governor’s mansion in Little Rock.”

“What does George think?” I asked. Jim George Dinsmore was Vernon’s plant manager, his farm manager, his majordomo, his right-hand man, and a very strong and level-headed Ozark hillbilly. I had known him since my childhood.

“We don’t know yet,” Day said. “Vernon hasn’t told him. That’s his next step. He showed me his schedule: he’s taking this whole thing step by step. He plans to tell George this week, and then the two of them are flying around the country to interview some prospective campaign managers.”

I fished my index cards out of my shirt pocket and took my ballpoint and began jotting notes. I really didn’t want to start a novel about Vernon running for governor; my problems with the previous attempt, although only a vague memory now, still came too readily to mind. I was immersed in a critical study of Arkansas painter Carroll Cloar, actually in the form of his “autobiography,” and I expected Cloar to keep me busy through the next several breaks and vacations from my teaching duties. “When Vernon told you of his decision,” I asked Day, “did he indicate any event or person or circumstance which prompted him to it? Was it just a spur of the moment thing?”

Day smiled. “Last year he got to the Ps in his Program, and the second P was politics. So you can imagine what he’s been doing for the past six months.”

I could imagine. I knew about Vernon’s “Program,” which was exactly that: a programmatic system of self-enrichment, almost rigid in its demands—although Vernon would have preferred calling it “orderly” rather than rigid—and going all the way back to Vernon’s teenage years (which I summarized in the conclusion of my architecture novel), when he had discovered that, on a trip to a used bookstore in Harrison, all the areas of knowledge and inquiry were tantalizingly available in softcover. Since then, Vernon’s whole life had been devoted to reading and study, a kind of continuous, obsessive adult education, a pursuit that I could only envy. What I envied most, perhaps, being a slow reader of the sort who “hears” every printed word as I read it, is that Vernon was a speed reader, phenomenally rapid, reading pages as fast as he could turn them. Not only that but he was apparently able, when he chose, to ignore sleep; he could stay up all night if he had thirty books to read before breakfast. And after breakfast, supervising the swine rearing and the ham-making consumed only a small part of his daily hours (George and his crew handled most of it), and, since Jelena was an inveterate bookworm herself, they deliberately did not possess a television (in all the Ozarks, there were less than half a dozen similar households, but the reason most of the other few did not possess a television was that they couldn’t afford one). The walls of both chambers of the strange “double bubble” house Vernon had constructed in the early Seventies, before the first hippie had erected the first yurt or geodesic dome anywhere in the Ozarks, were lined, floor to ceiling, with bookshelves fitted to their circular surfaces. In fact, a decade ago Vernon had been required to build a barn-sized “annex” for the purpose of housing the overflow of books. I had never seen Vernon’s weird house; I had included a vague illustration of it in my architecture novel, based on a smudged Polaroid that Day had taken and sent to me. When I took Kim on her first trip to Stay More, I spent all of one afternoon trying to find Vernon’s dwelling to show it to her, but I could not, and I had to respect Day’s determination never to reveal its location to anyone, not even God. But I knew the place was overrun with books.

I knew also that Vernon had decided many years ago to take a certain array of subjects in alphabetical order and, devoting a steady six months to each one, attempt to master it completely. At least, as much as one could master a subject. He made it through one letter of the alphabet and two subjects each year. He had started, sixteen years before, with “art history” and “astronomy” and within a year, aided by a fabulous collection of art slides, portfolios and monographs, and a quite expensive Celestron Ultima telescope, he had acquired the equivalent of a Ph.D in both subjects. No, that’s wrong, because a Ph.D implies a kind of limited academic expertise, a certain narrow, specialized knowledge. Vernon literally knew everything. I recalled from my previous aborted novel that like Willie Stark of All the King’s Men he possessed an elephantine memory: if you quizzed him at breakfast on those thirty books he’d read overnight, he wouldn’t give you many wrong answers. And since art history was my own professional field, I greatly envied Vernon his knowledge of that subject and often wished he would be willing to discuss it with me, if nothing else (especially nothing else). After he had published in Art Bulletin an astounding study of van Gogh drawings proving that van Gogh was not an expressionist after all, I wrote him a nice letter proposing an exchange, either by mail or in person. Jelena answered with a note to the effect that Vernon was totally absorbed with wrapping up his study of botany, running behind schedule, and biochemistry was waiting impatiently for him.

Another year, and they were followed by chess and Christianity; Jelena provided such an able partner for the former that it did not surprise me to learn that both Vernon and Jelena had acquired Grand Master status as chess players. As for Christianity, the Ingledews, since time immemorial, by tradition and genetic disposition, had been atheists, and Vernon’s profound investigation of the birth and development of a way of belief based upon a Jew of Nazareth named Yeshua was not at all pious or god-fearing but totally objective and scholarly, and he came away from it no less a nonbeliever than ever. The next two subjects, under D, were drama and dance, requiring Vernon and Jelena to spend most of the year in New York City, in order to attend performances. The year he did entomology and English he stayed home in Stay More, and a paper he published in Journal of Insect Behavior on the mating habits of Periplaneta inspired me to write my novel, The Cockroaches of Stay More. (Day told me that Vernon was not at all amused that I called him “Gregor Samsa Ingledew” or Sam, in the novel, and had had him romantically involved with a female cockroach, Tish, who was not at all Jelena.) Vernon’s study of Titus Andronicus has been acknowledged by Harold Bloom in his Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.

Year by year this “Program” of Vernon’s greatly increased his knowledge of the world and even contributed to the world’s knowledge of itself. His ultimate motive, perhaps, was a theme I had stated toward the end of my architecture novel and which is originally set forth in that Ozark funeral hymn, “Farther Along”: the idea that, farther along, we’ll know all about it, father along we’ll understand why. Vernon really did intend to understand everything eventually, even if he could do only two subjects a year and might have to start all over again when he reached the end of the alphabet. Getting into the F’s, Vernon’s factotum George Dinsmore helped him with some practical applications of his intensive study of finance, and he received much willing help from all the old-timers of Newton County in his study of folklore, which was not limited to Ozark folklore but encompassed that of the whole world. Indeed, Vernon made and published important studies of the parallels between Russian and German folk-tales. Two years were devoted to geology and gods, and history and horses, respectively. (Day reported that Vernon had found horses a more extensive and difficult subject than gods.) When the letters of the alphabet brought Vernon to “I,” he was hard-pressed for a pair of subjects, but settled upon Irish and Indo-European Linguistics, the former requiring Vernon and Jelena to rent a cottage in County Meath for six months, where, according to Day, they made friends with the reclusive and eccentric novelist J.P. Donleavy, once again to my everlasting envy.

Vernon discovered a clever way to combine his next two subjects, Japanese and journalism. For the five months that he and Jelena spent in Tokyo he was the Japan reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, and was invited to become Tokyo bureau chief for the Associated Press at just the time he was getting into knight-errantry and the Koran; he could find no connection between those two other than, of course, that many of the knights had been bent upon destroying Islam. Undoubtedly his study of the former subject required a lively reading of Don Quixote without his realizing that he himself would become quixotic in his eventual quest for the governorship.

One of the Ls was easy to choose: Latin. He already knew how to read it; even before he’d started his “Program,” his first intensive act of autodidacticism as a young man was to teach himself Latin for the purpose of translating a certain old book, De Architectura Antiqua Arcadiae, he’d found in a bookstore in Rome on the first wanderjahr that he and Jelena had taken. Latin was a subject I’d flunked in the ninth grade (although I’ve pretended to knowledge of it in some of my books); Vernon was so fluent in it that throughout his Program he had not hesitated to acquire books in Latin on art, cuisine, gods, horses, etc.

Choosing the other L was a bit more difficult, and he was strongly tempted to pick law. Given his amazing assimilation of all the topics he chose, he could doubtless have been admitted to the Arkansas bar if he had, but he would unknowingly have defeated one of the strongest selling points for his eventual gubernatorial campaign: the very fact that, unlike most of the other candidates, he had no background in law. He also considered the possibility of “locution” and its many subcategories, and perhaps he should have picked that, because when he ran for governor he would discover to his dismay that he had no talent at all for public speaking. But I must stress that all of these topics were undertaken without any inkling on his part that any of them would have any connection with his entry into politics.

The topic he chose was love. He was to discover that of all the subjects he had devoted himself to, it was the most boundless. A month into his investigation he began to realize that he could never hope to cover it, not even in a lifetime, certainly not in six months. Knowing Latin, he read and reread Ovid on the subject, as well as Seneca and Tibullus. He read Dryden and Stendhal and Goethe and Dickens and Oscar Wilde. He even read Henry Miller. When his eyesight was strained from reading and he needed to close his eyes, he listened to a plethora of love music, from ancient ballads and lays to modern pop and rock and funk.

His eyes rested, he stared long at certain paintings: Giorgione’s Tempest, Rembrandt’s The Jewish Bride, Kokoschka’s Tempest, or Bride of the Wind. He even read a few Harlequin romances, just to discover the source of their appeal to the masses.

As in so many of his courses of study, he enjoyed always the willing assistance of his consort, Jelena, who could not only match him game by game in chess but could match him, pang by pang and throe by throe, in love. He discovered, very quickly, that love can be written about, it can be painted, it can be composed into music, it can certainly be felt, but it cannot be discussed, not between lovers. Lovers can endlessly tell each other how much, how deeply, how endlessly, they love each other, but they cannot discuss love itself and its meaning. One knows love by not knowing it.

Learning that, Vernon was free. He went on down the alphabet. In recent years, Vernon’s plunge into mathematics and music resulted in actual contributions to the knowledge: Vernon’s paper on “New Approaches to Game Theory Suggested by John von Neumann’s Study of the Rings of Operators in Hilbert Space” appeared in American Journal of Mathematics, and his study of “‘Ranz Des Vaches’ and other Mountain Airs in Relation to Appalachian/Ozark Folk Music” was acknowledged as the inspiration for Benjamin Fisher’s haunting “Symphony No. 2 in C Minor,” which premiered at the New York Philharmonic not so long ago.

N was for Nature and for nuclear physics. Oh, he had some fun with “O”: occult and Osage, the latter the name of the tribe who had inhabited Stay More before being displaced by white settlers, principally Vernon’s ancestor, Jacob Ingledew. For years I’d known that Vernon owned and jealously guarded the original holograph of The Memoirs of Former Arkansas Governor Jacob Ingledew, in which, it may be assumed, that founder of Stay More detailed his earliest encounters not only with the last remaining Osage Indian but especially a brief liaison with that Indian’s squaw which supposedly had resulted in a pregnancy. These things, however, were not part of Vernon’s motive when he undertook to read all the dozens of volumes about the history and culture of the Osages in Missouri, Arkansas, and ultimately their reservation in Oklahoma, especially V. Kelian’s recent Dawn of the Osage, which inspired Vernon to master a speaking ability in the Osage language with the help of Francis La Flesche’s A Dictionary of the Osage Language, published by the U.S. Government Printing Office in 1932, and also by hiring and importing to Stay More from Pawhuska, Oklahoma, for two months, one of the few remaining mixed-blood Osages still fluent in the language. Day wondered if the man, whose name was James Big Eagle, realized that he was temporarily a resident of a hunting ground which had once belonged to his ancestors.

In alphabetical order, politics comes after philosophy, so Vernon had spent the first half of the previous year trying to read as much as possible of the enormous literature on philosophy, aided by, and starting with, a “popular” classic, Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy. The subject of philosophy was almost as deep as the subject of love; it was almost as unknowable. Jelena told Diana that Vernon had doubled his consumption of coffee during this “course of study.” He gleaned some personal mottoes that would come in handy when he got into his next subject. For example: Socrates’ “Let him that would move the world first move himself.” And Francis Bacon’s “It is a miserable state of mind to have few things to desire and many things to fear: and yet that is commonly the case of Kings.”

Quite possibly, in his determination to “cover” all the subjects in his Program, he was consciously or unconsciously jumping ahead to the next one. He made frequent note of how the great philosophers had viewed politics, such as Plato’s “The punishment suffered by the wise who refuse to take part in government, is to live under the government of bad men.” (Arkansas itself was currently under the thrall of Governor Shoat Bradfield, one of the baddest.)

The first thing he learned about politics is that, like all art, it is a lie meant to refresh truth. The deceptions of politics, like those of art, are not necessarily meant deceitfully but for the magic regeneration of life. The promises of good politicians are not meant to cheat but to inspire. In every society, there are two kinds of people: those who, like most of us, assume that there is somebody around who is going to take care of everything, and those who believe that the only caretakers are themselves. All politics are based upon the indifference or the apathy of the majority.

Slowly, as he rapidly devoured writings by Plato, Bacon, Edmund Burke, Thomas Jefferson, Carlyle, Benjamin Disraeli, Henry Adams, and Woodrow Wilson, he came to realize that he could no longer be part of the indifferent majority. By the time he began reading such things as Harry Lee Williams’ Forty Years Behind the Scenes in Arkansas Politics and Diane D. Blair’s Arkansas Politics and Government: Do the People Rule? he had pretty much made up his mind that he should seek election as Newton County representative to the state legislature, and he was so taken with the notion that he could think of nothing else. George Dinsmore went to Jelena to report that Vernon was just standing out in the middle of one of the pig pastures, not tending his swine but staring off into space. Jelena went and got him and told him that he had been reading too much, or too heavily. She recommended that if he had to read, he ought to read something light, like novels. She reminded him of how much he’d learned about love just by reading Harlequins.

So he began reading some novels. He ordered from his Internet bookseller a whole slew of political fiction. He started with William Brammer’s The Gay Place, about politics in Texas, and found it so readable that he began to devour a political novel at the rate of several a day, reading Allen Drury’s Advise and Consent and Capable of Honor before lunch, and novels by Salinger—not J.D. but Pierre, who had been Kennedy’s press secretary—in the afternoon, along with Fletcher Knebel, William Safire, and Ward Just at night. He enjoyed Joe Klein’s Primary Colors, based upon that Arkansas governor who had ascended to the presidency. According to his reading schedule, during the days he consumed Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men and lesser novels by Jeffrey Archer, Anton Myrer and Stephen Longstreet, he even found time late one night in December, to read my When Angels Rest, which was not, strictly speaking, a political novel, or rather was concerned with the make-believe politics of children, a bunch of kids whose names were all familiar to Vernon because they had attempted to set up a government for the village of Stay More during World War ii, before Vernon was born. He found the novel honest and accurate in its depiction of the village of Stay More and of the way of life then, and he even felt an intense pang of nostalgia for a world he had never known except in his imagination of the way it might have been if he had lived at that time.

That modest little novel should have convinced him that politics (like the warfare that is its handmaiden) is best left to innocents and idiots and idealists. There is no room in that country for the truly wise.

But instead he decided that, as he told Jelena at breakfast, the only way he could learn politics was to spend some time as a politician. What she answered is not known, but can be imagined.

Chapter two

George Dinsmore took another sip of his bourbon, which didn’t help him figure out an eight-letter word ending in y with the second and third letters as de, meaning a system of beliefs. He didn’t have him a pencil; a-working these goddamn things with a ballpoint pen was like a rattlesnake with piles trying to get home. He could flip over to page 113 of this here Sky magazine and find the answers, but that wouldn’t be honest. Hell’s banjer, he wouldn’t’ve tried the dumb puzzle in the first place except that nobody else before him had already started messing with it, the way you can usually count on some dumbass previous passenger to’ve already screwed up the puzzle before calling it quits when the plane landed. But this here one had been clean until George got aholt of it. Now look at it. And he wouldn’t’ve even started the dadburn puzzle if Boss had been awake for him to talk to. It was the first time in his life he’d ever seen Boss a-sleeping. No kidding, he’d known Boss ever since he was just a little squirt and ever year of his life except the four years George was doing his duty in Vietnam, and he’d even asked his niece Jelena, who lived with Boss, “Don’t he never sleep, even way off of a night in the early hours?” And Jelena had laughed and explained that Vernon sometimes went for days without a wink but usually got on the average four or five hours each night.

Now Boss was sawing logs so vigorously he didn’t even notice the air pockets this 747 kept hitting, one of them so bad George’s bourbon sloshed onto the laptray and would’ve wet his pants if he hadn’t mopped it up with the napkin. George realized that Boss probably had a good reason for being dead to the world: he was plum wore out from this project, not so much the hard work of it and the flying around from place to place, but the total shuck doodly poo going nowhere of it. It sure was a good thing that Cincinnati was the last stop, the bitter end maybe but down into the short rows, don’t you know? Boss hadn’t made no promises, but George had the feeling that if Cincinnati was a bust they could get their butts on back to Stay More and live happy ever after without any more of this here politics foolishness. George sure did hate to admit it, even to himself, but he had under his hat swore to his niece Jelena, cause she asked him to, that he would do everything in his power to crumb the deal, to louse up the whole project, short of wasting any poor sucker who was dope enough to swallow the bait. George didn’t like being put on the spot like this, being a two-faced four-flusher, pretending to Boss, who he liked more than any man on this here earth, that he was helping him out at every turn, not to mention costing him a chunk of money for airfares and hotels and eats etsettery, when in fact he was a double agent, working for Jelena, who didn’t want her man wasting his fortune running for governor.

Not that they couldn’t afford it. Last time George had looked, or that is, the last time that Rowena Coe the bookkeeper had told him, there was so much in the sock or under the mattress, so to speak, that Vernon could shut down the pig works and spend the rest of his life taking Jelena around the world once a week, not to mention buying out the Library of Congress, which he’d likely care to do. Way back in the Seventies, when the money first started rolling in, Boss had got his broker, over to Fayetteville, to buy up no end of Wal-Mart stock, when it was selling for diddly, and now look at it: what with stock splits and the bull market etsettery Boss had come mighty nigh to owning as much of the company as old Sam Walton hisself, rest his bones. So it wasn’t that Jelena was worried the campaign would put them in the poor farm; she just didn’t cotton to the idea of spending so much money on something she didn’t believe in and she wasn’t convinced that Vernon himself believed in.

For that matter, who could possibly believe in it? On this trip, George had asked himself, more than once, “Would I vote for Vernon Ingledew if he wasn’t my boss and my buddy and my sort of nephew-in-law?” And the well-considered answer was a loud and clear Nope, noway. Of course, George wasn’t much of a voter anyhow. He’d voted only once for Clinton himself for governor, and once for him for president, and that left eight other chances he’d had to vote for Clinton but stayed home. Not that he’d ever had anything against Clinton, unlike some of these here loudmouth clodhopper naysayers who had thought they’d looked smart running down the boy just on account of he was practically family, like killing your brother or your dad or leastways your cousin. George had been pure-dee proud of Clinton being family, and he hadn’t never held it against him. The odd thing was, he had a little bit of trouble trying to think of Vernon as family, even though Vernon really and truly was kinfolks. Not because he was Boss and not even because he was so all-fired brainy, but because he just didn’t somehow seem like he was one of the folks.

For one thing, he didn’t sound like one of the folks, what with those big words that fell out of his mouth like crumbs of caviar. And he didn’t exactly look like common folks but some godburn Hollywood movie star or somebody. Sure, he looked like an Ingledew. Anybody who’d ever known any of the Stay More Ingledews for generations back would say that Vernon was pure Ingledew, but come to think of it, the Ingledews had always stood out from everbody else.

George remembered when he was just a kid, growing up in that shack his momma tried to keep up yonder on Dinsmore Mountain, the least’un in a family of thirteen brats, he’d been learnt from the word go that the Ingledews was quality folks, the upper crust, never mind that Stay More couldn’t’ve been divided into classes any way you’d slice it. After old John Ingledew, Boss’s great grandpa, had lost his money in the Crash, none of the Ingledews had had any money to speak of, but they still kept their pride and their feeling that they were a cut above everbody else. Boss didn’t wear his pride like some goddamn epaulets on his shoulders, but you could feel it surrounding him like a invisible raiment. How had that Avenel feller in Salt Lake City put it? “Mr. Ingledew, I don’t want to hurt your obviously well-earned self-regard, but my experience is that most people who aspire to politics without ever having endured any of the tests and trials of the campaign are doomed to discover that they have inflated images of themselves.” George wondered if Boss was really capable of seeing himself as others saw him.

But George also wondered how others really and truly did see him. How did Jelena see him? How did Day and Diana? How did his sister Sharon and that college professor husband of hers, Larry? How did his grandma, Latha Dill? How did all the other seventeen employees at Ingledew Ham? Well, George could probably speak for the latter: they worshipped him. Come to think of it, George himself worshipped him. Why else would he be on this goddamn bouncing 747 working this goddamn crossword?

He took another sip of his bourbon and wondered if he himself could say anything to discourage this Pharis feller they were a-fixing to meet in Cincinnati. More than likely, it wouldn’t be necessary. The way it looked, Pharis was a lost cause irregardless of how the offer was made to him, but there remained, nevertheless, one possible selling point that separated Pharis from all the other guys they’d interviewed: he was a ole Arkansas boy hisself. The others—Fred Avenel in Salt Lake City, Matt Spears in Washington, D.C., Gene Kubby in Atlanta—didn’t even seem to have a clear idea of where Arkansas was, although they damned well knew that a former president of the United States had come from the state, which was not, as another former president name of George No-W. Bush had misplaced it, somewhere between Oklahoma and Texas. Two of them, Kubby and Spears, had both wondered if Vernon had been inspired to run for office because the former president had once held that office. Boss had replied that Clinton’s tenure as governor of his state had been “proceleusmatic,” whatever that meant, but that he didn’t have any presidential aspirations himself; he just wanted one term in the statehouse to see what it was like.

Matt Spears, who was an old man who had helped elect seventeen United States senators and eight governors, had understood what proceleusmatic meant, but had concluded, “You certainly have Clinton’s duende, and his eupatrid mien, but you don’t have enough of his track record to dissuade me from carrying out my long-anticipated and well-earned retirement.” On the plane to Atlanta, George had asked Boss if he wouldn’t mind enriching George’s impoverished vocabulary. Proceleusmatic was just one of them fancy Greek words meaning “inciting, animating, or inspiring.” Duende was Spanish dialect meaning the ability to attract others through personal magnetism and charm. And eupatrid mien (“He was just poking fun at me when he threw that in,” Vernon explained) simply meant aristocratic bearing or manner. I live long enough, I might learn a thing or two, George said to himself.

Gene Kubby had come pretty damn close to accepting. Of the three, he had given Boss the most of his precious time, nearly three hours, including lunch at Atlanta’s best rib joint (although George had slapped down his AmEx card to cover it), and George knew that Boss had got the feller just to the point where he was fixing to say, “Let me think this over,” but they never made it that far. Kubby’s credentials wasn’t nothing to write home about, not compared with the others; he’d elected the governor of Georgia twice and of Alabama once, as well as a whole slew of jackleg and peanut hopefuls, and the man wasn’t timid about talking price. When Vernon asked him flat out to name his figure, he had come up with some bad news so steep it made George choke on his sparerib but didn’t even make Boss blink. All Boss had said was, “When can you start?”

The man had carefully wiped all around his mouth with the cloth napkin and then had put to good use the bowl of water with the lemon wedge in it, and when he finished wiping off all his fingers he said, “Gentlemen, as you can plainly see, I’m not in this line for my health. I require not just a handsome fee but I require practically a guarantee of winning. Frankly, I don’t see any clue of that in your case. Why don’t you hire a local manager? I can recommend a good man or two in Little Rock.”

But Vernon had told him that he was determined to find the very best and he was sorry the very best was turning him down. He wasn’t interested in the “amateurs” in Little Rock. “So where do you go from here?” Kubby had asked. Cincinnati, Boss had said. Bolin Pharis. The man had laughed his fool head off. “Jesus god, you are ambitious, aren’t you? The good news is, if there’s a man on this earth who could overcome your insurmountable odds, it’s Bo. The bad news is, you don’t have a prayer of talking him into it. When he quit the game after Al Gore lost, he made it clear to everyone he’s never coming back.”

George winked at the stewardess, who was just sitting there like she didn’t have nothing else to keep her in business except waiting on him and Boss, who didn’t need anything because he was asleep, and wouldn’t bother her none if he was wide awake because he was not only shy with womenfolks in general but pretty airplane stewardesses left him speechless and petrified; in fact, when Boss first dosed off George figured he was just trying to escape the pretty gal who was bent on serving them. Now she brought George another Jack Daniels. He reached down and opened his briefcase and got out the file on Bolin Pharis. George earned his stiff salary, not just at the pig works. He had spent a good bit of time rounding up everything there was to know on all these fellers, and he had half a dozen pages on Bolin Pharis, who was practically folks, born in Harrison up in Boone County just forty miles from Stay More. George had never known any Pharises, but for that matter he hadn’t known hardly anybody up Harrison way. His niece Jelena had gone to school there, when Jackson Ingledew was a-raising her after her dad got killed in the War. Of course George had done a lot of business and trading in Harrison; everybody did. If Mr. Bolin Pharis wanted to chew the fat about his hometown, George reckoned he could manage.

Pharis had gone to the University at Fayetteville in the late Sixties on an academic scholarship and a football scholarship, had played for the Razorbacks and was Southwest Conference academic All-American. He had got hisself a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in business administration and had worked for a while in management back home at Hammerschmidt’s lumber yard before Hammerschmidt’s campaign manager offered him a job as assistant in one of Hammerschmidt’s early runs for United States Congress. Pharis had accepted even though Hammerschmidt was a Republican and Pharis was a Democrat. Pharis celebrated Hammerschmidt’s victory by marrying a Harrison girl he’d dated throughout his university days. They’d had two kids, the boy now in college in Texas and the girl working in Chicago; the wife had divorced Pharis some years ago but he hadn’t remarried. Pharis’s work for Congressman Hammerschmidt had led to a campaign managership when a Republican had tried to beat Dale Bumpers for senator; the guy had lost, but that was the last time Bolin Pharis’s man ever lost a campaign. Until Al Gore and the Florida fiasco.

It was also the last time he ever worked for a Republican. After helping elect several people in Arkansas, Pharis had been lured to neighboring states, Oklahoma and Missouri and Tennessee and even Texas, and had elected a bodacious list of senators and congressmen and governors. With some other fellers, he had set up a whole factory of campaigning, calling it Pharis Carville & Begala. They went nationwide and elected governors, senators and congressmen in Pennsylvania, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, etsettery, all they could handle. James Carville left the firm to manage Clinton’s successful first campaign for president, and while there had been rumors that Bolin Pharis had been mortified because Clinton had passed up a fellow Arkansawyer in favor of Carville, a Louisianian, he and James Carville remained good friends, and in his memoirs of the Clinton years Carville had praised Pharis as practically his mentor. “Hey, the dude taught me all I know about strategy, which aint much, but hey,” Carville had said.

When his man Al Gore won the popular presidential vote but narrowly lost the electoral vote to that dumb Texas governor, Pharis had no problem finding a top job out of politics. He was offered and accepted a position as public relations director for this great big company whose headquarters were in a tower in Cincinnati although the factories were all over the earth. They made everything. They turned out soaps and drinks and beauty products and coffee and medicines and god knows what all. Hell, George himself was an occasional user of some of their stuff, like Pepto-Bismol and NyQuil and Crest toothpaste, not to mention Head & Shoulders and Old Spice. But he wasn’t fixing to think their name out loud right here, where any fool could see it. He was only going to notice that if you took out that ampersand and replaced it with an “I,” it would spell “PIG.” He was also going to notice that he wasn’t too partial to the company’s name because the first part of it reminded him of some sessions he’d had to have with a St. Louis medical specialist called a “proctologist,” who caused him some pain and embarrassment.

He didn’t hold any of this against Bolin Pharis. From everything George could find out, Pharis had been doing a really bang-up job handling the public relations for the company, and the company truly appreciated it, and paid him accordingly, with bonuses and stock sharing and enough perks to keep any man happy and working his ass off. George knew there was no way on God’s earth they could hire him as campaign manager. They couldn’t afford him. Aw hell, of course they could afford him even if he asked for a million dollars, yet surely Boss had set some kind of limits.

Bolin Pharis was even in line to become Chief Executive Officer of the company. He was such a big man that the very thought of him reassured George that they would get a quick, easy, and indisputable turn-down, maybe even strong enough to make Boss give up his fool idea, and Jelena would feel good. But George had to play along with Boss, who was now stirring and waking up, mumbling something that sounded like “Ugithew,” probably one of those Indian words he’d learned last year when he was studying the Osages. “Where are we?” Boss asks.

“We’re a-fixin to light down,” says George.

“Where?”

“Cincinnati,” George tells him.

“Why?”

“You’re running for governor, and we need some help.”

“Right,” Vernon Ingledew says.

It was late before they got away from the baggage carousel, and by the time they’d checked into the Hyatt Regency it was nigh onto suppertime, so they got them a bite at the Champs Italia Chop House and took a stroll afterwards. There was snow on the ground but they still had their boots on. George had never been to Cincinnati before. It was a right nice old town. There was hills all around it. They walked past the General Offices Tower Building of their destination for the morning, so they already knew how to get there. The very size and shape of building ought to have warned Boss he didn’t have a dog’s chance.

They both wore business suits for breakfast and for the goings-on ahead, and they both carried briefcases, although Boss didn’t have anything in his except some books because George carried everything they needed. They rode up the elevator to the man’s suite of offices, way up yonder; he sure did surround himself with a fancier environment than any of those other fellers they’d visited, and had a real swell view of the Ohio River and all. The man’s secretary didn’t keep them waiting very long, hardly long enough for Boss to get out one of his books and read a bit.

The man didn’t have his secretary usher them in. He came out himself, with his hand extended and a smile on his face. Bolin Pharis was about fifty, and George was surprised to see he had a beard, still dark, not much gray in it, neatly trimmed on all sides. George had grown a beard when he came home from ’Nam, that time he discovered his wife had left him and taken the kids with her and he got so mad and so drunk he went around beating up any man in Newton County who crossed his path and some who didn’t, including Boss, who wasn’t his boss yet and who didn’t get beat up, as far as that goes, but in fact gave George the beating of his life, or rather the two of them whalloped the crap out of each other, off in the woods, for half a day until they couldn’t move, and then they got drunk together and healed their wounds and their bruises together, and Vernon offered George a job. George sobered up and shaved off his beard.

Bolin Pharis had a right powerful handshake, but George matched him in the strength of it and said, “Please to meetcha, Mr. Pharis.” He noticed out of the corner of his eye that Boss grimaced just a tiny bit when his hand was squoze in Pharis’s mighty grip. Probably wants us to not forget he was a Razorback linebacker, George thought.

It was the fanciest office George had ever seen, big enough for six or seven fellers, but Pharis had it all to hisself. There was Razorback souvenirs and stuff all over: flags and a hog hat and a couple of footballs and team pictures and etsettery. George’s chair was so big and so comfy he near about fell asleep right away. The secretary brought coffee.

The man kept looking back and forth between Boss and George and finally he says, “It sure is a pleasure to see some Arkansas people. Sometimes I think I’m the only one in Cincinnati.” He took a sip of his coffee, and then he says, “I’m not sure I’ve been to Stay More, though. Is it down in there somewheres around Parthenon?”

George offers, “Just six mile or so kindly southwest of Partheeny.”

“I may have fished the Little Buffalo in your backyard without knowing I was there,” says Pharis.

“The town’s so untenanted and necrotic you’d not notice it,” says Boss.

Pharis stared a little bit at Boss, and then he asks, “Are you any kin to Jelena Ingledew?”

“We’re own cousins,” says Boss.

“I’m her uncle,” George puts in.

“Well well,” says Pharis and shakes his head and says, “I never knew her myself, but she was a legend at Harrison High. She was a few years ahead of me. Highest grades in the history of the school and valedictorian and all, you know.” Pharis chuckles a little chuckle. “My teachers were always telling me, ‘If you’d just work a little harder, you might be as good as Jelena Ingledew.’” Pharis appreciated that George and Boss both chuckled along with him a bit. “Whatever became of her?” Pharis asks. “Is she married?”

“Naw,” George offers. “Not no more, leastways. Her and Mark Duckworth was married for a while, and had a couple kids, but they split up, oh, I reckon it must’ve been going on thirty year ago.”

“Really?” says Bolin Pharis. “She didn’t remarry?”

“Nope,” says George.

“She’s not still in Arkansas, is she?”

“Matter a fack, she is. Her and him”—George inclined his head toward Boss—“they kindly live together.”

Bolin Pharis gave Boss a good looking-over for a second or two, and then all he says is, “Well.” Then he sort of coughed, and after a while he says, “I sure do eat Ingledew Ham, I can tell you. Every chance I get, I buy it.”

“George gets most of the credit for the quality of that meat these days,” Boss says. George shook his head to deny it.

Pharis smiled and says, “You boys aren’t here to suggest that we buy you out, are you? Despite the diversity of our products, we don’t do anything fancy in the food department. I’m sure lots of people eat our Pringles with their Ingledew Ham, but we aren’t planning to diversify into meat.”

Boss shook his head. “No, Bolin—may I call you Bolin?”

“Just call me Bo, please,” says Bo.

“Bo, we’re here to get you on board my campaign for governor.”

“On board?” says Bo. “If you plan to run against that bastard Shoat Bradfield, I’d be glad to make a contribution…”

“The contribution we want is your expertise as our campaign manager,” says Boss.

George tried to figure whether Pharis’s smile was kindly wistful-like or just politely negative. He didn’t say sorry or nothing, though. He asks, “Who recommended me to you?”

“Everyone,” says Boss.

“Didn’t Everyone tell you that I’ve sworn off politics?” says Bo.

“Yes, but they didn’t tell me why,” says Boss.

Bo looked at his costly wristwatch. “Listen, fellows, we’re having this talk on company time, you know. If I had known the purpose of your visit, I would have declined outright, and spared you the trip, but if you had insisted on pursuing it I would have courteously offered to discuss it with you at any hour when I was free from my daily routines working for this company.”

George admired the man’s honesty. He himself made a point of never letting salesmen into his office if they were trying to sell him something for his own use, not the company’s. Since he had been responsible for setting up the appointment with Pharis, he felt obliged to apologize. “Sorry,” says George, and waited for Boss to lead the way out the door.

But Bolin Pharis asks, “How long are you boys in town?”

“Our plane home is late this afternoon,” George declares.

Pharis stood up. “Wish you could stay more,” he says, slipping in that little mention of their hometown in such a way it told them he knew they knew he was slipping it in. They stood too, and he walked them to the door and offered his hand for another one of those iron-man handshakes.

Boss wouldn’t let go of Bo’s hand. “Don’t you want to hear why you should be my manager?” Boss asks him.

“If you told me it would ensure my passage to Heaven, I still couldn’t do it,” says Bo without blinking an eye. “But if you could tell me on my time, not the company’s time, I could meet you for drinks downstairs after five. Better yet, I’d love to have a couple of Arkansas boys go to dinner with me tonight.”

George blinked. Had Pharis forgotten that out home in the Ozarks “dinner” always meant the noon meal? Boss says, “We’d be delighted.” And that was that. It was George’s job to call the airline and cancel their afternoon flight and make a new flight for the following day, and then to tell the hotel they were staying another night. Then they had a whole day to kill so they split up; Boss took off to the Cincinnati Art Museum to see a Van Gogh painting called Undergrowth with Two Figures, and George went out to the Cincinnati Zoo to look at the undergrowth with big cats.

The way it turned out, they didn’t just have drinks and dinner with Bolin Pharis, they come mighty nigh to spending the whole night with him. It was pretty close to midnight before George finally got to bed, and he was not used to that. When he got close to sixty, he learned that he needed to go to bed each and every night at the same time, ten thirty on the dot, and it really bothered him to miss out on that. But there they were, shooting pool in the feller’s game room way past George’s bedtime.

The supper had been at this real swank place called Maisonette, where they was waited on not by gals but by men dressed like for a wedding, and for that reason Boss was able to speak to ’em and George didn’t have to order for him as he would’ve if they’d been waitresses. Chances are, I’ll never find myself in a place like this again, George told himself. So he passed up the idea of just a good old steak, which wasn’t on the menu anyhow, and he tried the Scottish wild pheasant, because Bo recommended it. Boss had the Scottish hare saddle, not to be contrary, but maybe on account of he’d rather eat rabbit than fowl. Pharis had the venison medallion. And they had a couple of bottles of the by-goddest wine George had ever swilled. When it was all done, Bo Pharis, being an old Razorback linebacker, had much quicker reflexes than George and managed to grab the check about .037 of a second before George could reach it.

Things started out with Pharis saying an odd thing. “I apologize for my hypocrisy in refusing to use my company’s time to discuss this matter with you,” says Bo, “when I’ve spent a good part of my company’s time today looking into it. I’ve made calls to quite a number of my acquaintances in Arkansas, people in the know, you know, some pols who go way back with me, as well as a few people in the press.” The man stopped to make sure that George and Boss both understood just how much he’d been checking around, and then he says, real serious, “Not one of them has ever heard of you.” He let that sink in, and then he says, “Even Orval Faubus, who came out of nowhere in the Ozarks to run for governor back in 1954, had at least been elected to minor county office beforehand. You, Vern—may I call you Vern?—have never been elected to anything.”

George gripped the man’s biceps in a mighty hold. “Don’t never call him Vern,” he says, low and mean as if he didn’t want Boss to hear him although of course Boss could. He repeats it, “Don’t never call him Vern.”

Bo Pharis gave George a look as if they were about to square off right there and have it out. But he turns to Boss and says, “I was beginning to suspect that you are some kind of impostor, maybe running a scam on me.”

Boss just smiled. He showed teeth when he smiled, George reflected, just like old Bill Clinton had always done. “The very fact,” says Boss, “that you went to all that trouble to check me out would seem to imply that you are not dismissing, out of hand, my request for your services.”

“Whoa,” says Bo. “Let’s get this straight before we go another step. I will not, under any circumstances, serve as your campaign manager. Or anybody else’s. Would you like to know how much Al Gore paid me to handle his run for president? No, you don’t want to know. But it wasn’t enough to erase the pain of the defeat. Let’s please understand clearly from the outset, good buddies, that we are not going to negotiate my services. But we owe it to each other, as Arkansas men, as good old hillbillies—even if the part of Harrison I grew up in is actually flatland—we owe it to each other to understand each other: I want you to understand just why I will not under any circumstances operate your campaign, and in return I’d like to hear why you think you should be governor of Arkansas and how you think you could scare up enough votes to be elected. And I might even offer you, free gratis, some advice.”

But the funny thing was, they never did get around to talking about that, not during the supper, leastways. They didn’t talk about politics at all. The closest they got to talking politics was this here great joke that Bo told. It was about that bastard governor, Shoat Bradfield, who got hisself re-elected even though everbody hated him. ’Course “Shoat” was just his nickname, and a shoat is a young pig after he’s been weaned, and the joke was about a pig, but there wasn’t no direct connection with his name. Seems this here state trooper who was Shoat’s chauffeur was driving him down the road on the way to a speech he had to give in some little Ozark town, and maybe the trooper was a-drivin too fast but anyhow he don’t see this pig a-crossin the road and he hits it. The state trooper knows he hit the poor pig hard enough to kill it, and he wants to stop and see, but Shoat’s in a hurry to get to where he’s givin that speech, and makes him drive on. But that trooper is a good man despite his employer, and he keeps tellin the governor how awful it was to hit that pig. And finally he says, “Sir, while you’re givin your speech, would it be okay if I just drove on back down there to find out who owned that pig and tell ’em I was sure sorry?” And Governor Bradfield says well if you have to, and gives him permission. So the governor gives his speech and the party’s all over but that trooper didn’t come back. The governor waits and waits for hours, until finally his car comes back into view, weaving back and forth across the road, and there’s the trooper, drunk as a coot, and the back seat loaded up with enough meat and produce and jams and stuff to feed the entire state police. The governor gets in a rage and demands what the hell happened to him, and the trooper says, “I done what I thought was right. I went back to the farm where I hit that pig. When I knocked on the door and give them the news, they loaded me down with all these victuals and they fed me a big dinner and gave me a demijohn of fine whiskey and afterwards their real pretty daughter insisted on giving me a blow-job in the car before I could finally get away.” The governor demands to know exactly what the trooper told those folks. And the trooper says he don’t understand it hisself, all he said to them was, “I’m Governor Bradfield’s chauffeur, and I killed the pig.”

Boss was about two or three full seconds ahead of George in getting the joke, but they both laughed so hard that people stared at ’em. George wasn’t the laughing type; he hardly ever heard or saw anything that struck him as funny enough to waste a guffaw over, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had one of those laughs that was completely involuntary and natural, without him having any control over it. He blushed a good deal, realizing he’d let the laugh get away with him. But Bo Pharis sure appreciated his audience.

From then on, George was sort of left out of the talk, which wasn’t about any sort of governors or governorship or campaigning or nothing. Bo Pharis happened to ask what they’d done that day, and George mentioned he’d seen the zoo with all those big cats and that was about the last time he got a chance to open his mouth. When Boss said he’d been to the art museum, the two men got to talking about Van Gogh, and Bo Pharis even could quote the exact words that the artist Vincent had wrote to his brother Theo about that particular painting, Undergrowth with Two Figures, and then Bo and Boss got into this long talk about whether or not Van Gogh was really as wrought-up as he’d been cut out to be, and Boss seemed to really blow Bo away with his theory that the Undergrowth painting wasn’t spontaneous but calculated and orderly. After they’d talked about art for a good bit, Bo just says, “Ars est celare artem” and Boss says “Sutor ne supra crepidam,” and before you know it the two fellers was doing their chit-chat in Latin, and poor George had nothing to do but look over the various ladies in their finery who were eating their supper at other tables. It wasn’t too bad, studying all them pretty gals and wondering what-all they was a-talking about, you could bet not in Latin.

Bo and Boss discovered they shared a passion for astronomy, and they talked about black holes through dessert, when they also discovered their interest in geology, and talked about rocks until Bo beat George to grabbing that check. Then Bo put them into his sleek black Jaguar and took them out to a place called Indian Hill, where Bo had this huge mansion, the finest house George had ever been inside of. The bar alone was bigger than George’s house. They had drinks and Bo and Boss talked about all kinds of stuff, horses and Ireland and nuclear physics and the Osage Indians.

Maybe George had a little too much to drink, feeling left out, because when they were shooting some Eight Ball on this ten-thousand-dollar pool table in the game room (there was also a Ping-Pong table and a shuffleboard and a chess table, but Boss declined Bo’s offer to play a game of chess because he didn’t want to clobber him) and at one point Boss had to go to the bathroom and take a leak, so George and Bo were alone together for the first time, and George laid his cue-stick down and put his face up pretty close to Bo’s and says, “Lookee here, I reckon I ought to tell ye. I know ye aint a-fixin to jine the campaign anyhow, but afore ye git too chummy with Vernon I think ye ort to know something. Jelena don’t want him runnin for governor. Hell, I don’t want him a-runnin for governor. Aint nobody wants him runnin for governor.”

Bo Pharis he just smiled and looked at George kind of tolerant, like George had crapped on the rug but he forgave him for it. Then he arched his eyebrows and says, “But what if I would like to see him running?”

Chapter three

Bolin Keith Pharis iii drank an extra cup of breakfast coffee and thought out loud, which had been his habit in this house ever since he’d moved into it. Kristin, his maid, no longer lived in, but came to work each day after he’d left, so he was alone. “If George is Sancho Panza,” he said to the empty house, and not just rhetorically, “then who, or what, am I? One of the windmills? The rascally publican who dubbed the knight? The Biscayan squire? Or perhaps”—he permitted himself a laugh—“I’m just the bony old nag Rosinante!” If there weren’t something so godawful ludicrous about the whole situation, Bo wouldn’t have wasted another minute of his considerable powers of cogitation on it.

Surely his contempt for the present governor of Arkansas, the misbegotten Bradfield, would not have been enough excuse for him to get involved. If he truly cared about getting rid of Bradfield, there were any number of ways he could swing it, and any number of candidates he could back who had a good chance to defeat the man. Not that it mattered all that much who was the present—or future—governor of Arkansas. Although Bo still felt some concern for his native state, he had long ago severed most of his ties with it, and had been indifferent to the string of politicians such as Jim Guy Tucker and Mike Huckabee who had followed Clinton into the governor’s office, although when news of the election of Shoat Bradfield reached him he began to pay attention, because his experience with Bradfield was that the man was utterly without scruple or altruism. And the good Democrat whom Bradfield had defeated, Caleb Burdell, had used as his campaign manager one of Bo’s dearest old friends, a bright, bouncy woman named Lydia Caple, who, Bo had learned, had been truly wounded by Bradfield’s campaign tactics.

Bo still wrote to his mother in Harrison three or four times a year, and he still called her at Christmas and on Mother’s Day. He followed, at least in the back pages of the Enquirer’s sports section, the fortunes of the Razorback football team. He paid his annual dues to the University of Arkansas Alumni Association. He kept in touch with several old friends, such as those he’d called yesterday, including Lydia Caple, to see if any of them knew anything about this Ingledew. Lydia hadn’t been soured on politics to the extent of giving up the trade of political consultancy, but she’d told Bo that whoever this Ingledew fellow was, however much money he had, she didn’t want to mess around with any more “amateurs.”

Bo still had a few calls a make. He had told Ingledew, when he’d dropped him and George Dinsmore off at the Hyatt Regency late last night, that the least he could do was find a good man (or woman) in Arkansas willing to run the campaign for him. Ingledew had said, “I’m not interested in any amateurs in Arkansas.” Bo had resisted the urge to tell him that was the same epithet Lydia Caple had bestowed on him. Instead, Bo had kidded him about not having enough faith in the talent to be found in his own state. There were a few men and women in Arkansas who were anything but amateurs, and Vernon Ingledew could expect to hear from one of them in another day or so. Still, even in that last moment together, Vernon had not been willing to concede Bo’s refusal. “I’m offering you,” he had said, “something far greater than an obese salary with all conceivable expenses. I’m offering you a chance to do something that will save your soul.”

“Coming from anybody else,” Bolin Pharis said to his empty house over an unprecedented third cup of coffee, “such a statement would have been inexcusably presumptuous, or at best hopelessly quixotic. But coming from Vernon Ingledew, it is disquietingly thinkable.” It was thinkable, Bo realized, because Vernon had thought it, and Bo had come to believe that Vernon was capable of better thought than any man he’d ever met. They had got to know each other remarkably well in the few hours they’d had together. Bo had understood Vernon well enough to know that when he said “soul” he wasn’t talking in any religious sense. Indeed, whatever notion Bo had been developing that Vernon just might be electable, because of his intelligence, his kindness, and his good looks, not to mention his money, was given a severe jolt when Bo learned that Vernon was not religious. Of all the things that Vernon had going against him—and these were formidable, such as his lack of experience and his relationship with his “own cousin” Jelena—his lack of any church affiliation would practically kill him with the Arkansas electorate.

Bo knew that just as he had come to understand Vernon in ways that transcended the various weighty topics they had discussed, Vernon had probably come to understand him too, and thus, he realized, he might even have sensed that there was something lacking in Bo’s soul. “What did I say to him?” Bo asked the house. “What clue did I possibly give him that there is anything about my soul that needs saving?” Perhaps Ingledew had just been guessing. Or perhaps Ingledew had looked into his eyes and found there a hint of what one of his most recent girlfriends—had it been Lisa or Jan?—had called “a certain indescribable void.”

Bo enjoyed and appreciated being by himself, and was never given to brooding about his soul, or feeling that anything was missing in his character or his personality. Ask Patricia, his once-upon-a-wife, and she would tell you otherwise: she would call him selfish and stubborn and, her favorite insult, “a little boy.” But the fact remained that he was happy with himself, he was not bothered by any frustrations or resentments or yearnings, he was not aware of anything that he ought to do to change himself or his life. He had a great job and he was damned good at it. He had not cast a backward glance at his career in politics for quite some time. He never gave it a thought…unless somebody like Al Gore or Vernon Ingledew made him an offer that was excruciatingly difficult to refuse.

He loved Cincinnati. He was a die-hard Bengals fan and remained convinced that if only the Bengals could learn to tackle and learn to pass and learn to establish the run, and quit missing assignments and dropping passes, they had a good chance to make it to the Super Bowl someday, and Bolin Pharis intended to be here when it happened. His company had a skybox in the spanking new Paul Brown Stadium, and he never missed a home game. His company also had a booth at Cinergy Field, and Bo occasionally went to a Reds game. He would be even more of a sports fan if he didn’t dislike crowds so much. The older he got, the more uncomfortable he felt—a form of agoraphobia, he supposed—around large numbers of people. What he really liked to do with his spare time was a couple of private things, all by himself: fly fish and garden. He was really good at fly fishing, had practiced for years, owned the very best Orvis equipment, and liked nothing better than jumping into his second car, a Nissan Patrol 4-by-4, and heading for Twelve Mile Creek or Mad River or one of the creeks up in the Kentucky hills to spend a day reading the stream. There was only a bit of conflict in that the best season for fly fishing also coincided with the times when he needed to get out into his vegetable garden. Bo’s eleven-acre spread included a half-acre of good loam that he had devoted much time to enriching and planting and harvesting. He had the only vegetable garden in Indian Hill, and he’d had to plan it and screen it so that it couldn’t be seen from the road or the neighbors’. He never reflected that his green thumb had anything to do with his Arkansas heritage, because after all his folks back home in Harrison had never had a vegetable garden. Gardening didn’t make him a rustic. There was just something in it that was a handy metaphor for life and work: starting with a seed, which contains the incredible amount of information needed to make cells expand and multiply into a living plant, watching it grow, tending it, giving it everything it needed, knowing what it didn’t need, and being rewarded, finally, by the abundant, succulent harvest. It was too bad that there wasn’t anybody here to share the harvest with him. On occasion, he could serve his own fresh vegetables to his guests and his girlfriends, but usually he just put a couple of ears of still-in-the-husk corn into the microwave and ate them himself, and if there were too many ears he had to throw them on his compost pile. Maybe it wasn’t fair of him to do so, but he judged his girlfriends on their taste for radishes. He hardly ever had a date who could eat a radish, not just the champion and cherry belle but even the French breakfast and white icicle. He was crazy about radishes himself, their earthy taste, and, thinking of them, he realized that the planting season was just a few weeks away. His orders to Burpee and Shumway and Park had all been filled. He had a dozen heirloom tomato plants already thriving in the south windows.

Thinking of the nuisance of having to hide his garden from view, he realized that he wasn’t entirely happy with his residence or its location. One reason he’d taken it was a nearly unconscious wish to reconcile with Patricia, and he had persuaded her to come and visit at least once, but she had pronounced the manor too damn big and ostentatious. Bo had tried to sell her on the zoning: only single-family houses were allowed, and about 60 percent of those were on five-acre-minimum lots. There were no traffic lights, no supermarkets, no gas stations, no convenience stores, no barbershops, no four-lane roads, no apartment buildings, and almost no crime. Bo belonged to The Camargo Club, a private country club whose restaurant was the only “business” in Indian Hill. Although nobody but Bo had a vegetable garden, within the city limits of Indian Hill were at least three working farms, raising cows and sheep, and there were horses all over the place. Sometimes when Bo was rounding a hilly curve in the road, he could almost pretend he was back in the Ozarks. But there was nothing anywhere around to remind him of the courthouse square in Harrison, which had been his favorite hang-out as a kid. What he had liked to do most, even more than playing football, was to sit on the south side of the courthouse, where the old men whittled and swapped yarns. Bo had had a darn good Barlow pocketknife himself, and he could whittle too while he listened to the old men talk, spinning their fabulous myths. There was nothing at all like that in Hamilton County, Ohio.

The people who lived in Indian Hill and appreciated all that quiet and serenity and seclusion were mostly family people, sometimes with both parents working in order to support such a lifestyle but with lots of kids taking advantage of the best school district in the nation. Bo was one of the few single people living in Indian Hill. After Patricia had failed to respond to his not fully articulated invitation to forget their differences and move in with him, he had tried to persuade his widowed mother to move to Cincinnati, but she wouldn’t leave Arkansas. His daughter Sarah worked in Chicago as a promotion underling for a department store; he had tried for years to convince her that a much better job was waiting for her in Cincinnati. His best hope was that his son Bolin IV, due to graduate this spring from Rice University, might want to take a job with Bo’s company.

And of course more than one of Bo’s girlfriends had wanted too earnestly to move in with him, but he hadn’t yet dated one that he’d truly care to live with, never mind their dislike for radishes. So he was given to wondering if he was destined to spend the rest of his working career as an aging man living alone in a house much, much too big for him.

“But what has that got to do with lacking a soul?” he asked, rhetorically this time, of that empty house, and then he got into his Jag and drove to work.

One of his deputies, Castor Sherrill, had already left him a memo to the effect that he was on top of the latest problem involving the recurrent false rumor that the company had Satanic ties, a calumny that had derived from an old misinterpretation of the company’s logo of moon and stars (abandoned fifteen years ago). During his time with the company, Bo and his large staff had been required to respond to thousands of calls and letters regarding the false rumor. Now bright young Cast Sherrill was devising a plan to squelch it, once and for all.

Bo really didn’t have much to do. Cast and the other deputy, Jim Tompkins, worked zealously running the show. Despite Bo’s pretense, to Vernon and George, of not wanting to use the company’s time for personal matters, Bo had no compunction about using the company’s time for whatever he wished. At least two or three mornings a week he sneaked away to his athletic club for a good workout and a good swim. But this morning, instead, he began making some more calls to old friends in Arkansas, trying to scare up a good campaign manager for a worthy but callow gentleman named Vernon Ingledew. His first call went to Jerry Russell, but he learned the man was already committed to another candidate in the Democratic primary. “Ingledew?” Jerry said, and after a long pause “No, Bo, I can’t say I’ve ever heard of him. Is he in the state senate, maybe?”

Two other prospective managers he called were also already committed to candidates. Bo learned that there was going to be a pretty broad slate in the primary. So eager were the Democrats to find someone to run against and defeat Shoat Bradfield that there had already been eight filings for the primary, including a former governor, the present secretary of state and attorney general, a powerful county sheriff, a state senator, a rich and powerful automobile dealer, a popular minister, and a former congressman. “Good heavens,” Bo remarked to his informant, “My man Ingledew is going to be caught in a horse race.”

“With a name like ‘Ingledew,’” the man remarked in return, “who would bet on the nag, let alone jockey him?”

“Hey, names don’t mean anything,” Bo said. “What about ‘Eisenhower’?”

“Ike was a famous general,” the man replied. “Does your Ingledew have any war record?”

Bo realized that there was one more albatross (he was keeping count, and this was number thirteen) for poor Vernon’s neck: he had no military service at all. Not even ROTC, because he’d never gone to college. Bo felt obliged to mention this to the fourth person he called, the same woman he’d called the day before, Lydia Caple, who had not yet signed up with any candidate and was in fact trying to decide whether to keep shopping for a candidate or to accept an offer to be one of the other manager’s assistants or perhaps a press secretary (she had first entered politics from her career as a political reporter for the state’s top newspaper). Bo told Lydia that yes, she was right, Vernon was a crass amateur, but he was “the most personable, clever, handsome, engaging, outright lovable aspirant” that Lydia could ever hope to meet. He could palpably sense that Lydia might actually be refraining from giving him a second flat refusal. But because she was such a dear old friend (they had in fact enjoyed each other in bed on one wild, memorable occasion) he felt obliged to candidly inform her of the thirteen albatrosses that he had identified as obstacles in Vernon’s path, and he felt obliged to mention one in particular: that Lydia could expect to find Vernon extremely uncomfortable in her presence, not because of her but because Ingledew men going back to ancient Anglo-Saxon times had always been hopelessly bashful around women.

There was a long silence on the other end. “Bo, honey,” Lydia said at length, “are you teasing me? Is this some kind of joke? Or have you just lost touch entirely with the Arkansas electorate?”

“Lyd, sweetheart, think of it as a huge challenge!”

“The challenge is so huge that not even a seasoned pro like Bolin Pharis would want to handle it,” she said, and changed the subject, and that was that.

Bo was thinking that he ought to spend the rest of the morning at his athletic club. But he made one more call. “I am saving my soul,” he told the four spacious walls of his office. He put in a call to Archie Schaffer, an old college classmate at the University of Arkansas who had been the closest thing to a best friend Bo had had during his junior and senior years. Arch had successfully managed the campaigns for Dale Bumpers as governor and later long-term U.S. Senator from Arkansas. In fact, in a place where everybody was kin to everybody else, just as Vernon was Jelena’s own cousin and George was her uncle, Bo was not unmindful that Arch Schaffer was Dale Bumpers’s nephew. When Arch had run his Schaffer & Associates political firm in the Eighties, he had provided some stiff competition for Bo Pharis on occasion. It was Arch’s withdrawal from the political scene into a public relations career which had inspired Bo to do likewise: Arch was vice-president of Media, Public & Governmental Affairs for the huge chicken company Tyson Foods, which was headquartered in the Ozark town of Springdale. Bo realized, while the call was going through, that he couldn’t hope to persuade Arch to go back into politics any more than Vernon had persuaded Bo, but there was no harm in trying.

“Arch, you old bastard,” Bo said.

“Bo, you old rascal,” Arch said. “Hey, congratulations! Now I’ll have to call you Doc Pharis.”

“What’s this?” Bo wondered.

“You haven’t heard? Hell, maybe I shouldn’t be the first to tell you. The University’s giving you an honorary degree at May graduation.”

“No shit?” Bo said. “No, I hadn’t heard, yet. That’s swell. I guess I’ll have to accept it in person.”

“You sure as hell will. And Beverly and I are expecting you to stay with us instead of the Hilton.”

“Of course. And maybe we can go the next day to the tailwaters of Beaver Lake Dam, and catch us a few rainbows.”

“You bet.” There was a lull in the conversation, then Arch asked, “What’s up, Bo? What can I do for you or vice versa?”

“I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of Vernon Ingledew,” Bo said.

After a reflective pause, Arch said, “Which Vernon Ingledew did you have in mind? The fellow who runs Ingledew Ham? Or do you mean the fictional character in The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks?”

“I don’t know about the latter,” Bo said. “I never read that.”

“Well, could be they’re one and the same. He’s the owner and CEO of Ingledew Ham. I’ve met him. We tried to buy them out a few years ago, but they weren’t for sale. Are you thinking of buying them out? I can save you the trouble.”

“No, it’s something else. Have you heard any news about Ingledew entering the Democratic Primary for governor?”

“Give me a minute,” Arch requested, and Bo visualized him running a check on his computer’s high-powered search engines. Less than a minute before Arch came back. “Nope. He hasn’t filed as of this morning, and there’s really nothing at all on him except a bunch of books he got on Interlibrary Loan from the University.”

Bo told Arch about the visit from Vernon and George in Cincinnati. He gave him the rough outline of Vernon’s position. He told him about Vernon’s thirteen albatrosses. “You laughed him out of your office?” Arch asked.

“Not exactly,” Bo admitted. “I took them to dinner. After that, I took them up to my house for a few hours. We got to know each other real well. I made it clear to Ingledew that I’m no longer available as a political consultant. But—” Bo paused, took a deep breath, and gave a long moment’s meditation. How to say it? If anybody he knew could understand, probably Arch Schaffer could. “Arch, listen, I’m telling you—or I’m trying to tell you—that Vernon Ingledew is a natural. If I lived in Arkansas, I couldn’t think of anybody I’d rather have as governor. He just sends off this feeling that he could solve any problem on earth. He knows everything. He can do anything.”

“Wow,” said Arch. “Coming from you, that’s high praise. But I think I know what you mean. When Johnny Tyson and Buddy Wray and I and some of the other guys here met with Ingledew, he sort of projected that same feeling, that he not only knew exactly why we should not and could not buy them out, but he knew that we shouldn’t diversify from chicken into pork. Turns out he was right, too. We made a big mistake when we expanded into fish and beef and pork.”

“He could make Shoat Bradfield wish he’d never been born,” Bo declared.

“So, what you’re telling me is that you’re having second thoughts about turning down his overture, and you want me to tell you you’re doing the right thing.”

“Aw, shoot, no!” Bo quickly exclaimed. “I’m out. What I’m telling you is that if you ever had any desire to get back into campaigning, here’s your best chance.”

“I’m like you, Bo. I have no desire to get back into campaigning. You know how cops and firemen can retire real early because of all the stress they’ve had to put up with? I think political consultants ought to have the same consideration.”

“Could you at least think about it?” Bo pled.

“Could you?” Arch returned.

“I have been,” Bo told him. “I haven’t been able to think about anything else.”

“I don’t know about you, Bo, but I’m a real slow thinker. I’ll have to get back to you on this, but don’t get your hopes up. Beverly wouldn’t let me do it, for one thing. But I’ll think. And I’ll think. And I’ll also do some checking around, and see what I can scrape up on Ingledew. Meanwhile, let me strongly recommend that you read The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks.”

Bo Pharis asked his secretary to call some bookstores and find him a copy of the book. Later that day she reported back that Barnes and Noble had told her the paperback was out of print. Bo asked her to try some used bookstores. She finally found a hardback original marked down to just $4.95 at a place called The Dust Jacket, and asked them to hold it, and Bo left work early to pick it up. He took it home with him. In his home mail was a letter from the president of the University of Arkansas notifying him that he would be awarded the honorary doctorate of laws degree and the pleasure of his robing at the May graduation was anticipated. He would not be required to give the commencement address. A senator was doing that. Bo realized that the commencement was being held the weekend that he usually set out his tomato plants, but he supposed they could wait another week. (The plants, not the University.)

He read the book. Not all at once, for he lacked Vernon’s reading speed, but he managed to get through it in two nights and one day at the office. It was a riot in places. He laughed till his ribs hurt, beginning with the first chapter and the story of Jacob Ingledew, Vernon’s ancestor, and how Jacob “evicted” an Osage Indian from the future site of Stay More but impregnated the Indian’s squaw in the process. Bo wondered where the author had got all this stuff. The book reminded him a bit of One Hundred Years of Solitude, but there was nothing outright fantastic in it, that is, nothing that couldn’t actually have happened.

When Jelena Ingledew was born, and Vernon Ingledew was born, and nearly everything that happened to them was related in bold detail, Bo wondered how the author could have got away with that, writing a supposed “novel” about real people whose privacy he was invading. When Bo was in high school, he’d had a crush on the idea of Jelena, whom he had never met, and now he was reading about her actual lonely childhood and it made him practically fall in love with her. Her obsession with the boy cousin who was eight years her junior was made perfectly plausible but no less painful, and Bo found himself identifying with Vernon, and even believing it when Vernon wears a magic wristwatch which enables him to become aware of the reader of the novel! Bo thought that was real tricky: to find himself inside of Vernon at the same time that he found himself being the reader that Vernon is watching and communicating with. There were some spooky things in the ending of that book.

The book left Bo feeling hideously homesick. More than satisfying his curiosity about Vernon and Jelena, the book gave him a sense of the destiny of this whole long lineage of Ingledews who had inhabited this place in the Ozarks called Stay More. The narratives evoked for Bo those old tales he used to listen to the old-time whittlers spin on the courthouse square at Harrison. In fact, Harrison itself appeared in the book in several different places. Bo realized that the people of the Ozarks had had a fabulous history, filled with hardship but also with a rich sense of excitement and a texture that was entirely gone from current life.

“By God,” Bo declared to his empty house, “when I go back in May to get that doctorate they’re giving me I’d better plan on doing my fly fishing on the Little Buffalo, or even Swains Creek, and maybe even see if those old whittlers are still there on the square in Harrison.”

And behold, his empty house answered him, for once. “Bo, son,” it said, “that’s not until May. Can you wait that long? Why don’t you go back now and help a good man start running for governor?”

The house didn’t say anything more for the rest of the night, but Bo had trouble sleeping. Early the next morning he went to see his boss, the CEO of the company, and told him he needed some time off, a few months perhaps, for “spiritual enrichment.” No problem. Couldn’t Castor Sherrill and Jim Tompkins hold down the fort as long as need be? Sure thing.

He called Cast into his office and laid it on the line. He told Cast he had decided to take a leave and “re-enter the lists” as a campaign manager for an offbeat visionary in Arkansas named Vernon Ingledew. Cast would be put in charge, even allowed to boss his rival Jim Tompkins, for at least three months and possibly longer if Vernon Ingledew managed to survive the primary and make it to the general election. Cast was a bright, able kid; although he was a native Hoosier, he’d taken his MBA at Harvard. Tompkins’ MBA was from Stanford, but Jim lacked Cast’s lively personality. All Cast needed for advancement was a little managerial experience, and here was his chance to get it.

But Cast said, “Please take me as your disciple, sir.”

Where have I heard that line before? Bo wondered. Was it something in Don Quixote? No, maybe Bo hadn’t heard it but had read it in the subtitles of a movie. “Listen,” he replied, “I don’t have anything to teach you. I had a lot of experience fighting political campaigns, but for your own good you don’t want to get into that.”

“No,” Cast said. “I’ve made up my mind. I’ll follow you to Arkansas even if you won’t accept me.”

“I forbid you to do that,” Bo said, and showed him to the door. He was flattered, but he owed it to the company not to leave Jim Tompkins solely in charge.

Late that afternoon, while Bo was clearing off his desk, a call came in from his pal Archie Schaffer. Arch was dramatic: “Bo, because of you, I accept. I’ll do it. Tyson’s will let me off until the general election.”

“But Arch,” Bo said, “I’ve talked myself into doing it!”

Was Arch’s silence bitter disappointment? But it didn’t last long. “Great,” he said. “Really. I’m happy for you.”

As consolation, Bo offered, “Would you consider being my second-in-command?”

“Being second fiddle to you, Bo, would beat hell out of being first fiddle all by myself.”

Bo Pharis laughed. “I hope you mean that. We could make some real music together. But who else would we need for our orchestra?”

“We would have to get four or five more. We’d need a press secretary, a headquarters manager, a head of opposition research, and we’d need a good media advisor.”

Bo made a scoffing noise. “Hell, I know all that,” he said. “I mean, who do we want for those jobs?”

Arch sought clarification: “Money’s no object?”

“Ingledew is more than loaded.”

“Okay, so how about Carlton Drew for media advisor,” Arch suggested, naming a prominent dc consultant who had elected numerous senators and governors by the crafty use of television ads.

“Fine, if we can get him,” Bo said. “But he might not appreciate Vernon’s opposition to television.”

“God,” Arch sighed. “How opposed is he?”

“Won’t allow it in his own house,” Bo said. “Although I suppose he wouldn’t object to other people having it.”

“But he would object to using it for advertising his candidacy?”

“I’m afraid he might,” Bo allowed.

“All right, you give Carleton a buzz and ask him, hypothetically, if he would consider himself capable of electing a candidate without any use of television. Now, who’s the best oppo man you ever knew?”

Of course Bo understood the euphemism: the head of opposition research was in charge of digging up all the dirt on the other candidates. “Would you buy Harry Wolfe?” Bo ventured.

“Harry Wolfe’s our man,” Arch said. “But I haven’t talked to him yet. I think maybe you’d better talk to him.”

“Right. And we’ll need an office manager, and some conspicuous headquarters in Little Rock.”

“Better check with our man Vernon on that,” Arch suggested. “He might prefer having headquarters up here in the Ozarks.”

“Will do. We’ll also need a topnotch press secretary.”

“Shall I call Lydia Caple? Or do you want to?”

“I’ve already talked to her twice,” Bo informed him.

“Was that before or after you made up your mind to do it?” Arch wanted to know.

“Before,” Bo admitted, and began to feel good all over with the prospect of getting Lydia for the job. For years Lydia Caple had been the ace political reporter for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and when her job and her political savvy had been challenged by the popular columnist Hank Endicott she had decided to leave the paper and get into politics herself. She’d had legendary good luck with all the candidates she’d worked for, including briefly Governor Clinton himself, but his well-known propensity for requiring a certain sexual allegiance from his female underlings had cost him her services. Bo had not been able to resist feeling proud that he had succeeded in doing something the then-governor and future president had not succeeded in doing.

“Okay, I’ll call her again,” Bo said. The only thing he’d left on his desk was his appointment book, and he was jotting things down in it. Reminders: Call Lydia tonight.

When he’d finished his long talk with Arch, he needed a drink to help him catch his breath. He was pouring it at the little bar in the corner of his office when Cast Sherrill came back into the office. “Excuse me, sir,” said Cast, “but have you reconsidered?”

Bo had so much on his mind he couldn’t figure out what Cast meant. Something about the Satanic old logo? “What’s that?” he said.

“I want to go to Arkansas with you and be your disciple,” Cast said.

“Hell, Cast, you’ve been my disciple ever since I hired you. Now it’s time for you to run the show in my absence.”

“Don’t hold it against me, sir, but I don’t want to work here after you’ve gone. This place wouldn’t be the same without you, and I’d be lost.”

It was a long drive to Arkansas, Bo realized, and it might not be too bad to have a traveling companion. Maybe Cast could help drive. Thinking of this, Bo realized something more important. Which of his two vehicles would he be taking? The Jaguar was the object of his greatest affections, and he couldn’t conceive of being without it. But it wouldn’t be any good in the backroads of the Ozarks. If he had to go to Stay More, six miles beyond where the pavement ends at Parthenon, he would need the Nissan 4-by-4. How about taking the Jag himself and getting Cast to drive the 4-by-4, and then he’d have the use of both?

But no, he didn’t want the kid tagging along after him throughout the campaign. He was going to be so busy selling Vernon Ingledew to the people of Arkansas that he wouldn’t have time to teach anything to a goddamn apprentice. Or certainly not Castor Sherrill, who, despite his brilliance in college, had a peculiar background, the details of which Bo had picked up over several drinks when he’d first hired Cast out of Harvard Business: Cast’s mother, whom he hardly ever saw, was an Indiana farm girl who had a brief career in Los Angeles doing what budding starlets often have to do, making porn movies. Cast’s father was one of her co-stars, though Cast had never met him. The man had, however, named Cast, not after castor oil as his childhood friends assumed, but after the brother of Pollux, hatched from Leda’s eggs in Greek mythology.

“I’m flattered you feel that way,” Bo told him. “But the company needs you to run things while I’m gone. You don’t want Jim fucking it all up, do you?”

Cast opened a manila folder he was carrying and spread it out on Bo’s now-empty desk. There was a diagram that looked like an organizational chart. “Sir, if you’d take a look at this…”

Bo expected to see how Cast intended to reorganize the staff while he was gone, but instead he found, to his great surprise, the names of the eight candidates who had already filed for the Democratic primary in Arkansas, and, beneath the name of each, a list of five or six “liabilities.” The candidate who was a former governor, for example, had been tried and convicted in court of fraud. The attorney general had been blamed for the suicide of a legislator. And the popular evangelist was suspected of child abuse. And so forth.

“Where did you find all this stuff?” Bo wanted to know.

“Sir, in the time since you left politics, the Internet has grown exponentially in a fantastic manner.”

Bo stared at him for quite a while, awed by this display of swordsmanship. Then he invited, “Can I make you a drink?” He had never offered a drink to one of his employees before, but this was an exceptional situation. When Cast was halfway through his Scotch and soda, Bo inquired, “Can you handle a four-wheel-drive Nissan?”

“I can drive anything,” Cast declared.

At home that night, checking to see what he needed to do to the house to shut it up for several months, he said to the house, “Well, it would appear, in answer to the question I asked you the other morning, that I am the Knight of La Mancha, and Castor Sherrill is my Sancho Panza.” The house did not answer, this time. But then, thinking of Cast’s swordsmanship, Bo realized he had the wrong allusion. It wasn’t Don Quixote. No, it was The Seven Samurai. And he realized he had two more phone calls to make. But then, thinking of the wonders of the Internet that Cast had demonstrated, Bo decided to email Harry Wolfe instead of phoning him. If his guess was correct, Harry was probably sitting right beside his notebook computer in his spacious but squalid Georgetown apartment, waiting for email, or keeping an eye on the inbox while he did something else, like netsurfing for porn or serious drinking. One of the good things about email was that you didn’t need a salutation or a closing, and Bo omitted both.

Long time no E. Anything good up at the Phillips Collection this season? It’s been a while but I’ll have to forego a trip anytime soon. You won’t believe this, Harry, but I’m coming back. Not to DC. But to The Fences. The Game. There’s a fellow running for governor of Arkansas who would be your dream, if you wanted to find a huge pile of shit on a candidate. The problem is, we’re on his side. We have to find the shit on his opponents. We have to find enough shit on his opponents to coerce them into ignoring the shit on our man. Are you interested?

Just in case Harry wasn’t at home, he added Arch’s email address to his own. And he pushed the send button with his left hand while using his right hand to push the phone buttons for Lydia Caple.

She was home, somewhere in Little Rock. “Do you still love me, Lydia?” he asked in greeting.

“Bo,” she said, “if anybody could possibly love somebody like you, I’m qualified.” There was in her tone just the gentlest, faintest of reminders that she had enjoyed that one wild night they’d had together.

“Have you given any more thought to that personable, clever, handsome, engaging, outright lovable aspirant I was telling you about?”

“Hinkleberry, or whoever?” she said. “No, I put him forever out of my mind when you told me about the thirteen albatrosses. I might handle six or seven of those birds, but not all thirteen.”

“But he’s a good man, Lyd. All you’d have to do is show the people of Arkansas how good he is.”

“Where does he stand on the issues?”

“Honey, believe me, he is for everything you’re for, and he’s against everything you’re against.”

“Sounds wonderful,” she said. “But Bo, now it’s your turn to believe me: I don’t have any fight in me anymore. That bastard Bradfield took it all out of me.”

“That’s what I thought about myself, after fighting Bush,” he said. “But Ingledew is so good that I’m going to be his campaign manager, and I want you to be his press secretary.”

“No!” she yelled into the phone, and during the long silence that followed Bo was convinced that she had simply turned him down for a third time, but then it began to occur to him that she was simply expressing astonishment or incredulity.

“Yes,” he negated her. “I mean it. And do you want to know who proposed you for the job? Your old pal Arch Schaffer, who’s also coming aboard the team.”

“Arch is in it?” she said. “Really? Why didn’t you say so? If he’s in it, I guess you could count me in too!”

“You’re a sweetheart, Lyd,” he said. “You and I will be having a leisurely lunch with Arch just as soon as I can get out there. And then we’ll have to get ourselves out to a place called Stay More.”

Mention of Stay More made Bo realize that there was one more very important phone call he would have to make. First, before shutting off his computer, he checked for email and there was a speedy reply from Harry Wolfe. More and more people, alas, were beginning to believe that the ease and informality of email precluded proper punctuation and capitalization, and Harry was apparently one of these, but there were also mistakes to suggest that he was well into his cups.

hey, i am gladc to hear fromj you again man. real white of you tto think of me. i havent had a gigg in 2 yeares ever since i guess you mayv heardd about itt i tracked down sso much shameful stuff on senator passmore that the bastard wonb by sympathetic backlash. not my fault reallly, but anyhow haven’t had a job since. what can i tell you man i’m real rusty. i mean I nee dsome practice real bad. but if you want to take a rat’s chanc eon me an make me your dung beetle, jus tsay when an where an i’ll be there. never been to arkansaw former home of the alltime scandalousest poiltician

Bo made a quick email reply simply giving Harry the address and phone number of Arch Schaffer and suggesting that Harry catch the next plane to Arkansas, and then he closed his laptop and put it beside his Vuiton suitcases. Finally, he got around to making that most important call. “Why have I put it off so long?” he asked the house, and, since the house wouldn’t answer, he answered it himself: “I suppose I wanted to have everything in place before making it.” Nearly everything was in place. Six of the Seven Samurai were polishing their swords. And he had given Lydia permission to select the seventh one herself.

Jelena Ingledew answered the phone, and Bo was thrilled to be speaking directly to her. He felt like a schoolboy calling his first date. He felt himself wanting to ask her if she’d like to do some homework with him. He felt giddy, almost silly, to be speaking to her. Losing his edge, he quickly asked to speak to Vernon.

“Vernon’s not here right now,” Jelena said. “He’s over at some friends’.”

“Did he tell you about me?” Bo asked. “Did he tell you that I turned him down?”

“Yes, and we’re all very glad that you did.”

“But I’ve changed my mind!” Bo declared. “I’ve thought it over and decided that I’ll do it. Not only that, but I’ve assembled the best team in the country!”

“Sorry for all your trouble,” Jelena said. “But Vernon changed his mind too. It’s the first time I’ve ever known him to change his mind. But he’s done it. He’s going to devote himself to the study of quantum theory and put politics behind him.”

Chapter four

Something has gone out of life, she decided. And she wasn’t, for a change, thinking of herself. Or at any rate she was thinking of herself only in relation to the rest of humankind, and not just here in the Ozarks but everywhere she’d gone, which included a considerable part of the globe. Particularly in Ireland, particularly in Japan, she’d developed the same impression that people were almost suffocated with an unconscious nostalgia for a golden age they hadn’t even known and perhaps hadn’t even been told about but simply knew had once existed and now did not, not any more. Here in her familiar homeland it was inescapable: people everywhere seemed to be missing yesterday, as if it had possessed some magic no longer at work, as if tomorrow with all its fabulous wonders seemed to be a threat more than a promise of new delights.

She had long ago taught herself not only to give up the past but also to maintain the same skepticism about the future that she had maintained about everything, and if there was one word to describe her (as reporters interviewing people were in the habit of asking “What one word would you choose to describe yourself?”) it was skeptical. In fact, the only word that she knew that Vernon didn’t know was Pyrrhonism. When she had first come across the word, years ago, she had asked him, as was her habit, what it meant. “Gee, I never heard of that. How do you spell it?” he had said. And she had spelled it and he still didn’t know. She couldn’t believe it, that she had stumped him, for the first time in his life. She couldn’t find the word in her dictionary, and had to look it up in the encyclopedia. Pyrrho of Elis founded the Greek school of Skepticism in the fourth century B.C., and taught that, since knowledge is unattainable, the only way to achieve happiness is to practice suspension of judgment.

Skeptics are imperturbable. People like Vernon who think they can acquire knowledge are constantly disturbed and frustrated. People like Jelena, learning to suspend judgment, neither affirm nor deny the possibility of knowledge but remain peaceful, still waiting to see what might develop. The Pyrrhonist did not become inactive in this state of suspense but lived undogmatically according to appearances, customs, and natural inclinations.

Once she had looked up Pyrrhonism, she didn’t tell it to Vernon. She kept it as her own private word, a precious little knowledge that he did not have, one more among several secrets (her occasional cigarette, her vibrator) she kept from him. It amused her to think of the paradox: that Pyrrhonism says knowledge is not attainable but she had at least attained the knowledge of Pyrrhonism, and she took the trouble to read several books on epistemology, particularly Hume, until she had a full knowledge not only of Pyrrhonism but of the nature of knowledge itself. She didn’t come to know anything about herself that she hadn’t already known; she didn’t become more skeptical than she had already been.

She and Vernon rarely kept anything from each other (except a few vices and virtues she’s already thought of, above, and a few more she’ll think of soon), not even their innermost thoughts and fantasies (well, of course she’d never told him about sexual daydreams she’d had about his best friend Day Whittacker) and there was only one other thing besides Pyrrhonism that she considered her own private province of knowledge: the fact that she had taught herself enough of the ancient Egyptian language to be able to talk to her cat. Not to converse with it, because the cat had never replied, but to capture and hold its attention in a way she’d never been able to do with English. Or with Japanese or Gaelic, which she’d also tried. Her very large and handsome marmalade tom (altered), which she had named Vernon (why not?) was, like all cats, totally indifferent to the speech sounds of human beings, or pretended to be. Therein was the fundamental difference between dogs and cats.

She had acquired Vernon (the feline, not the human) from Aunt Latha, who had such an awkward surplus of cats living in and around that old dogtrot log cabin she insisted on keeping despite Vernon’s efforts to provide a much more modern home for his grandmother or, lately as Latha had passed her centennial, to persuade her to move to Jasper into a “residence for assisted living.” Jelena had asked Latha if there was any way to talk to cats, but Latha, who’d been keeping them for a hundred years, said “If there is, they sure do a good job of keeping the secret to themselves.”

As Vernon (the cat) grew up and became fully developed, and as Jelena’s studies and travels gave her new vocabularies, Jelena tried out French, Gaelic, and Japanese on the cat, to no avail. To accommodate her, Vernon (the man) even tried Osage on the cat. Osage was the only one of Vernon’s several languages that Jelena had never bothered to master, but she trusted that Vernon in speaking it to Vernon was not telling the cat to get lost and never come back. Vernon the cat however was as indifferent to Osage as to any other language.

Eventually, secretly, keeping the book hidden in the same cabinet she hid her Bible, Jelena had learned how to speak ancient Egyptian, and to her surprise when she said “Miw,” the Egyptian word for cat, Vernon perked up his ears and turned and stared at her with a dumbfounded look. She had seen cats with quizzical looks and curious looks and questioning looks but never a dumbfounded look. So she went on talking to Vernon in Egyptian, and while he didn’t answer he sure paid a lot of attention.

Once not so long ago Vernon (the man) had overheard her talking to Vernon (the cat) in Egyptian and had asked her what she was saying or what tongue she was using, but she just said that it was just some gibberish she’d invented to attempt to reach Vernon. “Successfully, it would appear,” he remarked.

This morning she was hanging clothes on the line with wooden clothespins, not plastic, and she was wondering if they would be dry before those people showed up, and she realized that she didn’t care if those people saw the laundry still flapping in the March breeze like a row of singular ensigns. On a whim which was not really a whim, she occasionally eschewed her soundless, hideously expensive nine-cycle moisture-sensor clothes dryer, and instead hung the clothes on this line, not to imitate her Stay More ancestors but simply because that state-of-the-art dryer couldn’t impart to the laundry the scent of fresh air and the scent of sunshine. She spoke in Egyptian to Vernon the cat, who was watching her, “Does sunshine possess a scent?” And he nodded. Those Egyptians knew a lot about the sun.

This morning she was a bit more careful to use her artistry in hanging the clothes according to color and shape, just in case those people saw them. Thinking of art, she thought of Picasso dangling a cigarette from his mouth while he painted, and she fished the pack of cigarettes out of her apron pocket and smoked one while she worked. The clothesline was too far from the house for Vernon to see her, even if he happened to be looking out his window.

She was not nervous about those people. Skeptics are imperturbable and she was skeptical that those people would have any luck at all in getting Vernon to change his mind. “What about me?” she said in Egyptian to the cat. “What about my mind?” Vernon (not the cat) had explained to her just who each of these seven people were, how “famous” they were in their respective areas of expertise in the game of campaign politics, which was a vocation requiring incredible powers of persuasion, and she knew that these people were coming here with the full intention of selling them on the idea of occupying that mansion on Center Street in Little Rock where little Chelsea Clinton had grown up. Jelena had used as a handy excuse, to those who had sought her opinion—her best friend Diana, Diana’s husband Day, Uncle George, Vernon’s sister Sharon and her husband Larry, and Aunt Latha—that she simply couldn’t stand the thought of living in the governor’s mansion, not after over thirty years of living in this fantastic twin-orb palace on a mountaintop in the Ozarks.

When she first saw this house, when Vernon was building it in the Seventies, it scared the daylights out of her. She didn’t see how she could possibly learn to live in such a weird pair of giant balls, and in fact she had bad dreams the first several nights she slept here. But now, after so many years of taking for granted its fabulous comforts and amenities, she didn’t see how she could possibly live anywhere else. Several times, back in the Eighties, when she and Vernon had been visiting Day and Diana and they’d had too much pot or booze to drive home afterwards, they had stayed in that house, a thoroughly cozy traditional house that had been built long ago by that weird old hermit Dan Montross who had been either Diana’s grandfather or father or both. Jelena hadn’t slept well, not because the place was haunted by Montross, but because its walls did not make great curved spheres surrounding and hugging her like her own walls.

No, she had no intention of living within the boxy walls of the governor’s mansion, where she probably couldn’t find space to set up her darkroom and would have to abandon photography for four years, but that was just her most convenient excuse, sparing her the trouble of elaborating upon her more intense reasons for not wanting to be First Lady of Arkansas. Jelena’s favorite reading matter was biographies, particularly women’s biographies, and she had consumed a ton of books about Sappho and Marie Curie and Sacajawea and Susan B. Anthony and Simone de Beauvoir and George Eliot and Harriet Tubman and Mother Teresa, et al., et alia. But when Vernon moved from philosophy to politics in his program, she began reading biographies of Eleanor Roosevelt, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, Betty Ford, Rosalind Carter, and, more recently, Hillary Rodham Clinton. She understood how much a politician’s wife had to deny her own identity and submerge her own feelings, and she was not ready to do that. Before Vernon abandoned his harebrained notion to run for governor, she’d tried to tell him this, but he had assured her, “That’s not the way I’d see it. We wouldn’t deviate significantly from the way we’ve always been living, together as equals.” But she had doubted that the campaign signs would read “VERNON AND JELENA FOR CO-GOVERNORS.”

What she disliked most about the whole idea was that the “job” would require of her almost constant contact with the public. She’d have to give speeches to ladies’ garden clubs and church socials. She’d have to shake a lot of hands. She’d have to learn to make polite but meaningless chitchat with anybody who chose to greet her, and she’d have to learn to smile when she didn’t feel like smiling.

But worst of all, she and her whole life and history would become the property of the people of Arkansas. Their ownership of her would allow them to pry into her relationship with Vernon and into everything she’d ever done in her life. They would know that she’d married at eighteen a loutish Stay Moron named Mark Duckworth who built and maintained eight enormous sheds for the raising of chickens. They would be unmoved by the fact that on her way down the aisle at the church, before Uncle Jackson Ingledew had given her away, she had paused at the spot where ten-year-old Vernon was standing in his first coat and tie, she had stopped beside him and bent down and whispered rather urgently into his ear, “I was going to wait until you grew up. Will you marry me when you grow up? If you say ‘yes,’ I’ll call off this wedding.” The people of Arkansas would not understand what it had done to her when Vernon had looked at her as if she were only teasing him, but then, understanding that she meant it as seriously as she’d ever meant anything in her life, shook his head and declared, “I will never marry.” The people of Arkansas would not understand just why he’d said that, and they certainly wouldn’t understand how right he was: he had never married, certainly not her.

There would be people who would want to know what she herself did not know and could not find out: was she possibly a grandmother? Surely, if her two sons had grown to manhood and perhaps even finished college in California or wherever their father had taken them, they had quite possibly married, and somewhere on this earth there might be a beautiful child—or two or three—whose photographs ought to be in Jelena’s wallet for her to show to people. She had nothing whatever against the idea of being a grandmother. If only she knew! She couldn’t stand the suspense. And page after page of her journal was filled with letters she had written to her grandchildren, year by year as they advanced from childhood into adolescence.

She stepped back to study the clothesline and admire her arrangement. She decided that even if the clothes were dry before those people got here she might leave them hanging anyway, not to let the world know that she still did things by hand but just to add a touch of color and pageantry to these drab March woods. The house itself, the two giant spheres, were a pale white surrounded by the bare trees and bushes in the woods on the eastern bench of the mountain, not even visible from the drive as it crossed the crest of the rise; her clothesline was out in the clearing, in the sunshine, the first thing those people would see when the road brought them off the plateau. Thus, she reflected, if she left the laundry hanging it could serve as a kind of beacon, to let them know they had arrived.

She stomped out her cigarette and buried the stub, then grabbed up the empty laundry basket (not plastic but wicker) and hiked back to the house, to check on the ovens. In both ovens of her built-in Whirlpool double-oven she had things baking: breads and pies. She was very good at pie. She would be serving a black walnut pie, just like pecan but tastier, made from nuts she’d gathered from their woods, and a cushaw pie, like pumpkin but made from cushaw she’d raised in her garden and canned. One part of that clearing on the mountaintop, which the visitors wouldn’t notice because there was nothing in it this time of the year, and Uncle George was coming up to Rototill it next week, was her vegetable garden, her patently substitute child, to whom she devoted all the love and attention that she had left over when she got through loving and attending Vernon and Vernon. Her orders to Burpee and Shumway and Park had all been filled. When Vernon had built the “annex,” as they called it, to house the sprawling overflow of books as well as her darkroom (and the building was not spherical like the house but conventionally boxy), he had added on the south end of it a greenhouse for her, and she had her plants thriving there already, waiting to be transplanted to the garden later this month and next: heirloom tomatoes, four varieties of pepper, three kinds of eggplant, six kinds of cantaloupe, as well as flowers already blooming. She could not conceive of the state of Arkansas permitting her to convert part of the lawn of the governor’s mansion into a vegetable garden.

She gave the living room another going-over. She was disturbed by the unusual number of chairs: in order to accommodate the guests, not just their side but our side too (seven of each, which was a fair balance), she had had to borrow some chairs from Diana and from Sharon, and there was an irregular assortment of old ladder-back rush-seated chairs, country rockers, captain’s chairs, and Victorian cabriolets, as well as her own Eames and Barcelona. She could not tolerate clutter; all the books climbing the rounded walls to the domed ceiling were very neatly arranged, their spines lined up, and they were carefully dusted. There were bouquets of glads and mums and dahlias she’d forced in her greenhouse. The omnium-gatherum of furniture seemed chaotic, but on reflection she decided that it might mirror the distinctly individual personalities of all the participants. Jelena had tried to arrange the hodgepodge with two equal focal-point chairs: for Vernon a tall, stately ladder-back which had been made in Stay More in the mid-19t? Century; for Mr. Bolin Pharis an equally stately Hitchcock chair. She had considered but discarded the idea of providing pads of yellow legal paper and pencils; those who wanted to take notes would have to furnish their own.

Before taking Vernon his lunch, she hiked to the mailbox, back up on the mountaintop where the dirt road met the gravel driveway. It was a big mailbox which said simply “Ingledew” on it, which could have represented either one of them. Today it contained her orders to Coldwater Creek and J. Jill and she couldn’t wait to try on the garments but realized she’d have to postpone it until after the guests had left. It also contained three packages from Amazon.com, and she had her arms full carrying all this back to the house, along with the daily Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a stack of bills and catalogs from Sundance and The Linen Source, and a letter for Vernon from someone in Louisiana named “Monica Breedlove.” Jelena stared at the envelope. They knew several people named Breedlove here in Newton County; it was a common name. Was this one of their displaced cousins?

Jelena made a BLT on toasted whole wheat and took it with a bottle of Dos Equis up to the “nest,” which was in the upper reaches of the other sphere, which contained their bedroom and the extravagant bathroom (whose shower could accommodate six or seven people although it had never known more than two). The nest was Vernon’s study, where he spent most of his time, usually half-reclined in his Barcalounger with a book in his lap or his computer blazing away. She didn’t worry that he was too sedentary; every day without fail he practiced his Tai Chi and then went for a long hike, sometimes all the way, three miles, down to Stay More, where his vast pork processing factory was sprawled out along the banks of Swains Creek. He also had an elaborate “gym” of exercise machines out in the annex, and he didn’t allow them to collect dust.

Now she noticed that although he had a stack of books on quantum mechanics on his worktable, what he was actually reading was a volume called Antipolitics by Max Konrad. She handed him his lunch and his beer and his love letter, if that’s what it was. “Who’s Monica Breedlove?” she asked him.

He studied it and turned it over. “Got me,” he said. “My first thought was it’s Clyde Breedlove’s daughter, but she’s not in Louisiana, and her name isn’t Monica but Mona, I believe.”

“Open it,” she requested.

He tore off the end and pulled out the letter. He took a bite of his sandwich and sip of his beer, and began reading it to her.

Your Excellency. Please don’t laugh. Don’t laugh at my salutation, which is practicing, not facetiousness. And don’t laugh at my name. You may be aware that there are many other people in your part of the country named Breedlove, and my former husband is probably descended from Arkansas Breedloves. I have had lots of experience working in Arkansas for successful gubernatorial candidates, such as Clinton, and unsuccessful ones, such as Bristow. Also I worked for Bill Clinton for years when he was governor, and then after he became president and that Lewinsky child got involved with him, anytime I told people my name or tried to get a job and mentioned that I had once worked for Clinton they would break out laughing, and some of them made crude jokes. You wouldn’t believe the nightmare my life became simply because I was given this name, a perfectly good and pretty name which, by the way, means “advisor,” and that brings me to my reason for writing to you. I am going to become one of your advisors. I am not going to get into your pants or let you into mine. I have many talents that will prove to be very useful to you but none of them involve that sort of thing. I know you are very busy, probably over your head in quantum mechanics already, but please listen to what I have to say.

Quite possibly you will have already met me before you read this, but if my timing is as good as it has always been, you will get this letter on the same day, maybe just minutes before, you first lay eyes on me. My good friend Lydia Caple, who as you know also worked for a time in the office of Governor Clinton, and was thus my colleague and dear friend, for whom I would do anything she asked me to, has asked me to join the select group of paladins who will constitute your campaign staff when you storm the statehouse.

I fully realize that you have elected not to seek election. I understand that we will be meeting with you this afternoon, maybe in just another hour or so, for the purpose of trying to convince you that you really owe it to yourself as well as the people of the great state of Arkansas, to change your mind and resume your previous ambition of learning politics by participating in it.

You won’t hear me say much if anything this afternoon. I am a shy person, especially when there are a whole bunch of other people present who are much brighter than I. And I understand that it is difficult for you to converse with persons of the opposite sex. So I have to say here and now what I’d want to say to you. Namely that I have this feeling—and I have always trusted my hunches, which have always turned out to be true—that you could become a governor such as this state, this whole nation, has never had before. And that is why I am willing to buckle down and bust my ass for you.

Yours sincerely,

Monica C. Breedlove.

PS The others don’t know I’m writing this to you, so please don’t tell them. See you in a jiffy.

“Well, how about that?” Jelena said. Vernon did not comment. He was smiling but seemed lost in reflection, as if he were actually touched by her flattery. A governor such as this state has never had before.

But what he was musing he eventually spoke: “It has a Farmerville, Louisiana, postmark. How could she have known exactly how long it would take to reach me so it would arrive on the same day she does? And how could she know so much about me?”

They were rhetorical questions but Jelena answered them. “Maybe just her infallible hunches.” And she added, “It’s touching but I hope it doesn’t sway you.” When he didn’t comment on that, she persisted, “You aren’t going to let it—or anything—make you change your mind?”

“I’m not running for governor,” he said. “Was it Coolidge who said ‘If nominated I will not run; if elected I will not serve’?”

“That was Sherman,” she corrected him. “But why are we going to such trouble to have this meeting? Do you realize we’ve never had so many people coming to our house before?”

“Has it really been all that much trouble? And aren’t you eager to serve your pies to those folks?”

“But you didn’t have to buy all that beer and booze as if you expect everybody to get drunk.”

He laughed. “Maybe if everybody gets drunk they’ll have a good time and forget about politics.”

“Maybe if you get drunk you’ll change your mind and decide to run for governor.”

“When was the last time you saw me drunk?”

“It’s been a good long while,” she admitted. She tried to recall. Maybe back in the early Eighties. And she hadn’t been able to tell if he was really drunk or just stoned on marijuana. She herself had been too high to discern.

“What are you serving for supper?” he asked. “Just in case we don’t get rid of them before suppertime. Are you prepared to feed fourteen people?”

“Sure,” she said. She had given it some thought and preparation, and she was all ready. “During the meeting, they’ll smell the aroma of baking ham coming from the kitchen.”

“Ham? That’s rather self-serving, if you’ll pardon the expression. Or unimaginative, as if Ingledew Ham were all we had.”

“I’m not serving Ingledew Ham,” she said. “I bought a nice big smoked spiral-cut Petit Jean Ham.”

“You’re kidding me!” he exclaimed. But she wasn’t. Petit Jean was Ingledew’s primary competition in the state and region, but comparing the former with the latter was like comparing a bicycle with a limousine. She had devised this plan not as a flaunting of Vernon’s product but as a kind of test: if the guests thought they were eating Ingledew Ham and made extravagant compliments about it she would know they were insincere or, like political people, too politic. But if they evaluated the ham honestly and said something like “This isn’t your own ham, is it?” she would confess that it was the product of their competitor and she simply wanted them to know how inferior it was.

“I haven’t had my own lunch yet,” she said, and gave him a kiss and took leave of him. Then she was confronted with the decision of what to have for her lunch. She hated having too many choices, and she spent a long time staring at the interior of the huge fridge, trying to decide. Finally she closed the door and went into the roomy pantry and got her jar of Skippy peanut butter and opened it and spooned it directly into her mouth. Seven or eight spoonsfull made a perfectly adequate lunch. For dessert she was also faced with too many choices but opted to get the big box of Godiva chocolates from their hiding place. She selected five but then had to take two more. She didn’t have many weaknesses, but chocolate was definitely one of them.

Aware of this indulgence she stepped into the bathroom to yield to another preoccupation: her appearance. Company was coming, after all. She knew she did not look anything at all like a politician’s wife. Not even Hillary had possessed her comeliness, but she seemed to be losing it faster than she had expected, and not just because chocolate had taken the pinch out of her figure. Would these political consultants think that she looked more like some aging Hollywood star or worn-out fashion model than like a homespun Arkansas girl worthy of being First Lady? Well, let them! She had to keep reminding herself that it was a series of subtle negative impressions that she wished to make. Her black hair was still too black; she ought to have allowed the gray to show more. As if in compensation, she selected a pair of earrings that were just a little too unlike her. Her third hobby, in addition to gardening and photography, was making earrings. She had made all of Diana’s and Sharon’s wardrobe of earrings; dozens for each. Even Aunt Latha had permitted Jelena to make some earrings for her. And for herself she had made hundreds. Now she deliberately picked a pair that she had once almost thrown away because they were too gaudy.

By two o’clock nobody had arrived. She stepped outside a couple of times to see if she could hear any vehicles coming up the mountain. The second time she distinctly heard a vehicle, but it was a familiar one, Day and Diana’s Jeep Cherokee. As passengers they were bringing Vernon’s sister Sharon and her husband, Larry, the former college professor. Jelena liked Larry, especially since he had gone off the hard stuff, under Sharon’s influence. As was customary, Jelena hugged Diana and Day. She’d done so hundreds of times, but she never embraced Day without feeling a little sexual arousal. In contrast to Vernon, who was the same age but far more intellectual, Day was strictly an outdoor type, roaming the forests of southern Newton County, and although Jelena had done nothing more with him than use him in her daydreams (and a few spectacular nightdreams) whenever he hugged her in greeting her body seemed to levitate a few inches. She also hugged Sharon but did not hug Larry, who somehow didn’t seem the type for such an intimate greeting.

Jelena made them comfortable, and Vernon came down from his nest and offered them drinks, and they sat around and made conversation. And wondered when the guests would come.

“How were they supposed to find you?” Day asked. “Did you draw them a map?”

“I’d never do that,” Vernon said. “George is waiting for them down below, and he’ll lead them up here. Assuming they can find Stay More.” Vernon had forwarded by fax to Arch Schaffer a detailed map giving the complicated directions for reaching Stay More from Jasper and Parthenon, a map Vernon sent to people who wished to do business with his company.

It was Diana, finally around three o’clock, who seemed possessed of better hearing than anyone else, who picked up the sound of Uncle George’s Ford Explorer and said, “They’re coming,” and the rest of them perked up their ears and opened the front door and listened to the sound of strange 4-by-4s negotiating the hairpins of the trail. They all went outside and stood in the yard staring up at the clearing on the mountaintop.

In time, the three 4-by-4 vehicles appeared, with George’s Explorer in the lead: a forest green Chevy Silverado extended cab pickup and a silver Nissan. They parked where the road came to an end, where the others had left their vehicles, alongside Jelena’s Isuzu and Vernon’s Land-Rover. Seven people got out, each of their silhouettes distinct in the blue air. Lined up like that in silhouette, all seven of them, five men of various sizes and two women, one large, one small, they seemed like a tableau from a Hollywood western, the heroes coming to rescue the downtrodden. Some of them were carrying briefcases. One of the women was carrying a houseplant. And one of the men was carrying two bottles of wine. They began walking toward the house, still arranged in a broad line. They seemed like vigilantes. Or…what was the word Monica Breedlove had used? Paladins.

But there was still another word struggling into Jelena’s consciousness. Although she and Vernon did not allow television in their house, they had an enormous TV screen in the den connected to their VCR and they watched a lot of films. It was this great Japanese movie she’d seen one time and could never forget. Yes, these people coming down to her house to spend the remains of the day were samurai. Seven Samurai. The problem was, the samurai were supposed to be the benevolent defenders of the good people against the evil warlords. These people, Jelena couldn’t help feeling, were the evil warlords. She hoped that the seven on her side could defend against them, and she glanced over her own Samurai to appraise their strength. Surprisingly, her glance lingered not on Vernon but on Day, as if he were the one who could do or say the right thing to repulse these invaders. Day was indeed sizing up the invaders as if he were David taking the first glimpse of Goliath.

One of the men was getting his single-lens reflex camera ready to take a shot of the house. Uncle George moved quickly to stop him. “No pitchers, okay?” Uncle George informed the man.

The man recased his camera and offered George his hand. “Mr. Ingledew, I’m Carleton Drew, your media man.”

“I’m not him,” Uncle George said. “That’un’s him.” He pointed and Vernon stepped forward to shake the man’s hand.

Introductions were made all around, but as usual Vernon could not bring himself to look at, let alone speak to, the women. The larger of the two women Jelena recognized, having frequently seen her picture in the paper beside her political column, which Jelena had read regularly with much admiration for her intelligence and keen grasp of the state of the world: Lydia Caple, here in person. The smaller of the two women was a pretty curly-haired natural blonde, Monica Breedlove, and Jelena was pleased with the good manners of our team: none of our team snickered or giggled or ogled at the mention of her name when she was introduced.

“Well well well,” remarked Mr. Bolin Pharis, who was dressed casually in a woolen plaid shirt, as if he were going hunting. “This is quite a layout you have up here!” He said this to Vernon, but then he said to Jelena, “You’ve got a real nice garden patch up there just waiting for the plow.” Jelena was pleased that he had recognized her garden patch, even if nothing at all was growing in it except her overwintered radishes and spinach.

“Let’s all go inside,” Vernon suggested, and led them in.

When they got into the living room, the guests were even more open-mouthed in wonder at the interior. Jelena took pride in the interior’s accessories. She was very good at selecting and arranging, without excess, all of the objects that adorned the walls and tables and floor: the houseplants, the pictures in their frames, the knickknacks, the small sculptures, the candlesticks, all the odds and ends that make a house a home. Bolin Pharis moved at once to inspect some of Jelena’s barnscape photographs in their frames on the walls. “Who’s the artist?” he asked.

“Jelena did those,” Vernon said and she detected a note of pride in his voice.

“Fabulous landscapes,” Bolin Pharis said, and beckoned to the man named Archie Schaffer. “Look at these.”

“Hey, great landscapes,” said Archie Schaffer. He and Pharis could have passed for brothers: they had identical beards, neatly trimmed, Schaffer’s just a bit grayer.

“I call them barnscapes,” Jelena said modestly. For years she had tried to document the falling, crumbling barns of Newton County, and these were her best ones, in color.

Rather than try to serve people individually, Vernon just led them to the buffet, which served as a well-stocked bar, and urged them to help themselves. Bolin Pharis and Archie Schaffer had Scotch with water. Carleton Drew had a Heineken. The man named Harry Wolfe, who was supposed to be an expert in uncovering scandalous information about opponents, poured himself more than a double from the bottle of Jack Daniels. Lydia Caple poured herself a jigger of Stolichnaya on ice. Monica chose a Coke.

Then they all sat down in the assorted chairs. Harry Wolfe plopped his corpulence down into the Hitchcock that Jelena had intended for Bolin Pharis. “Excuse me, sir,” Jelena whispered to him. “That’s Mr. Pharis’ chair.”

Harry Wolfe gave her an annoyed look and lifted himself up and into a lesser chair. Jelena realized, rather late, that the arrangement of the chairs was such that Vernon and Bolin Pharis would be a good twelve feet apart. Or was that one of her subtle negatives?

Fourteen people were more or less comfortably settled in a motley of seats. But there was a very long and uncomfortable silence before anybody said anything. Jelena wondered if her position as hostess required her to be the first one to say something. But she wasn’t thinking about possible opening remarks. She was silently praying. Vernon did not know that she prayed sometimes. She wasn’t religious in the sense of any system of belief or worship; she hadn’t been in a church since her wedding. But occasionally she tried to communicate with her idea of God. And she was doing that now, asking God please to not let these people talk Vernon into running for governor.

Chapter five

Who would speak first? And, assuming it was not a remark about the weather, would it carry any consequence? I will wait fifteen more seconds, and then I will speak, Day promised himself. He didn’t really want to speak despite having given considerable thought to what he might say in defense of Vernon’s well-considered decision to stay out of politics, although Day had spent hours with him recently playing devil’s advocate at his request, a sparring partner in preparation for the fight Vernon was now facing. Day had thrown at him every possible good reason why he should seek the governor’s chair and really laid on thick all the good things he could do for the state of Arkansas and in honor and memory of his ancestor Governor Jacob Ingledew, and Vernon had successfully countered every argument Day hit him with.

The irony of the role-reversal hadn’t escaped Day: back in December and January, when Vernon was making up his mind to run for governor, Day had played the devil’s advocate against the idea, and had made a powerful case not only for the reasons Vernon should shun politics but also for all the encumbrances he would face if he left himself vulnerable as a candidate. Day had even pretended to be his opponents in debate; they had made-believe that Vernon had survived the grueling primary and was now going head-to-head with Governor Bradfield, and Day had done a fairly accurate job of impersonating that bastard, even to the point of imitating his swagger. Day let Vernon have it. He threw at him all the damaging charges about Vernon’s lack of experience in elective office, his lack of a law degree or any kind of degree beyond a high school diploma, his scandalous living arrangement with his own first cousin, his refusal to accept the existence of a God or even to subscribe to the basic tenets of the Democratic Party. But Vernon had demolished Day. In time Day had told me what he believed now: If Vernon wanted to run for governor, fine. If he didn’t want to run for governor, equally fine.

It had always been thus, for as long as Day had known him. For almost thirty years, since they were just very young men and Vernon had given Day and Diana a couple of piglets to start their “farm,” and Day and Vernon had discovered they were the same age, the only two males in Stay More born the same year or anywhere near it, and thus if they were going to have coeval friends at all, they had no choice but to accept each other. The thing about their relationship is that either one of them could have done without it; neither Vernon nor he was the type who needed friends. But as long as they were here, they might as well make the most of it. And they had. Day can’t conceive of what his life would have been like without Vernon.

Vernon was speaking now. “I’m happy you good people could come and visit Stay More. There’s not much left of the town, and you probably didn’t even notice it when you passed through. It’s an easy place to miss. But I mean that in more ways than one. I’d miss the place too easily if I had to leave it. When we were in Cincinnati, Bo, even before you turned me down, I’d begun to get so homesick that I couldn’t wait to get back. And now that I’m here, I plan to stay here.” These last words he uttered with the kind of conviction characteristic of him: Vernon never said anything without meaning it; he always meant what he said.

When Day had been arguing against Vernon’s decision to run for governor, one of Day’s strongest arguments, prompted partly by his awareness of Jelena’s feelings (and it must be revealed to you that Day knows everything she thought and felt in the previous chapter, even her mention of sexual daydreams she’d had about him), was that Vernon would never be able to live in Little Rock for the duration of his tenure as governor. Day reminded Vernon of the problems that his ancestor Jacob had had trying to live there, Day even reminded him of the “other” woman who had come into Jacob’s life in Little Rock, the mysterious lady referred to as Whom We Cannot Name in The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, and Day told Vernon that even if he didn’t get into such an involvement himself he would spend too much of his time pining for his homeland in pastoral Stay More. The few times that Diana and Day had ever left Stay More—to visit their son Danny in Rome, to attend Day’s father’s funeral in New Jersey, to visit Diana’s mother in a nursing home in Little Rock—the pain began when they crossed the Newton County line and did not let up until they’d recrossed it going homeward in the opposite direction.

Bolin Pharis was speaking now. He was an impressive man, both in his appearance and his speech, the latter with just enough of his Harrison, Arkansas, background to keep him from seeming a “furriner” the way that Harry Wolfe and Carleton Drew did. You should know that Day is just as familiar with Bo’s chapter, number 3, as you are. Why should you have the privilege of knowing all those interior tidbits about Bo if Day can’t? But even if Day didn’t know such things as his habit of talking to his empty house, and the business about his soul needing saving, and all those allusions to Don Quixote, Day possessed the talent (if that’s what it was) to read his character in his face and his movements. For example, when Bo and his lieutenant Arch Schaffer were pouring their Scotch, Arch selected the Haig & Haig blended because he was a thoroughly up-front man who thought unblended Scotch was pretentious, but Bo picked the Glenfiddich because he was one of those nifty trendy unblended drinkers.

“We understand that,” Bo was saying, “and I might with equal justice point out that one of the chief reasons I decided to abandon my scruples and take on your campaign was that I too discovered how homesick for Arkansas I was in Cincinnati. There is something very special about the idea of home, whether it means Stay More in particular or Arkansas in general.”

Day cast a glance at Monica Breedlove, who for the sake of the present assignment had given up her home in Farmerville, Louisiana, to return to Arkansas, which was her second home but one dear to her heart. Day, who alone of these people had the privilege of knowing the events of Thirteen Albatrosses (or, Falling Off the Mountain) as they unfolded, knew of course the contents of the letter Monica had sent to Vernon, which Vernon had received and read this very day, and Day understood of course the sly and shy looks that Monica occasionally cast at Vernon, which of course Vernon was not able to reciprocate because of his impossible shyness toward women. Monica was not going to speak, but Lydia did.

“Speaking for myself,” Lydia Caple said, “I like Stay More in particular. I understand Vernon’s ties to this town and I can understand his disdain for Little Rock. As a native of Little Rock, I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.”

Jelena smiled broadly at that remark. Diana usually reported back to Day all the many conversations she had with her best friend (her only friend besides Day) Jelena, and even if Day didn’t know Jelena’s chapter as well as you do he would have known how much Jelena loathed the idea of having to live in Little Rock if she became First Lady. Day also knew that even if she did take up residence in Little Rock, against her will, the media would not let her be referred to as First Lady because she and Vernon weren’t married. So what would they call her? First Lover? Day personally felt she ought to be called simply First Person.

The only thing distressing about Day’s and Diana’s long relationship with Vernon and Jelena was Day’s belief that regardless of how much Diana and he loved each other, it could never match the love between Vernon and Jelena. Day didn’t feel inferior to Vernon because of his vast learning and his keen intelligence and his movie-star looks, and Day certainly didn’t feel inferior to him because of his money (because Diana was inconspicuously one of the wealthiest women in Arkansas, having inherited from her father a major insurance company). Day felt inferior to Vernon only because he enjoyed such a woman’s love as Day could not even imagine.

You are wondering, Day is sure, if during the almost thirty years that they’d been the most intimate of friends they hadn’t swapped. Back during the Seventies and on into the early Eighties when the Ozarks were filling up with back-to-the-land young people seeking alternate amoral lifestyles including lots of homegrown pot, they couldn’t escape having for neighbors (if not friends) certain interesting but ultimately shallow characters who temporarily affected their way of life. For one thing they created noise pollution in the form of the helicopters from law enforcement that periodically flew over scouting out the marijuana patches. For another thing their prolific cultivation of that weed led to Day and Diana’s and Vernon and Jelena’s brief experimentation with the use of it. And for a third thing their new friends’ flagrant, constant practice of “free love” provided a topic of conversation among the four of them which led, inevitably, to a desire to try it. Just out of curiosity, of course.

Day can remember the date: April 12, 1979. Young Danny, their son, then nine, was staying over at a friend’s house. Vernon and Jelena were staying over at Day’s and Diana’s, not by design or invitation but because they’d all experimentally lighted and smoked several joints made from the prime crop of a hippie friend who lived on the road to Parthenon and had been trying for years to have them sample his harvest. In the euphoria and lightness that goes with such an activity, they ceased gossiping about the constant mate swapping of various acquaintances and began to wonder, aloud, if they ought not give it a fling themselves. Day remembered the summer he’d first met Diana, ten years before, when they were camping out in the abandoned remains of Dudleytown, Connecticut, he just out of high school, she just out of college, both of them with the belief that he was the reincarnation of her grandfather, Daniel Lyam Montross. A band of pot-smoking Jesus freaks, who had wound up sharing not only their dope but also their bedrolls, had interrupted their tranquil idyll in Dudleytown.

So Diana and Day had previously been “unfaithful” to each other, when they were young and adventurous and naïve. But had Vernon and Jelena ever been unfaithful to each other? “I’ll try anything once,” Vernon said. “I’m game if you are,” Diana said. “Suits me, I reckon,” Jelena said. “Well, hell,” Day said, “so long as we’d still all be friends afterwards.”

They smoked another joint (enough perhaps to help Vernon overcome the appalling woman-shyness that he felt toward his good friend Diana simply because she was female), and then they repaired upstairs to separate bedrooms, Diana leaving the light off in her bedroom so that shy Vernon would not have to look at her, and Day taking Jelena into the guestroom. Day may never know what transpired in the other bedroom; he never asked Diana about it, and she never told him. But he can say what happened in the guestroom: nothing. Day and Jelena just stood there, facing each other, fully clothed, staring at each other with expressions on their faces that must have said How did this happen? Day did have an overwhelming desire for her. And after learning what she’d often felt about him, in the previous chapter, he can only assume that she had an overwhelming desire for him. Why didn’t they rush into each other’s arms, have a long mad kiss, strip the clothes from each other, and jump into bed? After a long moment he managed to ask, “Aren’t we going to do anything?” And she answered, “If we were sneaking around by ourselves, I guess we could. But with them too? In the same house? At the same time? I think I’d be thinking of them throughout.” So they went back downstairs and made themselves a pair of drinks with Chism’s Dew, and went outside to admire the stars and moon.

Day never smoked pot again after that night. He doesn’t think the others did either. They never talked about reaching a decision not to smoke any more pot, but they never did.

Arch Schaffer was saying, “You know, it’s a little ironic, when you get right down to it. I’d like to say this on behalf of Bo, because he’s too polite to bring it up himself. But he made it perfectly clear that he wasn’t going to get back into politics for anybody after Al Gore, certainly not an unsung greenhorn in Arkansas. Then after he was persuaded to change his mind, no doubt because of the many attractive qualities of that unsung greenhorn, and after he went to considerable trouble to persuade the rest of us to join him in the crusade, he discovers that the unsung greenhorn has backed out! Can you blame us for feeling betrayed?” Schaffer cleared his throat, took a sip of his Haig & Haig and added, “Of course I mean no criticism of the unsung greenhorn.”

“Damn right!” remarked Carleton Drew, the media man. He was a short man who had long but neat black hair and the look of being uncomfortable away from the blistering operations of politics in the nation’s capitol. He wore an ascot, for heaven’s sake. “I’m speaking only for myself, not for Harry, but we both left dc and came out here to risk our necks working for an unknown entity. I gave up a chance to handle Bergen Reed’s campaign for California governor. And I did so with grave misgivings because, if I understand correctly, Mr. Ingledew would not permit television ads, which is neither here nor there in view of the fact that he doesn’t intend to run anyway! Jesus.” Day wondered if Carleton Drew, who had brought two bottles of good wine with him, as a well-meant gesture of cordiality, was a bit miffed because his wine remained unopened.

Around the circle of various chairs various people offered variations on this theme: here they all were, with nothing to do, feeling led astray and frustrated. If only Vernon could give the word, they’d amaze him, they’d amaze themselves even, by organizing a campaign such as had never been seen before in Arkansas politics. They were proud professionals. Bo Pharis politely interrupted whenever any of them even hinted at the matter of what they were losing, financially. Without coming out and saying so, he gave the impression that he intended to reimburse all their expenses out of his own pocket, but Vernon at one point flatly declared that he would give each of them a generous “honorarium” for damages. The baby of the group, young Castor Sherrill, who couldn’t have been yet out of his twenties (and was drinking beer, not hard liquor) spoke up and said that he was probably the one who needed damages most but didn’t want any because he had “volunteered” for this “mission” in order to gain experience in politics. He said he could certainly understand and appreciate Vernon’s original motive of wanting to run for governor in order to gain experience in politics, and then he said to Vernon, “Sir, if you don’t want to run, could I have your place?”

Everyone stared at Cast, and it took them a while to realize what he was suggesting, that he become a candidate for governor. Arch Schaffer informed him that the law said you had to be a resident of the state for seven years before you could run for governor.

“I was just kidding,” Cast grinned, and got up to get himself another bottle of beer.

But was he? Knowing Vernon as Day did, and watching him now as his eyes revealed his thought processes, Day could make a strong guess that Cast Sherrill’s naïve, even absurd suggestion might have been the spark that made Vernon come round. If you don’t want that piece of pie on your plate (and by now Jelena was serving her delicious black walnut and cushaw pies and everybody was ready for seconds), could I have it? No? So you decided to eat it yourself, after all? Just because I wanted it? Day didn’t yet know Cast Sherrill well enough (Bo in his chapter hadn’t yet revealed enough about him), but he wondered if Cast had deliberately made that suggestion just to prod Vernon into changing his mind.

Whatever, to switch to another metaphor, the title metaphor, Vernon was beginning his slow fall off the mountain. The mighty eagle sitting on the tree limb had been hit by just one pellet from a kid’s B-B gun. But it was enough to make him start to fall.

The fat fellow named Harry Wolfe said, looking directly at Day and even winking at him, “If the mountain won’t come to Mohammed, Mohammed had better get his ass to the mountain.” Day stared at him. He was obviously well along into inebriation, his words slurred, but why had he directed that statement to Day, as if he’d been reading Day’s mind at the moment when Day came up with the mountain metaphor? Suddenly—and Day wasn’t stone sober himself—he had a weird suspicion that he might not be the only one of them who had the privilege of knowing what this novel is about: not merely a participant in it but a spectator of it.

Day waited until the next time Harry Wolfe got up to replenish his drink—he didn’t have to wait long—and then joined him at the buffet-bar, and Day quietly inquired what he had meant by that remark. Harry eyed Day a bit superciliously and said, “You haven’t heard that expression? You’re Ingledew’s best friend and he hasn’t revealed to you the Wisdom of Islam?” Sorry, Day said, wondering how Harry had unearthed his friendship with Vernon. “It’s a long story,” Harry said, “about Mohammed trying to throw a miracle like Moses or Jesus had done to prove his supernatural powers. He commanded Mount Safa to come to him, but of course it wouldn’t, so he came up with a good excuse: Well, God was merciful because if the mountain had come to him it might have fallen on them and killed them all. ‘I will therefore go to the mountain,’ said Mohammed, ‘and thank God that He has had mercy on a stiff-necked generation.’ So you might say it means this: if we cannot do as we wish, we must do as we can. Or like this: if someone won’t do this thing for you, then you’d better do it for yourself. Or even like this: we may find a way to make a difficult situation better if we just think about it in different terms.”

“That’s very interesting,” Day said. “But why did you happen to direct the remark to me, almost as if you could tell what I was thinking at the moment? You’re supposed to be the top opposition-research man in the country, but your talents don’t include mind-reading, do they?”

Harry Wolfe chuckled. He toasted Day with his refilled tumbler of bourbon, and said, “It’s not just Vernon falling off the mountain. It’s all of us. You too, buddy.” He returned to his seat.

Lydia Caple said, “As far as the people of Arkansas are concerned, right now Castor Sherrill is just as good a candidate as Vernon Ingledew. Our big question is: what has Vernon got that Cast hasn’t?”

“Good looks,” said Harry Wolfe, who was in bad need of good looks himself.

“Brains,” said Bo Pharis, and there was laughter at the implication that Pharis’ protégé lacked brains.

“Presence,” intoned Carleton Drew. “If they photographed Cast, the image would be blank.” More laughter.

“Sex appeal,” offered Monica Breedlove, the only words she’d spoken. But she got some laughs too, and a pout from Cast.

“Duende and eupatrid mien,” said George Dinsmore, and the others did not know, as Day did, where George had picked up those uncharacteristic words. Perhaps the guests thought George was using some old Ozark dialect. Vernon laughed. Vernon laughed very hard.

“A hearty and sincere laugh,” said Arch Schaffer. “That’s a rare quality in politicians…although I haven’t heard Cast laugh so I don’t know if he’s got it or not.”

“Laugh for us, Cast,” Bo Pharis requested.

“After my next beer,” Cast said, and so many laughed at that remark that Cast himself laughed. It was a good laugh, but it didn’t have the heartiness and sincerity of Vernon’s.

The afternoon waned and they went on drinking. Eating all of Jelena’s pies kept them from getting empty-stomach drunk, but they were all getting pretty light-headed and convivial. Harry Wolfe, who was a jump ahead of the rest of them in the intoxication upgrade, declared that because he’d been out of training for so long in his chosen field of uncovering dark secrets about the opposition, he had decided to get back in practice by digging up the dirt on each of his fellow members of the team, if anybody would care to hear it?

“Tell us!” several exclaimed, and Harry started with the head-man himself, Bo Pharis. Despite being the valedictorian of Harrison High, Bo had been caught cheating on the final exam in Physics his senior year. Arch Schaffer during the early Seventies had a real drinking problem that got him into several scrapes, jails, and situations. Carleton Drew was a gun nut and not only had done much work for the National Rifle Association but personally possessed an arsenal of handguns and long guns. Lydia Caple at the age of seventeen had been caught shoplifting a handful of Bit o’ Honey bars at a Little Rock supermarket. Monica Breedlove had five tickets for speeding in her Camaro. And Castor Sherrill spent his spare time sexsurfing the Internet.

“You forgot somebody,” Bo Pharis said to Harry Wolfe.

“Who?”

“Yourself.”

“Hell, I wouldn’t need to do oppo research to find that out,” Harry said. “All I’d need would be a good memory, but damn me if I can remember a single bad thing I ever did in my life.” Several others joined Harry in his drunken laughter.

Vernon looked levelly at Harry and asked, “When are you going to practice on me?” Day felt it was almost a concession, it was almost as if Vernon had changed his mind and wanted to get the ball rolling.

“That’s the very first thing I did,” Harry Wolfe announced. They all looked at him and waited expectantly. But he said nothing else.

The aroma of baking ham filled the house and gave Day an appetite, even if he knew that they would be served a meat inferior to Ingledew Ham.

Day spoke up, a bit self-consciously. “Well?” he said to Harry Wolfe. “Let’s hear it. What did you find? He couldn’t make the mountain come to him?”

“Mohammed’s problems with Mount Safa were like nothing compared with Vernon’s problems with Mount Ingledew,” said Harry. He looked inquiringly at Jelena. “This is Mount Ingledew, I take it?”

“Actually, Ingledew Mountain is the big one you see to the southeast,” Jelena informed him. “This one is called Daniels Mountain.”

“After Daniel Lyam Montross?” asked Harry, and once again Day was stunned by his wealth of information. But Harry could easily have read any one of the four Stay More novels in which Montross appears.

“How did you know about him?” Jelena asked. “But no, this mountain had been named back in the Nineteenth Century for an early settler whose last name was Daniels.”

“Excuse my interruption of this geographical discourse,” Day put in, “but we’re still waiting to hear what Mr. Wolfe has uncovered about Vernon.”

Harry Wolfe gave Day another of his supercilious looks. “What the fuck difference does it make? There’s not going to be any campaign. There’s no need to get personal on Vernon. Let sleeping dogs lie, for fuck’s sake.”

“Now, Harry,” Bo Pharis said, “I haven’t seen anybody else throw in the towel. If the towel is going to be thrown, I don’t think you’re the one to do it.”

“Supper’s ready,” Jelena announced.

There was no dining table to accommodate the fourteen of them, so they had supper with the plates in their laps in their customary places, although they were sitting as if it had been planned for a table: Vernon at one end with Lydia Caple beside him, Jelena at the other end with Bo Pharis beside her, the rest of them arranged in such a way that spontaneous conversations developed between one and another, and no attempt was made to keep the supper talk focused on the group as a whole or the subject of the meeting. There was lots of chatter. Day was sitting on Jelena’s left and he overheard her conversation with Bo Pharis on her right. She served, among the variety of side dishes, radishes which had been overwintered under straw in her garden, and Bo and Jelena devoted several minutes to talking radishes.

The Petit Jean ham wasn’t bad at all. In fact, it was tasty. But there is simply no comparison to Ingledew Ham. When Carleton Drew made the mistake of flamboyantly adoring the ham, even to the point of saying, “I can see why you made a fortune on this!” Day was not going to be the one to correct him. It was Bo Pharis.

“Carleton,” said Bo, “hold on. I’ve had plenty of Ingledew Ham, and I can tell you: this is an impostor. Or else the hog from which it was made wandered too far and ate something abominable.” Day was impressed with Bo, not just at his sensitive palate but his knowledge of the fact that Ingledew hogs are indeed free-ranging, not penned up and fed the usual commercial crap but allowed to forage for themselves in their natural element, the woods. Bo turned to Jelena and said, “So why did you do it?”

“Just to test you,” Jelena said. “And you passed the test. Congratulations. I apologize, but this isn’t Ingledew Ham. It’s Petit Jean, a perfectly fine Arkansas brand but just nothing at all like ours.”

“I flunked,” Carleton said morosely, and there was laughter.

“Maybe they’ll serve Ingledew Ham with your eggs Benedict at breakfast,” Day said, “so you can see the difference.”

Day got some polite laughs but also some quizzical looks: were they all going to be continuing this session through the night?

In fact, any supper party (although Day hadn’t been to many in his life) has a magic moment when everybody has a sense of the affair having run its course and people begin to leave. That magic moment didn’t happen here. Day reflected that everyone knew that nothing really had been accomplished, and there was a reluctance to leave the matter unsettled. Jelena, having already served her great pies at tea time, served for late dessert a light but scrumptious lemon curd. Although she offered carafes of both regular and decaf coffee, many of them preferred to make further inroads on the bar. The atmosphere was genial; people had even forgiven Harry Wolfe his snooping, and nobody was even making allusions about Vernon’s resolute refusal, which was, Day could detect in his eyes and manner, losing its resolution. People got up and wandered around the house and into the kitchen and, in the case of the few smokers, like Cast and Harry (but not Jelena) outside into the yard. People paired off; it was more like a party than a meeting. Day overheard Bo and Jelena, both once long-ago valedictorians at Harrison High, reminiscing about certain teachers they’d had in common and the Key Club to which they’d both belonged.

It dawned on Day for the first time that the median age of all these people was almost fifty. They weren’t young. Castor Sherrill was in his late twenties, Monica Breedlove in her late thirties, the rest of them either pushing fifty or pulling it. One of many things Vernon and Day had in common was that they lived with women older than themselves: Diana was three years older than Day, Jelena eight years older than Vernon. George Dinsmore was the “old man” at sixty-four. Vernon’s sister Sharon was a year older than he, and her husband Larry, the former college professor, was about the same age. Neither Sharon nor Larry had spoken up during the meeting, but they were doing a lot of socializing now that the meeting had changed to a party. Most everyone, Day reflected, had a sense of being what Jelena spoke of (or thought of) in her chapter as “almost suffocated with an unconscious nostalgia for a golden age they hadn’t even known and perhaps hadn’t even been told about but simply knew had once existed and now did not, not any more.”

Speaking only for himself (and possibly for Diana) Day knew that the incidents and adventures he’d known as a young man, particularly those of Some Other Place. The Right Place., were experiences he could never hope to have again. As he had expressed it in his own contribution to that book, Diana’s and his exploration of ghost towns had led him to realize that, as he said, “Oh, this is a story of—you know it, don’t you?—a story not of ghost towns but of lost places in the heart, of vanished life in the hidden places of the soul, oh, this is not a story of actual places where actual people lived and dreamed and died but a story of lost lives and abandoned dreams and the dying of childhood, oh, a story of the great ghost villages of the mind.” Day knew that everyone at Vernon’s and Jelena’s house that night, even young Cast, had an aching sense of those lost places and a fear of never finding them, and a notion, even a conviction, that perhaps Vernon Ingledew could lead the recapturing of them.

But the time came when they could no longer cling to each other and wait for Vernon to take the first step. It was almost eleven, and the Samurai realized they couldn’t hope to drive back to Fayetteville that night. Diana, bless her, was the first to offer an alternative when she suggested that they had two spare bedrooms. Sharon spoke up for the first time and said they had a convertible sofa in Larry’s study. Jelena pointed to her own sofa and said somebody could sleep on that and there’s a guestroom in the other bubble. The Samurai drew lots and everybody had a place to sleep.

In this spirit of good feeling, as they were preparing to leave the Ingledew house and were putting on their coats, Lydia Caple got in a few last words on the purpose of the get-together. “Some of you may remember when Bill Clinton lost to that Republican jerk Frank White in 1980 and had to give up the Governor’s Mansion for a couple of years. For a while he thought his political career was over. He was really down. He was the youngest ‘former governor’ in American history. His staff was as frustrated and depressed as he was, and some of them were pissed off at him for letting them down. He could have quit. He could have devoted himself to the study of quantum mechanics and forgotten about politics. But he got his staff together, including Monica and me, and told us that we were going to mobilize the grassroots workers who had been lazy and apathetic in the election Clinton lost. We got thousands of volunteers, mostly energetic young people, and those workers, to use one of Monica’s favorite expressions, busted their ass. In all my years of campaigning, I’d never seen such spirit, such a sense of having a mission. And as you know, Clinton demolished White the next time around.”

When she’d finished this story, she looked around to gauge the effect of her words on each of them, and then she took a deep breath and said, “I felt some of that same spirit in this house tonight. It’s the first time I felt it since then: that willingness and that readiness, to take it to the mountain, to move mountains.”

“Even to fall off ’em,” Harry Wolfe said drunkenly.

“If we fall,” Bo Pharis said, “we might discover there’s a thrill in free-falling.”

“If we fall,” Arch Schaffer said, “we might discover that we can fly.”

Diana and Day were going to accommodate Lydia and Arch for the night. Monica and Harry would stay with Sharon and Larry. Bo, Carleton and Cast were going to stay with Vernon and, as Day would later learn, stay up all night talking. As in Cincinnati, the talk would not have anything to do with politics but with their mutual interests in several areas of scientific and artistic inquiry. There was nothing Bo could say about politics to sway Vernon. But perhaps he wouldn’t need to.

Vernon walked them to their cars with a high-powered flashlight. Along the way, they discovered that Jelena’s laundry was still hanging on the clothesline, and Day offered to help her take it down. Everyone pitched in and helped, unfastening from their clothespins all the garments and towels and linen. Fourteen people make quick work of such a thing. As Day was taking down a towel, Vernon gripped Day’s upper arm in a friendly gesture that he would eventually use on hundreds of voters, a gesture that could, from one point of view, resemble that of a man clutching at a tree branch to keep from falling off the mountain. “Well, Day,” he said quietly to his best friend, “I’ve never asked you this before. What would it do to your opinion of me if I changed my mind?”

Day clapped him on the back. “It would just confirm what I’ve known all along.”

Chapter six

What a weird but fabulous room. The bed was the loveliest thing Lydia had ever seen or slept in, and there was an antique chifforobe for hanging up her clothes, as well as an antique wash-stand with basin and pitcher. There was a small desk, actually just a library table with a few books upon it that looked as if they hadn’t been opened for years. Hadn’t anybody else ever slept here in a long time? But there was fresh water in the pitcher! And the walls…my God, at first she thought it was strange wallpaper, but looking closer she saw that there was writing all over the walls: a kind of longhand such as was taught to schoolkids in the nineteenth century, covering all of the white plaster everywhere.

They’d told her, as if to make her appreciate it, that this had been the study of Daniel Lyam Montross. She wasn’t sure who he’d been. Diana Stoving’s grandfather? She remembered seeing this house in The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, which she’d read when she was in high school a long time ago, and she just vaguely remembered what it had said about the man who’d built this house, some outsider who’d come into Stay More and mystified the locals because he was strange and kept to himself.

Speaking of strangeness, she thought her host, Day Whittacker, was a rare bird. Well, he looked normal. In fact, he was good-looking in a rugged sort of way, but there was something in his eyes that made him seem…was possessed the word she wanted? Maybe weird was the word; weird like this room, and as she looked around her before putting out the light she wondered if maybe Day was the one who had done this room, even writing on the walls, thinking up all of those lists, nine items in each, under “Montross, His Becomings; Montross, His Leavings; Montross, His Namings; Montross, His Hummings; Montross, His Blessings; Montross, His Damnings.” She fell asleep, quickly and easily, and if her dreams were haunted at all she didn’t remember any of them in the morning. She would have only a slight hangover: she’d had too much of the Stolichnaya, but it was a fine vodka and everyone else had freely imbibed, except Monica, who’d stuck to drinking Coke. Lydia knew why Monica could have had something heavy but preferred Coke. Lydia wondered if she’d done the right thing in persuading Monica to come up here from Louisiana, leaving the house out in the country she’d worked so hard with her own hands to build, building it on the same ancestral spot where her family house had burned, taking her mother’s life with it. Monica had sworn off politics to go home and do that, build that house. Now Lydia felt she’d grievously misled the woman. We’ve all been grievously misled, she reflected. We’ve been had.

The smell of coffee and frying bacon was coming upstairs. Lydia dressed in dark green slacks and top, different from what she’d worn yesterday, an outfit that looked a little more countryfied, as this house was such a modest place compared with that extravagant pair of globes that the Ingledews lived in. Before going downstairs she paused to examine the three books on the little library table: an old, ponderous unabridged dictionary, an anthology of Elizabethan poetry, and a Bible that must have been used by some early settler.

At breakfast she asked Arch if he knew what time they’d be heading back to Fayetteville. She really liked Arch; all her many dealings with him, dating back to when she was just a cub reporter at the old Gazette and he was a patient teacher of the ways of the political world, and then in the Eighties when he had the best PR firm in Little Rock and could be counted on to furnish her with material for a column—all these dealings were up front, white and mellow, and he’d used his years of experience as chief of staff for Governor-then-Senator Bumpers to help her learn the ropes when she went to work for Clinton.

“What’s the hurry, Lydia?” he said, smiling. “Now that we’ve finally found Stay More, we ought to stay more.” He smiled at Day and Diana. “But we don’t want to wear out our welcome.”

Diana said, “Stay as long as you like. Please.” Lydia liked Diana. Unlike her husband she was real and all there.

“Vernon called,” Day said. “He wants to offer you a tour of what’s left of the town.”

She was glad she stayed more. After breakfast they drove into what once had been the center of the thriving village of Stay More but now contained only one old building, which she recognized from the Architecture book as the two-story verandahed house that Jacob Ingledew had built in 1868 after he returned home from his stint as Governor of Arkansas. It was a handsome old building and someone—probably Vernon—had put a good bit of money into fixing it up, so that it looked newer than it had when Governor Ingledew built it.

“Who lives there now?” Lydia wanted to know.

Day and Diana exchanged looks. Diana said, “The woman who restored the house. Vernon sold it to her. I don’t think we’ll see her and I don’t think we’ll be invited inside the house. She is a woman who…well, let’s simply call her Whom We Cannot Name.”

Lydia laughed. She knew that woman from the architecture novel, Jacob Ingledew’s mysterious mistress who was a young Little Rock widow and had thrown a bouquet of flowers at his feet from the gallery of Old State House when he had stood bravely alone to vote against Secession at the outbreak of the War. She had later become social secretary for his wife Sarah and had accompanied them back home to Stay More, where she’d lived in this house the rest of her life, long after Jacob and Sarah had died. The reason this house had three doors—what that novelist had called ‘trigeminal’(but that reminded Lydia of her neuralgia)—was because the three of them had lived together in a kind of menage à trois for many years.

Lydia said, “I assume that the Whom We Cannot Name who lives here now is not Vernon’s mistress?”

Day and Diana laughed. Diana said, “Heaven’s no! Nor is it likely she would ever become his mistress.”

“She’s old and ugly?” Lydia asked.

“She’s quite attractive,” Diana said, “and she’s just a bit younger than Vernon and Day. But trust me, she won’t be getting involved with Vernon, although they’re great friends and chess partners.”

“My, my,” Lydia remarked, “what mystery lurks behind the doors of Stay More.”

Across the road from the Jacob Ingledew house, which had once served, after the death of the Woman Whom We Cannot Name the First, as the village’s only hotel, was all that remained of Stay More’s principal general store, which had once been an imposing edifice of three floors beneath a huge gable roof. All that was left now was the cement porch floor and the cement steps leading up to it.

It was at this porch to the missing store that all the participants of yesterday’s meeting and supper party parked their cars and rejoined one another. She was glad to see her friends again. The morning was sunny and growing warmer although a March breeze kept it uncomfortably cool.

Vernon and Jelena, with help from George Dinsmore (who was quickly becoming Lydia’s favorite), led them on a tour of the remains of the village, pointing out the locations of the two doctor’s offices, the old bank, the blacksmith shop, and the cavernous cellar hole of what had been the great gristmill. Throughout their tour they encountered immense wandering hogs, and Vernon or George introduced several of them by name, George explaining that each of the many Ingledew hogs, male or female, had been named after a celebrated Razorback athletic star.

“Pat one if ye’d care to,” George suggested. “They don’t bite.” Lydia gave the mammoth hog named Burlsworth a tentative pat on his head, and he grunted and rolled his eyes at her.

“If you let them run loose all over the place,” Lydia wondered, “don’t they ever get hit by cars?”

“What cars?” George said. “Aint much traffic hereabouts. But if one of these here hogs ever met up with a car, the car would kindly go into the shop, not the hog.”

Farther up the main road they came to the ruins of what had been the Swains Creek Bank and Trust Company, and across from it the smaller general store that had been the town’s last post office and the home of Latha Bourne Dill. It was now tastefully restored as the home of Sharon and Larry Brace. Sharon served coffee and homemade beignets, and the fourteen people sat or stood on the porch of the house/store the same way that people had congregated there in the old days when it had still been the town’s post office. Those who wanted were given a tour of the interior, to see how Sharon had restored the store part with its post office boxes, and Larry had converted a side-room into his book-lined study, where an IBM Selectric typewriter was looking like an antique alongside the latest computer, scanner and printer. Lydia felt a pang of envy, and told herself she’d retreat from the world too if she could live like this.

Back on the porch, Vernon declared, “I’d like to say a word.” There was something about his tone that made everyone spontaneously sit down, either on the edge of the porch floor or in the assorted porch furniture, including a couple of nail kegs. Lydia sat in a captain’s chair. “This is an appropriate place for it,” Vernon said, and Lydia detected that she wasn’t the only one who had suspended breathing. “This was my grandmother’s store, as well as her house, and it’s the coziest spot Stay More ever had. It’s steeped in human history. So I may as well give it a little more: I’ve decided to run for governor.”

The first response came from George, who said, “Dad blast it all to ding dang hell!”

“Pussy’s in the well,” rhymed Harry Wolfe. He hadn’t started drinking yet today; it was his usual manner.

“Wow!” said Bo Pharis, and stood up to shake Vernon’s hand and clap him on the back. “Let the good times roll!”

“Way to go!” said Arch.

Day said to Jelena, “Sorry.”

“He woke me with the news,” Jelena told Day. “About five o’clock. I was the first to know, at least. Unless he’d already told Bo.”

Lydia said to Carleton Drew, “Let’s take a little hike,” and she led him out of earshot of the others. She and Carleton hadn’t had time to get acquainted or compare notes, and she wanted Carleton to know the chain of command. “Got your phone handy?” His cell phone was in Bo’s Nissan. He fetched it. She had her own in her purse. They agreed she would do the television stations and major newspapers; he would do the radio stations and the lesser newspapers. Not that she outranked him in the media department, but she had many more media contacts than he did, as she discovered when she put in her first call, to station KFSM in Fort Smith, a CBS affiliate, and was immediately connected to the station manager, with whom she’d once had lunch. They would send a crew right out, he said, and she gave directions, as best she could remember, on how to find Stay More.

“We’d better get Ingledew’s permission,” Carleton suggested. “You know he has this thing about TV.”

“Hold on,” she said to the phone and yelled at Vernon, “Hey! You got any objection to being on television?”

“My personal antipathy toward television,” Vernon said, “doesn’t extend to others’ use of it in any form.”

Lydia needed only a moment to figure that out and then she told KFSM the formal announcement would be at four o’clock. To be fair to the other networks, she also called KHOG in Fayetteville and KFAA in Rogers, ABC and NBC affiliates, respectively. She was pleased that the mention of her name got her a quick connection with the station manager wherever she called, and with editors at the newspapers she called. Carleton Drew’s name couldn’t have accomplished that in Arkansas.

She took the trouble to write out for Carleton’s benefit the “official” release she was dictating to the media:

“Deep in the remotest Ozarks a man has decided to learn Arkansas politics by starting at the top. Vernon Ingledew, 49, owner and operator of Ingledew Ham, declared today for governor in the Democratic primary to be held in May.

He will face eight other candidates, including former governor Jim Ray Birdwell and former congressman Bob Tunney, for the awesome right to challenge Republican Governor P.T. ‘Shoat’ Bradfield in the November election.

Unlike the other eight candidates, Ingledew has had no experience at all in elective office. But his vision for the state of Arkansas in the 21st century, and his exceptional intelligence, have already drawn to his corner a team of seasoned political professionals, including such well-known consultants as Bolin Pharis III, a native of Harrison, on leave as vice president for public relations at a major national corporation in Cincinnati; Archie Schaffer III, on leave as Director of Media, Public and Governmental Affairs for Tyson Foods, Inc. in Springdale; and Lydia Caple III, former political reporter and columnist at the Gazette and the merged Democrat-Gazette, as well as a well-known political consultant in her own right…”

“Are you really Lydia Caple the Third?” Carleton asked her.

“Of course not,” Lydia said. She handed Carleton the handwritten copy of the release and told him to get busy.

Then she put in a call, a long one, to Hank Endicott at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock, the state’s largest and most influential newspaper. When the old Democrat, Hank’s paper, had merged with the Gazette, Lydia’s paper, following a typically internecine newspaper war, Hank had taken over the thrice-weekly op-ed political column that Lydia had been writing, a circumstance which could have resulted in great enmity between them had it not been for Lydia’s gracious and philosophical attitude. Hank and Lydia weren’t exactly friends. They’d never lunched together and he’d never tried to flirt with her, and sometimes his political opinions had caused Lydia to cuss him to his face, but they had remained on good speaking terms if only because she found it easy to talk to him. Now she found it easy to tell him a lot of off-the-record information about Vernon—the things that the investigative reporters would find out soon enough—in order to give Endicott the full picture with all the local color it needed.

When she’d finished, Endicott asked, “What’s your part in all of this, Lydia?”

“My part?” she said. “I’m working for him. The minute he made his announcement, half an hour ago here in Stay More, I became his employee.”

“I can’t believe it,” Endicott said. “You?”

“There are going to be a lot of things about Vernon Ingledew that you won’t believe. It’s going to be your job to make him believable to the readers of your paper.”

“No, my job is just to say what I think about the world.”

“The world of Vernon Ingledew is going to give you plenty to think about.”

Bo Pharis called a strategy session that afternoon following lunch. By lunchtime the weather was warm enough that they could eat al fresco. Good George Dinsmore disappeared and returned with baskets of food: sandwich fixings, chips, condiments, beer and wine. Real Ingledew Ham was included this time. Sharon furnished a pot of baked beans she’d been cooking all morning. Diana fetched a plate of assorted homemade cookies.

It was a grand lunch but as soon as it was over they had to get down to business. First, Bo wanted the Seven Samurai to meet without Vernon. Not that there was anything they were going to keep secret from him, but they didn’t want to be inhibited by the candidate’s presence while they bounced ideas off each other. Sharon offered them the use of the interior of the store, where they could sit around the potbellied stove and cracker barrel. Then, later in the afternoon they’d bring Vernon into the meeting in time to get him ready for his formal announcement, scheduled for four o’clock when the media would arrive.

During the session without Vernon, while he was presumably secluding himself to work on the draft of his formal announcement, they discussed their individual responsibilities, and their ideas for making most effective use of their ingenuity and talents, but they agreed that they’d have to wait until Monday to really get started, when Bo and Arch would begin phoning and emailing old friends and Arch would use his contacts in the Democratic Party organization to get the machinery rolling.

Young Cast Sherrill brought up the idea that the state’s colleges and universities would soon be having their spring break, and it was important that sufficient college students be “energized” before the break to start “infecting” a considerable contingent of campaign workers. Monica volunteered to accompany Cast on a tour of the campuses the following week. Bo complimented Cast on his idea and complimented Monica for helping with it, but reminded Monica that her principal responsibility was office manager of campaign headquarters, which she would be setting up in Fayetteville, a city Vernon had decided would be a more appropriate place for it than Little Rock.

Lydia wanted to be complimented too so she brought up the idea of getting early endorsements from other prominent politicians. “Arch,” she asked, “could you get your Uncle Dale to plunk for us?” Arch said he could damn well try, but that Dale Bumpers, who had been one of the most popular governors of Arkansas in modern times during the Seventies, and who had followed that up with a distinguished career in the United States Senate, had consistently refused to endorse any candidates for the primaries, preferring to wait for the general election.

“And I’ll talk to David Pryor,” Lydia said. Like Bumpers, Pryor was a popular former governor who had also served in the U.S. Senate before his retirement.

“Good for you, Lydia,” Bo said. “Good for you.”

Harry Wolfe promised to begin digging up the dirt on the eight other candidates. Bo said he was driving in to Harrison to visit his mother on Sunday, and he’d give a Harry a lift to the Harrison airport so he could fly to Little Rock, the best place for researching the opposition.

The strategy session lasted over an hour, and then they sent Cast to find Vernon and invite him for the second or “open” part of the meeting. When Vernon arrived, Bo said to him, without beating around the bush, “Governor, do you have your speech ready?”

“Do I have to make a speech?” Vernon asked.

“Well, you can’t simply say, ‘Look, I’m running.’ And you ought to be ready to answer the reporters’ questions.”

Lydia would discover, to her and their chagrin, that they needed more than a couple of hours to prep Vernon for his first public announcement and his fielding of questions. They had taken it for granted that a man with—what was that charming expression of George Dinsmore? Duende and eupatrid mien, for godsake!—would be able to compose himself in front of a microphone and say something forceful and noteworthy to convince the people of Arkansas that he was a worthy candidate for governor.

“First,” Lydia said to him, “I think you ought to wear a jacket and tie, not just that shirt.”

The fact that he hung his head when she spoke to him made her think that he was ashamed of his shirt, but then she realized he was known to be shy of women. “What’s wrong with this shirt?” he asked his shoes innocently, and she wondered how to tell him. The shirt wasn’t bad; it was a plaid wool in an attractive color that went well with his complexion and looked like something a business executive would wear on weekends in the country.

Bo Pharis said, “When you came to my office that first time we met, I could have mistaken you for a CEO or a US senator. Couldn’t you wear that same suit?”

“That was Cincinnati,” Vernon pointed out. “This is Stay More. The last time I wore a necktie in Stay More was when I was ten years old and they made me attend Jelena’s wedding.”

“Speaking of Jelena,” Carleton Drew said. “What are you going to tell the media about your…uh, living arrangements with your cousin?”

“What are the media going to ask me?”

“She’s going to be by your side, isn’t she?” Bo said. “How are you going to introduce her?”

Vernon smiled. “I’m going to say, ‘This is Jelena Ingledew, who would much prefer that I stay home and make love to her instead of running for governor.’”

“You’re not going to say that!” Bo said.

“Then what should I say?” Vernon asked.

The Seven Samurai looked at one another; a couple of them actually scratched their heads in thought. Timid Monica Breedlove was the first to speak up. “Couldn’t he simply say, ‘This is my better half’?”

“Bitter half is more like it,” Vernon commented, not to Monica but to the sky. “She’s not going to be smiling, and I’m not going to force her to smile.”

“But sir,” Cast Sherrill put in, “how’s that gonna look? She’s so much older anyhow, she’ll really look like a senior citizen if you can’t get her to smile!”

“Mr. Sherrill,” Vernon said. That’s all he said, but his tone was such that Cast knew he’d be unemployed shortly if he didn’t watch his tongue.

“Jelena is a beautiful lady, smiling or not,” Bo commented. “Let’s not concern ourselves with her appearance.”

Carleton Drew said, “Personally I’m for full disclosure from the beginning. Since they’re going to find out everything about Vernon before the first vote is cast, we might as well put all our cards on the table from the git-go.”

Arch said, “That’s an admirable policy, but I think we’d better lay the cards down one at a time, in order to give people a chance to absorb them.”

When Jelena returned eventually in her Isuzu 4-by-4, Lydia was troubled to see that she was still wearing the same blue jeans and sweater she’d had on that morning. While Lydia was envious because she herself couldn’t fit as neatly into blue jeans, or couldn’t look as presentable in them, she didn’t think Jelena looked like a governor’s wife. Of course, she reminded herself, she isn’t his wife.

They had to decide upon a place to serve as the setting for the announcement. Vernon wanted to use the porch of Latha’s store, now Sharon’s house, the same place where he’d declared his intentions earlier that day, but the Samurai were pretty much in agreement that it wasn’t very photogenic: it just looked like some old country store…or an old country store converted into a house. Vernon’s second choice was the porch of the Governor Ingledew house, but he was reluctant to assemble a crowd there because it might disturb Whom We Cannot Name II. Lydia and the other Samurai much preferred that edifice, however, so Vernon offered to go talk to the Woman about it.

Other things continued to go wrong on this most momentous of days. The announcement was scheduled for four o’clock, and therefore the television crews ought to have arrived and been set up by three-thirty at the latest, but four o’clock itself came and there was nobody there except the Samurai and the local people, including all of the employees of Ingledew Ham, who had been given the afternoon off. Others of the few citizens of Stay More also showed up, including Vernon’s grandmother, the regal dowager Latha Bourne Dill, who didn’t look, as Lydia had been told, a full century old. Lydia couldn’t take her eyes off the woman, but soon she had to return her eyes to the road and wonder what the hell was keeping those media people.

Her cell phone rang. It was one of the television people, calling from somewhere in the vicinity south of Parthenon, where all of the television vans and the reporters’ cars had apparently taken a sequence of wrong turns and become hopelessly lost.

Lydia reported this to Bo Pharis, and he suggested that Cast take George in the Nissan Patrol and go out searching for the media crews and bring them in.

It was almost five o’clock before Cast and George returned, leading a convoy of cars, vans, and trucks. And then Lydia’s attention became focused, intensely and fearfully, upon what was to become the disaster of Vernon Ingledew’s formal announcement for governor.

When the microphones were in place at the top of the steps leading up to the porch of the Governor Ingledew house, Vernon just sort of ambled up to them. He didn’t walk with a brisk confident stride like all seasoned politicians. He ambled. And he just stood there with his hands in his pockets and a blank look on his face before realizing he’d forgotten Jelena, so he had to amble back down the steps and find her in the crowd and take her by the hand and pull her back up onto the porch as if he were a mother trying to get the scared kid to go to the first day of school.

Bolin Pharis, his campaign manager, introduced him. “People of Stay More, people of Arkansas,” Bo said, “it is my great privilege to present to you a man some of you already know and all of you will come to know as well as you know yourselves!” He paused and draped one of his muscular arms across Vernon’s shoulders. Lydia noticed that Vernon was several inches taller than Bo, but he wasn’t standing up straight to his full height. He had a kind of slouch, for godsakes.

Bo went on, “We’re standing here in front of the charming old house that Jacob Ingledew built for himself and his family after he left the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock in 1868. Just why we’re standing here I’m going to leave to Vernon Ingledew to tell you. He is a direct descendant of that brave, wise, courageous governor who dared to stand on the floor of the Old State House in 1863 and vote ‘No!’ against the motion to secede Arkansas from the Union, and who fought valiantly to keep the Union together during the Civil War, and who served as an able and foresightful governor to steer the state of Arkansas through the perilous years of Reconstruction after the war!”

Lydia admired the way Bo Pharis could say these words as if he were describing Vernon rather than Jacob.

“Look around, friends, at these lovely Arkansas mountains.” Here Bo paused long enough to let the television cameras pan the surrounding landscape. “Vernon Ingledew was born here, raised here, and learned how to make a scrumptious ham that has watered the mouths of every one of you! And now his beloved hills are going to let him go. But I’ll let him tell you why. Ladies and gentlemen, the most remarkable citizen of the state of Arkansas, our next governor, Vernon Ingledew!”

Lydia would have liked it if Vernon had said something folksy like “Howdy, I sure am proud to be here,” but he just stood there for a too-long moment, staring into the cameras, his hands still stuck in his pockets, and then he turned his head and stared at the house behind him, as if he were seeing it for the first time. Lydia detected, behind one of the curtained windows, the vague but striking face of Whom We Cannot Name II. Lydia hoped that none of the cameramen were zooming in, trying to pick out the figure behind the curtain.

Vernon faced the crowd again and tried to speak. “G-g-good evening,” he stammered. Although it was getting dark pretty fast, it wasn’t evening yet, but Lydia remembered that in the Ozarks “evening” means all the rest of the day following noon. Vernon gulped and faltered onward. “J-J-Jacob Ingledew wasn’t a great governor, and I’m sure he would much rather have—”

Vernon seemed suddenly to realize that what he was saying was being heard not just by this small gathering but by thousands of people all over the state, and for a moment he appeared on the verge of panic. Lydia’s heart quit beating.

“—much rather have, have, have stayed right here in Stay More instead of going to Little Rock. He had no use for Little Rock. Neither have I.” Vernon appeared to be getting in control of himself, but at the cost of beginning to make outrageous statements. He’d already lost the big Little Rock vote. Vernon wasn’t letting his eyes roam from face to face the way a good speaker should, but just staring straight ahead at an imaginary person, and Lydia realized she had better become that person herself real fast so she tried to position herself in Vernon’s line of sight and tried to convey instructions by sign language, to get him to stand up straight, to get him to take his hands out of his pockets, to get him to move his eyes from face to face, until she realized that Vernon wasn’t looking at her, because she was a woman. Her gesticulations failed to escape the notice of several media people, who snickered or laughed, and Vernon just stopped speaking, thinking he was being laughed at. He waited until it was completely silent, and then, as if Lydia’s sign language had gotten through to him, he took his hands out of his pockets, straightened his backbone, and began to look intently at each person…at least each male person.

“I am a reluctant candidate for governor,” he went on. “Jacob Ingledew was reluctant, but he accepted the job because this state was in a mess and only he with his eccentric ideas could straighten things out after the war. You know the state was bankrupt when he took over, and when he left office it had a surplus. He had to put a tax on everything—I think it’s only a myth that he put a tax on breathing.” Vernon grinned and waited to see if anybody laughed. George Dinsmore could be heard chuckling, and there was a smattering of laughter from a few others. “But he managed to hold the state together. I’m not going to ask you to vote for me because I’m Jacob Ingledew’s great-great-great grandson.” At first Lydia thought he was stuttering again, but she realized he was tracing his descent to his ancestor. “But I’m going to tell you that my ideas may be just as eccentric as his, and they’re going to save this state!” Vernon swept his arm, and permitted his voice to rise slightly toward the end of this sentence but otherwise his delivery was mild, without inflection, without any semblance of oratory. Lydia, using a sign language resembling the motions of an orchestra conductor trying to get a full crescendo, attempted to get Vernon to impart more eloquence to his speech, but without much luck. He still could not look at her.

Vernon rambled on about the anfractuous direction Arkansas had taken since these Republicans Mike Huckabee and then Shoat Bradfield had taken office. Arkansas might be enjoying a period of record economic prosperity but it wasn’t because of Huckabee and Bradfield. Vernon wanted a chance to show how tenebrific the state had really been during the Republican years. His own programs were still inchoate and perhaps ineffable, but he wanted a chance to enunciate them. Lydia made a mental note to pass out pocket dictionaries at Vernon’s next speech.

Dark had settled in, the place was as tenebrific as hell, but the TV crews had turned on their bright lights. Vernon didn’t even say thank you. A good speech ought to end by expressing gratitude for the listener’s attention, but Vernon seemed to think he was doing everyone a favor. Lydia was beginning to feel depressed. She knew that even if Vernon survived the primaries, if Shoat Bradfield challenged him to a debate, there would be no way that Vernon could stand up against Bradfield’s powerful oratorical skills.

But the worst part of it didn’t start until the question period, and the first reporter, a woman from the Northwest Arkansas Times, asked, “Mr. Ingledew, can’t you give us any idea of just what exactly you plan to do to improve the state of Arkansas?”

Because the reporter was a woman, Vernon wouldn’t look at her, and Lydia wasn’t even sure he had heard her. But then he chose to address his answer to one of the TV cameras, “Certainly. For starters, I would like, eventually, to extirpate our institutions, particularly our prisons, our schools, even our hospitals.”

Lydia wondered what extirpate meant and why he had to use such fancy words. If it meant improve, why couldn’t he just say improve? If it meant paint and fix up, why couldn’t he just say paint and fix up? She noticed that Bo Pharis had covered his face in his hands, so maybe Bo at least knew what the word meant. One of the reporters asked Vernon how to spell the word, and he spelled it out, but he didn’t bother to offer synonyms, and none of the reporters had the guts to admit that none of them knew what it meant.

Another reporter, a man from the Springdale Morning News, asked, “What about churches? Do you plan to extirpate the churches too?”

“No,” Vernon said. “As Plutarch wrote, ‘If we traverse the world, it is possible to find cities without walls, without letters, without kings, without wealth, without coin, without schools and theaters; but a city without a temple, or that practiseth not worship, prayer and the like, no one ever saw.’”

“Where do you practiseth worship?” the same reporter asked. “What church do you go to?”

“None,” Vernon said, but then he touched his heart. “Here’s my temple.”

“You have no religion?” the reporter asked, rather challengingly.

“Well, you might say I follow The Tao,” Vernon admitted, “So I suppose you could call me a Taoist if you had to.”

Like the reporters, Lydia heard this the way Vernon pronounced it, as “Dow,” and she, like they, took it to mean that the only thing Vernon worshipped was the Dow-Jones average. Which, of course, the vast majority of other Arkansas people also worshipped, even if they were Christians.

“Did you go to the University? Or where?” asked a teenaged (male) reporter from the Arkansas Traveler, the student newspaper at the University. Lydia realized she ought to have prepared in advance some bio sheets to give these people. If she had, they wouldn’t have to ask such questions. But she also realized why she hadn’t: a Vernon Ingledew bio would look awful to a reporter, let alone a voter.

“I’m strictly an autodidact,” Vernon said. “And I’d like to see your children and your children’s children become autodidacts.”

This time a reporter was brave enough to ask, “What’s an autodidact? How many wheels has it got?”

After the laughter, Vernon said, “A self-taught person.”

“So now you plan to teach yourself politics?” asked one of the reporters. And without waiting for Vernon’s answer, he commented, “I hope you’re a fast learner.”

Lydia knew Vernon was a very fast learner but she had her doubts that he could learn fast enough such things as elocution, ebullience, posture, glad-handing, backslapping, and, above all, tact and restraint: in a word, politics.

After it was over and the crews were on their way home, she asked Bo, “What does extirpate mean?”

Bo rolled his eyes heavenward. “Abolish, dear Lydia. Literally, it means to pull up by the roots. I suppose our friend, our candidate, our employer intends the subtle implication that we find the root need for schools and prisons and hospitals and then yank out those roots. God knows. When’s the next plane back to Cincinnati? Wait. I’ve got a car. And a chauffeur. Where’s Cast? Cast?”

Lydia took it upon herself to attempt to give Vernon Ingledew a good chewing-out. Somebody had to do it. But while she had often been unsparing in her critiques of the various candidates she had worked for, a carry-over from her years of lambasting all politicians in her columns, she hadn’t needed to criticize their delivery, their demeanor, and their absolutely crackpot ideas. Lydia could cuss better than a sailor when she had to.

She dragged him off into a field where the old gristmill had been, far enough out of the earshot of the others, even when she began to holler. She was a little rusty with some of those cuss words but as she warmed up they all began coming back to her, in all their glory and power. Vernon could only stand there and take it, not once looking her in the eye. She was so busy cussing him that she forgot to remember the reason he was hanging his head was not because he was abashed at her chewing him out but because she was a female and he was congenitally shy toward all women, as had been all males in the Ingledew lineage going back a thousand years or more! How could she do a proper job of cussing him out if she couldn’t even get his attention? But she kept on cussing him. She cussed his poor performance, she cussed his posture, she cussed his lousy duende and eupatrid mien, and above all she cussed his harebrained ideas. He stood there and took it like a ten-year-old boy getting a scolding from his mother, and she realized that Vernon had been only ten when his mother died.

It was not until this moment, or this sequence of profanity-laced moments, that Lydia Caple realized the real reason she was being so hard on him: she had fallen madly in love with him and believed with all her heart that he was going to be the best goddamn governor who ever governed any place on earth.

Chapter seven

Little Rock from the air at night is a jeweled Shangri-La, a fucking fairyland. He’d never seen it before, day or night. The closest he’d come was when the Bob Dole campaign had added him to the throng of oppo men reconnoitering Clinton’s whole life, but they had decided to keep him in dc and let others do the Little Rock search for secrets. To this day he remained convinced he could have found the tidbit or two that would have tipped the balance in favor of their client, but he was glad he didn’t, because when you got right down to it he hated Republicans. All his life he had always preferred working for Democrats. He’ll work for anybody who pays him, regardless of party, but when the great political balance sheets are drawn up, it turns out the debit side of the Republican sheet is besmirched with uglier scandals and misdeeds and sins and crimes. Look at Nixon. Harry would rather work against a Republican any day than for him. Of course the present job, at least until they got Ingledew past the primary, was going to mean lifting Democratic rocks to see what crawled out.

“Don’t leave a stone unturned,” Bo Pharis had said to him at the Boone County airport in Harrison. Harry had promised to give him within a week full dossiers on each of Ingledew’s eight opponents, and Bo had told him not to give a thought to expenses. Really the only commercial way to fly from Harrison to Little Rock involves taking a Big Sky flight to St. Louis, and a TWA from there, eight hundred miles of travel just to cover 140 miles from Harrison to Little Rock. Ridiculous. So Bo had put him on a charter flight, hang the expense. But Bo wasn’t a happy man. They’d gone to visit his mother, who lived in this cute little cottage just east of the courthouse square, and this sweet little old lady had known right away that something serious was troubling her son, but all Bo would tell her was, “I’ve let myself get deeply involved in a chimera, and my hopes have already been dashed.” He told her that he was home to stay for a while, however; at least until May, when he was due to get an honorary degree at the University and planned to have his mother attend.

The previous night the Samurai had a Saturday night “emergency session” in Stay More, Bo and Harry and the others, to discuss whether or not Ingledew’s campaign wasn’t “dead in the water,” as Bo put it: whether it could still be salvaged after such a shitty beginning. It was Saturday night, which by time-honored tradition Harry devoted to serious recreation, primarily bonded in 86 proof, but he went easy on the sauce long enough to hear out Bo and Lydia and Carleton and even the kids, Cast and Monica. Monica made a cute little speech reminding them that the first time each of them ever tried anything they blew it: the first time they walked, the first time they wrote, the first time they rode a bike or drove a car, the first time they had sex. Harry couldn’t help guffawing at that last part, and he said, “The first time I had sex was the last time I had sex!” That got some laughs and he added solemnly, “And maybe Ingledew’s first speech was his last speech.” Arch said they ought to blame themselves for not having coached Vernon sufficiently in advance. Carleton said all the coaching in the world wouldn’t have corrected his ding-a-ling ideas about eradicating prisons, schools, et cetera. Bo said the only way this campaign could go forward would be to “straighten out” Vernon. They might not be able to persuade him that he was crazy even to think of abolishing the school system, but they could certainly warn him that such ideas had to be kept to himself until after the election. They had to make sure that such gaffes would not occur again. They had to find out just what he was for and what he was against.

So they called Ingledew in and told him to lay it all on the line. Had he given any thought to legalizing marijuana? No, he said, he’d like to extirpate drugs. There was that word again. But Bo had explained it to any of the illiterati among them: “stirps” was Latin for roots, and ex meant out, so the word meant to pull up by the roots but the way Ingledew intended it he sort of meant to find the root cause of anything, the root of drugs, the root of prisons, and eliminate that need. Which wasn’t such a bad idea, if you thought about it. But then Ingledew looked at them as if he dared any of them to challenge him on that, and he added, “All drugs. Tobacco is a drug too. Guns are a drug.”

A lot of them sighed. Was he in favor of strict gun control, then? Was he going to “extirpate” smoking? Well, he’d better save it for after he was in the governor’s mansion, because the state had thousands upon thousands of proud gun owners who didn’t think their possession of guns was a drug, and thousands upon thousands of smokers who didn’t consider cigarettes a drug, and Ingledew didn’t have a chance to get elected by alienating all those people. Harry wasn’t sure they convinced him. But they got him to agree to tone it down, to put a lid on it, to generalize and extemporize and euphemize. In short, they got him to agree to become a politician. And from that point, they could move forward.

The charter plane, a Cessna, touched down on the same runway where a few years previously an American Airlines jet had overshot the runway and torn apart, killing eleven people. Knowing this didn’t make Harry nervous. Even if he weren’t such a goddamn fatalist anyway, he also knew why the airplane had crashed, he knew the pilot’s error that had caused it, he knew what the pilot was thinking when he shouldn’t have been thinking such thoughts at the moment he was supposed to have been thinking about deploying the wing spoilers but failed to do so. Listen: if you ever say anything, if you ever write anything, if you ever think anything, he can find out about it, believe him.

When Day Whittacker suspected Harry of reading his mind, that business about Mohammed and the mountain, he wasn’t very far from the truth. We’re decades past Big Brother in Orwell’s 1984 (a date which seemed so impossibly far in the future when he first thought of it over half a century ago but now seems hopelessly lost in the ho-hum Reagan years) but we’ve seen the near-complete erosion of personal privacy. Harry could tell you, if he had to (if he was paid well enough to), what you’re wearing, or not wearing, as you read this. He has got his Compaq notebook in his lap, and this charter airline thoughtfully provides a modem hook-up, and he has been plugged in the whole hour since Harrison.

He told the cabdriver to take him to a good hotel. The route went past the site of the Clinton presidential library, and the cabby pointed it out to him, what they could see of it in the dark, and although Harry can see in the dark when he has to, this wasn’t one of those times. The cabby deposited him in front of a sleek glass cliff called The Excelsior, but he noticed across the street from it a Victorian Italianate oldie called The Capital, which he thought looked more cozy, even more political, than The Excelsior. So that’s where he checked in. The rooms were expensive, but it wasn’t coming out of his pocket. The decor was soft and old-timey and his King room had a modem line, no problem. He ordered a bottle of black Jack from room service and plugged in. It was Sunday night, but hit men never sleep. Well, actually, if they drink enough their demons will pass out, and he expected to join them in the land of oblivion but meanwhile he’d just as soon work on Sunday night as punch a nine to five on a workday.

His Compaq notebook already had the chart of The Eight, as he’d begun to think of them, mapped out. Thanks to eager-beaver Cast Sherrill, who’d make a great oppo man himself someday if he hadn’t set his sights higher on a campaign managership or media expertship, Harry already had in his notebook’s many gigabytes a clunky file on all the basic known scandals involving The Eight: the ex-governor’s felony conviction, the evangelist’s suspected child abuse, the attorney general’s involvement in the suicide of the legislator. But all due credit to the kid Cast, these things were common knowledge: Cast had found them in newspaper accounts, probably lifted off Lexis-Nexis. Harry knew places to look beyond Lexis-Nexis that the kid had never dreamed of.

When Harry had found himself unemployed after Senator Passmore’s defeat (which was, he would always believe, the fault of the other campaign consultants who violated a fundamental principle of Harry’s: if you find some real poison about a candidate, use it early in the campaign; don’t wait until toward the end, when it can look like desperation tactics and can backfire), when Harry found himself unemployable for a time, with nothing to do but haunt the corridors of the National Gallery, the Corcorcan, and the Phillips, he decided to keep in practice by doing a complete dossier on himself: every possible existence of any sequence of bytes spelling out “Harry Wolfe” on the Internet was retrieved and examined (there are 125 Harry Wolfes in the United States, and he didn’t even bother with those in Canada, Australia and England). Posing as a credit rating service, he obtained a complete record of Harry Wolfe’s credit, which led to investigation of bad debts, a few minor thefts, countless overdrafts at the bank, and the use of a Mastercard to subscribe to “love clubs.” Using the foia, or Freedom of Information Act, he obtained all of the FBI files on Harry Wolfe, which contained some interesting revelations of how he and his activities were viewed by others. Pretending to be a consulting physician, he obtained all of Harry Wolfe’s hospital and medical records, shocking in their revelations of his failure to take care of himself. And then by posing as a potential employer doing a security-clearance check, he obtained all the records of Harry Wolfe at South Hagerstown High School, as well as at Georgetown University, from which he was expelled as a junior. He hacked Harry Wolfe’s computer and uncovered a cesspool of salacious material and a private diary that would sear your eyeballs.

So dedicated to this work did he become that he supposed for a while he was clinically a split personality: one Harry Wolfe was the fat, filthy, drunken loner who couldn’t get a date if his life depended on it, and overcompensated by doing just about anything, short of rape and murder, to give himself a good time; the other Harry Wolfe, hot on his trail, was America’s premiere investigative oppo man. The first Harry had a habit, at least once weekly, of drinking himself into oblivion, of not even remembering what he’d done while loaded, so the second Harry took advantage of this to hide miniature videocams in his bedroom, bathroom and kitchenette. Further, in disguise he interviewed various persons who had contact with Harry Wolfe during his blackouts, such as fellow patrons of the nude bars he frequented. Every loathsome deed of the man was recorded in lurid detail in a log on the computer. This surveillance reached its nadir when the sleuth paid a city sanitation department truckdriver a bribe to set aside the twice-weekly collection of Harry Wolfe’s garbage, an act (sometimes called in the trade “dumpster diving”) that depleted his financial resources. If you shake your head and say Why the fuck didn’t he just save his own fucking garbage? he could point out two things: one, that would have violated his sense of being split into dual personalities, and, two, he needed to find out how hard or easy it was to bribe a garbage collector. The experience created some unpleasant moments when he had to sift meticulously through all that dreck and analyze its possible meaning.

And the conclusion? Don’t, for any office, vote for this man! Don’t trust him. Don’t buy anything from him; don’t even sell him anything. Don’t rent to him or borrow from him. Don’t, if possible, speak to the bastard. Don’t touch anything he has touched. Don’t breathe the same air.

His very calling, once upon a time, was totally disreputable. Back in the Seventies he’d been a newspaperman stringing for a chain of small newspapers in Delaware when a man running for state senator had come to him and “wondered” if Harry knew anything about the man’s opponent. Nothing he hadn’t already published, he said. The man offered to pay him, and that’s how he got started. They weren’t called “opposition research” in those days; they were called a lot of unflattering names, the best of which was “lepers.” They were kept in small rooms behind closed doors all by themselves. It was lonely. Most of the men (and a few women) Harry worked for denied that they even knew him…sometimes to his face. Such researchers certainly weren’t allowed into the rooms where the key campaign decisions were discussed and reached. But then the Nixon White House hired a gum-shoe to research Chappaquiddick, Donald Segretti became Nixon’s “dirty trickster,” the Democrats answered with their own, Dick Tuck, and the muckraking escalated to the point where no politician in his right mind could live without oppo people, and they were afforded a place at the table in the highest campaign echelons.

The first thing Harry did that night was something he could’ve done at any time before but had postponed: he searched the Internet to see if any of The Eight had their own Web pages. A personal Web page is a flagrant display of egotism, which is another way of saying that every politician has to have one. Sure enough, six of The Eight had Web pages, some of them dignified and patriotic and stressing family values, decency, no taxes, all that crap, but some of them had unintentional gaffes, clumsy bad taste, and even clues for Harry to pursue in search of the candidate’s extremist support or faulty public record. Having downloaded all those Web pages to his computer, he then ran a Bigfoot search on each of The Eight: for a reasonable fee per hit (charged to his Mastercard), he could get what Bigfoot.com calls a Supersearch: all the known information about the person, including names and phones of the person’s neighbors (very handy, because your friendly neighbor probably resents the hell out of you and is more than willing to gossip and dish the dirt on you from his ringside seat), the previous addresses of the person going back ten years (politicians who move around a lot, like any fly-by-night miscreant, are fugitives from justice), as well as a summary of assets, and a complete record of any bankruptcies, civil judgments, or UCC lien filings. Bigfoot is a big bargain. Harry was ready to hit the street.

Monday, after a late breakfast from room service, he put on his suit and walked over to the county courthouse to start searching for overdue property taxes, government liens, mortgage records, and lawsuits—routine basic information. He found a few lawsuits involving some of The Eight which offered juicy reading and also provided him, as a bonus, with the names of the litigants, who were all now sworn enemies of one of The Eight and would each have further secrets to share with Harry. He made a few phone calls and set up a few appointments, lunches, or cocktail meetings.

Walking from that courthouse back to his hotel, he passed the Old State House, Gideon Shryock’s antebellum neoclassical masterpiece. In his computer he had the entire text of The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, and he knew the full story of how Jacob Ingledew had stood in the chamber of this building, not once but twice (and the second time all alone), to cast his vote against Arkansas’s secession from the Union. As far as Harry could determine from what he considered a rather frivolous novel, Jacob Ingledew had been just an old Ozark hillbilly, not very literate or grammatical, but possessed of enough good sense and dignity to make him vote his conscience. The thought of his bravery, which had occurred in this very building Harry gazed upon, made Harry gulp. He is a cynical man, as you’ve determined, but he is touched by human decency wherever he finds it.

Then he phoned Hank Endicott at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, to call in some favors. He knew Lydia had already talked to him, but she hadn’t told Harry about the call. If she had, he could have told her that Hank and he went way back and were the best of buddies, at least to the extent that a pariah like Harry could have a friend. When Endicott had gone to Washington back in 1993 for a whole year to cover Clinton’s early performance in the White House, and out of which he’d written a great book called Rascal: A President’s First Year, Harry had run into him in the bar of the National Press Club and introduced himself (Endicott claimed that “everybody knows who Harry Wolfe is”), and once Harry learned Endicott’s motive for being in town he offered to introduce him to some newspaper pals of his at the Post and Star who could show him the ropes of the dc scene. During Endicott’s year in town Harry had met him for drinks on several other occasions, and once—just once, but that was unprecedented—he’d had him up to his Georgetown apartment to view his extensive collection of political memorabilia. So Endicott owed him.

“My God,” Endicott said. “Lydia Caple told me all about this Ingledew, but she didn’t say you were on the team too.” Harry assured him he was, and conjectured that Lydia had neglected to mention him because there was still an odor of ill repute about oppo men. He asked Hank if he’d care to meet him after work for a drink, and learned that the bar of his hotel, The Capital, was the chosen watering hole anyhow. But Hank said, “Listen, Harry, I’ve got a column in tomorrow’s paper about Ingledew. Maybe you’d better read it before we meet.” So they set their bar date for the following afternoon.

Harry spent the rest of the day at the Little Rock Public Library. Despite whatever thrilling image oppo researching may have, most of the hard work is actually done in the library. But most oppo men just walk in, blind, and start looking around. Harry took the trouble to ingratiate himself to one of the head librarians, a splendid fellow named Bob Razer, who, it turned out, was delighted to learn of Vernon Ingledew’s candidacy because he was a major fan of Harington’s fictions. Razer showed Harry a case in which all eleven of Harington’s books were kept in first editions. Razer was thrilled at the prospect of being able to read more about Vernon, and he conjectured, “Maybe Harington will write a novel about this campaign.”

“He’s already started it,” Harry pointed out.

When Razer learned Harry’s objective, he was only too happy to direct him to a few sources he might otherwise have overlooked, and even to permit him to tap into some databases that were not customarily available to the public. Razer is, it can’t be said enough, a splendid fellow.

The next morning a copy of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette was delivered to Harry’s door at The Capital and he climbed back into bed with it and his breakfast. He turned at once to Hank Endicott’s column. Harry blushes easily and he could feel his face flushing over the headline on it:

A Clown’s Hat is Tossed into a Three-Ring Circus.

Remember Monroe Schwarzlose? Remember “Uncle Mac” McKrell? How about Crazy Joe Weston or Crazy Kenneth Coffelt? And then there was always Tommy Robinson and Sheffield Nelson.

Without the ill-fated, bumbling campaigns of such colorful characters, Arkansas politics would have been even duller than it already was, given the decline of stump speaking. Schwarzlose dared to run against Bill Clinton four times, and the first time he tried he somehow got 30 percent of the vote (only 5 percent the other times).

Now comes Vernon Ingledew, whose name isn’t quite as picturesque as “Monroe Schwarzlose” but who is even more of a political novice, and makes old Monroe look like a sage statesman. We’ve all (except Paul Greenberg) eaten Ingledew Ham, “the Smithfield of the Ozarks,” but that’s about all we know about him.

He’s abandoning his pig works in tiny Stay More, up in the remotest wilds of Newton County, in order to make a run (or at least a winded walk) against the eight other candidates already filed for the Democratic primary.

Schwarzlose had some good ideas, possibly ahead of their time: he wanted a statewide lottery, he proposed solving the problems of deteriorating roads and hazardous waste disposal by using the waste to fill the potholes, and he envisioned putting hydroelectric plants on the dams of the Arkansas River. Ingledew’s ideas, what little is known about them at this early stage, appear even more ahead of their time.

His near-invisible credentials—he has never held any office and isn’t a college graduate—include being possessed of extremely good looks and the fact that he’s a direct descendant of Jacob Ingledew, Arkansas governor during Reconstruction, whose best-known achievement, apart from casting the lone vote against Secession, was taxing the bankrupt state back into solvency.

Well, “Too-Tall” Tom McRae was the great-grandson of an Arkansas governor, but it didn’t get him past Clinton in the Democratic primary of 1990. Unlike Ingledew, McRae was thoroughly familiar with politics, having served as staff coordinator for Governor Dale Bumpers.

Speaking of Bumpers, Ingledew’s few supporters have probably encouraged him with the fabulous story of how young Dale Bumpers came out of nowhere in 1970 to run against and defeat Orval Faubus and his powerful machine in the Democratic primary and then to beat Winthrop Rockefeller in the general election.

Bumpers’ fantastic rise from absolute obscurity in less than three months might have prompted Ingledew to seek out the man who was one of its architects: Archie Schaffer III, then just a 22-year-old college graduate who also happened to be Bumpers’ nephew, and who is now—or was, until Ingledew hired him—head of PR at giant Tyson Foods.

But Schaffer, best known for the “Free Archie” campaign leading to his pardon by the lame duck President for a trumped-up charge of currying favor for Tyson, took a leave at Tyson not to be Ingledew’s campaign manager but only the deputy or associate campaign manager.

The top man on Ingledew’s expensive staff of topflight professionals is none other than Bolin Pharis, veteran of many a local and national campaign, accused of losing the presidency for Al Gore. Pharis supposedly quit politics after that fiasco and, like Schaffer, went to work as PR chief for a Fortune 500 company, but something about Ingledew not only got him to change his mind about politics but, again like Schaffer, to take a leave of absence from his company. With a pair like Pharis and Schaffer, who needs anybody else? But you still want the best possible press secretary, right? So who do you hire? Somebody with vast experience in journalism as well as a stint in the Arkansas governor’s office, somebody like…well, would you buy Lydia Caple? They bought her, and she hasn’t been happier for years, she says.

Enough already? No, there’s more: Lydia Caple brought onto the team one of the best administrative assistants from the governor’s office during the Clinton years, the unfortunately named Monica Breedlove, who bears no resemblance whatever to her infamous namesake. Also, the seasoned media expert Carleton Drew was hired away from Washington, perhaps to find ways to circumvent Ingledew’s declared intention to shun television.

Can you believe a campaign without constant spots? Ingledew, if nothing else, is going to be spotless.

The sixth member of the ferocious team is young: Castor Sherrill, Harvard MBA and Bolin Pharis’ protegé in PR. And last but not least, someone who ought to strike fear into the hearts of all the other candidates: the man who will handle opposition research and is in Little Rock right now hard at work laying bare every aspect of their lives, America’s paramount political spy, Harry Wolfe.

Never before has a candidate for public office in Arkansas (or any other state, for that matter) assembled a staff such as these Seven Samurai, as they call themselves, not necessarily smiling. How did Ingledew do it? Well, money of course. He apparently has unlimited resources. But also there’s that something about him, which, if the Samurai can package it and present it to the voters effectively, might well get him past the primary.

Even Monroe Schwarzlose could have won if he’d had these people in his corner.

Harry was of course flattered to be identified as “paramount,” but the first thing he said to Hank Endicott that afternoon, meeting him at the Capital Bar, was “What gives you the authority to call Ingledew a clown?”

“They’re all clowns, Harry,” he said. They shook hands and clapped each other on the back and looked each other over. Harry liked to think that if he could just lose about a hundred pounds, he might look like Hank Endicott. Not that Endicott’s skinny, by a long shot, but that Harry was obese.

“Do you think our clown stands a chance against the other clowns?” Harry asked him.

“In a field of nine, nobody’s going to get a majority,” Hank observed.

“But if the primary were held tomorrow, who would come out ahead?”

“Tomorrow?” Hank deliberated. “If the primary were held tomorrow, your boy wouldn’t get 1 percent of the vote, which was Dale Bumpers’ percentage in the first poll after he announced.”

“So if the pie is sliced nine ways, and my man gets just a sliver, who gets the biggest piece?”

“Probably Barnas, the state senator. He’s got the best organization, and he’s leading the polls.”

“That was my reading too,” Harry agreed, because he was thoroughly familiar with the polls and the organizational strengths of the opposition. Then he said, “Tell me, Hank, have you heard of something called the ‘Ouachita Militia’?”

“That’s pronounced Wash-it-taw,” Hank corrected Harry’s pronunciation. “Sure. A bunch of neo-Nazis.” The Ouachita Militia was a big, rich, not-so-secret right-wing paramilitary group, operating primarily out of Mena, in the Ouachita Mountains west of Little Rock.

“Well,” Harry said, leaning toward him, “they are bankrolling James Barnas.”

“You’re kidding me!” Hank exclaimed. “Says who?”

Harry smiled. “I can’t reveal my sources, just as you can’t reveal yours.”

“But can it be proved?” Hank wanted to know. “Can it be documented? If it’s true, Barnas’s ass is grass.”

“So there’s one down, seven to go,” Harry declared.

Hank’s cell phone rang, and he answered it, talked a while, scoffed, talked some more, snorted, talked some more, grunted, finally hung up, and said, “No, there are three down, five to go. That was Ned Green, up at the office, with some news. ‘This just in.’ Three of the nine candidates in the Democratic primary for governor of Arkansas have withdrawn from the race.” And he named the three, mostly minor: the automobile dealer, the state representative, and the briefly former governor. Vernon Ingledew wasn’t one of them.

Harry clapped Hank on the shoulder. “Your column did it, Hank! They’re scared shitless of me!”

Hank laughed. “Don’t flatter yourself. They’ve pissed their pants over the whole Seven Samurai, not just you.” He fished out his cell phone. “Excuse me, I’d like for you to meet someone.” And he made a quick call. Harry was hoping, against hope, that Hank might be setting him up with a desirable female of his acquaintance.

But they went on talking politics, and agreeing to help each other during the campaign. Out of Hank’s sense of journalistic ethics, he would not steer Harry to reports or rumors he hadn’t been able to pin down or hadn’t already written about, and out of Harry’s sense of tightfisted management of his intelligence (referring of course not to his fabulous IQ but his collection of secret information) Harry would not reveal to him all the dirt he’d found.

Who joined them wasn’t a lady at all but a creepy-looking little guy in tweeds and thick spectacles. Harry might not have got his name right: it sounded like “Garth Rucker.” When Hank made the introductions, Harry thought the guy was going to prostrate himself at Harry’s feet.

“Oh, Mr. Wolfe!” he said, holding Harry’s hand in both of his and shaking it up and down. “I couldn’t believe it when I read Hank’s column and learned you were in town, sir! What a pleasure this is! How thrilled I am to meet you, sir!” and he went on lionizing Harry until Hank interrupted him.

“You guys haven’t met before?” Hank asked. “At the national convention of Negative Researchers perhaps?” He laughed at his own wit and then he told Harry, “Garth is Barnas’s oppo man.”

“Oh?” Harry said. If there ever was such a thing as a national conference of opposition researchers, they would be the most repulsive assembly of human specimens ever congregated, either fat, slimy and evil like Harry, or tiny, fiendish and ratfaced like Garth Rucker. Harry didn’t number many oppo men among his acquaintances; they simply didn’t associate, if they could avoid it.

But Hank had other ideas, and suggested that they adjourn to this nice place called The Afterthought, up in the Hillcrest section of Little Rock, a sweet old neighborhood untouched by the creeping modernization of so much of America’s cities. It reminded Harry of Georgetown, and he was homesick.

When they were settled in, and munching their supper from the bar menu of meatballs boulés, spicy wings and cheese foccacia, Garth said to Harry, “Sir, would you like to play ‘Swap’? You tell me all the good stuff about Ingledew and I’ll tell you all the good stuff about Barnas!”

He meant bad stuff, of course. Harry had no intention of telling him Ingledew’s secrets. Harry knew things about Ingledew that haven’t yet been mentioned in this book, and they were going to remain his closely guarded preserve of skeletons in the closet. But he could throw this guy a sop or two. So just to humor him and keep Hank entertained they began swapping. “Ingledew was never elected to anything,” Harry pointed out.

“Already got that, sir!” Garth said. “That’s a good one, but I already got it. Okay, Barnas is too conservative by Democratic Party standards.”

“Got that,” Harry declared. “Ingledew has no children, just him and Jelena Ingledew.”

“Got that,” Garth said. “He’s not married to her, either, is he? Oh, we already know that one, sir! Okay, Barnas has the full support of the National Rifle Association. But maybe that’s in his favor.”

“Got that,” Harry said. “Ingledew is opposed to guns, period.”

“Really? Thanks. I didn’t have that one. Barnas voted in the state senate against the highway improvement bill.”

“Got that. He also voted against Day Care.”

“Check. Did you get that he was only 187t? in a class of 453 at Malvern High School?”

“Sure. And only 498t? in a class of 1,248 at Arkansas State University. Ingledew never even went to college.”

“Got that, sir. Man, that looks bad. Everybody goes to college.”

“Barnas plagiarized his term papers in Sociology, Economics, and American History,” Harry pointed out.

“Hey, touché, Mr. Wolfe, sir. I didn’t know that myself. But what about your man worships the Dow.”

“That’s Tao, buddy,” Harry pointed out, and spelled it for him. “And he doesn’t worship it, he just likes it. It’s an oriental religion which teaches, among other things, that we should be kind to one another.”

“But it doesn’t teach that Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior?”

“Not that I know of.”

“So what’s Ingledew’s religion?”

“He has no religion.”

Garth Rucker stared through his thick lenses at Harry for a time long enough to assure himself that Harry wasn’t jerking him around. “Whoa!” he said. “You don’t mean he’s an infidel?”

“I suppose you could call him that,” Harry granted.

“Wow! Boy, sir, can we use this!”

“I wish you wouldn’t call me ‘sir.’ Maybe I can outsmart you, but I don’t outrank you.” And then Harry told him flatly, “But you aren’t going to use any of what I’m telling you about Ingledew.”

“I’m not? But that’s the whole point of ‘Swap,’ sir. We need all this good stuff to attack each other with.”

“You’re not going to attack Ingledew,” Harry informed him.

“Hey, what is this?” He looked to Hank Endicott for help. “We’re talking politics, right, sir? Politics is about attacking each other’s faults and weaknesses and sins, isn’t it? What do you mean, we can’t attack Ingledew?”

“Because if you do,” Harry warned him, “if you utter, or publish, or televise, or even leak one unkind word about him, we will reveal that your man Barnas gets his endowment from the Ouachita Militia.”

Garth Rucker’s mouth dropped open. He struggled to put a blank, innocent look on his face. “Huh? What’s the Ouachita Militia?”

“A neo-Nazi gang of thugs whom the good people of Arkansas rightly despise,” Harry informed him.

“Never heard of ’em,” Garth said.

“Then you’d better go ask your client to tell you all about them. And while you’re at it, get him to give you full disclosure on certain other aspects of his activities. Ask him about the weekends that he flew to Jamaica at the expense of the tobacco lobby. Ask him, since we’re so concerned about religion, to tell you why he was expelled in 1989 from the Malvern First Baptist Church. Ask him to let you audit his income tax records for 1986-1992 and get him to account for all the falsifications therein.”

There was a long silence, an absolute silence that scarcely permitted the sounds of other customers in the cozy confines of The Afterthought. Even the jazz piano seemed to be muted. Harry reflected on the seemliness of the establishment’s name, because he was going to keep on rethinking and reconsidering everything he knew about James Barnas. The silence was finally broken by the sound of Hank Endicott’s laughter.

“Hoo boy,” Hank chortled. “You’re out of your league, Garth. It’s too bad I can’t print any of this good stuff.”

“Unless you have to,” Harry reminded him.

“Unless I have to,” Hank said ominously.

“So what’s the deal?” Garth demanded. “Do you mean nobody can say anything bad about Ingledew?”

“You’re a fast learner, Boy,” Harry complimented him.

“But that’s not politics!” he whined.

“It’s going to be politics,” Harry assured him. “By the way, did anyone ever point out to you the origin of the word, ‘politics’? It comes from the Latin, ‘poly’ meaning ‘many’ and ‘tics’ meaning bloodsucking creatures.”

“Hold on just a minute,” Garth, missing the humor and trying to reason with Harry, pled. “You and me both would be out of business if we couldn’t use the dirt we dig up and dish out. How’m I gonna tell my boss, ‘Here’s all this good stuff on Ingledew but you can’t use any of it’? Do you think he’ll pay me? I’ll be out of work!”

Harry smiled. “Maybe we can hire you to help sniff around Shoat Bradfield in the main campaign.” Harry was making no promises, but he was having afterthoughts about Garth Rucker’s possible usefulness. “Tell you what. Make you a deal. You show me all your files on the other seven candidates—oops, there’s only five left, right?—you show me all the good stuff you’ve got on those guys, and I’ll recommend that Bo Pharis hire you for the Ingledew campaign.”

So, thanks to Hank Endicott, that was how Harry greatly simplified his workload in Little Rock. He even had an ally badly needed when, because he’d lost his license over a DWI years before, he depended upon Garth Rucker to chauffeur him around and help plant a few videocams and wiretaps and hunt for a few garbage collectors to be bribed. Thus Harry was able to escape from Little Rock sooner than he had expected, coming away from the place with all the intelligence that could have been desired about any opponent who would dare oppose Vernon Ingledew.

Chapter eight

She was the cheapest of the samurai, but it didn’t bother her. She’d just as soon not have known how much less she was making than Cast, but among the five thousand other responsibilities in her job description was writing the checks for the weekly payroll. Of course Cast had a master’s degree from Harvard, which was one reason he was making more than she was, although what he was making was still a scrimption compared with what Bo and Arch and Lydia were pulling in. She didn’t really care. She would have done this job for nothing, to have a chance to be doing something like this. They had even let her pick out the campaign headquarters. They’d told her that it had to be in Fayetteville, and it had to be high profile, but beyond that they left it up to her, the way they left so many things up to her: the selection of the computer equipment, the hiring of office staff, the scheduling of Vernon’s appearances. Bo had draped his big arm across her broad shoulders and said, “Monica, hon, here’s the rule: whenever you think of something that needs to be done, you do it. You don’t need my say-so.”

That first week after Vernon announced was the busiest week of her life so far, and the first thing she’d done was find out which realtors managed the few vacant buildings in Fayetteville. Even before she found an apartment for herself she visited several buildings around town that were available, and after thorough investigation and careful consideration (but no advice or consent from the others) she had signed the lease on a building right close beside the picturesque Fayetteville Square, had got in there herself and swept the floor and cleaned the windows, had obtained all the necessary supplies during a one-hour shopping spree at Office Depot, and had visited some furniture renting stores and got enough desks and chairs and all, and even helped the men unload them and put them in place. There wasn’t anything a man could do that she couldn’t do.

The second day on the job she’d had a sign company make the signs and a printing company print some banners, and had already hired and put to work three of the office staff, when Vernon Ingledew came to Fayetteville for his first visit to get himself photographed for the official campaign photo and to begin his lessons in speech and deportment. He was amazed to find his headquarters already in business, not only in business but really busy, with four people on the phone and typing at their computers simultaneously. Although he was not able to speak directly to her, nor even look at her, he wrote a memo heaping her with praise, and she was ready to die for him. In fact she was tongue-tied as far as her own tongue was concerned, and when she tried to tell him some of her ideas for the upcoming tour that she and Cast were going to make to the state’s college campuses, she found that her voice sounded exactly like Lydia’s.

Vernon, whose woman-shyness didn’t prevent him from hearing her, laughed and said, “Who needs Lydia? You’ve even got her voice,” and even though he spoke these words to his shoes she felt that they were in touch at last. She’d always had a talent for imitating the people she admired, and way back when she’d worked in the governor’s office alongside Lydia, other people had called her “Lydia Junior.” That time that Lydia had grabbed Vernon and dragged him out into that field in Stay More to jump his ass for his poor performance, Lydia had thought they were out of earshot, but Monica had followed (it was dark) and eavesdropped and she wondered if the occasion would ever arise when she’d have to cuss Vernon herself but she knew that if it did, she could cuss nearly as good as Lydia. If Cast’s ambition was to make himself into another Bo Pharis, Monica’s was to make herself into another Lydia Caple. And this job would let her do it.

And like Lydia, without even knowing Lydia’s heart, she too was madly in love with the man and ready to die for him.

It was her assignment to take Vernon to meet Andrew Kilgore, the photographer, who shot Vernon all over the campus, particularly in the library, in what was supposed to be a staged picture in the reference room with stacks of books piled all around while he pretended to read and study. But he wasn’t pretending, and Monica had a heck of a time trying to get him to leave. You’d have thought he’d never been in a real library before. Maybe he hadn’t. The pictures turned out great, an official campaign photo that made Vernon look really movie-star-handsome and an “activity photo” that showed him looking like the answers to all the problems of humankind were in those books about to fall on his head.

Monica and Cast had been thrown together for a whole week, the second week after the announcement, early in April. Since it had been his bright idea to visit the college campuses, he had spent a lot of time at headquarters helping her plan and order what they needed to take with them: four hundred campaign T-shirts, thousands of banners, buttons and bumper stickers. These things were made right here in Fayetteville, but they had to wait several days for the bumper stickers. Cast and Monica had their first fight over what the T-shirts should look like and say. All they could agree on was that it should have the official photo of Vernon that was so striking. But Cast wanted a conventional campaign T-shirt, with red-white-and-blue lettering and something like “Vernon Ingledew for Governor,” whereas Monica wanted to put in big purple letters across the yellow chest INGLE WHO? and then in smaller letters below the photo, ask me! This was too unconventional for Cast, so they had to take it to Lydia and get her opinion, and then all the way up to Bo, who agreed with Lydia that Monica’s idea would attract more attention even if it sort of poked fun at the candidate’s name.

She selected the campaign colors with of course the approval of the candidate, who complimented her again (by memo) for her ideas. When she had been studying art at UALR she’d had an obsession with color and had learned everything she could about it. One reason she wore black herself so much, apart from the way it went with her blonde hair and pale complexion, was because the psychology of black connotes mystery, loyalty, authority, seriousness, and strength, not to mention death, and there had been so many deaths in her life that it was unmentionable. She chose as Ingledew’s colors purple and yellow because, for one thing, he himself didn’t want “trite” red-white-and-blue, never mind Cast’s opinion. Purple and yellow are complementaries, meaning that one of them makes the other more intense and noticeable. Purple is associated with dignity and royalty, with frugality and melancholy, and Monica was one of the first to detect Vernon’s streak of melancholy. Yellows give playfulness, gaiety and sunlight, but also confidence, esteem, and knowledge. All of these things were part of Vernon’s make-up. So with his full approval and appreciation, it was decided that all the banners, T-shirts, bumper stickers, etc. would be purple and yellow. The yard signs would have been too, but, as we’re going to see, Vernon wouldn’t allow the “visual clutter” of yard signs.

It was also Monica’s idea to put together a little paper sack full of goodies to be distributed on the campuses, each sack containing stuff that college kids could always use: the campaign pencil (which, Cast agreed with her, could simply be imprinted “Governor: Vernon Ingledew) and the campaign ballpoint (ditto) as well as notepads, a package of chewing gum and an imprinted lollipop. Monica’s tomato-red Camaro couldn’t carry all this stuff, so Cast took Bo’s silver Nissan 4-by-4. They had a trial run right here in town at the University of Arkansas, getting permission from the Office of Student Affairs, setting up a booth on the quad in front of the Student Union, and contacting the Student Democrats Club to come and help out. They gave the officers of the latter each a T-shirt and a little booklet that would tell them what to answer if somebody did take that ask me! literally and wanted to know not only INGLE WHO? but what he stood for.

That’s where the other Samurai were needed, putting that booklet or manual together. In what little free time they had, for each and every one of them had a full plate of jobs to do, the Seven Samurai got together, sometimes with the candidate, and talked about position papers. Bo had wanted to form what was called a “steering committee,” which wouldn’t have included Monica (did they think she wasn’t bright enough to have ideas about issues?) but when Vernon found out about it he gave them all together a little stern lecture against committees. No committee in the history of the world, he asserted, had ever accomplished anything, and he defied any one of them to tell him an example of a single achievement by a committee. He certainly intended to extirpate committees, right here and now. Monica was proud of the way he spoke out against committees, beginning to sound already like a forceful no-nonsense governor.

Without any committees meeting, it was commonly agreed among them that there was to be no further mention of Vernon’s more radical ideas, especially those involving “extirpation.” It was agreed to stress Vernon’s aim to bring Arkansas into the 21st century, to take advantage of technology and new inventions to lift the state out of the stagnation that two Republican governors had left it in. Those parts of the state Democratic platform which were not too unacceptable to Vernon (he could not accept “We hold that the public school system is essential to Arkansas’ economic success and support”) were rephrased into his own platform: it could be said that he supported law enforcement agencies without giving his support to prisons, that he expected government to refrain from undue intrusion into the private lives and personal decisions of Arkansans—no, wait, Vernon like a lot of people was adamant that the word Arkansans, which smacked of some kind of false connection with the state of Kansas, should never be used; that in places where one could not say “Arkansas people” the classical “Arkansawyers” would be employed (and indeed it would be Monica who would organize on the Internet a select bloc known as “Arkansawyers for Ingledew”).

Further, Vernon had no intention of raising taxes and wished to overhaul the entire taxation system. Further, Vernon fully supported the state’s cultural and natural heritage. At Monica’s suggestion, they agreed that Vernon was strongly opposed to drugs, although no mention was made of his inclusion of tobacco and guns among the drugs. Monica was also responsible for a plank in the platform favoring health care and mental health care with or without insurance for every person, and since this made no mention of Vernon’s opposition to hospitals it was acceptable.

Monica had a live-wire assistant at headquarters named Hazel Maguire, and she not only trusted the keys to headquarters to Hazel while she and Cast took off for the state tour of campuses, but she also got Hazel to visit her apartment daily to feed her dogs, Buster the bulldog and Whiskey the part Rottweiler, and her several cats. Another way Monica emulated Lydia was in surrounding herself with pets; Lydia too had taken an apartment in Fayetteville and installed in it her dog and several cats from Little Rock. Monica hated to leave her animals, and she knew that Lydia hated to leave hers. Whenever Lydia went out of town for overnight or longer, she hired somebody to feed her animals, and it had been Monica’s ambition to be able to emulate Lydia in that regard.

The morning that she and Cast were going to depart Fayetteville, the newspapers published the first polls for the Democratic primary. Monica was amazed to see that Vernon Ingledew had got .85 percent! But she couldn’t figure that arithmetic; the percentages of the other five added up to more than the remaining 15 percent. Barnas alone had 47 percent. And then she realized to her horror that it wasn’t 85 percent but only 85 percent of 1 percent: Vernon Ingledew had less than 1 percent of those polled! Arch Schaffer came to headquarters to deliver a pep talk (there were now several volunteers from the University in the headquarters) and to remind everybody that his uncle, Dale Bumpers, had pulled only 1 percent in the first poll taken after he’d announced for the primary, but that Dale Bumpers’ ranking had steadily risen in the polls. “Let’s get rid of those long faces!” he told them.

But Cast and Monica still had long faces when they headed south on Interstate 540. For many miles they didn’t even speak to each other, although they both felt an obligation to make talk. Finally, to cheer him up and herself into the bargain, she offered, “I’ll bet a week’s salary against your week’s salary that the next poll will show him with at least 10 percent.”

“If we have anything to do with it,” Cast declared firmly. She was going to be treated to the spectacle of Cast busting his ass, an act that she thought only herself capable of. So far he hadn’t seemed particularly industrious. He did his assignments, whatever they were, but he didn’t hustle. Now on this trip she was going to see him transformed into an activist take-charge guy. He had overscheduled the trip: fifteen colleges and universities in seven days, but Monica had calculated the distances between schools carefully so that, if they spent as much travel time as possible on the Interstate, they could get from one school in the morning to another in the afternoon.

There was nothing whatever romantic between them. Cast had never asked her how old she was, and she’d never offered to tell him that she was eleven years older. Of course there were lots of relationships between older women and younger men—look at Vernon Ingledew himself—but even though Monica thought Cast was “very cute,” she couldn’t see herself having an intimacy with him. Campaign workers are always on duty when in public, and any sign of flirtation or affection between them would be ill-conceived. She had been younger than Cast when she’d divorced, and she hadn’t had a real relationship for seven years. If Lydia could thrive without romance, so could she.

But there was nothing wrong with becoming the best of friends with Cast, and in the course of their travels they told each other quite a lot about themselves. Cast discussed what he knew of his unusual parentage: his mother a porn actress and his father one of her co-stars, neither of whom he’d ever seen much of as he grew up. Monica told about her family house burning down with her mother in it. They both talked about their names, how Monica meant advisor and she was full of not only political advice but was pretty good also at psychological advice and general health advice as well. He told her of the Greek legend of the beautiful Leda who the mighty Immortal Zeus had desired but had had to disguise himself in order to keep his seduction of Leda a secret from his jealous wife Hera. So he had turned himself into a swan. Naturally Leda had laid a pair of eggs. Monica thought that was hilarious. Out of one egg had hatched Helen, who would become Helen of Troy, and her twin brother Pollux. Contrary to popular belief, Pollux had not shared an egg with Castor. Castor had been in the same egg with Clytemnestra, destined to become Agamemnon’s queen, but he has spent all his time growing up with his half-brother Pollux. Castor was mortal, Pollux immortal, but when they died and Pollux went to Heaven (Olympus) while Castor had to go to Hell (Hades) Zeus took pity on them because they missed each other so much, and arranged to let Pollux give his brother half of his immortality, so they could stay together, half the time on Olympus, half the time in Hades.

“Did you have a twin?” Monica asked him. “In real life, I mean?”

“If I did, nobody ever told me,” Cast said, “but there might just be a Clytemnestra somewhere out there.”

Monica and Cast both confided the embarrassment their names had caused them. Cast had been the victim of many puns based upon the fact that a cast may be something put on a broken limb, the group of actors in a play or movie, a throwing of a fishing line, the outward appearance of anything, even the circling of hounds to pick up a scent in hunting or a pair of hawks released by a falconer at one time, to name only a few of the forty-odd meanings. When he was a child other kids called him “Castor Oil.” Because at Harvard he’d read Robert Bly’s Iron John (as recreation, and did not particularly enjoy it), he picked up the nickname Cast Iron. Monica told him of a woman she’d met, who, upon learning her name, had stared at her and said, “My dear, you have something on the corner of your mouth,” causing Monica to wipe at it, to the laughter of the others, until she realized the woman’s joke. Then there was the woman in Louisiana at a Wal-Mart who had said loudly to Monica, “Oh tell me, is it true that Bill Clinton has distinguishing marks on his penis?” To which she’d been constrained to reply, “Examining Bill Clinton’s penis was not in my job description!”

“He never even flirted with you?” Cast asked.

“He flirted with everyone, but that was all: just talk. Down home in Louisiana, they all assume I must have slept with him, but I never did.”

Cast and Monica took turns driving. The Nissan practically drove itself, as if it had autopilot. One time when she was driving, Cast reached into the back and uncovered from the stack of campaign materials his guitar case, opened it, took out an expensive guitar, tuned it, and then asked, “Any requests? Classical? Popular? Rock?”

“Do you know any country western?” she asked.

“Sure.” He began to play Willie Nelson’s “Stardust Memories,” and sang it in a remarkable imitation of Willie’s voice. She wanted to scream. It was one of her favorite songs, and it melted her heart and she decided she might be falling in love with Castor Sherrill. At her request he also sang “Georgia on My Mind,” “I’ve Seen Better Days,” and a lot of others. From then on, she would have preferred doing all the driving herself, just so he could play.

They did Arkansas Tech, Hendrix College, University of Central Arkansas and her own UALR in the first two days, at each campus setting up a booth, finding volunteers from student organizations to maintain it, passing out the beautiful yellow-and-purple INGLE WHO? T-shirts along with the FAQ manual to the more enthusiastic students, passing out the paper sacks of goodies to anybody who wanted one, and, everywhere they went, getting and keeping lists of names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and dates and times available for such work as database entry, giving talks to their classes, phoning their friends, organizing rallies. The goal was to have each student contacted provided with a sheet to recruit a minimum of ten more fellow students.

She never saw Cast sitting or standing still. He was a whirling dervish, which his campaign T-shirt accentuated, and he almost put her to shame, but she did more than her job, she gave those college kids a crash course in just who Vernon Ingledew was and why they would have better futures if they got out and campaigned for him. On some campuses it was tough sledding, and they lost valuable time just trying to find enough students to put together the simplest organization. On some campuses, their request to speak to political science classes was refused, or else the college didn’t even have courses in pol-sci. There was one college where they couldn’t find anybody to be a volunteer coordinator to manage the assignments and contact lists for the other volunteers, so they had to hire one. Everywhere they went they offered summer jobs to the more enthusiastic and personable of the campus leaders: they looked for kids who were as kind, considerate, and hardworking as themselves.

They had no spare time. They stayed in the best motels (the idea of saving money by sharing a room never actually crossed their minds, or it certainly didn’t cross Monica’s), but every night before putting out the lights they were on the telephone or their computers making calls and emails to local students. If Monica had a free minute on any campus, she tried to visit the art department—the painty smell of art departments was in her blood and she could sniff them out without needing directions (she suffered homesickness not so much for Louisiana as for her own art studio she’d had to abandon to take this job)—where she would get into conversations with teachers and students about the connections of artists to politicians, whether kings, queens, Egyptian rulers, state or local governments, whatever. Winston S. Churchill was a painter, right? So was Eisenhower. Vernon Ingledew was an expert in art history and they could go over to their library and look up his article in Art Bulletin. At every art department she visited, she left behind the message that Vernon Ingledew was the first person in Arkansas politics to be passionate about art.

They had their share of unpleasant experiences: the wise-ass punks who challenged their right to be alive, the hecklers, the rude creeps who eagerly gathered up the campaign literature and made a big show of dumping it into the trash can. On every campus there are always certain students who can only establish their identities by being arrogant, contentious, contemptuous, and generally vile. Monica had to restrain Cast from throttling one of the worst, and she had the notion that the kid, a twenty-year-old jock, might actually have been badly injured if she hadn’t held Cast back.

He brooded for a couple of days afterward, and she couldn’t get him to play his guitar. She wasn’t sure how much he was troubled by that particular incident as he was by the plain fact that most college students simply didn’t care who Vernon Ingledew was, and weren’t at all interested in finding out. She tried to reassure Cast by pointing out that all they were really doing was establishing a base on each campus, and that once Vernon became better and better known throughout the state, those bases would be in place and could unfold.

As if to compensate for the bad encounters (and Monica strongly believed that Destiny likes to keep things in balance), they had a wonderful experience at the last school on their schedule, little Lyon College in Batesville. They were met by a delegation of seven students who had already learned about Ingledew from reading the column in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and who were united in their opposition to their school’s political science teacher, an arch-conservative who, they said, would oppose anything that Vernon Ingledew might stand for, just on principle. More to flaunt him than in genuine support of Ingledew, this group of students set up at once an Ingledew-for-Governor headquarters in the student union. Each of the seven began wearing the Ingledew T-shirt right away, and called themselves The Little Samurai and were bright, eager, polite and happy: the best kids Monica had found yet. They plastered Vernon’s picture all over the campus, and Monica and Cast were able to leave town early enough to start the long drive back to Fayetteville.

Partly out of relief that their tour was over, the Nissan emptied of its campaign contents, and they both could look forward to a day or two of R&R, they really relaxed and became convivial on that return drive. Monica even told some of her favorite jokes, and Cast played some tunes on his guitar with hilarious showing off. They even stopped to treat themselves to a fancy supper at Otis Zark, a quirky restaurant way out in the sticks of Durham, along the Pig Trail home. Most of their meals throughout the tour had been quick, usually just fast food. Here they relaxed and did some fancy eating. Afterwards, on what little remained of the drive to Fayetteville, they were old friends, co-conspirators, and even a little bit sweethearts: Monica told Cast things she wouldn’t have told anyone. In reciprocation he confessed to her that while he had a few dates at Harvard and a few more in Cincinnati he had never gone to bed with any of them.

Monica was both touched and incredulous. “Do you mean you’re a virgin?” she asked.

“I guess that’s what you’d have to call me,” he said.

Oh, she could have stopped the car right there and done something about that. But they still had some miles to go before they slept.

Whiskey and Buster were so glad to see her you’d think she’d been gone a month. Bo Pharis debriefed Monica and Cast the next morning on their tour and was very pleased with their report and with the databases of student names they brought back with them. “I’ve been observing the local campus,” he said, “and if what you established there is any indication of your work, you’ve had a most fruitful trip.” Indeed, the flagship campus of University system had a full-blown Ingledew organization in place and was actively recruiting. The T-shirts had become prized and were proliferating all over the place. The Arkansas Traveler, a student newspaper, had run a feature story on Vernon, and there was a request that he personally visit a political science class.

Monica was appointed to take Vernon to meet that class. It met at 8:30 in the morning, and when she phoned his hotel to inform him of the hour he suggested that they first have breakfast together at the student union. She was thrilled. Although she couldn’t imagine how he would be able to overcome his woman-shyness to the point of sitting across the table from her. Instead of wearing her customary black, she wore a campaign T-shirt. When Vernon appeared at the food court of the union, she was tickled to see that he was wearing the T-shirt too! It was really funny: there was this picture of his face on his chest, with his real face right above it! If the real face couldn’t look her in the eye, she’d just lock eye contact with the printed face! And of course they got lots of attention, and even a few people came up while they were eating breakfast and asked for Vernon’s autograph, or, trying to be funny, said, “Ingle who?” to which the candidate always laughed and said, “A couple more weeks and you won’t have to ask that.”

While he looked not at her but at his plate, she told him of the tour she and Cast had made, and which colleges she thought would be strongest, the colleges where he ought to give speeches. Speaking of speeches, he managed to impart to her, without a glance in her direction, that he had just returned from a few days in Washington D.C., where he had gone to spend some time with a speech coach that Carlton Drew had recommended. He had taken with him a videotape of the disliked announcement speech; he had also been videotaped making a set speech, which was played back to him repeatedly with analysis of his weak phrasing, mannerisms, poor posture, lack of gesticulation, etc., etc. It had been an embarrassing experience but he had learned quite a lot, and it was well worth the expense. Jelena had gone with him, to see the sights of the capital.

“And I’ve been working on my timidity toward the opposite sex,” he declared, but he still wasn’t looking at her when he said it.

Now, this morning in the political science class, he was going to be delivering his first speech since having been taught a few things about his flaws as a speaker, and, he told Monica, he wanted her to monitor him closely and keep notes in her notebook. She told him she’d already arranged to have the session videotaped for possible use by the television stations, and she of course had her cassette tape recorder with her, and would sit in the front row.

“Splendid,” Vernon said to his cup of coffee. “You’re being a great help to me, Monica, and I really appreciate it. I don’t know how I could get along without you. Besides that, you’re simply a very good person, and I like you very much, and if there was any woman I could feel unnervous toward it would probably be you.”

Monica had to brush away a tear on her cheek, and hoped it hadn’t messed up her mascara. “Thank you,” she said quietly. “And I just want you to know this: I have worked for many politicians. Every last one of them was arrogant. But you’re not.”

Vernon smiled broadly and straightened his shoulders and said to the tabletop, “Let’s go bulldoze those students.”

They walked across the campus to Old Main, Vernon waving and smiling to students and stopping to shake hands or say hello. In between these greetings he told Monica he wanted her to do a little favor for him. He wanted her to record in her notebook any word he used that she’d never heard before. Also any expression. He laughed and said, “I’ll pay you a hundred dollars for every word you write down that you haven’t heard before, and I’ll pay you two hundred dollars for any expression I use you haven’t heard before.” She said she’d be glad to do it, but he didn’t have to pay her. It was just part of her job.

As it turned out, she wouldn’t have made any money on that deal anyway. After the introduction by the professor, who simply read most of the details of the official bio Lydia had written about him, Vernon strode to the lectern so briskly he overshot it and had to back up. Then he looked out over the room—there were only about thirty students—and said, “My fellow Americans.” He said it movingly, clearly, with feeling. Then he said, “Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, in this day and age when all is said and done but good things come to those who wait for the best-laid plans of mice and men to rush in where angels fear to tread, it is indeed a glorious and undeserved privilege for me to address such a sea of bright and shining faces. It is my considered opinion that the state of the nation and the state of the state leave much to be desired, that this tide in the affairs of men, this heat in the kitchen that men cannot take and stay out of, this position between a rock and a hard place, this can of worms which has upset the apple cart—”

The professor himself, Monica noticed, had begun cackling, and even his students were staring at their teacher as if wondering if he were being rude to the guest, but then they started chuckling, cackling, snickering, snorting and guffawing too. Monica was uneasy. Vernon was speaking beautifully, such a fantastic improvement on his announcement speech, but his words seemed to be provoking an inappropriate amount of amusement.

“For want of a nail the shoe was lost and we are waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s on the other foot now. If it fits, wear it. My friends, I am here to tell you that there is simply no use flogging a dead horse of a different color that you led to water but couldn’t make drink and tried to put the cart before him. Where was I?”

Monica suddenly realized, as the roar of laughter swelled, that Vernon was trying to be silly. He had offered her two hundred dollars for any expression she hadn’t heard before, but she had heard all of these expressions so often they were stupid.

“The issues of this campaign are substantive and cannot be avoided. One of life’s little ironies, which I have on unimpeachable authority, is that the rich get richer and poor get poorer, and it is time to pay the piper! My opponents claim that what goes around comes around, but I beg to differ. That dog won’t hunt. He who hesitates is lost. The finger of destiny has pointed itself at me and said, ‘Take the bull by the horns!’ Life is what you make it. Am I right or am I right? Far be it from me to put all my eggs in one basket, because, my friends, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet! Thank you. I can’t even begin to tell you what a pleasure it’s been. It has been a pleasure.”

They gave him a standing ovation, so Monica stood up and clapped and laughed too. She was a little worried, though. When the laughter died down, Vernon stopped being oratorical and said in a matter-of-fact voice, “I am establishing in this political science department a special award of merit for mental alertness, and the first winner of that award will be the student in this class who can tell me anything I said worth hearing. Anyone?”

After another uproar of laughter, a student raised his hand and said, “Well, that part about paying the piper wasn’t so bad! But where do we find the piper?”

That brought another swell of laughter. The professor stepped to the lectern. “I think Mr. Ingledew has made an admirable demonstration of the vacuity of most political rhetoric. But perhaps he would now be willing to answer our questions about his life and work and beliefs. Let’s hear those.”

A girl said, “Mr. Ingledew, you never went to college yourself. Do you belief that college is useless, or did you just not get a chance to go?”

“No,” Vernon said, avoiding her gaze. “College is a kind of Arcadian paradise where everyone—faculty and students alike—can retreat from the mundane realities of life long enough to explore the vast body of wisdom governing the smooth functioning of those realities. I was simply too far away from a college campus and too busy earning a living.”

“You’re not opposed to colleges?” a boy challenged him.

“I don’t honestly believe you can learn anything in college that you couldn’t learn better by yourself.”

“So you consider yourself smart?” another boy asked.

“Smart sounds like a handicap if you say it like that,” Vernon said. “And don’t confuse intelligence with knowledge. There are unfortunately a lot of smart politicians who don’t know anything. And a lot of really good politicians who aren’t particularly smart.”

“But you’re both, right?” the boy said, and Monica made a note to get his name after class and try to recruit him. “You’re smart and you know it all.”

“Thank you,” Vernon said, as if the kid had complimented him, not insulted him. “But as you’ve discovered every day you’re in college, the more you know, the more you know you do not know. Knowledge is a life-long process and I’ve still got forty years to go, I hope.”

“You claim to know so much,” the same boy said. “But how do we know you know anything?”

Vernon smiled. “Why don’t you test me? Ask me something.”

The guy looked around at some of his fellow students as if for their help in furnishing questions. He apparently couldn’t think of a good one offhand himself. But then he opened the textbook on his desk, letting it fall open at random, and said, “What’s the difference between Hobbes and Locke?”

Vernon summarized the contrasts between the philosophies of the two thinkers, making the explanation so clear that the professor complimented him.

The student flipped to another page. “What is the purpose of the behaviorist conception of political science?”

Vernon not only outlined the goals of behaviorism but contrasted them to Greek and nineteenth-century conceptions.

“Shit,” the student said, “you just got ahold of our textbook and memorized it.”

“What is your textbook?” Vernon asked.

The professor showed Vernon a copy. “Looks like a good book,” Vernon said, “but it’s not in my library. Why don’t you ask me something else?”

“Any subject?” a student asked.

“Any subject from A through P,” Vernon said. “That’s as far as I’ve got in my autodidacticism.” He meant it as a witty observation and it drew much laughter. And then a student asked him to explain Laplace transform. Another student asked, “Who was the better painter, Rubens or Caravaggio?” And a third student asked him to define and give examples of “gunboat diplomacy.” For the rest of the class period they asked Vernon Ingledew questions and he answered them all.

“A most impressive performance,” commented the professor when it was all over. And added, “I think you’ve got my vote.”

What Monica decided—her best idea yet—was to start a radio call-in program. It would be called Ask Me Anything, and Vernon would do it for an hour twice a week and it would be on several different radio stations all over the state.

She didn’t know whether it was that, or the tour that she and Cast had made to campuses, but the next poll showed that Vernon had 8 percent, almost ten times his ranking in the first poll! But Cast reminded her that she had bet him a week’s salary that Vernon would reach 10 percent in the next poll, and he hadn’t quite made it. Monica cheerfully paid up, even though she couldn’t afford it.

Chapter nine

At this point in the campaign he still felt pretty good about his new job. He got up every morning eager to get to work, and he no longer had to don his khaki workshirt, which all Tyson executives wore out of some kind of solidarity with the blue-collar (or rather khaki-collar) workers. What he was doing on behalf of the state of Arkansas in general and Vernon Ingledew in particular filled him with a greater sense of accomplishment than what he’d been doing at Tyson’s. One of the reasons he decided to take leave from Tyson’s was the frustrations he had been putting up with for ten years, trying to convince the public and elected officials across the country that Tyson’s was a good corporate citizen, paid its people a fair and competitive wage, provided a safe workplace, was environmentally responsible, and concerned about food safety. This was not easy with the prevailing attitude about Tyson’s in the media being that they, like all big corporations, were interested in nothing but the bottom line. And he still bore understandable resentment over Donald Smaltz’s federal case against him that got him a prison sentence for an innocent act…although President Clinton in his last days had pardoned him, and he’d never had to spend a day in jail.

Of course Bo had had some of the same frustration, which may have been part of his reason for taking leave, but his company after all was one of the top American corporations while Arch’s was just a local chicken company, so to speak…even if it was the world’s largest poultry processor. But apart from that difference in the relative size of the companies they left behind them, Bo Pharis and Arch were remarkably alike, even in their appearance, and more than once they got mistaken for each other. Hank Endicott in his column took to referring to them as “The Smith Brothers,” because of their beards. But Bo still kept his linebacker’s body in trim. Arch had been a tackle at Charleston High, and if you know anything about the difference between linebackers and tackles you can imagine how his lower body weight had gotten a bit out of hand. He may as well confess something that Bo himself never knew, or if he did he kept his knowledge of it a secret from Arch: in the Class AA football playoffs of 1965, Arch’s Charleston High Tigers played Bo’s Harrison High Goblins, where Bo was the star of the defense. Arch’s job was to take him out, to knock him flat on his back. Arch did. Bo didn’t know who Arch was then. But in the heat of the campaign Arch could always remind himself that if Bo needed to be taken out Arch was the man for the job.

If Bo was correct in his search for a Don Quixote allusion, Arch was his Sancho Panza. But Arch liked to subscribe to the Seven Samurai allusion, as everybody else did, in which case, if Bo was Kambei, the leader, Arch was not necessarily Shichiroji, his adjutant, but rather Kyuzo, the all-purpose deadly swordsman. Kyuzo was quiet and kept to himself and never ran out of energy. He never lost a duel. At every turn he could be counted on to do his job. He worked best under pressure. He was always ready. That was Arch.

Without boasting, Arch recognized in himself certain qualities that set him apart from Bo Pharis. Sure, they had their similarities, which were endless, apart from their appearance. For example, they discussed art together, although Bo knew much more about nineteenth-century art than Arch did; they played golf together, although Bo’s handicap at Stonebridge Meadows, the new public (Democratic) course in Fayetteville, was seven, whereas Arch’s was eighteen at best; they fly-fished together on Kings River and Crooked Creek, but Bo always caught twice as many as Arch did (Arch didn’t wish to give the impression that they sneaked off from the campaign constantly to go fishing or golfing or chatting up modern art, but they did allow themselves an occasional break from the stress of their jobs, and they deferred until after the election even the thought of fishing for king salmon on the Kenai River in Alaska, or deep sea fishing off the Baja Peninsula at Cabo San Lucas).

But Bo, like managers of any sort—boxers’ managers, writers’ managers, actors’ managers—could be tough, abrasive, even mean. Arch had always tried to be nice to people. He was easy to get along with. Bo could make enemies right and left without compunction; Arch couldn’t tell you the name of any enemy he’d ever made…except possibly his first wife, and even she, he believed, had good feelings about him overall. He had a talent for making friends, and the state of Arkansas was densely populated with his lasting go-way-backers. There was even a time, in the Seventies, when Witt Stephens, the super-rich kingmaker of Arkansas politics, tried repeatedly to persuade Arch to run for governor himself. His father, Archie II, always told Witt, “Spike would have to have an ego transplant even to consider such a thing.” (“Spike” was a nickname bestowed upon him in infancy by a relative and he never could outgrow it; by the way, Arch was his real familiar name; Archie is his actual birth-certificate name, the same as his father and his great-uncle; the distinction confused a lot of people who thought they were being chummy when they call him Archie.) Like Monica, he never met a politician who didn’t have a huge ego…until he met Vernon Ingledew, and while Vernon might have had ambition, a quality Arch was lacking in as well as ego, Vernon did not think that he was God’s gift to mankind—or, since like all the Ingledews he didn’t believe in God—he did not think that he was put on this earth for the purpose of attracting universal love for his personality and accomplishments. If Arch had had a smidgen of Vernon’s looks he would probably have had to have an ego to go with it, but he was convinced Vernon didn’t even have an idea of how good-looking he was. Arch never once saw Vernon glance in a mirror.

One reason Vernon could pull off that little speech he gave to that political science class at the University was that he was not only poking fun at politicians but poking fun at himself too. You had to realize that to know how funny it was; otherwise it just seemed silly. The professor of that class requested a copy of the videotape, from which he had several copies made and sent to his colleagues who taught political science at other Arkansas campuses, with the result that Vernon was invited to speak at a number of campuses just before the semester was over, and to speak not just to political science classes of thirty or sixty students, but to the entire campus. This helped energize the good work that Monica and Cast had already started, and was one reason that so many hundreds of college students devoted themselves to the campaign in the crucial last weeks before the primary election.

It was also the beginning of what would become an essential component of Vernon’s campaign: a return to stump speaking. Arch’s uncle Dale Bumpers, the last of the great old time stump speakers, and recently cited by a poll of historians as Arkansas’s best governor of the Twentieth Century, was not just a great orator but a firm believer in contact with the people, and as his chauffeur Arch had taken him to hundreds of rallies in little Arkansas towns. Arch knew that George Dinsmore intended to be Vernon’s chauffeur, but when Arch learned that George, a sensible and engaging old hillbilly, had been a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, and still possessed a pilot’s license which he hadn’t had any reason to use for twenty-five years, Arch suggested, and Bo agreed, that they ought to lease a helicopter—even if it meant going to Tulsa to get a good deal—in order to get Vernon to all those campuses, and, subsequently, all those little Arkansas towns. In time, the only difference between old-time stump speaking and what Vernon did was that the candidate did not arrive on a dusty winding road but out of the sky.

Vernon’s candidacy became noticeable and targetable to the other candidates. Endicott’s original column had scared three of them into quitting, but the others didn’t really start worrying about Vernon until he jumped from 1 percent to 8 percent in the polls. Bo and Arch hired their own pollster whose numbers were actually higher (and more accurate) than that. The other primary candidates began looking for ways to keep Vernon from getting any more attention, and their oppo men started sniffing around Stay More in such numbers that George Dinsmore had to run them off.

The good thing about Vernon, despite those thirteen deadly albatrosses, any one of which would have killed his candidacy if it became widely publicized, was that he left no paper trail whatever: there were no documents or public or private records or anything at all on the Internet which could be used against him. Nevertheless, the other five candidates became thoroughly familiar with the fact that Vernon had lived out of wedlock for thirty years with his first cousin, had no children, that he was an atheist, that he had no experience in elective office, etc., etc. So it became Arch’s pleasant chore to call each of their campaign managers, each of them old friends of Arch’s, and politely inform them that the Ingledew campaign’s Director of Opposition Research, Mr. Harry Wolfe, had obtained sufficient information on each and every one of them (with one exception, to be discussed below) to thoroughly discredit, defame, and destroy each of them, “if the need arose.” That need would not arise, Arch politely warned them, if they did their utmost to refrain from making any personal attacks on Vernon Ingledew. These guys, who knew Arch and knew he played fair, cursed him aloud, making some really offensive insults, and if they did not do that, he could hear them over the phone gnashing their teeth and snarling in frustration. Even he felt sorry for them.

This tactic didn’t faze Secretary of State Leon McCutcheon, who either didn’t believe Arch or else wasn’t afraid of anything. In his television spots he began to refer to Vernon as “Mr. Know-It-All” because of Vernon’s new radio call-in show, Ask Me Anything. The spot showed a not-very-bright farmer calling in to the radio show, who says, “I got a question for you, Ingledew. What makes you think that a egghead smarty pants is qualified to be governor?” And the spot ended with a smooth announcer declaring, “Leon McCutcheon may not know everything, but he knows how to govern!” Arch thought the spot was innocuous enough but Bo felt otherwise, and it was soon leaked to the press that Leon McCutcheon’s wife was in the process of filing for divorce, the grounds for which would be announced at a later date. McCutcheon shut up. He killed those spots and had nothing else to say about Vernon.

Indeed, all the other candidates concentrated so fiendishly on attacking one another from top to bottom, without any further mention of Vernon, that the electorate (surely the intelligent electorate) must have begun to get a little suspicious. Here were these five guys slinging mud all over the place, and not a fleck of it hit Vernon. Was he a saint? Or, since he was so fabulously rich, had he bought the silence of his opponents? The Reverend John Colby Dixon, a popular television evangelist, who had used his pulpit on statewide TV for the past year to drum up votes for himself, and whose campaign manager was the only one Arch hadn’t fully intimidated, because indeed all that Harry Wolfe had been able to find on him was the allegation, never taken to court, that he had seduced a 16-year-old member of his choir (Cast had found a newspaper item about that very early on, but the news hadn’t diminished the size of the evangelist’s audience or voters), made bold to denounce Vernon from the pulpit, not for his atheism, strangely enough, but for the fact that he was “nothing but a pig farmer, an ex-hippie Ozark hillbilly living in the weirdest mansion you ever saw.”

George Dinsmore had his hands full trying to keep photographers and television crews off the mountain trail to the Ingledew double-bubble. Erecting a locked gate on it wasn’t enough; photographers can climb fences. George had to delegate a posse of Ingledew factory workers to keep around-the-clock guard. Fortunately the majority of snoops hunting for Stay More couldn’t even find Stay More, let alone the trail to the Ingledews homestead. At any rate, no image of that double-bubble ever appeared in the media; the only public image of it remains the smudged and obscure final illustration in The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks.

Bo told Harry Wolfe, since he had nothing better to do, to devote his full energies to the Reverend John Colby Dixon, and to find, at all costs, that alleged 16-year-old seductee, and offer her whatever price necessary for her full confession. Harry did succeed in locating the girl’s mother, who lived alone in Beebe. She informed him that the girl, now twenty and twice-divorced, was living in “Boston or Seattle or one of those places” but had no mailing address, phone number or other means of contact. “Did she have an affair with Reverend Dixon?” Harry asked the mother. “Oh, no question about that,” the woman said.

But without details or proof or a confession or anything, and nothing else in Harry’s meager file on Dixon (Garth Rucker had devoted a fruitless week to the task), there was no “leverage” to dissuade the evangelist from his weekly attacks on Vernon, or rather his disparagement of Vernon as a “mere” hippie pig farmer. Bo and Lydia and Arch wondered why the evangelist never brought up the matter of Vernon’s atheism. “Maybe he’s saving it,” Lydia suggested. After McCutcheon began to fade, Reverend Dixon rose until he was right behind Barnas in the polls.

Fourth place was the highest Vernon could hope for. The Samurai did their damnedest, each of them, but they just couldn’t claw their way up those stingy polls. Vernon couldn’t lift himself by his bootstraps. In his own eagerness to improve his rating he was inclined to forget some of the lessons they’d tried to teach him about keeping a lid on his radical ideas for what he was going to “extirpate.” They didn’t mind too much when he proposed broad and revolutionary solutions to the “highway problem,” meaning not simply improving the condition of the highways, which all the other candidates were loud about, but totally eliminating litter by stepped-up patrols that would catch litterers and force them into on-the-spot clean-ups: one large bag of collected litter would be the fine for having tossed an item.

What the Ingledew campaign really needed was not any more radical ideas but a media event. Arch knew very well that politics itself rarely makes news; the newspapers don’t give space to politicians’ attacks on each other, or the manipulations of the campaign, or even the fluctuations of the polls. For a candidate to get noticed in the media, he or she has to be involved in something newsworthy. Every candidate knew this. When, for example, in late April the horrible tornado hit the town of Barling in western Arkansas with so much destruction and death, all six of the primary candidates, plus Governor Shoat Bradfield himself, were on the scene before the wind died down. Shoat Bradfield got himself on television with a speech that promised relief and personally absolved God from any responsibility for the disaster. Five of the Democratic candidates rolled up their sleeves and tried to get themselves photographed clearing away the debris or serving food to the victims, but they were lost in the crowd. Vernon encountered a television cameraman who was curious to know if he and George had had any turbulence bringing that helicopter into Barling, and Vernon took the occasion to give a speech in which he actually promised, if elected governor of Arkansas, to eliminate tornadoes!

Bo was fit to be tied. “Don Quixote has found his windmills!” he raged. As soon as they got Vernon and George back in Fayetteville, Bo called a meeting and, since Bo was out of control, Arch took over and politely said to Vernon that he thought it would be a really fantastic achievement if Vernon eliminated tornadoes. It would hugely benefit not just the state of Arkansas but also Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, all the “tornado alley” states. But just how, for godsakes, did he plan to do it? Without batting an eye, Vernon launched into this complicated meteorological explanation of just how tornadoes could be—he didn’t use this word, but Arch couldn’t help thinking it—extirpated, that is, each tornado can be thought of as having a root at the base of its funnel, and that root, while the most powerfully destructive part of the tornado, is the most vulnerable part, and can be “tripped” and broken. But just what means would be used to trip and break the root was something that Vernon would discuss only after he was elected.

They had their media event all right. The television commentators and all the newspapers, while they devoted the top of the news to accounts of the actual destruction and mounting death toll and the relief efforts, with just brief mention of Governor Bradfield’s appearance and no mention at all of the other five candidates, made side-of-the-news references, implicitly derisive, to, as the Southwest Times Record of Fort Smith put it, “the campaign promise to end all campaign promises: elect Vernon Ingledew and he’ll stop tornadoes!” The next day, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s editorial cartoonist John Deering had a lulu depicting Vernon in the stance of Charleton Heston as Moses parting the sea, lifting his arms to split a tornado. It wasn’t even a good caricature of Vernon, and, because he still lacked wide recognition, he had to be identified by a banner that said INGELDEW [sic].

Although the other five candidates were loath to paint Vernon’s promise as sheer folly, out of fear of retribution from the files of Harry Wolfe, the media itself had a high old time with the matter, and Hank Endicott wrote a witty, satirical, slightly vicious column in which he suggested that the real opponents in this matter were Vernon Ingledew and God, and that God ought to be put on notice that if He tried to throw a tornado after Vernon became governor, He had better expect to have to file a “Tornado Permit” at least forty-eight hours before attempting to unleash a twister. “Tornado control is above politics,” Endicott concluded. “But Ingledew appears to have lost the Almighty’s vote, even if he hadn’t already lost it because of his refusal to believe in Him.” That was the first clear public allusion to Vernon’s atheism, and while a number of preachers lacking subjects for their Sunday sermons picked up on the matter and began to question the candidacy of a man who not only defied God by planning to stop His tornadoes but also didn’t believe in Him in the first place, the other candidates did not broach the subject…except, as we shall see, the Reverend John Colby Dixon.

The tornado fiasco wasn’t the straw that broke Bo’s back, but it didn’t help. Arch turned on his computer one morning to find this email:

Arch – the University has just informed me that they have decided to ‘postpone indefinitely’ the awarding of an honorary degree to me at commencement. Only reason? ‘Certain members of the Board of Trustees feel that partisan politics should not intrude upon academia.’ Well, fuck ’em! I thought the goddamn thing was for my past achievements, not what I’m doing lately. I’m sick about this, and I’m taking off. Catch you later. – Bo.

The first thing Arch did was try to find Cast, to see if he knew anything about his mentor’s whereabouts. Monica didn’t know where Cast was. Arch thought of protesting the Board’s decision to John White, the chancellor of the University, but he and Arch weren’t the best of friends, not since Arch had countermanded his decision to close the University of Arkansas Press by offering a gift of a million from Tyson to keep it in business. So Arch went over him, and called Frank Oldham, chairman of the Board of Trustees, who owed Arch, and Arch gave him an earful. Politely, of course. Oldham consented to give Arch the names of the three members of the Board who had been responsible for the decision to rescind Bo’s honorary degree. Not all three of them owed Arch, just a couple, but Arch gave them all an earful, even dropping the politeness during several minutes, and Arch wound up getting their agreement to “strongly reconsider” their asshole stupidity.

But Arch couldn’t find Bo to give him the good news that he’d probably get his degree, after all, even if Arch had to hood him himself. In the wee hours of one morning Lydia called Arch, waking him, and said, “You’re boss now, you know.” Arch answered that he wasn’t so sure, but he was “acting campaign manager” for the nonce. Well, she said, she’d just got a feed from a radio station manager with a possible media event looming behind it. In Morrilton a small grocery store called Sam and LaTonya’s, operated by blacks in a mixed neighborhood, was bombed earlier in the middle of the night. This very same night, meaning earlier this morning, across the river in Danville, La Comida, a tienda de comestibles, an Hispanic grocery store, was similarly bombed. Lydia thought they ought to get Vernon to both places as fast as George’s helicopter could take him. So Arch phoned Vernon in Stay More about 5:00 a.m., told him Arch was subbing for Bo, gave him the details and jokingly asked him to refrain from proposing the extirpation of bombs.

George and Vernon got in that helicopter and George whisked his boss down to Morrilton, arriving simultaneously with the first television trucks out of Little Rock. After making a forceful and dramatic speech to the several dozen blacks assembled there, expressing his outrage at whomever planted the bomb, Vernon was televised standing between Sam and his wife LaTonya with his arms around them. “We’ll find who did it,” he told them, “and this will never happen again in the state of Arkansas. Not after I’m elected governor.”

Then after they’d milked the situation for all it was worth, Vernon and George disappeared, reboarded the helicopter, which George had parked out of sight, and flew quickly to Danville, where the entire Latino population of the town, about three hundred people, were congregating in front of La Comida and the television cameras from Fort Smith. Vernon addressed them in Spanish, deploring this senseless violence and inviting their solidarity with their black brethren across the river, who had suffered an identical bombing. He told them in Spanish that when he became governor of Arkansas he would extirpar whatever root causes of such racism or bigotry had caused this. He told them that he hoped this incident would not diminish their pride in being Arkansawyers. He knew why they had come to Arkansas in the first place from Mexico and El Salvador: Trabajo. Tranquilidad. Familia. Work. Small-town tranquillity. Family. He would guarantee they could enjoy those things forevermore.

They cheered Vernon wildly and yelled, Gobernador! Gobernador Ingledew! The television stations broadcast the performance to the entire Hispanic population of Arkansas, particularly in the northwest counties, where it was strongest, thanks in no small measure to the fact that Arch’s Tyson Foods had been hiring them in droves. The other five contenders for the gubernatorial primary could only mouth the customary pap of indignation; they had been caught flatfooted and were ignored by the media.

Vernon’s appearances at Morrilton and Danville were all over the next day’s papers as well as on television and radio. The three or four Spanish-language newspapers published in the state really made a big deal out of it, making it look as if Vernon Ingledew were the only friend the Latinos had among the Anglo population. The Ingledew campaign couldn’t possibly have bought such good publicity. Vernon practically sealed the Hispanic vote, as well as a large part of the black vote, with that single morning’s work.

Never mind that sharp FBI agents sent in to examine the bombings discovered that there had been no forced entry or other way of getting the bombs inside the stores, and this led them to the eventual discovery and analysis, weeks later, that the “bombs” had actually been defective or malformed cans of food that had exploded on the shelves in the stores. It was too late to reverse the image of Vernon as a leader of the oppressed. And a lot of non-Hispanic white people began to notice and admire him because of his championing of the downtrodden and his forceful opposition to prejudice and injustice. Arch’s pollster told him he had nothing to worry about. The next public poll gave Vernon an astounding 20 percent, again more than doubling the previous poll. More incredibly, some of the media began to editorialize that Vernon just might be capable of abolishing tornadoes.

One more candidate dropped out of the race, leaving only five, and Vernon was clearly in third place, even if a distant third behind Barnas and Reverend Dixon. Surely, wherever he was, Bolin Pharis was apprised of this. Arch kept up his efforts to locate him, even calling his Cincinnati house several times. Finally, Monica reported to Arch that Cast had returned to work, or, rather, he had never left work, but had been busy helping Carleton Drew plan an advertising campaign that would get around Vernon’s proscription of television by extensive use not only of newspaper ads and radio but also the Internet. Since Vernon would not allow yard signs, Cast had coaxed Carleton into the idea of using a blimp: they were going to hire a large dirigible, paint its sides with INGLEDEW FOR GOVERNOR in huge letters, and pilot it constantly all over the state. “Great idea, Cast!” Arch complimented him. And then Arch asked politely, “I don’t suppose you have any idea where Bo might be?”

“Yes, but I’m not supposed to tell,” Cast replied.

“In his absence, I’m your boss,” Arch called to his attention.

“Yeah, I guess you are.”

“Then I’m ordering you to tell me where he is.”

After further persuasion of that nature, Cast finally relented. Bo had been gone for some time “back to the sticks”: he was spending a lot of time sitting on the whittler’s bench at the Harrison courthouse square, he was walking, not driving, along the backroads of the Ozarks, and he was even, supposedly, hanging out a lot around Stay More.

Arch decided to go see if he could find him.

But first there was one other big boost Arch needed to give Vernon in the polls, possibly even to propel him into second place. And it happened mostly by accident.

Arch’s uncle, Dale Bumpers, was in Fayetteville leading a seminar at the University (the entire College of Agriculture had been named after him). Dale asked Arch to meet him for lunch, and they met at Herman’s, a real institution so popular it doesn’t even have any signs identifying it in its run-down stucco roadhouse along busy 71. Herman’s makes the best steaks in northwest Arkansas and that was what they ordered. It had been a long time since Arch had eaten with Uncle Dale, and it brought back memories of the hundreds of meals they’d taken together when Arch was his campaign manager in the seventies.

Arch’s mother and Bumpers’s wife were sisters, and Bumpers had just been talking to Arch’s mother in Charleston. “Spike, what in the hell are you doing back in politics?” he wanted to know.

“I guess the political junkie in me needed a fix,” Arch said.

“The last time we talked about this, you were a total cynic about politics, and you were even asking me to help you talk some friends out of running for office. Do you remember you practically insulted me, calling politicians ‘nasty, partisan, self-serving killjoys’?”

“There was a time, Uncle Dale, when I lost all respect for politicians. But never for you.”

“So tell me about this nasty, partisan, self-serving killjoy who has lured you away from a respectable job at Tyson’s.”

Arch told him as much as he could about Vernon. Arch even attempted to describe Vernon’s appearance. He told him some of Vernon’s more radical ideas, as well as his really common-sense ideas for leading Arkansas into the 21st Century. Arch spelled out a few, but not all thirteen, of Vernon’s albatrosses. And when Arch was all finished depicting Vernon, he asked Arkansas’ greatest modern governor, “Does he remind you of anybody?”

At first Dale Bumpers looked puzzled, as if Arch were making up a riddle. Then he grinned, mildly. “So you’re just trying to recapture your lost youth by reliving or recreating those good old days.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Arch said. “But Beverly’s been telling me I look a lot younger these days. Do you think?”

“Come to think of it, you do. But I just figured you’d dyed your hair.” He dabbed at his mouth with his napkin. “Well, I certainly wish you and your Ingledew the best of luck.”

“You can do more than that, Uncle Dale. You can give him your endorsement.”

“Godsakes, Spike! You know I never endorse candidates in the Primary. If he survives the Primary I’ll certainly endorse him in the General Election. Anybody to beat that shithead Shoat.”

“He needs your endorsement now,” Arch told him. Arch sketched out the current situation: Senator James Barnas firmly entrenched in first place, the Reverend John Colby Dixon nipping at his heels, Vernon Ingledew bringing up a distant third but crowding out the remaining candidates. “All those guys, even the preacher, are career politicians, or has-beens or never-will-bes. Vernon’s the only answer.”

“Sorry, Spike. If I endorsed your man, I’d hurt the feelings of all the candidates I’ve declined for years to endorse simply because I wouldn’t get involved in primary elections.”

Arch sighed. He had the greatest admiration for his uncle, who was his family. When Arch’s father had died a couple of years before, Dale Bumpers had delivered the eulogy, as fine a speech as Arch had ever heard him make. Like Dale, like Vernon, Arch’s father had been an independent thinker, an idiosyncratic visionary, almost a pariah at times. “Throughout history the great men and women who left a great and enduring legacy,” Dale Bumpers said at the memorial service, “never hesitated to stand alone, to swim against the tide.”

From memory Arch now quoted these words back to his uncle, and Arch beseeched him to swim against the tide once more, and, while he was still debating with himself whether to take the plunge, Arch added, “I promise you that Vernon Ingledew when elected will appoint you Adjutant General of the Arkansas National Guard!” That was a post which Arch knew that Uncle Dale, an old World War II Marine, had always coveted.

They discussed the best place for the announcement—in front of Old Main? At the campaign headquarters off the Square? Why not the steps of the capitol building in Little Rock? Or even the steps of the Old Statehouse, which Clinton had used for such dramatic effect?

“I don’t want anything special,” Uncle Dale said. “Why not simply the front porch of your lovely home?”

Arch may have blushed with pride, but he did happen to have a nice big old two-story Shingle Neoclassical Craftsman in the heights west of the University. It had once been a fraternity house. Beverly and Arch had put a lot of work into its restoration.

Anyhow, that was where Vernon Ingledew came to meet Dale Bumpers for the first time, to shake his hand in front of the cameras, and to thank him warmly for his endorsement in the primary, and then to make a little speech in which he said that Dale Bumpers’s original campaign for governor could never be duplicated but it could certainly serve as a constant source of inspiration.

Attending that ceremony were Arch’s wife Beverly and their daughter Eliot, who was going to turn fifteen the week before the upcoming primary and who discovered that Vernon Ingledew was “the coolest guy” she’d ever met, even if he talked not to her but to the top of her head. Arch was surprised to notice that Vernon’s woman-shyness extended to young ladies too, but Eliot would later remark that Vernon’s bashfulness was what she liked best about him. Eliot was going to have some great ideas for enfranchising, as it were, the hundreds of thousands of Arkansawyers too young to vote but not too young to proselytize their parents. Eliot’s finest idea was to have a great campaign poster downloadable from the Internet, and this poster would, very shortly, be seen in the rooms of all of the state’s teenagers. It did not say INGLE WHO?, a question that no longer needed asking, but rather VERY VERNON. That poster became so ubiquitous that Vernon sent Eliot an email in which he declared his intention to appoint her Secretary of Teenagers, and Arch didn’t think he was entirely joking. Arch was also proud of Eliot because she was the first person to notice (how had it escaped everyone else’s detection?) that Ingledew and Governor contain the same number of letters, eight, a handy thing to know when making posters, painting blimps, and having rich but subliminal mental associations.

Also attending the ceremony were the Samurai—all seven of them, including Bo, who had flown in with Vernon and Jelena in George’s helicopter. It turned out that what Bo had primarily been doing was a combination of wandering all over Stay More or hanging out at the double-bubble, where he begged Jelena to permit him to help her plant her tomatoes (as well as the ones he’d brought from Cincinnati) and other stuff in the vegetable garden, and to help keep the weeds out of it, and where he’d had some long talks with Vernon whenever the candidate was at home. “Trust me,” Bo told Arch. “He really does know how to stop tornadoes.”

Bo had returned to the campaign without having learned from Arch that he stood an excellent chance to get his honorary degree after all. In fact, he did get it, and all of them were there watching and applauding. All of them. The Seven Samurai. Vernon and Jelena and George and Day and Diana. Dale Bumpers, whose endorsement of Vernon had boosted him into second place in the polls. The lengthy citation for Bo’s degree, read out by Chancellor John White, carried no mention of his current occupation.

Bolin Pharis III, LL.D., returned to his current occupation energetically. Arch didn’t mind being second in command again. Monica found and gave him an old button for Avis, the car renters. WE’RE NO. 2. WE TRY HARDER. Monica meant for it to refer to the fact that Vernon was now second in the polls, but Arch, proudly wearing the button on his shirt, thought of it as referring to himself.

Chapter ten

It was true that he was the only boy in a family of five girls all older than he, and it was true that he slept with his mother until he was nine years old, and there was no preventing the opposition using such facts as these in whatever skewed psychological implication they wished. At the age of fourteen he encountered his unhappy cousin Jelena standing on the edge of Leapin Rock, that’s true, and he may or may not have been responsible for the fact that she did not jump. When he was sixteen, his father, John Henry (“Hank”) Ingledew, had presented him with a gold chronometer wristwatch which had been given to Hank at the age of only ten years by an itinerant peddler on his last trip to Stay More moments before his death, who had told Hank that he would keep and save the watch to give to his son, assuming that ten-year-old Hank would ever have a son, or would have one only after trying and failing five times. That (and much, much else) was true and available to any of the opposition who bothered to read the peculiar chronicle called The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks.

But that gold watch did not possess any sort of magic power, nothing which enabled the wearer of it to become aware of the fact that he was “in” a novel and could communicate with readers of the novel as well as with the Author himself. Life is hard enough without the added burden of feeling that one is merely acting out some assigned role in a made-up story.

In any case, that gold watch, which was still in Vernon’s possession and still kept excellent time, although he hadn’t worn it since he was twenty, did not, Vernon can assure you, endow him with any ability to communicate with you, or you, or you, or any other “readers” or “viewers” or “witnesses” or “eavesdroppers” or “audience” or whatever you would prefer to be called, you who are holding in your hands a book called Thirteen Albatrosses (or, Falling Off the Mountain). Of course you aren’t saying anything. (Or are you?) The point is, even if Vernon put on that magic chronometer, he couldn’t hear you.

It was his estimable best buddy, Day Whittacker, who revealed to him the book’s title, and advised him that he might as well “go along for the ride” and enjoy it, as he was doing. Over the years, Day and Vernon have had some really heavy arguments, but they rarely if ever got angry with each other. Vernon was a bit irritated, however, with Day’s own kind of “magic realism,” nearly as bad as that gold chronometer business, which claimed that Day had already “read” each of the previous chapters of this book, and knew what each of the persons—George, Bo, Jelena, Lydia, Harry, Monica, Arch—had been thinking.

“If we’re only in a book,” Vernon said to Day, “then why don’t you flip ahead a few pages and tell me whether or not I’m going to win this goddamn Primary.”

Day laughed uproariously. “We’re not ‘only’ in this book, Vernon,” he said. “If we were ‘only’ here, then the reader would know every little thought that passed through our minds. It would be awfully boring. I have a rich, full, exciting life outside this book.”

“So you’re telling me you can’t skim ahead a few pages and reveal the outcome of the primary?”

“I can’t understand,” Day challenged Vernon, “why some people have to skip to the end of a book. That’s gross impatience, and violates the fairness of time.”

So Vernon gave up. There was the Second Conversion of Bo Pharis to accomplish, the First Conversion of course being the trip to Cincinnati. Now Vernon arrived home for a short rest from a grueling trip downstate to shake several thousand hands and smile several thousand times and reiterate from memory his standard campaign speech. He arrived home, George settling their helicopter upon its pad near Jelena’s garden, and there was Jelena down on her knees putting tomato plants into the rich soil which was being spaded up by some fellow in overalls and a straw hat, whose skin was already tanned from the sun but wasn’t quite as red as what one might expect to see on a Newton County farmer. After giving Jelena a big kiss Vernon turned to look at the man, and it took him longer than it should have to recognize him. Vernon supposed it was the man’s build, and his dark beard, which gave him away.

“So,” Vernon said to him, jokingly, “I’m paying you two hundred dollars an hour to dig holes?”

But Bo Pharis did not think it was funny. “You’re not paying me zip. I’m no longer working for you. And Jelena’s not paying me for this, either. I’m doing it for nothing. I’m doing everything for nothing.”

His voice sounded a bit frantic, even unhinged. Vernon suggested that when Jelena and Bo were finished with their garden, they might have some gin and tonic and talk. Later Vernon asked Jelena, “How long has he been around?” and she said just a few days. “Just a few?” Vernon said. “You mean he’s been spending the night?” Vernon’s beloved explained that she’d found Bo wandering around down in the valley, like a lost dog, and she’d taken him home with her, fed him, given him a drink, and told him to make himself at home and take over the guest room if he wanted it. They’d gotten along just fine, talking about gardening and what was to be planted and when, and she really enjoyed Bo’s company and his help in the garden, although, as Vernon must have noticed, Bo was not exactly playing with a full deck. One night he had asked Jelena, straight out, “Do you think Vernon is right?” About what? she’d replied. “Everything. Anything,” Bo had said. She had laughed and said, Well no, frankly, Vernon was wrong about a lot of things, and he was certainly wrong to think that he’d be happy as governor of Arkansas. “Me too,” Bo had said.

Vernon, whose primary quality, it must have been noticed by now, was not his intelligence so much as his compassion—his ability to empathize with anybody—took hold of Bo, literally and figuratively, and straightened him out. Vernon took Bo for long walks all over Stay More. He commiserated with Bo over the stupid about-face of the University Board of Trustees, and he predicted, quite correctly as it turned out, that Arch would handle the matter, and Bo would get his honorary degree after all. But that wasn’t the main thing troubling Bo. Bo had become increasingly pessimistic about the campaign. He had hoped that there would be a way to accommodate Vernon’s radical ideas to the electorate. He had intended to gloss over the fact that Vernon was extremely conservative in some respects—like Stay Morons for generations he was opposed to “PROG RESS,” as they had always disparagingly pronounced it—while in other ways he was dangerously liberal in his intention to abolish traditional institutions. Bo felt he could paint a picture of Vernon as a populist which would hide his extremism. But Vernon was not making it easy with his occasional outburst of crackpot ideas like stopping tornadoes.

As chance would have it, one of their hikes along the backroads of Stay More took them into the presence of one of those common little whirlwinds called dust devils. Whether or not a dust devil is a miniature tornado, it behaves in basically the same fashion, and funnels dust, debris and sand to great heights. And thus Vernon was able to demonstrate, to Bo’s astonishment, how he could simply extirpate the dust devil, depriving it of its root. Since Bo couldn’t believe his eyes, another dust devil conveniently came along, and Vernon repeated the trick, which involved some fancy footwork and the swinging of an old board.

“Wow,” Bo was moved to remark. “The next thing you’ll be doing is claiming that you can extirpate cancer.”

Vernon smiled. “I’m saving that for the general election.”

As they were strolling down what had been the Main Street of Stay More, now populated by Vernon’s free-ranging hogs, who had converted into hog wallows the old foxholes dug by children playing war games during the Second World War, they noticed that the occupant of the old Jacob Ingledew house was sitting on her porch, enjoying the early May sunshine. Vernon waved at her and, as she did not get up and rush into the house or show any shyness in the presence of the strange bearded man, Vernon decided to introduce them. But Vernon did not use either her actual name, which was Svanetian, nor her well-known American pen name. Vernon assumed that Bo, like any well-read person, would have heard of her or even read one of her many books, and would, like the world at large, have assumed that the woman had been murdered years before, as recounted in the pages both of The Paris Review and in the novel Ekaterina, by the same Author as The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks.

Vernon knew that Bo had read at least one of those, and he took the familiarity to serve as a basis for reminding him that Jacob Ingledew’s mysterious inamorata, who had shared the ex-governor’s last years here in this house with him and his wife Sarah, had been referred to simply as Whom We Cannot Name, and thus, for the present purposes, for the nonce, it would be just as well to refer to the present occupant of the house by that same cognomen. Vernon was not ready—and might never be ready—to reveal to Bo the complicated story whereby he had conspired with the woman, and with the woman’s presumed murderer, to fabricate her death in order to allow her to retreat into permanent seclusion and anonymity here in Stay More, free forevermore from harassment by her fans.

The Woman graciously invited Bo and Vernon inside the house so that Bo could see what she had done to it. Bo expressed his astonishment constantly. The interior was both an attempt to restore the building to the actual rustic Victorian appearance it had had when the ex-governor lived here and an adaptation of that appearance to the Woman’s needs and interests, particularly her extensive library and her music collection.

Vernon wanted Bo to see especially the way an upstairs room had been transformed. For years it had been called “The Unfinished Room”: just a big storeroom, like an attic space filled with the accumulated cast-offs of generations of occupants from Jacob onward, but now it was the nicest room in the house, a guest room never used, containing a gorgeous four-poster bed and other bedroom furniture, antique paneling, and stenciled floors: it was like stepping directly into the 1860s, not as they were known by typical Ozarkers but by that anonymous Little Rock woman who had become the governor’s mistress. It had been in this room, in its former cluttered, unfinished state, that Vernon as a young man had found the nearly complete holograph manuscript of The Memoirs of Former Arkansas Governor Jacob Ingledew. Vernon told Bo that he was welcome to read a photocopy of it, for whatever it was worth. There were only three copies in existence: the original in a bank vault, a copy this Woman possessed, and a copy Vernon would lend to Bo.

“I’d be delighted,” Bo said, and then he asked the Woman, “What about ghosts? Is this house haunted?”

“Oh, yes!” she said. “But not as much as the last place I lived.”

“Where was that?”

“The Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs,” she said. “Do you know it?”

Bo said he’d been there a time or two. “Do the ghosts here bother you?” he wanted to know.

“Bother?” The Woman laughed. “I’d rather think it’s the other way around. I bother them.”

As they were leaving and thanking her for the tour of the house, Bo asked, not entirely in jest, “What does the ghost of Governor Ingledew think about his descendant running for governor?”

“I quote,” the Woman said. “He’s ‘proud as the devil.’”

That night Vernon gave Bo a photocopy of his ancestor’s handwritten memoirs and Bo began reading it. The next day they would be summoned to Fayetteville for a special ceremony involving an announcement by former governor Dale Bumpers. For now, Bo Pharis, who seemed to be searching so desperately for something in the rural past of the Ozarks, could be permitted to stay up late reading Jacob Ingledew’s fabulous recollection of how he and his brother Noah had trekked with two mules some six hundred miles from their home in Tennessee to establish a new home in the lush paradise of this Ozark valley that was to become known as Stay More, given that name by the last Indian resident of the paradise, an Osage who had been nicknamed by his long-gone tribesmen “Fanshaw” because of his friendship with the early British explorer George W. Featherstonehaugh, and who had learned from his friend a passable, albeit British, English, and had befriended Jacob.

The two men enjoyed many hours together, smoking the Indian’s tobacco and drinking the white man’s corn liquor and—it struck Bo Pharis as so much like his own endless talks with Vernon—discussing everything under the sun, including their philosophical differences and the inevitable question of which of them would have to yield Stay More to the other. Always at the termination of one of these long sessions of smoking, drinking, and debate, whenever the Indian tried to excuse himself and return to his own lodging, where his squaw was waiting for him, Jacob always said, “Stay more. Hell, you jist got here.” And the town’s named derived from that formality or custom, which Fanshaw’s wife found amusing because among their own people the exact reverse was the case: when a guest has stayed as long as he wants to, his host senses it and sends him packing with an Osage expression which, if translated into modern idiom, would most literally be “Haul ass” or perhaps even “Fuck off.” Whenever Fanshaw left his wife to go visit Jacob Ingledew he would tell his wife that he was on his way to Stay More. And that was how the place got its name.

What Bo could not quite understand, as he expressed it to Vernon, was just how Fanshaw could so easily have made his wife available to Jacob for sex. The Osage were not like certain Eskimo tribes who consider it polite to provide guests with abundant gratification of all their needs: food, drink, sex. Jacob was still a virgin at the time of his encounter with Fanshaw’s squaw, whose name, if it was ever known to Jacob, was not given in his memoirs, although the memoirs speculated endlessly not only about her background and feelings and appearance (which Jacob had seen clearly only once, as she and Fanshaw were about to depart) but also about Fanshaw’s motive (and his wife’s accession) for the generous gesture. Had Fanshaw just been drunk? Was he just being extremely hospitable and friendly? Or was he trying to teach Jacob the meaning of an emotion which Jacob had been very slow to grasp: joy.

There was no question what the deed itself—described in detail in The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks and in even greater detail in the governor’s memoirs—actually accomplished for Jacob, not only removing his virginity but providing him with a single manifestation of female passion and joy which would forever after be a standard that no white woman could match. One reason that Vernon had never considered publication of the memoirs was the amount of space devoted to Jacob’s comparison of the squaw’s sexual performance with that of the three other women he would eventually know: his wife Sarah, a Confederate “recruiter” (with sexual favors) named Virdie Boatright, and the nameless Little Rock woman. It was so erotic that Bo stayed up reading long past his usual bedtime, and promised himself that when he got back to Fayetteville he would ask Arch if he didn’t know any nice single women.

Jacob’s fabulously joyful encounter with the wife of Fanshaw was not a first and last experience. He was invited to repeat it, and he did, with variations, several times. The squaw became pregnant, and, as Jacob learned from Fanshaw himself, although the two men had been sharing the women repeatedly, to their mutual complete satiation and even exhaustion, only Jacob could have been the impregnator, for Fanshaw was sterile. The Indian couple did not remain on their ancestral campground, in their basketry domicile, until the baby was born. One day they packed up and left, presumably going westward to try to find their Osage tribesmen in Indian Territory. Jacob never saw them again.

Was the impregnation of his squaw therefore Fanshaw’s motive for the sharing? Vernon told Bo that if he was really interested in such things, he should feel free, eventually, to discuss it with Day Whittacker and with the Woman now living in Jacob’s house, who was an authority on the Osage Indians.

But there was a campaign to run, and the current Stay More idyll was at end. Vernon was gratified to watch as the endorsement of Dale Bumpers raised his rating in the polls until he slipped ahead of the Reverend Dixon and was right behind Barnas, with less than a month to go until the Primary. The Seven Samurai had mapped out a couple of scenarios, both of which made it increasingly likely that there would have to be a run-off. In order to win the Primary you had to have 50 percent of the vote plus one vote. There was simply no way that any one of the three front-runners—Barnas, Ingledew or Dixon—could achieve that. The question was, since a run-off would be necessary, which of the other two would be the “better” opponent? Did they want to run up against Barnas’s well-organized and well-heeled grassroots juggernaut, even if Barnas was already proscribed from attacking Vernon? Or would they rather take on the evangelist, who, because his own record was unblemished (except for the choirgirl that Harry Wolfe and Garth Rucker had been unable to locate), would be free to attack Vernon on every front? Bo and Arch explained to Vernon that it would be possible for them to manipulate the primary, to determine which of those two would be the opponent in the run-off.

The last three weeks until the voting were unimaginably hectic, and any other man who, unlike Vernon, could not go without sleep would simply have dropped from exhaustion. The Samurai had to work in relays to keep up with him and with his busy schedule. Lydia arranged to have Vernon take to a leisurely lunch, one by one, each of the state’s major newspaper editors. Since Carleton Drew was going to be spending most of the budget customarily allotted to television on newspaper ads, particularly an advertisement which depicted graphically why Vernon was opposed to yard signs (a photograph of a Fayetteville street with all the yards hideously cluttered with all the other candidate’s yard signs), the newspaper editors were grateful for the revenue coming in from the Ingledew campaign and they were more than willing to meet with Vernon, listen to him, or rather, as he preferred, talk to him about what they considered the pressing issues of the day while he listened and took notes.

From then until the voting, the newspapers treated Vernon as if everything he did or said was newsworthy, and it wasn’t uncommon to see large headlines like INGLEDEW IMPRESSES RICE FARMERS and INGLEDEW SHOWS STATE’S EDUCATORS WHY HE IS THEIR MAN, and even HELICOPTER BREAKDOWN FAILS TO SLOW INGLEDEW’S RELENTLESS MARCH TO THE STATEHOUSE. The television stations, which were peevish because the Ingledew campaign wasn’t wasting a cent on TV ads, tried their best to ignore him, but he was so often and spectacularly before the television cameras that they simply couldn’t edit him out. Wherever he went, he was accompanied by a large marching band, “Ingledew’s Instrumentalists,” made up of talented college band members on summer vacation, usually accompanied by a choir, “Vernon’s Vocalists,” who sang among other things a spirited sort of country-western campaign song, “Why I Gotta Have Vernon,” that was so catchy it was soon on everyone’s lips. As if the marching band and the choir weren’t enough, Vernon’s rallies and speeches were usually highlighted by performances by The Cheerleaders, members of the University of Arkansas Razorbacks’ acrobatic cheerleading squad, male and female, who were employed for the summer by the Ingledew campaign and wore not their red and white uniforms but the purple and yellow associated with Vernon. When the band, the choir, the cheerleaders came into town ahead of Vernon, you could be sure that there would be such a crowd there that the television stations couldn’t ignore it or him. “All this,” Hank Endicott commented in awe, “and he hasn’t even begun what he intends to call ‘the rebirth of stump speaking.’”

The highest form of publicity was accidental. The incumbent governor, Shoat Bradfield, who didn’t need to run in the Republican Primary because the nomination was already assured him, was shown on the evening news in early June in an unguarded, candid rage, waving his arms and declaiming, with much profanity that the network bleeped out, that he had never heard of Vernon Ingledew and didn’t expect him to survive the Democratic primary but that if he did he’d get murdered by Bradfield in the election. If there was any person left in Arkansas who didn’t know who Vernon Ingledew was, that appearance by Shoat Bradfield soon straightened them out.

The last week of the campaign, television commercial time was almost constantly devoted to the vicious battle between the Reverend Dixon and Barnas. Since Barnas could only attack the innuendo about Dixon, he made the most of that, with TV spots showing an old photo of the minister with his arms around several female members of his choir, and a voice-over asking, “Which of these young ladies was it?” Bo and Arch eventually decided that they’d rather, in the run-off, challenge the preacher instead of the state senator, so they leaked to the preacher’s men several tidbits about Barnas’s connections and his past, enough to provide the preacher with all the ammunition he needed in his attack ads. Whether this violated Harry Wolfe’s “deal” with Garth Rucker was immaterial. The preacher was able to capitalize upon it sufficiently to defame Barnas in television spots. By election-day morning, most of the newspaper editorials said that Vernon Ingledew was the “clear” choice.

There was a big party planned at Ingledew Headquarters for election night. Monica made sure that there was plenty of food and drink, plenty of room for the crowd to spill out onto the sidewalks, plenty of room for the television cameras, and places of honor for the main participants: Vernon and Jelena and the Seven Samurai. As the returns began to come in and were chalked up on a board, Bo expansively draped his arm across Vernon’s shoulders and said, “This is the best part of politics. This is the game, watching the score. This is the most fun.” Vernon had butterflies, and couldn’t eat, but he tried to keep smiling and shaking hands with people (at least the men) who came to watch the board. Day and Diana were there, and Vernon preferred huddling with them.

When the final chalk marks were made on the board, voters in the Primary had given Barnas 28.5 percent of the vote, just behind Reverend Dixon, who got 29 percent. Vernon got 31 percent, and the other three candidates split small pieces of the remaining 11.5 percent. Since all the Samurai had been rooting for Dixon to edge out Barnas, there was more cheering over that than over Vernon’s coming in first.

Vernon got two letters in the next day’s mail; Bo intercepted both of them but shared their contents with his boss. One was from Barnas, congratulating him sarcastically, cursing him to high heaven for having leaked damaging information to Dixon, and vowing that not one of his 28.5 percent of voters would vote for Vernon in the run-off. “Does he want them all voting for Dixon?” Bo asked rhetorically.

The other letter was from the Reverend Dixon, and said:

I knew it would be you, all along. The gauntlet is laid down. I’m sure you’ve noticed I’ve refrained from maligning you thus far, apart from raising the mild question over the fitness of an ex-hippie pig farmer to move from an outlandish yurt into the governor’s mansion, but now that you and I are alone together in the ring, you may be assured that I’ll hammer you with everything I’ve got, particularly your rejection of Our Lord and Savior. Run scared, Mr. Ingledew.

The evangelist’s second-place finish, ahead of Barnas, attracted large cash contributions from some of the other former candidates’ supporters, from the viewers of Dixon’s regular Sunday-morning television show, and from several Democratic loyalist sugar-daddies who were not above letting Hank Endicott know that they despised Vernon’s fanatical ideas. The huge influx of contributions filling Reverend Dixon’s coffers enabled him to fire several of his own campaign consultants and replace them with professionals who came as close as was humanly possible to matching the Seven Samurai. They attempted to hire Barnas’s oppo man, one Garth Rucker, but Rucker declared he’d already accepted an offer to be Harry Wolfe’s assistant. “I might learn something,” Hank Endicott quoted Rucker as saying. Bo reported to Vernon that Harry had revealed he’d been offered a substantial amount of money to “switch” to the Dixon team. Harry had declined, out of his sense of decency. Bo had made no attempt to raise Harry’s salary to match the exorbitant offer made by Dixon, but he had given him a token raise, and also authorized a trip Harry and Garth were making to Portland, Oregon, where, Harry was convinced, the long lost choir girl was living.

Vernon perceived that John Colby Dixon bore two burning resentments: he fancied himself a learned man, certainly not a “high-brow” but a cultivated, educated, quick-witted sophisticate who was able to charm his vast television audiences in polished, perfect English with his wisdom about the Bible and the road to salvation, and therefore he bitterly envied Vernon’s supposed knowledge of any subject; and of course he coveted and resented Vernon’s Seven Samurai, any one of whom, even Cast Sherrill, was superior to his opposite number on Dixon’s team. In his first Sunday morning sermon following the Primary returns, Dixon made disparaging references to Bolin Pharis as “The Pharisee” and to Arch Schaffer as “The Archfiend,” to Lydia Caple as “The Uncapable” and to “Harry Wolfe” as “Old Harry,” a common Arkansas nickname for the Devil. He called Monica Breedlove “The Intern,” and Castor Sherrill “The Cast-Off,” and he probably had to tax his enlarged brain to come up with a designation for Carleton Drew as “The Cigarette,” a triple allusion to the fact that there was a brand of cigarettes called Carltons and to the fact that Drew smoked cigarettes and to Drew’s previous employers, the Washington tobacco lobby.

Cigarettes were just about the only issue on which Vernon agreed with the evangelist, but while Vernon intended to make Arkansas the first tobacco-free state in the Union, Dixon only wanted to make sure that the state collected as much damages as it could from the tobacco companies. Dixon’s platform, as it was perceived by the public, was not notably challenging or even unusual. He was against crime. He supported the environment, welfare, term limits, health care, and most particularly the family and children. He opposed taxes and illegal drugs, as well as poverty and homelessness, and particularly the moral and ethical decline. His opposition to abortion was as equivocal as he could make it.

But as far as the campaign was concerned, Dixon was indifferent to the issues, and appeared to want only to attack Vernon on every possible front. Toward the end of that sermon mocking the Seven Samurai and giving them nicknames, he suddenly declared, “I hereby challenge the infidel Vernon Ingledew to a debate!”

Bo was opposed, and so was Arch. They knew that Dixon, with his enormous experience as a preacher, his smooth eloquence, evangelistic fervor, and dramatic delivery, would make Vernon at his best look dull and awkward, even if Vernon was considerably better-looking than Dixon, a gaunt, sharp-chiseled person with wire-rimmed spectacles and the look of an old-time country preacher. Lydia, however, believed that Vernon could “acquit himself handily,” and, if they avoided getting into personalities, could probably out-duel the preacher on the issues. The Seven Samurai (six rather; Harry was in Oregon) spent quite a lot of time with and without Vernon, trying to come up with a way that Vernon could refuse the debate without losing face. Every day that went by, the evangelist capitalized upon Vernon’s hesitation in accepting the challenge. “Have you left the state, Mr. Ingledew?” demanded his television spots and his newspaper ads. Vernon said to his team, “Come on, guys, let’s do it. I can handle him!” and he sounded so confident that Bo began to have lengthy talks with Dixon’s campaign manager, trying to agree on conditions, a format, and a location. Carleton Drew made sure that there would be major television coverage of the event. Finally it was agreed that the studios of KARK, the NBC affiliate, would be suitably furnished for the debate; and that Hank Endicott would serve as moderator. The Dixon campaign wanted Meredith Oakley, less liberal than Endicott, but the Ingledew campaign pointed out that she had already declared in favor of Dixon, and would thus be biased.

“Gentlemen,” Endicott declared at the outset of the debate, like a referee instructing the boxers, “this is going to be a clean fight. No hitting below the belt. You will not, either of you, get into personalities, but confine yourselves to answering my questions about your intentions for bettering the state of Arkansas. All right, my first question: Do you support the death penalty? Reverend Dixon?”

“Certainly. Where would Christianity be if Jesus had got eight to fifteen years with time off for good behavior?”

The studio audience had a good laugh over this, and Vernon joined in.

When his turn came to answer the question, Vernon said, “Does it make sense to hire murderers to kill defenseless victims on death row, in order to prove that hiring murderers to kill defenseless victims is morally wrong?”

“But you are a godless man, Mr. Ingledew, totally ignorant of Christianity’s support of the death penalty.”

“All early Christian writers who discussed capital punishment were absolutely opposed to it,” Vernon pointed out.

“Early Christian writers?” said the evangelist. “Name one.”

“Lactantius Firmianus of the late third and early fourth centuries. Better known as the ‘Christian Cicero.’ He wrote a fine book called Divinarum Institutionum Libri Septem, in which he said, ‘When God forbids us to kill, he not only prohibits the violence that is condemned by public laws, but he also forbids the violence that is deemed lawful by men. It is always unlawful to put to death a man, whom God willed to be a sacred creature.’”

“Mr. Ingledew, you have no right to mention God, since you don’t believe in Him!”

“I don’t believe in fairies. Am I forbidden to tell fairy-tales?”

“Gentlemen—” Hank Endicott tried to intercede.

“You’re out of your depth quoting some obscure ‘early Christian writer’ to me,” Reverend Dixon said. “You’re simply showing off your false wisdom. And you forget that that God whom you discredit has discredited your wisdom. ‘Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?’ First Corinthians, one and eighteen.”

“That’s First Corinthians, one and twenty,” Vernon corrected him.

“What?” The minister got very red in the face, and demanded of those present a copy of the Bible to prove himself right, but, discovering that the atheist Ingledew was correct, waved the Bible about and declaimed, “This is a sacred Book and that blasphemous smart-alecky heathen has no right even to mention it!”

Hank Endicott’s next column said:

It was my dubious honor to attempt to moderate a debate between a popular clergyman who kept losing control of his temper and a savvy layman who repeatedly demonstrated that he knew far more about Christianity than the pastor did.

Other commentators were not as restrained; one columnist continued the boxing metaphor by saying “Ingledew laid him out with an uppercut in the first round.”

Just how many thousands of votes that debate cost the Reverend Dixon couldn’t be calculated. But the minister’s behavior cost him considerable support, even among those minions of Senator Barnas who had been instructed to vote for Dixon. In an effort to counteract the effects of the debate, the minister made a number of television spots with his former enemy, James Barnas, in which they stressed the need for solidarity against the godless hippie hillbilly radical who was living out of wedlock with his own cousin. As the date of the run-off neared, these television spots grew increasingly virulent. Dixon seized upon a few of Vernon’s thirteen albatrosses, those that were already known, and paraded them in the public view, and this was why the polls, just a week before the run-off, showed the minister several points ahead of Vernon.

Then Harry Wolfe and Garth Rucker returned from Oregon, bringing with them a young lady, a rather attractive and neatly dressed girl of twenty, who announced to the reporters and cameramen covering her arrival at the airport, “I am tired of being forced out of my dear sweet home state by that man. He can’t keep me away. No amount of money will keep me away. I’m back. I have some things to tell you.”

Vernon Ingledew collected 53 percent of the vote in the runoff.

Second part: Election

Chapter eleven

About the same time that Vernon and Bo were encountering those two dust devils on their hike around Stay More, I received an email message from a stranger, a cybernetic dust devil I couldn’t extirpate. On the average, I get about three emails from strangers each year, and on the average one of them will be a request from a teenager in Sweden who wants my autograph, another from a teenager in Arizona who has been assigned to do a theme on an American Author and wants me to supply her with my complete biography, and the third a fan letter from Wisconsin. The email that whirled into my computer may have been from Wisconsin or from Sri Lanka. In keeping with email etiquette, there was no salutation.

From: Heartstays@aol.com

To: dharingt@uark.edu

Subject: your book

Read your book. Wish I could say I enjoyed it but I found too much of it too painful, although I realize you wrote it trying to be funny. I notice it was published when I was only eight. I wish I had known about it before now, but our public library doesn’t have it. I found a copy of the paperback for fifty cents at a yard sale, almost as if I were fated to stumble upon it. The people having the yard sale I have known all my life and now they’re leaving town and I hate to see them go. After I read the book, all of one night, I asked the woman if she had read it before consigning it to her yard sale. Some years previously, she said. Did you realize that it is about us? I asked her. Well, she replied, maybe just a little. And it didn’t bother you? I wanted her to tell me. Well, maybe just a little, she said.

One question I have for you, sir, is this: where did you get all your information? How much of it did you just “make up”? You have obviously mixed up real people and imaginary people all the way along, but my question is, if you’re still alive yourself after all these years, are those people you pretend to be real still alive?

Juliana Nancy Waspe

So much for my morning. I ought to have put off until the afternoon, when the day’s work was over, checking my email inbox, but the job of writing fiction, as I am careful to warn the students in Advanced Placement English at Fayetteville High School who each spring invite me to answer their questions about what it takes to be a writer, is the loneliest job on earth, and the Author is, unlike the Creator, fallible and subject to temptation. The urge for human contact is not always resistible.

For all its disturbing flaws, this message from this Juliana person was compelling. I am always grieved by people who announce that they have read “your book,” as if I have written only one of them, as if that in itself, the writing of a book, is such a noteworthy thing that it is inconceivable there might be more than one. (In my case eleven.) And which of the eleven did she mean? The only clue was that she was eight when the book was published, and thus, assuming she was not merely ten or even twelve now, we could discount When Angels Rest and Butterfly Weed. If she meant Ekaterina she would be only fifteen now, but somehow she seemed older than that. So she could have been referring to any of the seven novels from The Cherry Pit, making her forty-three, to The Choiring of the Trees, making her seventeen. The latter was the least funny of my novels, so I scratched it. My principal clue in this little detective game was her claim, or her question to the seller of the paperback, that that book was about “us.” Was she perhaps a native of Stay More? Or of one of the lost cities of Arkansas described in my Let Us Build Us a City? That book was marketed as “nonfiction,” although I’d thought of it as a kind of nonfiction novel, but nowhere did Juliana use the word “novel” so quite possibly this was the book she meant. She was therefore twenty-four years old.

With nothing better to do, since my morning was shot anyhow, I replied at length to Ms Waspe (a name I’d never encountered in any of the places covered in that book, but of course it could have been a married name). I explained that all eleven of the lost “cities” of Arkansas are actual places, and that the names of the inhabitants therein that my wife Kim and I met and interviewed were actual names of real people, and that for the most part I stuck to the facts as revealed in the considerable research I’d done, but that I had indeed, as she surmised, invented several imaginary people and “mixed them up” with the real people, which I have always considered a sure-fire legitimate means of giving verisimilitude to a story.

For example I was currently engaged in a fascinating project called Thirteen Albatrosses (or, Falling Off the Mountain), a political novel, wherein I was combining real live actual people such as Archie Schaffer, Monica Breedlove, and Vernon Ingledew with imaginary people such as Bolin Pharis, Lydia Caple, Harry Wolfe, Carleton Drew, and Castor Sherrill. Whenever I respond to the occasional fan letter I like to mention the forthcoming book in detail, in order to drum up a little advance business for it. I said I hoped that Juliana would watch for it at bookstores in another year or so, and that meanwhile she might like to read other of my previous novels (I listed them), particularly the one most relevant to the current project, called The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, which, despite its unusual title, was very much a novel, albeit a novel wherein I continued my lifelong practice of combining real and imaginary people.

Her reply to my email was so fast that I began to imagine her sitting at her computer.

From: Heartstays@aol.com

To: dharingt@uark.edu

Subject: Re: your book

That’s the book I meant! I didn’t know you’d written so many. The architecture book. I don’t know the lost cities book. I mean the Ingledew book is the one I read. Are you sure that you spelled Ingledew correctly? It’s very easy to misspell Osage, happens all the time, but the correct transliteration for panther is “Ingthonga,” which could very easily have got mispronounced as Ingledew, just as “Osage” itself is a hideous French misrendering of Wah-Shah-She. But maybe you know this, since you appear to know so much about the Osages, at least the one you presumed to call “Fanshaw,” driven away by Jacob the Panther.

My really big question to you now is: do you mean to tell me that Vernon the Panther is alive and real??!! If so, where? And what’s he doing in a “political” novel? Please answer right now. I am here.

Juliana

I replied at once that I had not realized there was an Osage word so closely resembling the Anglo-Saxon family name, Ingledew. Although several panthers figured prominently in “the architecture book,” I had not known that the Osage word for panther was so similar to Ingledew, and I thanked her for telling me that. I said I wished I’d known that at the time I’d written the book. My only sources for telling the story of Fanshaw, the Osage brave displaced by Jacob Ingledew, were the latter’s unpublished memoirs, plus a book called Indians of the Ozark Plateau by Elmo Ingenthron (whose name, come to think of it, was even closer to “Ingthonga”) plus of course the classic Wah’kon-tah by John Joseph Mathews.

How did Juliana come by such familiarity with the Osage? It was wholly a pleasure to make contact with somebody who knew anything about them. And yes, Vernon “The Panther,” if she wanted to call him that, was at this very moment running for governor of Arkansas. Where did Juliana live? Maybe her local newspaper would carry a story about the upcoming Arkansas Democratic Primary, in which Vernon The Panther was facing several other candidates but had a good chance to win. He was still living in Stay More, still in the house described at the end of “the architecture book,” still living with his first cousin, the beautiful and brilliant Jelena.

For the rest of the day, we exchanged several messages. My wife Kim commented, “Sounds like you were real busy in there,” referring to the fierce pecking of the keyboard in my study. Yes, I said, I was getting a lot done. Before Juliana and I discontinued our email chat for the day, I had learned some basic facts about her. She was, as arithmetic had already shown, thirty-four years old, eight at the time of the publication of The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks. She lived near Pawhuska, Oklahoma, not in it but near it. Pawhuska I already knew to be the “capitol” of the Osage nation, and in fact I’d recently read Dennis McAuliffe’s gripping The Deaths of Sybil Bolton, wherein he tells the story of his search for the truth about the murder of his grandmother in 1925 during a period when several Osage women were killed in order to get the money they’d made from owning oil-producing acreage. Not only had Juliana read this book, six years before reading mine, she had, a few years before that, met and talked with Dennis McAuliffe when he was living deliberately in Pawhuska for three months to track down the story and, in the process, come to terms with his own alcoholism. Juliana had attempted unsuccessfully to befriend him, but he was, as she put it, “out of it.”

Was she perchance therefore an Indian—excuse me, a Native American—herself? Mixed blood, she said. As I knew from McAuliffe’s book, the population of Pawhuska contained only a very few pure-blood Osages, a number of mixed-bloods of various mixtures, and quite a large number of whites of various mixtures. Pardon me for putting it so bluntly, but did she “look” Indian? Her hair was black, she said. But her skin was not particularly “red.” She could pass, and had passed, for Spanish, Greek, Italian, etc.

In my insomnia the night after our email meeting, the sound of her name kept repeating itself in my head. Juliana Nancy Waspe. I assumed that the sound was pronounced correctly, with the last name as two syllables: WAS PEE. The relationship among the three parts of her name was more melodious and congenial than that of any other person I’d encountered since Daniel Lyam Montross, his name “three sounds bonded at two junctions of end and beginning.” The first thing I did, in my first email of the next morning, about the same moment that Vernon Ingledew was shaking hands with Dale Bumpers on the broad porch of Arch Schaffer’s house, was to ask Juliana about her name. Juliana was of course her given name, but the rest of it…. Her parents had allowed her to pick, from several appropriate sources, her last name, and “Nancy Waspe” was a rough phoneticization of the Osage which she used to disguise her actual last name, which was Heartstays, as in her aol.com address.

Was I familiar with any of the ancient legends of the Osage? Very few, I said, although I had read V. Kelian’s Dawn of the Osage (and had to resist the urge to reveal to Juliana that I knew that “V. Kelian” was actually alive and well and living in Jacob the Panther’s old house in Stay More, Arkansas).

Well, Juliana explained, in the story of the Great Flood, when the flood struck, some of the Osages climbed up into the tops of trees and were called Top of the Tree Sitters. Others climbed a forested hillside to its top and were called Upland Forest People. A third group saved themselves among the thorny growths on the sides of a ravine, and were called Thorny Thicket People. A fourth group couldn’t reach high ground but took refuge on the talus at the base of a cliff, and were called the Down Under People. But the fifth group, the last group, Juliana’s ancestors, stayed where they were: they refused to flee but stood their ground on the hummocks of dry land amid the swirling flood-waters. They were attached to their land and could remain contented only by staying there. Staying more, as it were. Their hearts thus were quieted, and they became known as Heart Stays People. The name is rendered in Osage as Non Tze Wath Pe, sometimes spelled Nontsa Wah Spah, which the Jesuits spelled as Nantze Waspe, and which Juliana spelled Nancy Waspe.

How clever, I wrote. Would you rather I call you Juliana Nancy Waspe or Juliana Heartstays? Suit yourself, she replied. And then she wrote:

So you see, you were entirely wrong about the origin of the name Stay More.

Her words were like a slap. In my various books I had laid out all the several possible beliefs about the origin of the name, and in “the architecture book” I had conceded that while the name was indeed based upon the common Ozark polite injunction not to rush off but to stay more, the actual name of the place had been bestowed by Fanshaw the Osage in recognition of his host Jacob Ingledew’s common employment of the expression. “I have the book open before me, page eight,” Juliana wrote.

You say, ‘Yet Fanshaw could not help but remark upon this custom to his wife because among his own people the exact reverse is the case: when a guest has stayed as long as he wants to, his host senses it and sends him packing with an Indian expression which, if translated into modern idiom, would most literally be “Haul ass” or perhaps even “Fuck off.”’ Well, excuse me, but you didn’t get that out of Jacob’s memoirs and you didn’t get that out of Ingenthron and you certainly didn’t get it out of Mathews’ Wah’Kon-tah. So where did you get it? How did you know what Fanshaw and his wife said to each other?

I allowed as how that was one of many places in the novel where I’d given my imagination and my comic sense free rein. She responded:

You also claim that Fanshaw’s basketry dwelling was portable, that—here’s another of my many X-marks in the margins of your book—page six, ‘“A gentleman and his squaw,” Fanshaw explained over the firewater, “can lift and transport their domicile over great distances where the woods are not, or, where the woods are, disassemble and reassemble.”’ Think about that. It’s wrong. Even if those basketry huts could be picked up or disassembled or whatever, the Heart Stays people never took anything with them when they left, usually because they never left!

“Sorry,” I wrote. “You’re right. That was a stupid passage. But are you saying that Fanshaw was of the Heart Stays band?”

“Of course he was!” Juliana answered. And then she wrote:

Catch you later. Bending Bear wants to take me into town.

Was this Bending Bear her boyfriend? Whoever he was, he had stolen her away from me at a crucial junction in our exchange, when I needed to confirm whatever theory she might have that Stay More had got its name because the last Indian resident of the place had been of the Heart Stays People.

Come to think of it, the site of the Osage camp in Stay More, in the rocky meadow hard by swirling Swains Creek, waiting for Bo Pharis to explore, fit the description of the traditional locale of Heart Stays people as being right on the water’s edge.

I rushed to locate my copy of the Ingenthron book and to look again at the Harold Hatzfeld illustration (pp. 64-65), on which I’d based my own drawing of Fanshaw’s double-dwelling (“bigeminal”). The depiction of an Osage seasonal hunting camp at the mouth of Swan Creek in Missouri shows several of these basketry beehive-shaped huts, with a larger lodge in the background, all of them spread out right alongside the waters of the creek, so that any hard rain might swamp them if they weren’t determined to heartstay. Jacob Ingledew and the Osage Fanshaw had had many conversations during the several months that they shared Stay More before the Indian’s departure, and Jacob had recorded most of these conversations in his memoirs, from an excellent power of memory that would be inherited by Vernon, but there was no mention, or none that I could recall, of any “Heart Stays People.” I must say it crossed my mind that, just as I freely admitted enlivening prosaic truth with my novelist’s imagination, perhaps Juliana herself was making a few things up in order to “explain” her name.

Waiting for her whenever Bending Bear brought her home was my lengthy email in which I confessed something I’d scarcely told a soul and had nearly forgotten myself: my book she’d read had been intended originally as just the first volume in a trilogy. Volume Two was to have been called Interiors and would have gone more deeply into such things as whether or not the two halves of that basketry paraboloid were connected by any sort of interior door joining Fanshaw’s half to his wife’s half, and, consequently, whether or not Fanshaw and his wife discussed at any length their (his? her?) decision that she might divest Jacob Ingledew of his virginity. Volume Three was to have been called Outbuildings and Others, the double O’s of its title symbolizing the two holes of the privy, and having in its first chapter the meaning and significance of the lodge building in Fanshaw’s camp. Did Fanshaw and his squaw use it for anything? Or was it just a constant reminder that their tribesmen had abandoned the camp forever, that their hearts had not stayed?

No doubt, I told Juliana, if I’d gotten around to writing those other two volumes, I could have “corrected” some of the mistakes she’d found in her reading. But the first volume had not fared well commercially or critically; it had been either ignored completely or dismissed as a “spoof” and there had been scant chance the publisher would have wanted to risk the other volumes in the trilogy, which remained unwritten.

Several days went by (what “town” had Bending Bear taken her to? Dallas?) before her answer came, in the form of a list of all the mistakes she’d caught in Chapter One, involving Osage habits, beliefs, practices, and pronunciations. (Example: when Jacob and Fanshaw went hunting together, Fanshaw would not have used his bow and arrow if Jacob was using his rifle. Fanshaw, like most Osages of the time, probably possessed a rifle too.)

Would you have corrected all of these in Interiorsor Outbuildings and Others [she asked]? More importantly, would you have revealed the name of Fanshaw’s squaw, which was Kushi? More importantly yet, would you have admitted your major misrepresentation of the truth, namely, that Kushi did not freely offer herself to Jacob but was raped by him?

My service provider suffered one of its recurrent failures (probably from an overload of students doing end-of-semester work) and thus my immediate and vehement response to this question did not reach her until the following day: Hold on, Juliana! I wrote. Where do you get that? On what authority are you basing such a contentious and extravagant claim?

How do I know her name, and you do not? Because she was of the Heart Stays People, who in their staying told their children all the old stories, the Little Old Men, the storytellers who made a profession of it, told everything about Fanshaw and Kushi and their idyllic life together in Stay More until the white men came and drove them out, told it to their children who told their children, and all the old stories came down generation to generation as neatly and truthfully as if they had been written in stone.

How does Kushi translate? I wanted to know.

The k is medial between k and g, and there is a slight but distinct suppression between the initial consonant and the initial vowel. Without that suppression, the name might be heard as “Kuzhi,” which means far away, at a great distance. “K’ushi” is hard to translate without knowing the whole folk joke behind it, but literally it means ‘gulped into the earth.’”

Speaking of folk jokes, stop me if you’ve heard this one, I wrote. It’s from Vance Randolph’s book of folk jests, Hot Springs and Hell, which I freely expropriated in my novel Lightning Bug, the beginning of—and the key to—the Stay More saga. There was a girl had a fellow arrested for rape, and the prosecuting attorney was asking her some questions about it. She says the fellow just throwed her down and raped her, and it happened on Easter Sunday. “It’s August now,” says the lawyer. “You say he hasn’t bothered you since Easter?” The girl said a dirty word. “Bothered me! I’ll say he has! Why, it’s just been rape, rape, rape all summer, and something has got to be done about it!”

Funny. Relevance?

The relevance, Juliana, is this. According to Jacob Ingledew’s memoirs, and as I indicated in “the architecture book,” not only was Jacob’s sexual intercourse with Kushi, if that was her name, at the express invitation of Fanshaw himself and with the express consent of Kushi herself, but also it was repeated on several occasions. Is that “rape”?

That is only Jacob the Panther’s perspective, and what may have seemed consensual to him was not to her.

What I needed to do, I decided, was to quote at length to Juliana several passages of The Memoirs of Former Arkansas Governor Jacob Ingledew. But, as we’ve learned, there were only three copies in existence, the original in Vernon’s bank vault, one in the possession of the Woman Whom We Cannot Name II, and one on loan to Bo Pharis. I had seen the original when it was still undiscovered in “The Unfinished Room” of the Jacob Ingledew house, when I was a very young man. I hadn’t fully appreciated at the time its value and significance and I didn’t consider stealing it, which I could have done. Worse, I hadn’t considered copying it; photocopy machines in those days were slow, awkward, and barely legible. Now I thought of asking my good friend Arch Schaffer if he could temporarily borrow Bo Pharis’s copy and have a copy made of it. I certainly wasn’t going to ask Vernon Ingledew to copy the original in his bank vault.

Then, when Kim and I dropped in on the Ingledew Campaign Headquarters to watch the returns come in the night of the Primary, we ran into Day and Diana. During the course of the long evening, as Vernon’s lead gradually mounted but not enough to avoid a run-off, I had a chance to speak privately with Day. I told him of my discovery of Juliana Heartstays, and of our lengthy email correspondence. He thought it was fascinating. As we’ve already seen, Day was thoroughly familiar with Thirteen Albatrosses (or, Falling Off the Mountain). This certainly was not because I had allowed him to see any of it, but because of his firm conviction that he had every right to be just as aware as you, the reader, are. Now, having heard what I had to tell him about Juliana, it was Day Whittacker who first thought of something which, I’m abashed to say, had escaped my own awareness. Because I’m so hard of hearing, he even took the trouble to write it down on a note-card: You don’t suppose there’s a possibility that Juliana is a descendant of Jacob Ingledew and Fanshaw’s wife Kushi?

“Good Lord!” I exclaimed, and we both glanced at Vernon, who was standing by the tote board watching the numbers being chalked up. I knew we were both thinking, Maybe Vernon’s got another cousin he doesn’t know about.

I made my request of Day: since he was on such good terms with the Woman Whom We Cannot Name II (he was one of the privileged few who knew that she was also the writer V. Kelian, who had written Dawn of the Osage), could he possibly ask her to make, on her high-speed Canon copy machine, a copy of Jacob’s memoirs? And get it to me, pronto?

Which he did, although it wasn’t quite as pronto as I’d have liked. During the three weeks that Vernon was battling the Reverend John Colby Dixon, either Day or the Woman II was taking a lot of time getting around to making that copy. My email chats with Juliana continued, but I didn’t tell her that I was arranging to obtain a crucial document to help convince her that Jacob had not raped Kushi. I did tell her about the campaign: how this extremely popular and smooth evangelist John Colby Dixon, the runner-up in the Primary, was challenging Vernon to a debate. Could Juliana’s television pick up the Fort Smith stations? Maybe she could watch the debate. But Juliana informed me she didn’t have television. Neither does Vernon, I said, but I did not posit that as evidence of their kinship. I wasn’t ready yet to put forth that Juliana was the offspring of Jacob and Kushi.

Are you a good friend of Vernon the Panther? asked one of her emails.

Hardly, I answered. I’ve met him only once, seen him only twice. As you may have gathered from reading “the architecture book,” and as you’d know conclusively if you’d read my other books, I have never been overly fond of the Ingledews. Growing up in Stay More, I was taught to think of the Ingledews as—well, I suppose as the Osages might think of their clan chiefs—you venerate your chief and obey him and all that but you don’t necessarily love him. Stay More never had any class distinctions but the Ingledews always had a sense of being leaders.

She repeated it back to me.

A sense of being leaders. So now Vernon the Panther wants to be the leader of the whole state of Arkansas.

He might be a good one, I allowed. He’s enormously intelligent, and has some visionary ideas, and he has a sense of what people want and a sense of what they don’t need even if they want it…like cigarettes. You don’t smoke?”

I quit.

Good for you. So did I.

Did you quit drinking?

I gave up the hard stuff. But I have a beer now and then.

You’re a writer. Can you put into words what Vernon looks like?

The best I could do was tell her to imagine her favorite movie star, or, better, all of her favorite movie stars rolled into one, and be sure that he was suave, impish, about six feet five inches tall, about 215 pounds, with brown hair that looked sunbleached, and blue eyes.

I hate him, Juliana declared. “I don’t care what he looks like, or how smart he is, I hate all the Panthers and would kill them if I could.

It took me a while to digest this. Trying to pace my flourishing acquaintance with Juliana, I had not yet told her an important fact about Vernon: that in his sixteen-year program of autodidacticism, he had devoted six intense months, right after spending six months on the occult, to the Osage, their whole history and culture, even their language. Eventually I intended to ask Juliana if she knew her neighbor James Big Eagle, the Pawhuska mixed-blood who had come to Stay More for two months to teach Vernon the Osage language. I questioned my own motives in wanting to dispel Juliana’s hatred of the Ingledews, but I was determined to do it.

At the Ingledew Campaign Headquarters the night of the run-off, as Vernon’s lead over the Reverend Dixon became indisputable early on, I saw Day Whittacker again, and he delivered into my hands at least a ream of copy paper, bound with a yellow bandanna, containing my request. He apologized for not having got it to me sooner; he hadn’t wanted to trust it to the US Mail, and had hoped to see me again at this function: the celebration of Vernon’s victory in the run-off. “And now,” Day said, “you can deliver it, if your trust of the US Mail is as weak as mine, into the hands of Juliana Heartstays.”

I laughed, then realized he wasn’t joking. Driving home late from the victory party, I told Kim that I had to go to Pawhuska, Oklahoma, a distance of about three hours or so, in order to do some research on Jacob Ingledew.

“One,” she said, “what has Jacob Ingledew got to do with Thirteen Albatrosses (or, Falling Off the Mountain)? And two, what has Jacob Ingledew got to do with Pawhuska, Oklahoma?”

I tried to explain that Fanshaw and his squaw, pregnant with Jacob’s child, had eventually rejoined the rest of his clan on the Osage reservation in Pawhuska, and that the early career of the man who was Vernon’s ancestor as well as a governor of Arkansas was an important “subtext” in the novel. But Kim and I have rarely been separated for an entire day, going separate places. I offered to take her with me, but I knew she had errands of her own to handle that day, and would decline the offer. I promised to try to get home before nightfall.

In my red Jeep Cherokee I got away from Fayetteville before 7:00 a.m. and taking the Cherokee Turnpike reached Tulsa by 9:00 and turned northward on State II to Osage County, the largest of Oklahoma’s counties, larger than the state of Delaware. I was mindful of all these Indian names, and of the names of every town large and small I passed through, concluding with my destination, which was named after Paw-Hiu-Skah, or “White Hair,” a chief of the Little Osages, which included the Heart Stays People.

It was a hot day—my Jeep’s external thermometer would register between 92 and 97 for most of the day, but of course I had air-conditioning. And Diet Cokes on ice. And a sense of excitement which even permitted me to fantasize, as thousands of email correspondents have done, about the charm of the unseen “other,” and what might transpire when two correspondents actually meet for the first time. I knew that she’d find nothing particular charming in me, thirty years her senior and a Paw-Hiu-Skah myself. But the manuscript, still in the yellow bandanna in which Day (or V. Kelian) had wrapped it, would be delivered into her surprised hands, and I might be invited to lunch, and that would be that: enough.

The drive was not interesting; Oklahoma falls far short of Arkansas in attractiveness. I made mental note of an occasional interesting road sign such as “Little Dog Threasher Creek,” which might furnish topics for conversation. Although I was prepared by Dennis McAufliffe to find Pawhuska itself unglamorous—he had used words such as “run-down,” “god-awful,” “hellhole,” “deserted,” and “dump”—I was still unprepared to see what an ugly place it was, and I couldn’t imagine my Juliana being imprisoned there. As in small towns all over America, most of the downtown buildings were either abandoned or had been converted into uses far removed from their original intention. One of the few busy buildings with any trace of modernity was the supermarket, called “Homeland.” The name struck me because I had originally intended to call Thirteen Albatrosses (or, Falling Off the Mountain) by that name.

I stopped at Homeland to look at a telephone book. I can’t use the telephone, but if Juliana was listed it might give her street address. It was a yellow Southwestern Bell book for “Bartlesville Area,” including Pawhuska, but there was no “Heartstays” nor “Waspe” nor “Nancy Waspe” in it. I drove up the town’s one hill, called “Agency Hill,” and parked at the Osage Tribal Museum and Library, which really was not much more than a souvenir shop. I asked the lady running it, herself obviously an Indian, if she knew Juliana Heartstays or Juliana Nancy Waspe, and got only a blank look.

Did she know anything about the band of Indians called Heart Stays People? Where had they lived? My poor hearing failed to catch several of her words, but I heard enough to understand that she really didn’t know anything. She suggested I might try the Osage County Museum, which was in the abandoned railroad station, and was not much more than a junk shop and used book store, and where the couple who ran it, both of them at least mixed-blood Indians, could not tell me anything about any Heart Stays people or anybody named Heartstays or Nancy Waspe.

I was beginning to suspect that my email correspondent had just invented herself and her location. It was lunch-time and I missed the chance to be invited to have lunch with Juliana. I ate at the town’s lone remaining family restaurant, where I got a decent cheeseburger. The waitress, a thoroughly non-Indian blonde, had of course never heard of anybody named Juliana. While eating, it occurred to me to try the public library, which I did. The white librarian, a very polite and helpful lady, said she couldn’t reveal any information about library patrons, and thus couldn’t tell me if they had a patron of that name. “But couldn’t you tell me if there’s anyone by that name living in this town?” I begged. I think there could be, she said. But she had no idea where the person might live. “Have you ever heard of any band of Indians called the Heart Stays People?” I asked. No, but let me check, she said and disappeared into a room marked “Osage Materials.”

While waiting, and waiting, I had nothing better to do than check the card catalog to see if they had any of my books. Nothing, of course. The librarian returned with a popular picture-book called The Osage, by Terry P. Wilson, and there was a map, “Osage Reservation Around 1900,” which showed Pawhuska on Bird Creek with five little dots upstream representing “Heart-Stays People.” How far is that from here? I asked her.

“There’s nothing up that way any more,” she said, and got a U.S. topographic survey map to show me how an “unimproved” (dirt) road led northward through a valley, between Bird Creek and Mud Creek to the area where the hummocks or “lenticular bottoms” (as John Joseph Mathews had called them) had led the Heart Stays People to pick a “permanent” campground reminding them of those sites they’d had to leave behind in Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas. There were no habitations indicated anywhere in the area, just abandoned oil wells and an old railroad grade.

“Is this road still passable?” I asked. The nice lady said she hadn’t ever been up that way.

The road started near the Pawhuska cemetery, a sprawling necropolis suggesting that most of the Osages, like their oil reservation, were underground. The road cut through a ravine, stopped being blacktop, and continued on as a decent gravel road that meandered through thickets and straightened out onto the suggestion of a prairie, took a couple of sharp right angles, then roughened and weedened and climbed a hill and meandered through woods for quite a ways. At least there were tire tracks to suggest that the road was still in use, and I stayed on it for a couple of miles until finally it dropped down into a bosky dell alongside Bird Creek where I caught a glimpse of what might be those hummocks or lenticular bottoms, and where, finally, having seen no signs of human habitation yet, I came to a mailbox.

It was an RFD mailbox beside a trail, and on the side of the mailbox was a red heart, but the heart was sideways, that is, it was resting on its side, it was sleeping, or it was staying, it was a Staying Heart. I turned into the trail, which wandered through the woods a ways and then emerged onto the lenticular bottoms where stood the most fabulous house I’ve ever seen. It gave a first impression of being thrown together by a horde of hippies on peyote, but on closer inspection was obviously the work of a trained postmodern architect who knew pretty much exactly what he was doing and had at least a million dollars to spend: it was a kind of vast enlargement of the same structure that I had illustrated in Chapter One of “the architecture book” as Fanshaw’s dwelling: a basketry paraboloid beehive, or rather a giant pair of them closely conjoined with several buttresses or protuberances or annexes. It hadn’t been built yesterday; it looked as if it had been there for several years at least, and thus Juliana could not have used the illustration of my book as her inspiration, not if she’d only discovered the book recently. It was a huge place, actually larger than Vernon’s double-bubble (which of course I had never seen but had had a good description of from Day and from Arch Schaffer), to which it bore a kind of kinship, in its bigeminality and its singularity, the principal difference being that Vernon’s house was on a mountaintop and this was right beside the banks of Bird Creek. Juliana was going to have a lot of explaining to do, about her extravagant house.

I sat in the Jeep, transfixed by the palace, for a long time, long enough for Juliana to become aware of my presence in her driveway. Then I got out, toted the manuscript of Jacob Ingledew’s memoirs, and boldly approached the house’s huge oak door, and rang the doorbell. She answered at once.

She was a great disappointment: round. Many Indian women seemingly settle into a general rotundity as they mature: their faces apple-shaped and almost swollen, their waistlines disappeared. Not fat necessarily but just circular. And her dark-skinned face beneath the thick, braided black hair was nothing at all like I’d fantasized. She was homeliness personified.

“Juliana Nancy Waspe,” I said, trying to keep my chagrin out of my voice. “I am Donald Harington.” Whatever she replied was not clear enough for my deafness. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I should have told you that the only way we can communicate is by email…unless you want to use my note-cards. And I offered her my ballpoint and my pack of note-cards. But she would not take them.

“Gone,” she said, raising her voice. And I could hear it. “Not here. Gone.”

I perked up. “You aren’t Juliana?”

The woman shook her head, and tried to shape her lips carefully: “Housekeeper.”

“Oh, that’s good,” I said, beside myself. “So where’s she gone? When will she be back?”

“Homeland,” she said. “Gone Homeland.”

“The supermarket?” I asked.

The woman laughed. I was glad to see that Indians have a sense of humor. The previous Indians I’d met that day had never even smiled. “Not that Homeland,” she said. “Not grocery store.” And then she pointed generally eastward, the way I had come, the way Fanshaw and Kushi had also come, and said carefully, “Gone to find her grandmother’s homeland. She and Threasher and Bending Bear. Left this morning.”

“Who’s Threasher?”

“Her dog.”

“Who’s Bending Bear?”

“Her chauffeur.”

Chapter twelve

Hoo Lordy it was hot as blue blazes and George was cussing hisself for not doing what Boss told him to do, take a few days off, which was what all the others was doing, Bo just a-cooterin around up yonder in Jelena’s garden patch and Arch a-floatin the Mulberry River and Lydia gone down to Pine Bluff for something or another and Monica gone home to Louisiana, and God knows what had become of Harry and Carleton, although if George looked hard enough he could probably find Cast, who was somewheres hereabouts, George had seen him earlier this morning down at the swimming hole on Swains Creek. Bo said they all needed a little spell of rest to catch their breath before gearing up for the big campaign that would run all the rest of the summer and into November.

George doubted that Boss hisself was taking a break, but at least he’d gone back to his big easy chair in his office up under the dome of that puffball house of his, and although he was probably a-settin there reading books on how Roosevelt and Truman and Kennedy got theirselfs elected, he was just a-lollygagging around compared with what he’d been doing for the past three months.

But George didn’t rightly know how to take it easy, and here he was in his Explorer running all over God’s creation taking care of these razorbacks. He’d spent the morning rounding up and castrating the shoats—he allowed himself a smile, knowing what symbolism was and knowing there was a kind of symbol involved here—the rest of ’em all taking a lull to get ready and castrate that Shoat Bradfield and George with his trusty knife (there were others at the plant who could do it but not as quickly and painlessly as George) snipping off the balls of these just-weaned piglets.

He’d also had to track down a boar named Schoonover, an old pal of his who’d somehow missed out getting castrated when he should’ve, and had taken to roaming the high hills of Juberaw or wherever, and George had spent most of the afternoon wearing out the Explorer and a-calling and a-calling old Schoonover (couldn’t nobody call a hog as good as George) and then finding him and sweet-talking him and sticking him with a anesthetic and slicing off his nuts, apologizing while he did it, and Schoonover hadn’t liked it one bit. A young pig didn’t seem to mind, or didn’t even seem to know what was happening to him, but an older hog sure did hate to get deballed. It didn’t happen often, but it was one of the few drawbacks of Boss’s idea of giving the hogs their freedom, which years ago Boss had explained to George, or tried to: you can’t pen up a hog without getting inferior meat. You’ve got to keep the animals from ever feeling that they belong to you. You’ve got to turn ’em loose. He knowed in reason that a free pig is a happy pig, and he’d understood that being happy truly makes the meat more tasty (Boss had tried to explain to George stuff about glycogen depletion and lactic acid build-up in stressful pigs, but George had taken his word for it).

Now he was tired and dirty from wrassling with Schoonover and he was itching to get on home and take a shower and have a drink. As he passed the old Governor Ingledew house, however, he stomped on the brakes, for there in front of the house, parked, was a sleek black vintage automobile of some kind, and a real big fellow polishing it with a chamois rag. George hadn’t seen a car that old in Stay More since Doc Swain passed on, and for a moment he felt himself transported back in time. He knew that the strange woman who lived here—he’d met her many a time and to himself called her “Cat”—was a rich writer-lady who was hiding out from the world, and Boss had made it clear that George and everbody else in Stay More would do whatever they could to protect the woman and her privacy. So who was this giant dude with the fancy antique auto and what was he parked here for?

George got out of his Explorer to take a better look. The man had a dog, a mongrel setter or something, and the dog commenced barking at George, which he didn’t like, because he had more right to be here than the dog did. The man gave George just a glance and said to the dog, “Shush,” and then resumed polishing the fender with the chamois rag, but George gave the man a thorough scrutiny. He was plumb nearly seven foot tall and broad as a corncrib door and was a-wearing one of them Hawaiian sport shirts, but on his head he had a black uniform cap, like a hired driver would wear. As George got closer, he saw that the man had dark reddish skin and dark hair, and by God if he sure didn’t look like he was some kind of injun! George had known only a few injuns in his life, mostly boys in Vietnam, good soldiers but hard to know. They’d all been of a average size, though, not overlarge like this feller.

“Howdy,” George says politely but warily.

“How,” says the injun, proving he must be a injun, sure enough, not a Mex or a African. But then he says, “Excuse me, but you’re staring at me, and it’s rude.”

“Well, hell, feller,” says George, “excuse me but it aint ever day I run acrost a car like this’un a-settin smack dab in the middle of Stay More.”

“So this is Stay More, then,” the big feller says.

“What’s left of it,” George admits. And then he asks, “What-all make of car is this, anyhow?”

“It’s a Pierce-Arrow,” the man says.

“How much did a relic like this set you back?” George wants to know.

“It isn’t mine. I only drive it.”

George took a glance at the house. It hit him that whoever this injun was driving the car for might be inside the house, a-visiting with the nice lady who lived there. George wasn’t fixing to think that lady’s name out loud right here, where any fool could see it. He was only going to notice what she herself had already observed in relation to Latha Bourne’s yard full of cats: that you could call it—and her—“a cat arena.” Maybe just Cat for short.

“It aint none of my business, I reckon,” says George to the injun, “but how long do you figure on standing here?”

“Not that it isn’t any of your business,” says the injun, “but I just couldn’t tell you, one way or the other. I’ve already been here more than an hour, and my lady had just stopped to inquire if this is Stay More, which you’ve already told me in far less than an hour. You aren’t by any chance an Ingledew?”

“Naw, but I work for one,” says George.

“Really?” says the injun cordially. “Then you’re just a hired gun, like me.”

“I reckon,” George admits. “Though I don’t tote no gun.”

Both men chuckled over this, and then the injun says, “Are you married?”

“Now what in tarnation has that got to do with anything?” George wants to know.

“I’m just curious about your disposition,” says the Indian. “Family man? Bachelor? Male oriented? Switch hitter?”

George didn’t rightly know what-all this feller was a-talking about, but he sure was nosy. “B, I reckon,” he says.

“B?” says the injun. “Bi? Boondagger? Bindle boy?”

“You gave me a multiple choice, A through D,” George tells him. “So I picked B.”

“Ah, yes. Bachelor!” says the injun, smiling really big. “That’s very interesting.”

Trying to change the subject, George asks, “What-all kind of dog is that you got there?”

“Threasher? He’s what I suppose you would call a turtle dog.”

“Turtle dog?” says George and even though it might be rude he had to stare at the pooch. “I know what a turtle dove is, but I aint never heared tell of no turtle dog. You don’t mean to tell me he trees turtles?”

“He doesn’t tree them. He just points them.”

“Huh? That’s the dumbest thing ever I heared. Why would a dog point a turtle?”

“So we can catch them and eat them.”

Rude or not, George had to stare at the huge injun for a long moment. “They eat turtles where you come from?” he wanted to know. George had never eaten no kind of reptile in his entire life and he wasn’t about to start, nor even to start thinking about it.

Probably this injun was a-fixing to tell George a few box tortoise recipes, but just then the door of the house opened, and out come two women, one was Cat who George had known for years, the other was not just a stranger, but the strangest woman George had ever seen, strange like she was somebody he’d just dreamed up, somebody whose feet didn’t touch the floor but floated above it, a sight, a knockout, looking like a million, which she must’ve been worth at least. She was wearing some kind of long silk summer dress, blue-green, and a broad-brimmed straw hat atop her long dark hair. It hit George that just maybe she was some kind of injun too, though she sure didn’t look like one, not her skin, not her shape, she sure wasn’t no kin to this hefty feller standing here that worked for her.

She was smiling from ear to ear, the prettiest smile George had ever seen on a woman’s mouth. “Waxkadazhi, Ben!” she calls to her hired gun. “This woman speaks better Osage than I do! And this is Stay More! We’re in the right place.” And then she turned to the woman and says, “This is Thomas Bending Bear, my man.”

“Hello,” says Cat. “Ha-way Washazhe. Thots-he pee-chay. Waywenah.” And the big brave answers her in the same lingo, and they just commenced a chit-chattin. George couldn’t rightly tell what they was talking about, but it seemed it was all politeness and compliments, and it lasted too long before Cat took a notion to wave at George and say, “Good evening, George.”

“Howdy, ma’am,” says George.

The gorgeous injun girl’s smile vanished. “Not an Ingledew?” she says to Cat.

And Cat says, “No, this is George Dinsmore. He’s the general manager of operations for Ingledew Ham, and you might say he’s Vernon’s right-hand man.”

The lovely gal gave George a stern look, as if his connection with Boss didn’t sit too awful well with her. Then she says to him, “How do you do?”

“I was better, but I got over it,” George says to her, but winks to let her know he’s just trying to be clever.

“Where is your employer?” she asks him.

“Boss? Aw, I reckon he’s up to home,” George allows.

“Where is home?” she asks. And then she says, “Pardon my manners. I’m Juliana Heartstays.”

“Right pleased to meetcha,” George says, and he meant it, he sure was tickled to pieces to make the acquaintance of such a sightly gal. He gestured toward the west, toward Daniels Mountain. “Boss lives up yonder a good little ways.”

“Ben,” the gal says to her hired gun, “this wonderful woman, who lives in this wonderful house which had been built long ago by Jacob Ingledew himself, just happens to know everything about the history of the Ingledews. And as you can see, she just happens to speak perfect Osage, and has even written a book about us!”

“Marvelous!” says Ben.

Cat says, “And I’ve invited you to spend the night, because there’s nowhere else. This used to be Stay More’s only hotel, years after Jacob Ingledew died.”

Ben says, “I am prepared to pitch a tent on the creek bank at the location of the ancient Osage camp. In fact, I’m prepared to erect an authentic wigwam.”

“George, would you like to join us for supper?” Cat says.

“Why, thank ye kindly, ma’am,” George says. He knew he smelled too bad to sit down at the table with anybody. “But I reckon I’d best be gittin on over home. Sure am mighty proud to make you’uns’ acquaintance.” He offered his hand to Ben to shake. Ben’s handshake was soft, for such a big powerful-built feller. George couldn’t offer his hand to the gal. Her touch might melt him.

“Could I have a minute?” Cat asks George, and walked him back to his Explorer, out of earshot of the injuns but not of the turtle dog Threasher. “Tell Vernon that I’ll try to phone him later tonight. But for right now I’d better tell you this much: these people, that exquisite girl and that formidable Osage warrior, are here for the purpose of extirpating all Ingledews from their ancestral homeland, meaning Stay More.”

George’s mouth dropped open. “You don’t mean to tell me,” says he. “How come?”

“It’s a long story. Ask Vernon to explain it to you. But tell him that there is a ravishingly beautiful Osage girl who would be pure-blood except for one thing: Jacob Ingledew was her progenitor.”

Maybe it’s rude to stare, but George couldn’t take his eyes off Juliana Heartstays, standing over there on the porch of the old house, and it wasn’t just on account of she was such a sight for sore eyes. “Lord have mercy,” says he, “I reckon you’re fixing to talk ’em out of it.”

“If I can,” says she, and pats him on the arm and goes back to join the others.

George didn’t know whether to go on home and call the county sheriff, his good buddy Mark Rupp, or just to call up the posse of Ingledew workers, the same fellers who had worked so hard to keep them nosy newsmen and cameramen from finding or getting to Vernon’s place. He could call up that posse and they could run these injuns out of town so fast they wouldn’t know what hit ’em.

But George decided he’d better go tell the bad news to Boss. So he turned his Explorer around and headed across the Swains Creek low-water bridge and on up the road that led to the mountain trail that climbed up to Vernon’s and Jelena’s. He was hungry, but he could count on Jelena to offer him a bite, if he didn’t have to sit at the table with them, stinking of hogballs as he did, if maybe they was just some way she could feed him out back with Vernon the cat.

The three of ’em was just a-setting out in the yard, drinking gin and tonic, all three of ’em. George didn’t much care for gin and tonic, and Boss knew it, even though he’d tried to explain to George that hot weather demanded gin and tonic with a wedge of lime in it.

Boss jumped up to fetch George some bourbon, the drink of his choice, hot weather or cold as a well-digger’s balls, and George pulled him up another chair, not too close to the others, and they sat and drank and talked. “Aint this the by-goddest weather ye ever seen?” George remarks, although in fact he’d seen much worse. But Bo allowed as how it was probably a lot hotter downstate, so it was a good thing they weren’t down there stump speaking already in places like Pine Bluff and El Dorado. Boss says he likes hot weather hisself. Jelena says she wonders why we’re all a-settin out here in the yard instead of inside the house where it’s nice and air-conditioned. George says he’d been cutting shoats all day and ought to stay out in the open air. Bo says settin in the yard is good for the constitution, and besides it puts us in touch with our Ozark ancestors.

George jumped on that remark for a excuse. “Speakin of Ozark ancestors,” he says, “they’s a coupla injuns just turned up down to Stay More town, in this here fancy old auto called a Pierce-Arrer, and that Woman Whom You Cannot Name is a-fixin to put ’em up for the night, and feed ’em and all.”

“Really?” says Boss.

“What tribe?” says Bo.

“Osage,” says George.

Nobody says nothing for a little while, then Boss says, “That ought to make her very happy. Do they speak Osage?”

“It appears so, I reckon,” George says. “There’s a feller and a gal, and the feller is just her car-driver but he’s this big old redskin brave looks like he ort to be on a horse with his bow’n arrer and his war paint and all. Nobody never told me that they made injuns that big. The gal is something else. I mean, let me tell you’uns, she’s something else. Nobody never told me that they made injun women that pretty.”

“Well well,” Bo says, “Maybe we ought to go meet her.”

“Not me,” says Boss.

“Ha!” says Bo. “I keep forgetting your legendary Ingledew woman-shyness.” He turned to Jelena like he was just a-making talk and says, “Tell me, Jelena, if it’s true that all Ingledews from time immemorial have been paralyzed in the presence of the opposite sex, how could Vernon be so chummy with you?”

Jelena smiled and says, “Because I’m an Ingledew myself.”

George figured that was as good a answer as any. But it also set him to figuring, if them injuns was out to exterminate all Ingledews, just how many Ingledews hereabouts was there? Boss and Jelena made two, Boss’s sister Sharon made three, and Boss’s dad, Hank Ingledew, made four. The injuns wouldn’t have no trouble finding Sharon, who lived just up the road a little piece from Cat’s house, but they’d probably have to search around a good bit to find Hank, who lived away off up high on the yon side of Ingledew Mountain.

And what was they fixing to do the exterminating with? George recalled Ben’s remark about “hired gun” and wondered if the redskin brave was packing a pistol or two. “Boss,” he says, “is there some reason why them injuns might be out to get you? The Ingledews didn’t drive them injuns’ ancestors out of town, did they?”

“I can answer that one,” Bo says, “based on my reading of Jacob Ingledew’s memoirs. There were only two Native Americans remaining in Stay More, an Osage brave named Wah Ti An Kah, called ‘Fanshaw,’ and his wife. Jacob and his brother Noah, who was shy not just toward women but toward anyone, especially Native Americans, lived in peaceful coexistence with the Native Americans through a whole winter and into the spring, when Fanshaw decided to leave and go westward in search of his kinsmen.

“Fanshaw had freely shared on many occasions the sexual favors of his wife with Jacob. Like all Ingledews, Jacob couldn’t tolerate the thought of seeing or being seen by a female, but apparently it had always been pitch dark when he’d succumbed to her allure and her passion. Fanshaw knew that he himself was sterile because his constant efforts to impregnate his wife had failed. So the baby that his wife was bearing when they departed Stay More was Jacob’s, but that was not by any means their reason for leaving. They left because…well, I suppose because they were lonely for their tribesmen, and, like people everywhere at all times who have to choose between love of place and love of family, decided they would sacrifice their ancestral homeland in favor of their kinfolks…if they could find them.”

Bo finished his little lesson and then he nudged Boss with his elbow and says, “Is that the way it was, Vernon?”

“In a nutshell,” Boss says, “although I suspect it’s a bit more complicated than that. I think Fanshaw didn’t harbor any jealously toward Jacob’s being the father of the baby, but on the other hand he didn’t want to raise the baby with two fathers, as it were. So he had to leave.”

“Whatever reason they left,” George says, “they’ve come back. What I mean is, this scrumptious injun gal I’m telling you about, right down in the town yonder, is a offshoot of Jacob Ingledew.”

They all three stared at George so fixedly he was of a mind to repeat back the immortal words of Thomas Bending Bear, “Excuse me, but you’re staring at me, and it’s rude.” But he didn’t say this.

“How do you know?” Bo says.

“What the Woman Whom We Cannot Name said to me, and tole me to tell ye,” George says. “And something else too. She said she’d try to phone ye, Boss, sometime tonight. But she says to warn ye, them injuns is here to wipe ye out. She said they was here for the purpose of extirpating all Ingledews from their ancestral homeland, meaning Stay More.”

“Why, for heaven’s sake?” says Jelena.

“We had better find out,” Bo says. “Surely they don’t think that the Ingledews drove the Native Americans out of Stay More.”

“Bo,” says Boss. “Do me a favor. You don’t have to say ‘injuns’ like George, but I think it’s hypocritical to say ‘Native Americans’ after they’ve been identified as Indians forever.”

“Political correctness is the first aim of politics,” says Bo.

“Let’s eat supper and talk some more about it,” says Jelena. And to George: “You stay to supper with us, hear?” George says he’d be mighty glad to, excepting he’s so smelly from wrassling them pigs he couldn’t sit at the table with them. Jelena says, “Dear heavens, Uncle George, Bo and I have been working in the garden all day and we smell just as bad as you do.”

So they sat at the dining table and ate. George didn’t much care for the cold gazpacho soup, but the tunafish casserole was edible, and Jelena’s homemade bread was always real good eatin. Right in the middle of supper the phone rang and it was for Vernon and he took it out of earshot and it went on for quite a time. His food got cold and Jelena decided not to wait for him to serve dessert, which was blackberry cobbler, and George had to have seconds on that. Nothing like hot cobbler with cold ice cream on top to make the whole meal just right.

They were still waiting for Boss to get back when Bo says to Jelena but with a glance now and again at George to let him know he’s not left out, “One thing I don’t understand. If these two Native—if these two Indians are here for the purpose of extirpating Ingledews, how would the Woman Whom We Cannot Name have found out about it? Did they just come right out and tell her? Assassins have to work in secrecy. Why would they have declared their intention to her?”

George says, “You got me on that one, but I reckon she let it be knowed right off that she wasn’t no Ingledew herself.”

Boss finally returned, smiling, and the first thing he says is maybe he won’t have to go meet that Indian lady after all, which suits him fine. George knows Boss would probably have fainted from shyness if he’d ever had to meet up face to face with that peach of a female.

“Well, I would certainly like to meet her,” Bo says.

“Nothing’s stopping you,” Boss says to him. “But you could wait until tomorrow. The Indian woman is going to be busy for the remainder of the night reading the memoirs of Jacob Ingledew, which the Woman suggested she read, to disabuse her of the notion that her ancestor, Fanshaw’s wife, was raped by Jacob.”

“Raped?” says Bo. “That’s preposterous.”

“Tell her that, when you see her,” Boss says.

Before leaving, George told Boss just to say the word and he’d round up the boys and give them injuns a escort out of the whole country. But Boss said that probably wouldn’t be necessary, even if it weren’t so inhospitable. “The least we can do,” Boss says, “is let them reclaim their ancestral campsite.”

So George just went on home and put it out of his mind for the rest of the night. But the very next morning, bright and early, while George was eating his Lucky Charms cereal, there come a knock at his door, and George snuck a peek out the window to see that there shiny Pierce-Arrow getting chummy with his Explorer. He opened the front door and there was the heap big injun. He was wearing a different Hawaiian shirt than he’d had on yesterday, but he still had that hired driver’s cap on his head.

“Good morning, George!” says Thomas Bending Bear, singing it more than saying it. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

“Naw, I just eating my breakfast,” George says, and knew it was rude not to invite a guest, even a strange injun, to join you. “Come in and have you a cup of coffee.” George poured him a mug, and even says, “Lucky Charms?”

“No, thank you very much,” says Ben. “Our hostess has already filled us with khinkali, an exquisite breakfast dumpling common to her native Georgia.”

“Georgia?” says George. “I thought she was from some’ers in Europe.”

The injun laughs. “There’s a Georgia in Europe too, you know.”

“Where’s your boss-lady?” George asks.

“She’s very busy reading. Very busy reading.”

He says it twice as if George might be feeble-minded, which he aint.

When their coffee was finished, Ben says, “Would you care to go for a drive?”

Actually George wouldn’t, but he needed a good excuse not to go to work for Ingledew Ham this morning. He’d overdone it yesterday, and besides he had to get used to letting others take over his job, because when this here campaign really got clicking, he wasn’t going to be around very much anyhow. “In that thing?” George says, and pointed at the Pierce-Arrow.

“If you want to sit in back, you could pretend I’m your chauffeur,” says Ben.

“I’d as lief sit up front with you,” says George.

“How sweet!” says Ben, and pats him on the arm. “You wouldn’t happen to have a chainsaw I could borrow?”

George fetched his chainsaw, and after debating it with himself decided not to ask the injun what he wanted it for. If he was a-fixing to use it on human beings, leastways I aint a Ingledew, George reminded himself.

That there Pierce-Arrow was some automobile. As they rode around, hither and yon, not going nowheres particular, Ben told him all about the car, its whole history, how many cylinders it had, etsettery. Seems that when the Osages commenced getting rich from all that oil, back in the Twenties, the Pierce-Arrow was their vehicle of choice, and became as common as clothes, though you hardly ever saw one anymore, leastways not in Osage country. It sure was a fine-riding car, and George felt rich just a-setting in it.

Ben interrupted his harangue about the Pierce-Arrow to say, “What beautiful country! These glorious mountains! All my life I’ve lived in flat country, Oklahoma, with scarcely a hill. And my people, you know, the Heart Stays band, always had to have a flat but hummocky creek bank to settle upon…like that one.” Ben pointed, and George all of a sudden caught on that the injun hadn’t been just gadding about without no purpose but had been heading all along for this particular spot, which George knew was where the Osage camp had stood when Jacob and Noah Ingledew came to settle Stay More. There wasn’t ary trace of it left behind, not a piece of pottery or nothing, maybe an arrowhead somewheres but not in the camp itself. There was just this hummocky stretch of meadow right beside Swains Creek. Hadn’t no white man ever built on it; it had been the Duckworths’ pasture at one time, and during the Second World War it had been a bivouac for army tanks on maneuvers, and then the Duckworths reclaimed it, and it had stayed a pasture for some years until Boss had cut down all the barbed wire so the hogs could run free.

Ben stopped the car. He just sat there and looked out at that meadow for a while, kindly wistful-like. George had him a idea what the injun might be thinking and, recalling what Boss had said last night about letting the injuns have it back if they cared to, and what Ben had said yesterday about pitching a wigwam on it, George says, “It’s yours if you want it.”

Ben’s eyes was full of water when he turned his head back to look at George. “Really?” he says. “On whose authority? Is it yours to give me?”

“It’s Boss’s,” George says. “All the land hereabouts belongs to him. And he says you can have that piece where your ancestors made their home.”

Ben swept his mighty arm to take in the whole world. “My ancestors had ‘all the land hereabouts’ which now belongs to your boss. Of course my ancestors did not have it, because they did not know the meaning of property ownership, but it was theirs.”

“You wouldn’t settle for that there whole meadow?” George asks.

“It appears that your swine have already taken full possession it,” Ben says. And sure enough there was a whole bunch of hogs a-rooting and a-wallowing all over the place.

George laughed. “I reckon them swine sort of feels the same way about it your ancestors did. They don’t own it, because creatures, like men, can’t own the earth. And if you was to set up your wigwam or whatever, even right atop their favorite wallow, they’d just move on across the creek or somewheres else.”

Big Ben real sudden gave George a mighty hug. It was embarrassing. While Ben was a-hugging him, with arms that could’ve crushed him if George wasn’t pretty darn sturdy hisself, George could only pat him on the back and say, “There there. There there.”

“Can I cut down a few of those trees?” Ben asks, and points at a thicket of bodark saplings.

“It’s your land,” George says.

George had nothing better to do this morning, so he helped Ben make his wigwam, or rather the pair of them, a sort of double hut bound tight together. Ben explained that the sapling George called bodark was the Bois D’Arc, Maclura pomifera, also called Osage Orange, not just because of its orange-colored wood and its fruit which looks like an over-sized orange (“We call ’em horse-apples,” says George), but also because the Osage Indians had used the tree to make their huntin bows and to build their houses. What Ben and George would do was, they’d use the chainsaw to cut down a long slender trunk of the bodark, sharpen both ends with an ax (which Ben already had, maybe to do some ax murders with), and then the two of them would bend that pole into an arc and stick both ends deep into the ground.

“I could never have done this by myself,” Ben says. “Thank you so much. Thank you so very much.”

Then when they had about ten of them poles interwoven and arched into a big circle, they covered the sides with reeds and cattails, which grew all along the creek bank.

It took ’em just two days to finish the job, hooking the second beehive-wigwam to the first one on the second day. There wasn’t no door connecting one beehive with the other’n in between. “What’s the point of joining ’em?” George wants to know.

“Now that is a mystery,” Ben said. “My lady’s mansion in Oklahoma is constructed in pretty much the same design, only infinitely larger, of course, and there are several connecting doors between one ‘beehive’ and the other. But here…” Ben fetched from the Pierce-Arrow a book, called The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, and showed George one of the pitchers. The pitcher was exactly what they’d just been doing. “I’m just following orders,” Ben says, and his voice was kind of wistful. “I’m just doing what my lady asks me. All my life it has been that way.”

When they had the double wigwam all done, Ben’s lady come down to take a look at it, and she had the Woman, Cat, with her, and also Bo, who was driving ’em in his Nissan four by four, and even the dog Threasher. But no Boss. “Wonderful,” the lovely gal says, and gives Ben a big hug despite he’s all wet from the sweat of his work.

“Half the work was his,” says Ben, and the smiling eyeful goes to give George a hug too, but he backs off, not on account of he’s soaked with sweat but because he knows if she touches him he’ll turn into a pillar of mush.

“You’ve been more than kind,” she says to George.

“Aw, it wasn’t much of nothing,” George says. “I just did what he told me to.”

“Is it ready for me to try it out?” she asks Ben.

“I haven’t put the bedding in it yet,” he says, “but the structure is finished.”

“You’re going to sleep here?” Bo asks her. “May I have the other side?”

The gal laughs. “Bo, you’d have incredible dreams if you did. No, I have to spend at least one night here all alone.”

George has been thinking that if these injuns really intended to use this beehive combo for living purposes, that the reason there are two of them without no door in between is that one is hers, the other’n is his, but it appeared that’s not what she had in mind. Bending Bear wouldn’t sleep here at all, or not unless he built another beehive combo for hisself.

Ben had been sleeping in one of the spare rooms at Cat’s house, although just last night when he drove George home he stayed a awful long time, drinking George’s bourbon and making hints so plain any fool could’ve figured out that Ben was trying to get hisself invited to spend the night. George had a terrible time getting rid of him.

“Look, Threasher’s pointing!” Ben says, and sure enough that dumb dog was just a-standing there with his tail straight as a rod. Ben ran and searched and came back a-holding this here big soft-shelled turtle, who was trying his best to bend his neck and bite Ben’s hand.

“My supper!” says Juliana Heartstays as if she’d been in that Maisonette restaurant in Cincinnati. George would have puked but he had a empty stomach. “Good boy, Threasher! Point a few more, and I’ll invite all these people to a feast.”

And sure enough, that turtle dog rounded up a whole bunch of terrapins and box turtles and softshells, and even a snapping turtle out in the creek. That crazy dog just went wild, and pointed them critters as fast as Ben could catch ’em and chop off their heads with his ax, the same ax he’d used to build the wigwam with.

And Juliana Heartstays declared they’d have a real feast that evening for supper, right here on the creek bank, to “housewarm” the new habitation. An old-style injun celebration. Cat said she’d be glad to take a couple of the turtles and use a old Svanetian recipe on ’em, and contribute ’em to the feast.

Near about everbody was invited—Day and Diana, Sharon and Larry, Boss and Jelena, etsettery. Cast showed up with a local girl, Sheila Kimber, who was the bookkeeper at the plant, and who was a real looker herself. But Boss never showed up. Jelena said he claimed he was rehearsing a speech he was a-fixing to give in Pine Bluff next week—and George realized his services as helicopter pilot would remove him from the presence of these injuns in just a few more days. But when Jelena was making excuses for Boss, George noticed she winked at Bo, as if she and Bo knew the real reason Boss wouldn’t come—but so did everbody else, practically, except Juliana herself—not that he was scared of the threat that these injuns was out to assassinate him, but pure and simple that he couldn’t face womenfolks on account of his congenital Ingledew disorder: pathological woman-shyness. The way it worked was, the prettier the woman was, the worse an Ingledew’s disorder. And Juliana Heartstays was just about as pretty as they make ’em. Even if Boss hadn’t even laid his own eyes on her yet, but just had to go by George’s and Bo’s descriptions.

She threw a real spread. Right out there on the creek bank. George was happy to tote in a bunch of sawhorses and planks to set up some tables, and Cat and Jelena covered ’em with nice tablecloths, and all the womenfolks contributed their very best desserts: you never in your life saw such a passel of tasty pies and cobblers and a fancy Georgian lemon tea cake made by Cat that George couldn’t wait to set his teeth into, but first he had to at least pretend like he was a-sampling some of that turtle meat. Why couldn’t some of the women have brought a platter of fried chicken? There wasn’t nothing but turtle: the main course was little meat pies made with turtle, but there was side dishes of turtle stew, fried turtle, and turtle soup, with plenty of good wines and George’s own contribution of a case of Molson’s ale. When Thomas Bending Bear saw that George wasn’t even tasting any of them turtle dishes, he practically held him down and forced him to bite into a piece of fried snapping turtle, and George was amazed to discover it wasn’t uneatable, in fact it was pretty tasty, sort of like a cross between chicken and ham. George was just half-kidding when he told Ben that the two of them ought to put Threasher into business and start a turtle-packing company to compete with Ingledew Ham. “I’d love to be your partner,” Ben says.

All and all, it was one of the best eatin parties George had ever attended. He just wished Boss could’ve been there. Juliana and Ben both made little speeches, saying they was so happy to be here and so happy to get to know all these good people, and although they had come originally with some ill feeling in their hearts toward the descendants of the Ingledews who had forced their ancestors away from this homeland, they realized that such removal and change had been inevitable, almost a part of Nature’s plan, and now we were privileged to witness this handsome edifice as testament to the cooperation of an Osage Indian, Thomas Bending Bear, and a near-Ingledew, Mr. George Dinsmore.

At home later that night, after getting rid of Ben, who wouldn’t hardly take no for a answer, George was just a-setting around digesting that big supper and the three pieces of lemon tea cake he’d eaten, and he got to pondering about Juliana spending the night all by herself out there in that wigwam. George knew she didn’t have nothing to fear from the hogs, even if the hogs was resentful that Juliana had forced them out the same way that Boss’s ancestors had supposedly forced out Juliana’s ancestors. No, the hogs wouldn’t bother her. And there wasn’t no coyotes or wolves or bears or nothing hereabouts. But George wondered if that fine woman might get any trouble from human beings. Who knows? That Bolin Pharis sure had the hots for her. George had noticed how Bo had kind of cozied up to her during the party, always talking to her and laughing with her and what-all. Obviously the fool had his heart a-sliding down his wrist. No telling but what he might take a notion to see if she didn’t need some company in the wee hours of the night.

George couldn’t put it out of his mind. Nigh on to midnight, he got into his Explorer and drove over pretty near the Osage camp, switched off his headlights, drove on closer, stopped, and walked the last quarter-mile or so. It was a dark night, dark as pitch, no moon, and George stumbled a couple of times. He wasn’t young any more. He was thinking, when this here campaign was all finished and done with, and Boss was either elected governor or defeated enough to drive some sense into his head, George might just take a early retirement.

He crept as soundlessly as he could to the vicinity of the Osage camp. There was no light of any kind inside the wigwam. She’d be fast asleep this time of night. But George could hear voices. One of the voices was some man’s, but George couldn’t tell if it was Bo or not. George tried to creep closer, but then Threasher caught wind of him and commenced barking, and George hightailed it out of there, falling down more than once.

Just as he was making it back to his Explorer he happened to detect the looming bulk of some other vehicle parked off the road amongst the brush. He went up to it until he could tell, practically by feel, that it wasn’t Bo’s Nissan. It was a Land-Rover. George was abashed that it took him a while to figure out who it was, hereabouts, that owned a Land-Rover. It ought to have hit him all at once, all of a heap: fellow name of Ingledew, better known as Boss.

Chapter thirteen

They were made to wait in the Reception Lounge of Republican Headquarters, which was not in customary downtown Little Rock but in an elegant new building on Chenal Parkway in the upscale western suburbs. They were offered their choice of beverages, even alcoholic ones, but still they had to wait. Bo explained to Cast that this was just a transparent ploy that Billy Joe Slade was using to put them in their place. “He knows we’re here,” Bo told Cast, “and he’s not particularly busy. But he wants us to cool our heels as an additional reminder that we’re on his turf, that this is his show, and he’s going to call all the shots.” But if any of this explanation was getting through to Cast, there was no way of telling.

Bo had invited Cast along for three reasons: one, the kid needed the experience, especially of how to sit at the bargaining table with the enemy; two, on the long drive in the Jaguar from Fayetteville, Bo preferred for a change not his haunting solitude but a sounding-board for his ideas, not just about the campaign; and three, Bo wanted somebody on his side of the table in this showdown. But it may have been a mistake: during the recent interlude, Cast too had fallen under Stay More’s magic spell, and had apparently become deeply involved with some local girl he’d found picking flowers in the forest, and couldn’t get her off his mind.

Bo had thrown enough loaded questions at Cast to be able to determine that, sure enough, Cast had managed to rid himself of his long-standing virginity. Maybe he’s the only one who got any, Bo reflected. He certainly hadn’t gotten any himself. And Bending Bear’s lust for George Dinsmore had gone unrequited, apparently. And Vernon…despite Bo’s best efforts as a pimp, after all the trouble Bo had gone to, setting up an assignation for Vernon and Juliana that would’ve circumvented Vernon’s appalling shyness toward women, in much the same fashion that his ancestor Jacob had been able to get around his shyness toward Juliana’s ancestor (using full darkness but without benefit of whiskey), you would think that Vernon might at least have reported back to Bo on the success or failure of the venture. But Bo still did not know if anything sexual had ever transpired between them.

“Did you catch a word of what I said?” Bo asked Cast, who was staring dreamily off into space, his gaze narrowly missing a huge poster of Shoat Bradfield smiling and offering his hand to the world.

“Sir?” Cast said. “Oh, yes sir, we have to sweat it out to take the starch out of us, so we’ll be meek and nervous when he tries to put one over on us.”

Bo chuckled. “Good enough. We didn’t have to do this, you know. We could have insisted he come to Fayetteville, on our turf. Or we could have met him for lunch at a neutral place.” The first polls following Vernon’s victory in the run-off had shown Vernon trailing Bradfield by twenty-four points, 57 - 33, with eleven percent undecided. Of course part of that lead was from Democratic supporters of Reverend Dixon (and of Barnas) who were still bitter over Vernon’s win. But as of right now, Billy Joe Slade could afford to gloat over his man’s commanding lead. Still, Bo felt very condescending toward Billy Joe, whom he hadn’t seen for years, who was just a deputy assistant campaign manager the last time he’d seen him, who had supposedly risen from the ranks of salesmen: Slade had made his reputation as a live-wire peddler of pharmaceuticals, winning national awards for his prowess as a pitchman.

“So why did we come here?” Cast wanted to know.

“Just to let him know that we’re not afraid of him,” Bo said. “But listen, we’ve got to stay focused. This campaign is going to be all uphill, and we can’t let our recent adventures distract us from the matter at hand.”

Speak for yourself, Bo, he thought. He was having the devil’s own time keeping his mind clear of the two enthralling women whose company had given him so much recent pleasure. If he were not already madly in love with Jelena, he could so easily have fallen in love with Juliana (Bo took credit for being the first to notice, even before Vernon did, the great similarity of their given names). And because he had lost his head and his heart over Jelena, it was easy for him to want, even without thinking about it, to push Vernon toward Juliana. Had there ever been a situation in politics comparable to this one? Had a campaign manager ever become a pimp to get a woman for his candidate so that he could steal his candidate’s woman? That was a blunt and equivocal way of putting it, but that was the way it was going to look in Bo’s memoirs whenever he got around to writing them, and the more complicated this situation became the more determined Bo was to put the whole story on paper eventually. But that’s the distant future, Bolin Pharis! Get ahold of yourself!

“Sir? What’s the distant future?” Cast asked.

“What? Was I talking aloud?” Bo muttered.

Finally Billy Joe Slade came out of his inner sanctum and greeted them. “Sorry to keep you guys waiting,” he said.

“Like hell you are,” Bo said.

“Doin’ all right, Bo?” Billy Joe said. “Aint seen you in ages. Welcome to L’il Rawk again.” He gestured expansively with his hand and ushered them into a room where there were four chairs facing a blackboard, one of those portable flip-over two-sided blackboards on casters. There was no table, and nothing else in the room. “Just have you a seat, and he ought to be here any minute.”

“Who ought to be here?” Bo asked.

“The guv’nor.”

“Hell, Slade, you didn’t tell me that Bradfield was going to be in on this,” Bo objected.

“You wouldn’t want to leave His Excellency out, would ya? That would be downright rude and disrespectful.”

“But it would only have been fair, then, if Ingledew could have joined in also.”

“I heard tell he was real busy starting a wham-bang stump speakin rally down to Pine Bluff.”

That was true. Vernon himself had chosen to inaugurate his new tour of Arkansas towns—almost a hundred of them scheduled—by throwing a gala party-cum-speech at one of Arkansas’ less prepossessing locales: the populous but downtrodden city of Pine Bluff, where equal numbers of blacks and whites would turn out (they hoped) to feast on Ingledew Ham and to watch and hear Ingledew’s Instrumentalists, Vernon’s Vocalists, and The Cheerleaders in a three-ring extravaganza opening for an old-fashioned demonstration of oratory by the Democratic candidate. Lydia and Carleton had used good chunks of their recent vacation planning it all.

It had been hard for Bo to decide whether or not to give the staff the brief vacation in the first place. Arch had argued against it, and had only grudgingly agreed to take a few days off, go to Turner’s Bend (where, Bo knew, Arch would love to reside permanently if Beverly would allow it) and kick the campaign out of his canoe for a while. As for himself, Bo had needed and thoroughly enjoyed every minute of the vacation…although he’d not exactly consummated his passion for Jelena.

While the Samurai had been on brief vacation, Shoat Bradfield himself had lost no time in beginning the contest…although, characteristically, he had stuck his foot in his mouth. As soon as Vernon’s victory in the run-off was announced, the governor had gone on television to declare, “If he thinks beating a two-bit preacher-man earned him a shot at the title, let him come on. The lowdown scumbag deserves to be kicked to death by a jackass, and I’m just the one to do it!” Moments passed before Billy Joe Slade whispered something into Bradfield’s ear, and Bradfield blushed and said, “Let me rephrase that.”

And now here was the jackass himself. Bo and Cast rose from their seats respectfully as he entered the room. Even if the man was a crook, a lowlife, and an asshole, he was still the governor of Arkansas, the state’s highest elected official, and you couldn’t help feeling some sense of awe or reverence in his presence.

“We meet at last,” Shoat Bradfield said to Bo, pumping his hand. “I’ve heard so much about you. You’re a legend in Arkansas politics, even if you turned your back on us and went east.” Bradfield was physically imposing, in much the same way that Bo himself was, but his face, up close, was pocked and sallow, and whatever handsomeness he had once possessed had been corroded by alcohol.

“I never turned my back on you, Governor,” Bo said. “I just had more important things to do.”

“But now we’ve got the most important thing to do, and I’ve got another meeting at the statehouse in an hour, so we’d better get cracking. Billy Joe, light into ’em!”

“Yessir,” Billy Joe said, “if y’all will just make yourselfs comfortable. Anybody want a drink or anything?” Billy Joe moved to the blackboard and gave it a flip so that the empty frontside turned away from the backside, which had writing all over it. “Now let’s see what we got here,” Billy Joe said.

There were thirteen items written on the blackboard. In the margin at the beginning of each was a crude drawing, like restroom graffiti, representing some kind of bird, a cross between a chicken and a seagull, except that its wingspan was extremely long and thin. After Bo had read Item One on the blackboard, he suddenly realized what the crude drawing was supposed to represent: an albatross.

1. Refuses to believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of the Living God.

2. Never elected to any office anywhere at any time.

3. Has slept for thirty years out of wedlock with his very own first cousin. No children, no experience with child-raising.

4. Never worked. Owns a large unregulated pig farm managed by others, and earns income from ham-processing operation in which he takes no part.

5. Said pig farm is in remote Ozark Mountain boondocks, out of touch with the rest of Arkansas.

6. Resides there with said first cousin in outlandish homemade “house” consisting of two huge bubbles, unlike anything ever seen elsewhere.

7. Never been to college. High school diploma only.

8. But uses big words to make himself seem smart, although this makes everybody else feel dumb.

9. No military experience whatsoever. Could have served in Vietnam, but never signed up.

10. Walks and moves around like he’s got all day; laziness is infectious.

11. Really just a pretty boy. Like all very good-looking men, he’s vain and obsessed with appearance.

12. He’s opposed to things that give enjoyment, like television, cigarettes, and guns. He thinks schools and prisons and hospitals ought to be abolished.

13. Despite being handsome, he’s scared to death of women, or anything female. Can’t even look at them, let alone talk to them.

“Isn’t that just beautiful?” Governor Shoat Bradfield declared admiringly. “Good job, Billy Joe!”

“Where did you get this?” Bo demanded.

“Well, I’ll tell ya,” Billy Joe said. “You’ve been known to mention the Albert Ross bird to other people, haven’t you?”

“Who? Oh, yes, I’m the originator of the metaphor of the albatross, but I didn’t spell out all these items.”

“But there they are!” said Shoat Bradfield. “And boy, are we gonna have us some fun with ’em! Billy Joe, do you want to give him the big news, or do you want me to do it?”

“I can do it, Chief,” Billy Joe said, and he and the governor exchanged huge smirks. “Hate to tell you this, Bo, cause I know it will just break your heart. But Mr. Carleton Drew aint working for you folks any more. As of day before yesterday, he is in the employ of His Excellency Shoat Bradfield.”

Bo was infuriated, but he kept himself in check. It was understandable that Carleton, given his fondness for television advertising and his frustration over Vernon’s refusal to sanction it, would have wanted to work for a man who would appreciate his talents. But to betray his former employer by giving the opposition all of the thirteen albatrosses was incomprehensible.

“I thought he was a good man,” Cast remarked mournfully, “but he’s just a greedy shit heel.”

The governor snuffled. That was the only word that would describe the man’s inability to laugh or chuckle or chortle. Billy Joe Slade began to describe in detail just what they intended to do with their information about Vernon, but Bo found that he couldn’t pay attention, that his mind was deliberately wandering, not just to escape the dishonor of Carleton’s defection but to seek out more attractive objects of contemplation: a pair of fabulous women. Even if the holiday in Stay More hadn’t afforded any sexual consummations (other than Cast’s), it had certainly started something. At least Vernon was willing to report to Bo that he and Juliana had talked into the wee hours not just one but three nights. Or perhaps four—after Bo had had to leave Stay More, Vernon had remained until it was time for George to helicopt him down to Pine Bluff. And Vernon was willing to admit to Bo that he had quickly discovered the essential difference between Jelena and Juliana: Jelena was lovely and warm and almost unbearably intelligent, but Juliana was unimaginably beautiful and earthy and vigorous.

During his own lengthy conversations with Juliana, in the gradual process of “introducing” her to Vernon, Bo had learned much about her background and her original motive for coming to Stay More. Bo and Juliana had in common that they were recent readers of the memoirs of Jacob Ingledew, and Juliana was willing to admit that it was difficult for her to cling to the notion that Jacob had raped Kushi, as Fanshaw’s wife was called, after having read the memoirs. Or even to blame Jacob in any way for the out-migration of those last two remaining Osage. Juliana had showed Bo her .38 Smith & Wesson and had told him of the arsenal of weapons that Thomas Bending Bear kept in the trunk of the Pierce-Arrow, and had declared that she had fully intended to employ the weapons on all of the Ingledews, but after reading Jacob’s candid and apparently truthful memoirs she had told Ben they wouldn’t be killing anybody.

“Excuse me, Mr. Pharis, are you paying attention?” The governor’s unpleasant voice brought Bo back from idyllic Stay More to the harsh reality of Little Rock.

Bo looked at the governor, taking in his sneer, his clouded eyes, his haughty jaw, and for a moment, just a moment, he felt sorry for him.

“You may call me Bo,” he said. Then he rose from his chair and moved to the blackboard, and gave it a flip which turned away the thirteen albatrosses and revealed a clean slate. He took up the chalk, silently thanking Harry Wolfe and his sidekick Garth Rucker. He drew a bird, a cross between a pelican and a bald eagle, and said, “This, gentlemen, is not an albatross but a foo bird. Have you ever heard the legend of the foo bird? Stop me if you’ve heard it. The bird is a native only to areas of Africa where elephants live, although the connection between the bird and elephants is not certain.

“Anyway, a group of explorers quickly discovered the foo bird’s habit of dive-bombing them from the air with excrement, as we’ve all experienced from pigeons and other birds. Several of the explorers thus besmirched quickly washed it off, and just as quickly died a painful death. A native explained to the last remaining explorer that the only way to survive the droppings of the bird is not to wash it off. The moral of this story, gentlemen, is: if the foo shits, wear it.”

The governor’s snuffle was feeble. Billy Joe’s laugh was perfunctory and impatient. Cast cackled.

“All right,” Bo said, “Foo Bird Number One.” And he began to sketch thirteen numbered foo birds on the blackboard, and with each number he spoke these words:

1. Sent to principal in fourth grade for calling Abraham Lincoln “a Jew niggerlover.”

2. Suspended from school in fifth grade for calling principal “a cunt.”

3. Expelled from school in the sixth grade for drilling peepholes through the wall into the stalls of the girls’ restroom. And for charging admission.

4. Insufficient credits for high school graduation. Purchased for $100 an equivalency certificate from a school official later jailed.

5. Did not actually receive diploma from Southern State University; registrar’s records show sixteen hours of incompletes and thirty hours of Fs.

6. Defeated in three high school elections and four college elections.

7. Never elected to any office before running for governor. Defeated in three high school elections and four college elections.

8. Spent most of military service in the brig for insubordination and goldbricking.

9. Made fortune in real estate, mostly from selling poor properties at twice their value.

10. Of all his promises made in his first campaign for governor, not one has been kept.

11. Three different physicians have urged him to join AA, but he refuses. Gave January’s state of the state address while plastered and incoherent.

12. Has not been able to keep a chief of staff longer than three months, and has had six of them so far.

13. His Republican predecessor, Mike Huckabee, has privately called him “inept, foolish, and disappointing.”

Bo’s thirteen foo birds nearly covered the blackboard but he could squeeze in one more. “I see you, and I’ll raise you one,” he said to Billy Joe Slade, who was sitting open-mouthed and dumbstruck. And he put one more foo bird on the board:

14. His teenage daughter is residing at a private mental hospital, Charter Vista.

“I assume that when you stole Carleton Drew from us you also attempted to steal Harry Wolfe,” Bo said. “But you didn’t. So he’s busy, even as we speak, tracking down those five former chiefs of staff of yours to learn their reasons for quitting. And he has dispatched his lieutenant, Garth Rucker, to Charter Vista to learn by hook or by crook the reasons your daughter is incarcerated there. Their next project is to find out why your wife wears such heavy make-up. To cover her bruises perhaps?”

Shoat Bradfield was standing, his hands on his hips, his face as red as a baboon’s buttocks. “You filthy scum,” he said. “Have you no decency at all?”

“Have you?” Bo asked.

The governor glowered, or tried to glower, but his lip was trembling, and suddenly he burst into tears. He lost control completely and shook with sobs and Billy Joe Slade had to embrace him and hold him for a long time, and then to lead him out of the room into another chamber.

“Gosh, sir,” Cast said when they were alone. “I’ve never seen such a display of swordsmanship in my life. You shredded him!”

“He has shredded himself,” Bo observed.

They waited for a while, but remained alone. “Maybe we should just go?” Cast suggested.

Bo held up a finger. “One minute.”

In less than a minute, Billy Joe Slade returned. “Shame,” he said. “Shame on y’all. That was uncalled for, and it was disrespectful to the chief executive of Arkansas and you’ve hurt a good man in such a way that it just makes my blood boil!”

“It was tit for tat, plain and simple,” Bo said. “If you don’t know that, you haven’t learned the first thing about politics.”

“But y’all have got such an unfair advantage over us!” Billy Joe observed.

“Thank you,” Bo said. “I intend to keep it that way.”

“What are your plans, could I ask? Do you plan to start leaking that stuff right away? Or are you gonna save it for later in the campaign?”

“We would prefer never having to use any of it,” Bo told him. “But it depends on what you do with what you’ve got on Ingledew. If you don’t reveal anything, we won’t. That’s tit for tat too, you know.”

“But that’s not the way people campaign any more. You know that. Even the public expects us to tear into each other, and if we don’t, they’ll wonder if we’ve made some kind of deal.”

“Let ’em wonder,” Bo suggested, and then he asked, “Have we made a deal?” He offered his hand.

Billy Joe didn’t take it. “I’ll have to clear it with the governor first. I’ll get back to you soon as I can.”

So that was that, for the time being. Mission accomplished. Bo and Cast got back into the Jaguar and headed back to Fayetteville. Bo had considered going on down to Pine Bluff to watch Vernon’s big rally, but he had seen it before and he hated crowds and there really wasn’t much that he or Cast could do to lend a hand down there. But he intended to promote Cast into Carleton Drew’s position, and he told him so, on the return trip to Fayetteville. Cast protested that he wasn’t a media expert like Drew. “But didn’t you learn anything from him?” Bo wondered. Oh yes, lots, Cast said, but he just wouldn’t know how to do all the things that Drew could do. “Like turn traitor?” Bo said. Cast said he couldn’t understand why Carleton would have done that. Bo said, “Then you’re not as smart as I’ve been giving you credit for.”

Once again Bo permitted his thoughts to drift away from the machinations of politics, away from the self-serving dishonesty of such as Carleton Drew, and toward the halcyon contemplation of those two goddesses in Stay More. Or three, if we counted the Woman Whom We Cannot Name, who had told Bo that the coming of the two Osages must have been ordained by Anangka, the name she gave to her personal Fate-Thing, a sort of fairy godmother. Bo knew that the Woman had spent years researching a book she’d published on the Osage, and Bo also knew that the Woman was rumored to have been a novelist before she went into seclusion. Maybe, Bo reflected, she would beat him to the pleasure of telling the story that was unfolding before them.

At Russellville, Bo abruptly left the Interstate and headed north on State Highway 7. He told Cast that they’d done enough work for the day, maybe enough for two days, so why didn’t they just take a little detour and drop by Stay More to see if it was still there? Cast of course was thrilled beyond words, but he did have to call Bo’s attention to the fact that they were driving the Jaguar, not the Nissan 4-by-4, and the roads of Stay More were rough. Bo suggested they could just leave the Jag at the Stay More Hotel and get people to come pick them up. Didn’t Cast’s girlfriend have a car? Sure, Cast said, and then he asked, Hotel? And Bo explained the history of the Jacob Ingledew house, how after the death of the original Whom We Cannot Name, one of the Ingledew women had converted the house into a hotel, which had never done much business during the decline of the village. Bo told Cast that if he ever found the leisure to do so, he ought to read The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks.

Stay More in the heat and drought of July was still a luxuriant garden, nearly swallowed up in dense and unrestrained plant life; the contrast with the city they’d just left a few hours before was fantastic. The only vehicle in town was the Pierce-Arrow, parked in the shade of a giant maple tree beside the former hotel, and that made it seem as if they were escaping not just from the city but from time, back into the thirties. On the long porch of the house, whose frilly roof sheltered them from the late afternoon sun, sat three people, the Woman and Juliana in rocking chairs and Bending Bear in the porch swing.

Was it just Bo’s imagination, or were each of them dressed as they would have seventy years before? At least Bending Bear wasn’t wearing one of his loud Hawaiian shirts but a collarless broadcloth dress shirt, and his chauffeur’s cap had been replaced with a straw sombrero. The women were wearing calico cotton dresses such as Bo had seen in old pictures of country folk. With the pointer Threasher sprawled out on the porch floor, the scene was a tableau of yesteryear.

Cast used the car phone to ask his girlfriend to come and pick him up, and Bo reflected that the technology of the car phone was out of keeping with this setting. It was hard, though, to step out of the Jaguar’s air-conditioning into the heat.

There were other chairs, including another rocker, lined along the porch, and they could sit in these, after exchanging greetings. “Too hot for the wigwam?” Bo asked Juliana.

That radiant smile. “I don’t think the original Stay Morons spent much time in their wigwams on days like this,” she said.

The Woman observed that they ought to be inside enjoying the air conditioning but nobody anywhere sits on their porches any more. If you have a porch, why not use it?

Bending Bear remarked that when Threasher wasn’t able to move because of the heat, he couldn’t move either. He was fanning himself with an old-fashioned funeral-parlor fan. Where had he got that?

They all sat on the porch and watched the world fail to go by. Eventually Cast’s girlfriend arrived, and Cast introduced her to Bo, although he’d already met her, briefly, at the turtle feast. Sheila Kimber was a very pretty young lady whose people went way back in the history in Stay More. You could tell by the way that she and Cast looked at each other that they were fast becoming a number. Before leaving with her, Cast asked Bo when and where they should meet the following day, for the return to Fayetteville, and Bo said they ought to meet right here around two o’clock or whenever lunch was finished.

When Cast and Sheila were gone, Juliana said, “So you’re spending the night?”

“If I can find a place to crash,” Bo said.

“Oh, I’m sure Jelena would love to have you!” she said.

Did he blush? Bo abruptly had a disquieting thought: Juliana and Jelena had become friends, and were comparing notes on both Vernon and Bo. Well, actually, he told her, he was thinking of doing something he hadn’t done since he was a kid: worm-fishing by lantern-light for catfish.

“Down at my creek?” Juliana asked, smiling, always smiling.

“Your creek?” Bo said. “I didn’t realize you owned it.”

“Osages own nothing, I’ve told you that,” she said. “But Guckah Wazhingah—Swan Creek—is a major source of our food supply, including those turtles.”

He said that unless he was mistaken it wasn’t Swan Creek but Swains Creek, named after the family of Swains who were early settlers.

The Woman spoke up. “Wazhingah means any kind of bird, and Juliana’s home in Oklahoma is on Bird Creek.”

They made chitchat about Oklahoma and birds and creeks and turtles and worm-fishing by lantern light for catfish. The subject of birds tempted him into relating the morning’s battle between the albatross and the foo bird, but he decided to put politics out of his mind. Eventually Bo stole a glance at his watch and announced that he supposed he ought to at least give Jelena a ring and get himself invited to her place.

“She’s not at home,” Juliana said. “She’s having supper with Diana and Day.”

How could Juliana know that unless they were becoming friends? Bo was only mildly disappointed to learn Jelena wasn’t at home. He could catch her later. He was really more interested in talking with Juliana, for now. But he needed to get her away from the Woman and from Bending Bear. Half of that problem was solved when the Woman excused herself to go inside and start supper, first inviting Bo to dine with them if he wanted (and where else would he get a bite?). The other half was solved shortly thereafter when Ben announced that it was just too damned hot for him and he was going inside to his room to cool off before supper.

So they were alone. Bo discovered he could tell her privately what he couldn’t tell the others, the battle of the albatross and the foo bird, which greatly amused her as well as made her admire his swordsmanship, as Cast had called it. His summary finished, he remarked that somehow that all seemed as if it had happened in another decade in another continent to another person.

“I’m glad you’re here, Bo,” she said.

“So,” he said. “Where were we? I was about to ask you, what do you think of your cousin Vernon?”

The radiant smile became more effulgent. “He’s the most charming man I’ve ever met.”

“In utter darkness how could you tell?”

She laughed. “Just his voice. But I saw him in daylight too. I have laid eyes on him. After you left. Before he left. He had George land the helicopter near the wigwam the other morning. George kept the rotor running and Vernon kept his head down so it wouldn’t get chopped off or that’s the way it looked but actually he was keeping his head down so that he wouldn’t have to look at me because he still couldn’t stand to see me. They were on their way to Pine Bluff and he wanted to say goodbye and tell me that he was so glad that I hadn’t murdered him, and he hoped I would stay here forever. And then he kissed me and took off.”

“Forever?” Bo said. “Kissed you? Wow.”

“He had kissed me before, in the dark, in the wigwam.”

“And that’s all he did? He didn’t suggest that you and he re-enact the first meeting of Jacob Ingledew and Kushi?”

“He didn’t bathe beforehand in three waters, in rainwater, in creekwater, in springwater.” Juliana laughed.

Bo laughed with her. In Jacob’s memoirs, as well as in The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, the Indian Fanshaw, after finally persuading the reluctant Jacob to accept his offer of his wife, explains to Jacob that Indians can’t tolerate the smell of white people and therefore Jacob should first wash in three waters, rainwater, creekwater and springwater, and then, instead of putting his buckskins back on, arrive naked at the wigwam. “If I bathed in three waters, could I come to the wigwam tonight?” Bo boldly asked her.

She stopped laughing, and stared at him as if she were trying to decide. She asked, “You wouldn’t rather stay with Jelena?”

Bo lied. “You are much more desirable.”

They reparteed. Juliana wondered aloud why Bo wanted her if he had been so intent on getting her and Vernon together. Bo countered that since Vernon wasn’t here, and alluring Juliana was all alone, Bo would be a fool not to avail himself of the opportunity. Juliana said that sounded like an excellent excuse for availing himself of Jelena. They bantered with each other over this topic until the Woman returned to the porch to announce that supper was ready. After an excellent dinner of kuchmachi—a Georgian dish combining chicken giblets and walnuts—served with a surprising bottle of Pouilly Fuissé, Bo and Juliana returned to the porch while Ben remained with the Woman, who wanted to continue a conversation they’d started about Maria Tallchief, the Osage ballerina, another cousin of theirs.

Bo remarked that Ben and the Woman seemed to enjoy each other’s company, and Juliana said they spent all their time together, now that George was gone. “You know, of course, that Ben’s crush on George is nearly as strong as my crush on Vernon,” Juliana said. “But quite possibly neither of us will ever accomplish our desires.”

Bo scoffed. “Oh, if you want Vernon, I’m sure you’ll get him sooner or later. But Ben—for heaven’s sake, George Dinsmore is old enough to be his father!” Bo remembered his own first impression of George in Cincinnati as a somewhat uncouth and tough but kindly hillbilly, and he could not imagine why a refined person like Bending Bear would have fallen for him.

Juliana explained to Bo that Ben was what was called a berdache, that is, a person of two spirits: a woman actually, but a woman who appears to be a man. A berdache is not exactly a homosexual, not in the conventional sense. Bo observed that they must be as rare as turtle dogs. Turtle dogs are not rare, at all, Juliana said. And she explained that Bending Bear was more of a cousin than Vernon was; they were both descended from Saucy Chief, the last of the Heart Stays chiefs. Bo could not come right out and ask her how much she was worth, but he gathered, from what they discussed that evening on that porch, that her Osage great-grandfather, a son of Saucy Chief, had wisely invested his share of the oil rights, had taken it out of the stock market before the crash, and had built it into a tidy fortune which she’d inherited when her father and mother were killed in an automobile accident at the time she was fourteen. Bo learned another thing Vernon and Juliana had in common besides their descent from Jacob Ingledew and their great wealth: neither had been to college. Or rather Juliana had spent only a semester at Stanford before being overcome with homesickness. Bo wanted to ask her about the history of her love life, but the best he could do was to ask, “Have you been in love, before Vernon?”

Her laughter must have made Ben and the Woman, inside the house, think that Bo was telling his favorite jokes. “Do you think I’m in love with Vernon?” she asked him.

“It’s written all over you,” he declared.

As the evening settled in and the air darkened and cooled a bit, Juliana told Bo the short history of her love life, beginning not with the loss of her virginity at fifteen (she hadn’t loved the guy, an Indian classmate) but with her first true love, a white guy she’d known in her last semester of high school. She had dropped out of Stanford to go home to him, only to find he’d already married somebody else. She hadn’t dated anyone else for years after that, and then had an affair with a married man.

This was in Pawhuska? Bo wanted to know. Juliana said, Oh no, she’d grown up in Tulsa, gone to school there, thought of it as home, returned to it. Spending most of her life there until, visiting the Gilcrease Institute one day and seeing all the Indian art there, she had suddenly become interested in her heritage. She had never been to Pawhuska before then. But she became obsessed with the Heart Stays People, and wanted to track down whatever she could find about them, and, finding nothing except the approximate location of their final encampment up Bird Creek a few miles from Pawhuska, she had bought the land and commissioned a Tulsa architect, a disciple of Frank Gehry, to erect a great manor house done in the fashion of the conjoined reed-thatch wigwams of the Osages. She had devoted her life for the past six years to learning the Osage language and culture. She had no social life in Pawhuska, although for a time she had been an habitué of a Main Street dive called The Phoenix Lounge, had met a very few men who appealed to her and whom she’d taken home with her, purely for sexual purposes. “You could say I was a bad girl, for a while,” she declared.

“What did those guys think when they saw your fabulous mansion?” Bo was curious to know.

“Either that I was some kind of screwball, because of the architectural design of it, or that I was, as one of them put it, ‘rolling in it.’ I didn’t care what they thought. I fucked them and forgot them.”

It was the first time Bo had heard her use a dirty word. He found it both shocking and endearing. More to the point, he began to hope that her experience with casual sex might make her willing to accept him into the wigwam that night.

The lightning bugs had come out. He knew of course why the male lightning bug flies around flashing his illuminated advertisement, and why he searches constantly for a flash coming in response from a female waiting in the bushes. It was too dark now for him to see Juliana’s face. But he could see Jelena’s. Jelena had a charming habit of winking at Bo. He supposed she winked at Vernon too, and, for that matter, at Uncle George and everybody else. But he had only seen her winking at him, and he had even winked at her in response. There wasn’t anything necessarily sexual about the wink, it was just sort of conspiratorial, or not even that, just friendly, just her way of saying, “You and I are in this together, this situation, this moment, this life.” Now in his mind’s eye he saw Jelena winking at him, and it was disconcerting.

“How did you know Jelena was having supper with Day and Diana?” he asked. “Are you becoming friends with her?”

“Oh, no!” Juliana said. “But they invited me too, and told me she was coming. I simply told them I had other plans. I’m not ready to sit at the table with Jelena. I’m not ready to pretend to be her friend.”

“I suppose I should call her,” Bo reflected out loud. But he made no move to fetch his car phone. Moments, and lightning bugs, drifted by. Then he said, “I keep thinking perhaps instead I should take those three baths…. But where would I find springwater?”

“If you wanted springwater,” Juliana said, “the same spring in which Jacob washed is still there. You would have more trouble finding rainwater. Nobody has a rain barrel any more. And even if they did, I’m told it hasn’t rained since early June. But really you wouldn’t need all that washing. Maybe a quick dip in the creek would do.”

“And you could join me for that!” he suggested.

“Bo,” she said. “You should know a couple of things. First, Fanshaw was putting one over on Jacob when he made him wash in three waters. It has been a joke among the Osage ever since. We don’t think you stink. Jacob didn’t need those three baths. And second, I really do think you ought to phone and see if Jelena is home yet. If she isn’t, then…well, then I have no choice but to invite you to the wigwam.”

Chapter fourteen

Really she was glad Vernon was gone for several reasons. He was removed from the temptation of that Indian woman. He was off somewhere in some godforsaken south Arkansas town throwing one of his campaign parties and giving one of his eloquent speeches and shaking hands with everybody (at least with all the men) and maybe enjoying himself for a change. When he was just sitting in his study totally immersed in his books she never could tell if he was having fun or not. It is difficult to live for thirty years with a companion who doesn’t reveal whatever delight he receives from life.

While he was gone, she didn’t have to do anything to delight him: she didn’t have to prepare his meals, she didn’t have to listen to his philosophical rants, and she didn’t have to adjust her sexual responses to match his. She didn’t have to adjust anything. She could do whatever she liked. Or if she chose, she could do nothing at all.

When Vernon had first left her to hit the campaign trail, she had gone to Harrison and purchased a television set, a small one, the smallest she could find, but a good one, which she kept hidden in the food pantry covered with a dishtowel whenever Vernon was at home. As soon as George’s helicopter lifted Vernon off the premises, she got out the TV, plugged it in, and watched talk shows. She even watched a few soap operas, ashamed of herself but helplessly trapped in their stories.

She openly smoked cigarettes while watching television. Maybe she smoked too much; when Vernon was around, she could get by with sneaking maybe one or at most two cigarettes a day; when he was gone, she’d smoke almost a pack. She might have smoked more than that, but the cat Vernon didn’t like smoke and avoided her when she was smoking, and she really enjoyed having him (the cat) around. When Vernon was here, Vernon the cat was strictly a yard cat; when Vernon was gone, he became a house cat, and sat in her lap whenever she wasn’t smoking. When Vernon the man was here, she kept hidden her Bible and her journal, and got them out only when she knew he was taking his six-mile hike or was at the ham plant. Now she could indulge her desire to write in her journal long letters to her grandchildren, whom she had never seen and whose names she had to invent: Jacob and Sarah and Isaac and Salina and John and Sirena, all names of her Ingledew ancestors. Beautiful kids.

Vernon had wanted her to get a dog, just as protection during his absences. Just as a sentry, Vernon had called it. You know, a watchdog to bark if anybody tried to approach the house. But she didn’t want a dog. There was no telling how Vernon the cat might take to the idea of a canine on the premises. He might run away from home. She had never had a dog, and while there were some things she wasn’t too old to try for the first time, dog-ownership wasn’t one of them.

Her diet went to hell. Since she didn’t have to prepare meals, she could eat Skippy peanut butter for lunch and a bowl of popcorn for supper, and plenty of Lady Godiva chocolate for dessert, and that was that. It was a shame not to be eating all those wonderful vegetables that her garden was producing, and which Bo had helped her nurture—beans and squash and peppers and eggplant and all—and they’d have gone to rot if she couldn’t find someone to give them to. For a while she’d given them to the Woman Whom We Cannot Name—hell, Jelena could damn well name her and did: Ekaterina—but then those Indians moved in with Ekaterina and Vernon started taking a too-deep interest in the Indian girl, and Jelena could not stop there any more to unload her uneaten vegetables on them.

She couldn’t really bear to look at the Indian girl, whose name was so like her own but prettier: they were both long-haired brunettes but “Jelena” suggests a country girl, an aging courtesan, housemate to a genius running for governor, whereas “Juliana” suggests an exotic enchantress of indescribable beauty whose very walk, Jelena observed during the turtle feast, was lithesome and graceful beyond compare. Never mind even the fact that Juliana must have been at least twenty years younger than Jelena, Jelena was smart enough (boy, was she smart enough) to realize that she was no competition for that trophy doll.

For a while, Jelena had had only her secure knowledge of Vernon’s ludicrous woman-shyness to ward off the thought that he might be drawn to her. So long as Vernon couldn’t even speak to the Indian woman, Jelena was safe. But she hadn’t reckoned with the idea of darkness. She hadn’t realized that if somehow Vernon could speak to Juliana without seeing her he wouldn’t necessarily be shy with her, not any more than his ancestor Jacob had been shy with her ancestor Kushi—or, rather, both their ancestors, because in a way Juliana was an Ingledew, which, as Jelena had tried to tell Bo, was the only reason that Vernon wasn’t shy with Jelena.

Jelena knew that Vernon had spent at least three nights with Juliana. Whether or not he had actually slept with her Jelena didn’t know, and couldn’t know, without asking him. The first night she had awakened around 1:00 a.m. and ordinarily would have made nothing of Vernon’s absence from the bed—he habitually stayed up reading in his study until and beyond the wee hours. But something—intuition perhaps—made her look into his study and discover he was not there, and then to throw on her kimono and hike up to the parking space atop the mountain and discover that his Land-Rover was not there. She went back to bed but couldn’t sleep. Around dawn she looked into his study again, and he was asleep in his Barcalounger. She didn’t wake him, and she didn’t later confront him with the fact of his absence. That night the situation was repeated. And the third night. It was not like Vernon to get into the Land-Rover and drive around at night; she could only surmise that he had been going down to that wigwam which Uncle George had helped that queer Indian gorilla build, a wigwam in which Juliana had expressed her intention to sleep each night. Was Juliana openly attempting to recreate the setting in which Jacob and Kushi had screwed? Whenever she had got the chance, Jelena had given Vernon a hug and a kiss on the morning after and attempted to pick up any scent of the Indian woman, or any of the musky scents of sexual activity, but there had been none.

Earlier tonight she had told Day and Diana of her suspicions. Or, rather, she had told Day first, in the living room while Diana was busy preparing supper. Jelena wanted so much to say to Day, “Well, if Vernon is fooling around, now you and I can fool around at long last.” But she knew beyond question she could never say that. Diana was her best friend. The only way she would ever be able to actualize her sexual fantasies for Day would be to ask Diana for permission, which quite possibly Diana would be happy to grant, but which Jelena could never request.

“Even if it’s just a fling,” Day had tried to reassure her, “he’s going to be too busy between now and the election in November to give her any more of his attention.”

And later, when she’d told Diana too (did she detect a jealousy in Diana? as if Diana wished it were she that Vernon was fooling around with), Diana simply reminded her that skeptics are imperturbable, and that Jelena was the most imperturbable skeptic on earth, and there was nothing Vernon could ever do that would stir Jelena up. Then Diana, trying to be light or even funny, had said a disquieting thing: “Since you don’t want to live in the governor’s mansion anyhow, let him take the redskin chick to Little Rock with him!”

They had laughed, but Jelena had only been able to remark, “Her skin is lighter than mine.”

Which was true. Jelena had spent so much time in her garden this summer that she was sunburned. In fact, the vegetable garden hadn’t satiated her; as one more secret from Vernon, from everyone (she hadn’t even told Day and Diana about it), she had created a secret garden: about the time Vernon had announced his candidacy, back in March, she’d begun the digging and the planting and the transplanting, on a quarter-acre of forest-enclosed clearing not too far from the house but not at all visible from it. She had a secret path to it which she could use from a corner of the vegetable garden, so that Vernon would never see her going to the other garden. Not that he’d ask her anyway. He never once asked, “Where have you been?” She could take a five-mile hike through the woods and he’d never ask, “Where have you been?” She could spend the whole day driving around to the nurseries of Harrison and other towns in northern Arkansas, hunting for the most exotic plants for her secret garden, and when she got home long after supper time, he would never ask, “Where have you been?”

Because she was so proud of that other garden, which now in July was thriving luxuriantly and blooming spectacularly despite the drought (she ran an underground hose from her vegetable garden hose to keep the secret garden watered), she had been tempted to show it to Bo, who would’ve appreciated it, but if she’d done that, then it wouldn’t be secret any more, it wouldn’t be her very own. It was so hidden, so secluded, so private that she could do things there she couldn’t even do in her house when she was all alone in it, because even in the house with Vernon gone she still had the thought that it was Vernon’s house too and he was still somehow involved if for example she masturbated. Which she did, more often than she wanted to reflect, so she didn’t reflect, she just did it. The shower had been her favorite place until she had created the secret garden, and then she’d much prefer doing it out-of-doors surrounded by flowers and weird shrubs and the idea that plants themselves couldn’t ever stop thinking about sex, and did it constantly, all the time, theirs lives devoted to it entirely.

Jelena wanted to be a plant in her reincarnation, which she didn’t believe in despite Day’s and Diana’s involvement with it. But thinking of Day, she realized that although nobody had seen her secret garden, not even Bo, she always took Day with her when she went to visit it for the purpose of autoeroticism, a word she wouldn’t ever have thought except it was such a good match for Vernon’s autodidacticism. It was Day, the outdoorsman, the forester, the plant specialist, who crept into that secret garden with her, at least in her mind, and held her, and touched her, and kissed her, and licked her, and entered her, and made her gasp and sigh and come. Their lovemaking was like that of the flowers, burgeoning and bursting and bright, in all colors.

She didn’t do this because Vernon was undersexed or inept or not desirable in any way. They had a rich and full life—she almost thought in bed but realized they didn’t spend very much time together in bed, except maybe in the middle of the afternoon or late Sunday morning—they had a rich and full sexual life which was probably, she thought, better than most couples’. But after thirty years it was like something you just did, not because you particularly wanted to but because you’d been trained through thirty years of repetition to keep on doing it. Jelena had no standards for comparison except her ex-husband Mark who had been even worse than Vernon in one respect: when he ejaculated, not too long after he started getting busy, that was it, that was all. She was left high and dry.

When she’d first started her affair with Vernon, while she was still married to Mark, they often did it in the woods, mainly because it was safer than doing it in her house, where she might be discovered, and she still treasured her memories of those wild, abandoned frolics, with all their clothes off, on pine needles and fallen leaves or even the hard earth. They hadn’t had sex outdoors since then, even though Jelena had broadly hinted that she’d like to recreate the passion and abandon and naturalness of doing it in the open air.

Thinking of this now, she decided to take a kerosene lantern to light her way, and pay a visit to her secret garden. She hadn’t been there at night before. She wanted to go out there and lie down among the flowers that did their fucking by moonlight or starlight and try to keep count of their orgasms and her own.

But as she was preparing to leave the house, the phone rang. “Hi. Guess where I am. Guess who I’ve been talking to. Guess where I’d rather be.”

“First I have to guess who you are,” she said, laughing. “Uncle George?”

“Oh, come on,” he said. “Do I sound like George?”

“Where are you?”

“The Stay More Hotel. I have the Jag or else I’d have driven straight up to your house. Could you come and get me?”

If she went and got him, she’d have to give up her immediate intention, going to the secret garden in the night to count the orgasms of the flowers and herself. Or would she? She could take him with her. “Is Juliana around?” she asked.

“As a matter of fact, she’s sitting on the porch, and I’ve been talking to her for hours. Why?”

“I would be embarrassed if we saw each other.”

“Oh? Well, I suppose I could ask her to go inside when you arrive.”

She knew of course that if she went and got him he would spend the night. He had spent the night a few times when Vernon was gone. Nothing wrong with that, although there ought to have been. He ought to have at least flirted with her, or have made an outright proposition, but although they’d talked and talked and drank and drank, finishing a bottle of Glenfiddich between them, to the point where she herself had almost blurted, “Want to sleep with me?” he had never done anything, never even hinted at doing anything. They had talked about Harrison, Arkansas and Harrison High School until they had exhausted the subject. They had talked about gardening until there was nothing left to be said. Naturally he was Vernon’s campaign manager and therefore his employee, and you don’t fuck the boss’s wife, even if she wasn’t a wife and Vernon wasn’t really a boss and it wouldn’t have been fucking, but something, she hoped, far grander than that.

She sighed. “Why don’t you just start walking in this direction, and I’ll pick you up at whatever point you’ve reached when I get there.”

“Fine. Starting now?”

“Start walking.”

And that was the way it happened. She set aside the kerosene lantern that she’d been preparing to use to light her way to the secret garden, and, first checking to see that the guestroom was tidy, the bed neat, everything in its place, she walked instead up to the place where her Isuzu 4-by-4 was parked, got into it and drove down the mountainside. Her headlights picked him out as she rounded a hairpin: he had covered maybe a mile from the village. He was carrying only his briefcase, in which, she supposed, he had his toothbrush, comb, and a change of underwear. She was always glad to see Bo; he was a physically imposing man, quite muscular, and his neatly trimmed beard gave him character and kept him from looking like a businessman, which he was.

When he climbed into her car, he gave her a kiss. It was quick but it was on the mouth. Then he said, “Sorry to put you out. I didn’t know I was coming, or I’d have brought the Nissan. Cast and I spent the day in Little Rock, sparring with the governor himself—I’ll tell you about it. And on our way back to Fayetteville I decided I deserved to see you again, and inspect our garden and pick a few hornworms off the tomatoes.”

“But you spent hours talking to Juliana.”

“Only because I was invited to dinner, and because I learned you were having dinner with Day and Diana.”

“How did you know that?”

“Didn’t they tell you that they had invited her too? But that she declined?”

“No,” Jelena said. “Maybe they were going to surprise me. And what a surprise that would have been! I’m glad she turned them down. Did she say why?”

“For the same reason that you don’t want to see her.”

It was after ten o’clock when they got back to the house, too late to visit the secret garden. Maybe she could show it to him in the morning. She offered him a nightcap. He said he’d do the honors and poured a Glenfiddich for each of them. They sat side by side on the sofa. She came right out and asked, “How much do you know about her and Vernon?”

“If it will make you feel any better, I’m almost certain they haven’t made love.”

“How do you know? Did he tell you?”

“She did.”

“What else did she tell you? I’m not stupid, you know. I have an idea that Vernon has spent quite a lot of time in her company, late at night.”

“Oh, they’ve spent hours talking. In Osage as well as in English. There’s no denying that they’re fascinated with each other…the same way I’m fascinated with you.”

She laughed self-consciously. “Bo Pharis, that’s the first flattering thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“No, it isn’t, but if you’d like to be flattered, I could do it all night.”

“Do what all night?”

He blushed. “Accidental. Oh, hell, maybe it was deliberate.” They both laughed, and she couldn’t help winking at him. “I love your wink,” he said. “Did you know that you wink at me?”

“It’s just a nervous tic,” she said.

“No, it makes me feel as if you and I exist together in a world of our own, that we have our own secret way of communicating.”

“What a nice thing to say. Flatter me some more!”

“Gladly.” He finished his drink quickly and poured himself another. “Remember Miss Nettleship? Eleventh grade English? She certainly remembered you. Whenever she returned one of my papers, it would have an A plus on it but it would say something like ‘This reminds me of the good work that Jelena Ingledew always did. It is almost worthy of her.’ All my life since high school, Jelena, I’ve wanted to be that worthy.” She was so touched by that she didn’t know what to say, and she was thinking, If ever there was a moment for a real kiss, this is it, but he didn’t move to kiss her, and she didn’t know what to say, and it was something that a wink couldn’t answer. After a while, he went on, “My ex-wife—I don’t suppose you ever knew Patricia Harmon or heard of her?—when she divorced me she said one of the problems was that whenever she said or did something wrong I would always remark, ‘Jelena wouldn’t have done that!’ even though I’d never known you. I guess it wasn’t fair to her, but she wasn’t the only victim. I’ve always, whenever a woman did or said anything, asked myself, ‘Would Jelena have done that?’ You have made life difficult for dozens of women.”

She gathered enough aplomb to remark, “After years of setting me on a pedestal like that, it must have been a terrible let-down to see what I’m really like.”

“On the contrary. From the very first I discovered that I hadn’t raised the imagined standards high enough. I discovered that you are far more beautiful, and charming, and wise, and intelligent than I had ever dreamed.”

“Oh, Bo,” she said. “That’s enough. That’s enough flattery to last me for the rest of my life.”

“One more thing,” he said, and put his big powerful hand on top of hers, and her breath caught in the expectation that he might really be getting ready to give her a passionate kiss. “When I was with Juliana earlier tonight, our chat reached the point where she practically invited me to join her in the wigwam tonight, but I turned her down because I’d rather be with you.”

“Now that was a dumb choice,” Jelena said. “If you had that opportunity, you should have taken it. Unless you’re already beginning to think of her as Vernon’s woman.”

“You’re much more Vernon’s woman than she could ever be,” Bo said. “But that doesn’t stop me.”

“Doesn’t stop you from what?” she wondered aloud.

“Doesn’t stop me from telling you I love you.”

When he said that, there really was nothing for her to do, no choice for her, nothing to say. Since he still didn’t make the first move, she made it. She scooted closer to him on the sofa and inclined her head to his and waited for their lips to meet. Which they quickly did. Quickly and ardently, and for a long time. She knew she wouldn’t have to take him to the secret garden. He had already created his own secret garden and surrounded her with it. It was a garden that had the power to enchant her to the point where she couldn’t even think of Vernon, let alone of Juliana. She did have one brief thought about Miss Nettleship, a very nice teacher and one of her favorites. But then she thought of no one except Bo and herself, and she said to him, when at last they broke their long kiss, “Now you’ve made it supremely difficult for me to allow you to sleep alone in the guest room.”

He was just a little slow in getting that, and she realized it sounded a bit as if she were going to refuse him sleeping privileges. But he said, “Then why don’t you join me?”

She preferred it that way, to use his bed instead of theirs. In fact, for the convenience of their rare guests that bed was king-sized, a larger field for sport, whereas hers and Vernon’s bed was only queen-sized, for sleeping closer together if the chance ever occurred.

He declared, “I’d like to shower first. And you could join me for that.” He was grinning as if he knew a joke, as if perhaps he’d already said that to someone else and was enjoying his repetition of it to her. Or maybe he was grinning because he meant not the guestroom shower but the shower in the master suite, which could accommodate all the Samurai at once if need be. It had been a very long time since she and Vernon had used the shower together. And they had never used it before making love, always after. What about during? which was what she did by herself.

But Jelena was mildly reluctant to reveal her body naked for the first time in thirty years to anyone other than Vernon. “I’m sorry,” she apologized to Bo, “I’m just much too modest for that.”

“My goodness, honey, I’ve worked hours in the garden with you when you were dressed just in shorts and a tee-shirt without a bra and I had no trouble pretending you were totally nude. You have a sensational body.”

“Flattery again,” she said, but she was pleased beyond words. “You might not think so if you saw me without a stitch.”

“Would another drink help?” he offered. “Or another kiss?” He enfolded her in his arms and gave her another vigorous kiss, and she twisted and squirmed with desire for him, and thought To hell with modesty. When the kiss was over she ran into the kitchen and came back with two large plump tomatoes, which she’d picked that afternoon, intending to take them to Day and Diana but forgetting, what with all the other thoughts on her mind. They were the first ripe fruits of the Brandywine variety that Bo had started in his Cincinnati windowsill and brought with him to Arkansas. Brandywine, thought to have been started by the Amish, is an heirloom tomato whose taste is far more assertive and luscious than conventional tomatoes.

“Recognize them?” she asked him.

It took him just a moment. “My Brandywines?”

“Yes, but the old-time Ozark folks called them ‘love apples’ because they were rumored to be aphrodisiac.”

They didn’t need aphrodisiacs. But they took the love apples into the master bath, where they removed each other’s clothes quickly and got into the huge shower with their love apples, which they both began munching as if they were peaches, a very sexy, messy thing to do. He traced his juice-dripping fingertips along her backbone. “You have the most lithesome long back,” he said. Nobody had ever complimented her back before, and she was overwhelmed.

“You look good all over,” she said. He was broad-shouldered, very muscular, and for a man his age his belly didn’t bulge very much. Below the slight paunch she couldn’t help seeing that his penis was already well risen, and not because of the love apple. It was huge, almost too big. She’d seen only two others for comparison—Mark’s and Vernon’s—and theirs had been plentifully expanded when aroused, but nothing like this. She couldn’t resist wrapping her fingers around it and her thumb came nowhere near meeting her fingertips.

Bo shuddered and wriggled. “What a marvelous hand you have,” he said. They gobbled down the rest of their love apples, and then turned on the shower to wash away all the tomato juice trickling down their fronts. There was a big fresh bar of bath soap, an aromatic loaf bar scented with gardenia, and Jelena was the first to grab it. She rubbed it all over him, and it sudsed and foamed and lathered, and the fragrance turned him into a flower. She gave so much attention to his cock and balls that he had to say, “Easy.” And then he took the bar of soap from her and applied it to her body, gently and soothingly, to every convexity and every concavity of her flesh, coming finally to the bump that rose from the lips of her sex, and stroked and twiddled it in almost the very same fashion that she did to herself. In this very same spot, this shower, this very same spot, this place here, this, this, this. She was so close to coming.

“Have you ever made love standing up?” he asked.

“Not that I can recall,” she breathed, trying to remember if, long ago, she and Vernon might have done it.

“Here we go,” he said, and pressed against her, bending his knees, spreading hers, raising her on tiptoe, touching, meeting, and then the one sliding up into the other. She gasped; it was painful, he was so big, it was worse than childbirth for a little while.

He was attuned to all this. “If it hurts, we can wait until we’re more comfy, in bed.”

She loved him for his thoughtfulness. “But I’m so close to the edge,” she said. “Could we just hold still a bit? To let me get used to it?”

And he understood that perfectly too. He did not attempt to thrust. He was deep inside her and just stayed there, for a long time, the water coursing over them, washing off all the lovely suds. Eventually, he flexed his penis. She could feel it give a throb of expansion inside her. She squeezed her vaginal muscles around it in return. And then she decided she could stand it. She could stand standing and stand his stand. She could understand. She began rising on tiptoe and coming down, lifting and settling, impaling herself and levitating, slowly at first but then faster, until he too began moving, with great gentleness, gentleman that he was, until he realized he was no longer hurting her and could let go, exert himself, drive into her. He held her buttocks in his hands and steered his driving with them. He talked the whole time. He kept her informed of his progress, his destination and the pleasures of the trip, the feelings that he was having.

Vernon never talked during sex. Mark had never talked, period. Bo was almost too much, like a tour guide. Rising on our left, ladies and gentlemen, is a monumental edifice called a multiple orgasm; we shall soon not only see it but feel it, and we will never have felt anything like it before. She knew she was going to come uniquely, and multiply, and she did her share to make it happen, and he, considerate sweetheart that he was, took note of her every inch in progress toward that goal, and kept always just an inch behind her, always with her, but letting her get there first, as if, racing toward the finish line as all-time scholar of Harrison High, she beat him by just a fraction of an inch, and gasped and shook and cried aloud in victory and collapsed against him, who held her as his own crossing of the finish line shook him and shook him, and she could feel that thick flesh of his emptying itself inside her. Then they both slid to the tile floor of the shower and just lay there panting and sighing, and Bo had to shut up, at last. The water continued to pour down on them, washing away every trace of tomato juice and love juice, until the water began to turn cold, and she rose up to turn it off.

They spent the night together in the king-sized bed of the guestroom, but it was a long time before they slept. That big bed was a challenge to try it out this way and that way, south north east and west, south over north and east over west, the great variety of things they were doing and feeling only briefly giving her the jealous thought that he must have had a lot of experience with all these things. Vernon, alas, did not. As far as she knew, Vernon had never made love to anyone else (except possibly that one time when he had a chance, with Diana). Jelena had been his original teacher and while surely his vast reading had exposed him to an entire kama sutra of possibilities and variations, he had never seemed to realize that she had more than one opening, or even that there were more than two or three positions available to them. Now to add to her list of all that things that were secret from Vernon she wanted to have Bo take her anal virginity. “I am not too old to start,” she declared. But it wouldn’t work. He was simply too large. He gave her plenty of lubrication and stretching with his gentle fingers but it wasn’t enough, although he blamed himself, not for his being too large but for being too soft: after his second coming of the night he simply couldn’t become stiff enough again.

“But we can try again tomorrow,” he said. “Or any time.” And she reflected that this night was not, as she’d been thinking, a onetime spur-of-passion fling, but just the beginning of something that could conceivably continue a long time.

She gave him his third coming with her mouth, and then they fell asleep. It must have been long past midnight. But she woke before dawn, her intuition on fire, and slipped out of Bo’s bed and returned to her own. She lay there for quite a long while trying to get back to sleep, kept from it not by any guilt over her infidelity nor even any further jealous thoughts of Juliana, but by the conviction, not suspicion but conviction, that Vernon was in Stay More, that he would be home any minute now but that he was still in the process of taking leave of the wigwam, where he had discovered that the Osage bedding was not nearly as commodious as the king-sized bed where she and Bo had been cavorting, but that, in contrast to the square shape of the king-sized bed, the Osage field of sport was round, like the wigwam itself, and that there is something about fucking in a round space that gives a whole new dimension to the frolic. So what Jelena found herself being jealous of was not that Vernon and Juliana had been screwing (you can’t be jealous of something that you’ve just been doing yourself) but that the round space of their act(s) was a creative cosmos unlike any she’d ever imagined or would ever experience…unless she and Bo borrowed the wigwam some night. This last thought caused her to laugh aloud, wondering when was the last time she’d laughed aloud alone.

“You’re awake,” Vernon observed. She turned, and there he was, under the sheets beside her. He must have sneaked into bed so stealthily she hadn’t even felt the bed move. “What’s so funny?” he asked.

“When did you come in?” she asked.

“Oh, a while ago,” he said, which could have meant anything: thirty seconds or an hour. For a moment she had the panicky thought that he might have already been here while she was in the guestroom with Bo, but she convinced herself that that wouldn’t have been possible if the sexual activities of the two couples were truly simultaneous, as she knew them to have been. “George and I decided to leave right after the rally was over. Pine Bluff is no place to spend the night.”

“How did the rally go?” she asked politely, wondering if by any chance she might possess any aromas of sexual activity, or of Bo. But there was only the gardenia, a pervasive fragrance.

“There wasn’t much of a turn-out,” he said. “In this hot weather, nobody wants to attend an outdoor rally. I don’t think I gave a very inspired speech.”

Perhaps your mind was elsewhere, she nearly said. Instead she asked, “How did you get here? I didn’t hear the helicopter land.”

“Bending Bear brought me.”

“In the Pierce-Arrow?”

“Those things can go anywhere.”

“How did you happen to run into Bending Bear?”

“It’s complicated. Basically, George landed down in the village, because he suspected engine trouble. He decided to wait until daylight to work on it, and so there we were, and Bending Bear offered to bring me on home.”

“Did you see Juliana?”

He was spared answering that question by the ringing of the bedside phone. He reached for it, and she tried to hear enough to determine who was calling. She could only determine it was a woman’s voice. Did Juliana have a cell phone in the wigwam? He talked a while, keeping his voice low. Or rather he listened, mostly. Then he said, “Hang on, and I’ll ask Jelena. She’s already awake.” And he put one hand over the mouthpiece and said to her, “It’s Lydia. She’s trying to locate Bo. All hell has broken loose down to Little Rock, and she can’t find Bo. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about him?”

“He’s sleeping in our guestroom,” she declared.

“Ha! No wonder he couldn’t be found.” Vernon got out of bed. He said into the phone, “Lydia, it just so happens he’s right here in my house. I’ll get him.” Vernon headed for the guestroom. Jelena tried to think if there might have been anything incriminatory about the guest room. No doubt it smelled like gardenia in there. She got up and put on her kimono and stepped into the master bath just to look around and be sure there wasn’t anything left behind. Sure enough, Bo’s and her clothes were still on the floor! She snatched up Bo’s things and hugged them into a bundle and sneaked into the other bubble, into the guest bath, where she dumped them on the floor there. As she was returning to her own bedroom, she bumped into Vernon. “He’s talking to Lydia,” Vernon said. “Why don’t you make some coffee? I had better shower and get dressed. We’ll be going to Fayetteville, whether or not George fixes the helicopter.”

“What’s this all about?” she wanted to know.

“Governor Bradfield apparently has decided not to back down in the face of all the ‘goods’ we’ve got on him. We hoped—or Bo did—that if we had enough evidence against him, he wouldn’t use his evidence against me…and it seems that Carleton Drew went over to his side and divulged all of my albatrosses. We hoped that we could run a clean campaign without mudslinging and concentrate on the issues. But it seems that my crafty opponent—my powerful opponent—went on television last night to announce that he has elected to confess each and every one of the black marks that we’ve got on him. And then to make capital of those he’s got on me.”

“Can he defeat you with that?” she asked, politely but hoping, as she had been all along, that something could stop Vernon from moving into the governor’s mansion.

“Quite possibly,” Vernon said glumly, and then, changing the subject, lowering his voice, he said, “Did you know that Bo sleeps in the nude?”

Chapter fifteen

For a long time after becoming aware of the contents of the previous chapter, Day was thrown, to put it mildly, and he began to wish that he did not enjoy his privilege of being privy to all this novel as it unfolded. Now, when it was his turn to take charge of a chapter, following the same sequence as in the first half of the book, he felt as if some unruly strangers had left behind a hideous mess for him to clean up. Not knowing how to clean it, he seriously considered begging out of the responsibility of taking charge of this chapter. Why couldn’t Cast Sherrill do it? Or Larry Brace? Or Sharon? Or, perhaps best of all, since she had so much experience at writing, Ekaterina?

He wanted desperately to confide in Diana and complain to her about this impossible onus, not only of knowing about Jelena’s secret garden literally and figuratively but of having to comment upon it in Chapter fifteen. Of course he couldn’t say anything to Diana. How could he possibly explain to her how he knew the contents of Chapter fourteen? He wasn’t completely sure, himself, just how he possessed that privilege. He hadn’t seen the words written on a page, even in typescript or computer printout. Unlike you, the reader, he hadn’t even seen the words at all. He just knew that Jelena Ingledew, the woman in all the world he loved most next to Diana, had wanted so much to say to him, “Well, if Vernon is fooling around, now you and I can fool around at long last”—but she had not said that; she had instead fooled around with someone else. He just knew that Jelena had created a secret garden in which she imagined making love to Day, “their lovemaking like that of the flowers, burgeoning and bursting and bright, in all colors.” Worst of all, he just knew, as if he’d been in that shower with them and in that bed with them, that Jelena and Bolin Pharis had started a passionate affair. Rightfully, Day was feeling more jealous than Vernon himself might have, under the circumstances. Why couldn’t it have been me? he kept asking of the woods, aloud.

Diana and Jelena had been such intimate friends for so many years that quite possibly Jelena would confess the affair to Diana anyway, and then perhaps Day could talk to Diana about it. But not now. Day doubted that Jelena would ever confess to anybody, not Diana, certainly not Vernon, that she made herself come with fantasies of Day. He was most uncomfortable with that, at the same time he had to face up to the simple fact that when he “saw” her in her secret garden with her eyes closed pretending he was with her, holding her, touching her, kissing her, and licking her, and entering her, making her gasp and sigh and come, he had become so aroused that he himself had been required to masturbate, then and there. No way could he tell Diana about that, and even thinking of it swept him back thirty-some-odd years to the time when, as kids in the forest of Five Corners, Vermont, he had been so embarrassed to learn that Diana had seen him masturbating that he had tried to hang himself.

Years ago he had told Vernon the story of that, needing to talk about it at last to somebody, not just the embarrassment of being caught jerking off but the humiliation of failing in his attempt at suicide (he’d tripped and got tangled in his rope, and Diana had to climb the tree and get him down), and he had been surprised and relieved to hear Vernon explain how commonplace and incessant the act of masturbation is. “Do you have to do it?” Day had asked him. “With Jelena available?” And Vernon had delivered a little lecture on how self-sex is more “ready” and “personal” and “expert” than sex with another.

“Jelena does it too,” Vernon had said.

“How do you know? Have you watched?”

“I found her vibrator,” he had said. “If she used it simply for other parts of her body, why would she hide it from me?”

Day wondered if possibly the other things that Jelena was hiding from Vernon—her cigarettes, her journal, her Bible, her TV set, her other garden, and, now, her affair with Bo—were not as secret as she thought. Vernon was no dummy. And what about his casual remark to her: “Did you know that Bo sleeps in the nude?” That sounded to Day as if Vernon had a suspicion, even if he hadn’t noticed the clothes on the floor in the master bathroom and the scent of gardenia in the guestroom. Day was convinced that if Vernon did not already suspect the affair between Jelena and Bo, he would soon find out. And then what? Would he simply shrug it off, or use it as an excuse for his own affair with Juliana Heartstays? Day was mildly amused that Vernon had started his affair with Juliana before knowing that Jelena was starting one with Bo. Or had he? Diana had told Day that on several occasions when she’d gone up to visit Jelena, she’d found Jelena and Bo working together in the garden (not the secret one) and on at least two of those occasions Vernon was out of town, and Jelena had told Diana that she thought Bo “exuded virility.” Day still wasn’t able to understand how Bo could permit himself with impunity to become involved with his employer’s woman, and right in the middle of a hectic political campaign.

Now in this chapter under Day’s aegis, the campaign was going to become more hectic. Governor Bradfield, surrounded by his family, including a daughter recently removed from a private psychiatric hospital, and even the family’s cocker spaniel, had appeared on television to say, “Yes, I have sinned. I am no better than the next man in this regard. I have misused alcohol. I was a problem child in school and a goof-off in college. My military service to my country was hampered by misfortune due to my own stupidity. The Democrat-controlled legislature has kept me from carrying out my vision for the great state of Arkansas, and I have made enemies right and left. But you are still my friend. And when you compare my character and my record with Vernon Ingledew’s, you will reach the firm conviction that I am the lesser of two evils.” The governor and his campaign had launched a 13-week program of spending an entire week of newspaper ads and television spots (under the fiendish direction of Carleton Drew) on each one of Vernon’s so-called albatrosses, starting with his atheism, in which Vernon was being presented not just as a disbeliever in the divinity of Jesus Christ but as an Antichrist, who, if elected, would guilefully abolish the state’s houses of worship. Week One of this campaign was already pretty ugly, with the Arkansas Ministerial Alliance up in arms and unanimous in their opposition to Vernon, and making a large number of widespread Sunday sermons denouncing him, several of which were reprinted in the state’s newspapers. Monica Breedlove was appearing regularly at church youth groups and church socials and fellowship meetings to deliver a spirited talk in Vernon’s defense, in which she, a good Christian, claimed that Vernon had the highest respect for Jesus Christ even if he did not believe that He was the son of God (for the simple reason that there was no God).

Vernon himself was valiantly trying to combat the attack, by temporarily abandoning his stump speaking rallies with their ham feasts and bands and singers and cheerleaders, and going instead to any church that would accept him (he hit seven the first Sunday morning, but three of those were Unitarian) and professing his profound knowledge of the Bible and his abiding faith in the existence, if not the divinity, of a Savior.

It would be three weeks before Vernon would get a chance to return to Stay More. When Day saw him again, he was stunned to see how haggard Vernon was. Day had always admired and envied Vernon’s indefatigability, but now here Vernon looked as if he couldn’t get out of his chair if he wanted to, which was good, because he didn’t want to. So he just sat and told Day of some of the rough encounters he’d had with ministers and church elders and one woman churchgoer who had spat in his face and called him Satan. And then, Diana not being present, Vernon confided in his best friend, telling Day that he was hopelessly in love with Juliana. He began with a question, “Day, old friend, do you think it’s possible for a man to be equally in love with two women?” Day, who was in love with Jelena himself but not as much as he was with Diana, perhaps for the simple reason he’d never gone to bed (or the shower) with her, had protested that he couldn’t really answer the question since he’d never had any experience along that line. He said he supposed it would take great powers of concentration and greater powers of feeling, and, above all, supreme powers of diplomacy in the event that one woman found out about the other.

“Does Jelena know?” Day asked.

“Not yet,” Vernon admitted. “I mean, she doesn’t yet know that I’m crazy about Juliana, although she probably suspects that we’re fooling around.”

“No wonder you’re all worn out,” Day observed.

Vernon laughed. “Not from that. Although I’ve got to tell you…” And then he described, in intimate detail, not one but two sexual encounters he’d had with Juliana, the first three weeks ago, the second just last night. Day was just a bit uncomfortable listening. Vernon had never once told Day anything about his sex life with Jelena. Now he was being erotically frank in describing just what he and Juliana had done. Not boastfully, not lasciviously, but just matter-of-factly as if he were recounting not his own adventure but that of Jacob Ingledew and Kushi a hundred and sixty years before. As a matter of fact, whether by design or by disposition—whether she was trying to imitate her ancestor Kushi or whether that was simply the way she was—Juliana had at the moment of climax unclasped her legs which were around his back and had straightened them out and then her whole body had arched itself into a long quivering arc: a bow, a soft but taut arch that held him suspended up from the ground for a long moment until he had his own stupefying climax. That was a nearly exact duplication of the orgasms of Jacob and Kushi as described in his memoirs.

Vernon also spared Day no amplification of the various sexual supplements that enhanced Juliana’s sensuality, things she’d done that Jelena had never known. “I’ve suspected that Indian women simply have a greater repertoire of sexual turns and tricks than white women. At least my reading into American Indian customs has led me to believe that. But Juliana claims it isn’t true. She says Indian women have stronger libidos, and that’s all there is to it: where there’s the appetite, there’s the inventiveness.”

“Apart from her prowess in the sack,” Day said offhandedly, “what do you see in her?”

“Oh, come on, Day!” Vernon chided him. “She’s exotic! She’s gorgeous! And she’s dynamic!”

“But how on earth can you keep your mind on the business of running for governor?”

“Now that is a problem,” Vernon admitted.

Day congratulated himself, later, that he had not even hinted around the possibility that Jelena herself might be enjoying a sexual adventure. But Vernon’s brief stopover in Stay More was accompanied by the Samurai, who were holding a planning session to get ready for Bradfield’s week-long assault on the matter of Vernon’s thirty-year relationship with his first cousin Jelena. Once again Day and Diana had overnight guests in Lydia and Arch; Monica and Harry were staying with Sharon and Larry; Cast was staying with his girlfriend Sheila, and Bo was ensconced in his familiar guestroom at Vernon’s house, where, presumably, when Vernon sneaked away to visit Juliana, he would sneak with Jelena out into the secret garden, or use the shower again, or the king-sized bed.

Diana and Day were happy to have houseguests, and they genuinely liked Lydia Caple and Arch Schaffer. But Day was not at all amused by the irony that Stay More, long a ghost town, was beginning to fill up with characters and their intrigues. Even apart from the Samurai, who appeared to love the town so much they might as well have set up their campaign headquarters here (which Monica had actually suggested at one time, a not altogether frivolous or wistful idea), and even apart from the newsmen and television people who prowled around in search of local color—or scandal—there seemed to be a steady rise in Stay More’s population which abnegated its charm as a ghost town.

When Day and Diana had first arrived here at the beginning of the Seventies, they had the whole place practically to themselves. Then Larry Brace had come to town, and Sharon had joined him, and then Ekaterina, and as the ham works had expanded its employees had bought up the outlying abandoned houses. Nobody was keeping count, but it seemed Stay More had as much occupancy of dwellings as it ever had, even in its heyday. And now here were the two Indians, apparently considering themselves permanent residents or reclaimants of their ancestral lands. The house of Day and Diana was still at the end of its road, and still enjoyed abundant privacy, yet Day sometimes found his sleep troubled by the thought that there were in the neighborhood dozens of other humans sleeping—or having exceptional sex.

But the population was going to be reduced by one. The planning session of the Samurai, apparently, did not come up with any better counter to Bradfield’s intended attack than to suggest that Jelena ought to start accompanying Vernon on his campaign tour. Was that Bo’s idea? Did Bo think it would permit him to see more of her? No, it was Vernon’s idea, who argued thus: if Bradfield was going to call public attention to the “illegitimacy” of Vernon’s relationship with Jelena, the public was naturally going to be very curious to see her. Keeping her hidden back in Stay More would just make it look as if he were trying to keep his relationship secret. So why not put her on display? Let the world see what a lovely lady she was. Somehow Vernon (perhaps with an assist from Bo) persuaded the reluctant Jelena not only to do this, but also to buy herself a new wardrobe of smart summer separates and suits, and to visit a hairdresser, and to appear at a number of rallies looking like what Vernon proudly introduced her as: “the next First Lady of Arkansas.”

For the whole week that the Bradfield campaign was attacking her—or attacking the idea of her as an unmarried consort and cousin of the candidate, Jelena diffidently but boldly appeared with Vernon at rallies all over Arkansas. Monday night, anyone who watched reruns on television would repeatedly see a commercial consisting of footage of Jelena (not in her First Lady garb but taken by some paparazzo who’d caught her in unbecoming dishabille) superimposed with the letters “P.O.S.S.L.Q.” and a voice-over that asked mockingly “People of Offensive Sexual Situations Living Quietly? Partner Opposing Safe Sex Laughs Queasily? Perhaps Occupants Shouldn’t Save Leftover Q-Tips? Please Omit Such Sinful Life-styles Quickly?” And then on Tuesday, at a rally in Jonesboro, thousands of people would turn out to see her waving and smiling to the crowd, and then affectionately holding Vernon’s arm. All of their head-shakings and “tsk tsk”s and their disapproving sneers and scrapings of one forefinger with the other would dwindle and disappear as a barbershop quartet from Vernon’s Vocalists would serenade her with a rousing take-off on “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.”

She was a drawing card, there was no question of that, and the idea of flaunting her instead of hiding her began to plant an idea in Day’s mind. Nobody had asked him for any advice on the campaign, and he certainly had little interest in, and less knowledge of, politics, but this whole contest between albatrosses and foo birds was beginning to seem absurd to him, although he understood that it was what people expected in any sort of political campaign. He had given a lot of thought lately to how to put a stop to it, and Jelena’s public humiliation—if that was what it was, and he knew she hated every minute of it—made him determined to come up with a solution.

Before he got any opportunity to offer his unsolicited advice to Vernon’s people (he chided himself for that excluding expression, as if he himself were not the utmost of Vernon’s people) he was solicited to give advice in his field of expertise. One day in August he arrived home for lunch (he’d been thinning some stands of cedar in the nearby Ozark National Forest) to find on his message machine (Diana had gone shopping in Harrison for the day) this throaty message: “Hi, Day, this is Juliana Heartstays. I didn’t have much chance to speak with you during the turtle banquet last month. When you get a chance, could you drop by the wigwam? Or, if you prefer, or if I’m not there, could you drop by Ekaterina’s?”

Day smiled. For a brief moment he allowed himself the fantasy that since Vernon had been gone for a while Juliana’s notorious Indian libido was acting up and she needed a substitute for Vernon. After lunch and a shower Day drove his Jeep Cherokee to the wigwam; one good thing about being your own employer is that you don’t have to return to work after lunch if you don’t feel like it. She came out of the wigwam (wasn’t it awfully hot in there?) and sat in the Jeep beside him. He left the air-conditioning running.

“Vernon tells me you’re a forester,” she said to him.

My God, up close she was breathtaking. And her simple words in that deep vibrant voice were as if she were professing her love for him.

“I don’t live in the forest,” he said. “Not at night, anyway. Maybe ‘dendrologist’ would be a better word.”

“What’s that?”

“A student of trees.”

“Exactly why I want to see you,” she said, and there was the pinprick in the bubble of his fantasy. “Can a dendrologist look at a piece of land and tell what kind of trees used to grow there? I mean, for example, this pasture was cleared by white settlers at one time. Would you be able to tell me what was growing here originally?”

“That’s easy,” he said.

She got out of the Jeep and came around to the driver’s side and opened the door and took his hand. “Come,” she said, and his fantasy leapt into his vision again, full-blown. But she didn’t lead him to the wigwam. She led him to a spot between two hummocks of earth, and pointed at the turf. “Here, for example,” she said. “What was growing here two hundred years ago?”

“Right where you’re pointing,” he declared, “nothing grew, because one of your ancestors had cut down an elm tree to make room for another wigwam. But here—” he pointed to a spot just to the west of where she’d pointed “—there was a giant maple.”

“You’re good,” she said. “Now my question is, would it be possible to put that giant maple back? Or one just like it?”

“Do you mean transplant a mature maple to this spot?”

She nodded and he hedged, “It would be awfully complicated. It would require some heavy machinery—backhoes and a truck-mounted tree spade and a huge flatbed hauling truck—but it could be done.”

“When can you start?”

He laughed. “I don’t normally contract heavy equipment, and in any case you’d have to wait until the cooler weather of autumn to do it.”

“Day,” she said earnestly, in her throaty voice, and sweeping her hands to encompass the whole area, “whenever you can do it. And not just the maple, but everything. I want to make all of this look as it used to look before the white men came. I want to restore this piece of earth to its original appearance.”

“It would be terribly expensive,” he pointed out.

“That doesn’t give me a moment’s thought,” she said. “Can you do it? I know it may take you a good bit of time just to do the planning, and deciding what goes where, and finding the trees and all, but I’ll pay you whatever you want.”

“Have you asked Vernon what he thinks of the idea?” Day had a suspicion that Vernon might not like the idea of a drastic reshaping of this part of Stay More’s landscape.

“I don’t need his permission,” she said. “He has given the Heart Stays site back to us. My lawyers have drawn up the papers. The only permission I need is yours.”

Day knew he could do it if he had to. It would be a challenging assignment, to determine what large trees had originally grown all over the pasture when it was forest, and to replace them, and to turn the entire site into a kind of laboratory where he could watch a climax forest coming into contact with humanity.

She raised her eyebrows. “Do you think it’s preposterous?”

“I think the idea is radical but it’s feasible, and even exciting. As the old song goes, ‘If you got the money, honey, I got the time.’”

“I would have just one requirement,” she said. “I would want you to hire Bending Bear as part of your crew. Well, I mean, you wouldn’t have to give him a salary; he’s already got one. But I want him to participate, and he needs some busy-work, because he doesn’t have to do much driving for me anymore.”

“Be glad to have him,” Day said. He liked Bending Bear. He knew that the big fellow was a deviate; Day and Vernon had joked about Ben’s crush on George, who didn’t know what to do about it. But Day couldn’t imagine that Ben’s sexual orientation would create any problems on the job of moving trees.

“So back to my question: when can you start?” she asked.

“Might as well start now,” he said. “Let me get my notebook from the Jeep.” He got his notebook and his pencil and began making a sketch of the site. “You’ll have to let me know where your property lines are,” he told her.

She laughed. “Osages don’t believe in property. But if you can simply tell by looking at the land where the trees were, can’t you tell where the encampment was?”

“I’d say it included both sides of the creek.” He squinted toward the west. “Possibly from yonder bluff—” he pointed to the rocky banks beyond a meadow on the other side of Swains Creek “—to just about the edge of the road up there. And from where the old Duckworth place stood, to the south, on up to just this side of where the canning factory used to be. Maybe about thirty acres, all told.”

“You’re good,” she said again. “You really are very, very good. Especially by including the other side of the creek. Because that’s where I’m going to build my house.”

“Oh?” he said. “The wigwam’s not big enough for you?”

She laughed. “The wigwam’s a playhouse. For now, it’s just a playhouse.”

“So I’ve heard,” he said.

She gave him a look, and then remarked, “You’re Vernon’s bosom buddy, aren’t you?”

“We go way back,” Day admitted.

“Has he told you about us?”

“Jacob Ingledew had already done that,” Day said.

She poked him in the ribs. “Day! So you’ve read the memoirs too? I hope you don’t think I’ve just been trying to relive the past. Osages believe the past is past and gone, that change is inevitable, that the course of history can’t be reversed.”

“Then why do you want the trees back?” he asked.

“If anybody asks, tell them that I value my privacy.”

And that was that. Day spent another hour by himself, tramping around the former location of the Indian encampment, making notes in his notebook. A great oak stood here. A cluster of elms here. There was a green ash, and a stand of white ash, there were several swamp chestnut oaks, along with cherrybark oaks, hickories, black-gums, and winged elms. Day took pride in his ability to be a tree, to think like one, to know where, for example, if he were a sassafras, he would want to stand. When the time came to give each of these trees a personal name, he’d have to ask his “client” for actual Osage names.

Juliana had briefly returned to her playhouse, stayed there a while, and then, as Day was concluding his inventory of the former arboreal citizens of the campsite, she came to him briefly to say she was going on back to Ekaterina’s house. “I neglected to ask,” she said, “and it’s not even important and you don’t have to tell me, but what should I be paying you? Could I give you some sort of retainer now, or should I start a salary, or what?”

Day decided that if she didn’t yet know that he and Diana had no need for remuneration, she would probably find out, soon enough. Day hadn’t worked for wages since he’d bagged at a supermarket at the age of seventeen. The U.S. Forest Service had sent him periodic checks for the services he was rendering on government lands and he had simply forwarded them to Diana’s team of accountants, who spared him from ever having to think that he was gainfully employed. Diana herself had no interest in money. Neither of them had ever bothered to estimate her incredible net worth, and neither of them ever discussed the subject or gave any thought to it. Day knew that Juliana too was fabulously rich, but probably not as much as Diana. The mention of the subject gave him a headache. “Let’s not discuss it,” he told Juliana. “I’ll just let you know what my expenses are, when they occur.”

“If I start building my house now,” she asked, “would the construction crews be in your way? Would you rather I waited until you’ve finished the job in the autumn?”

“No, it would be better if the house was finished first.”

“Good,” she said. She offered him her hand for a shake, and she held his hand too long.

The next time he saw Vernon, he told him that he’d been thinking about it and had reached the conclusion that it was indeed possible to love two women at the same time. In fact, he said, it was even possible to love three women at the same time. But he didn’t tell Vernon which three. He might have, but Vernon was in a hurry. The Samurai were assembling in emergency session at Vernon’s house. Again Lydia and Arch would be Day and Diana’s houseguests for a couple of nights; each of them brought gifts, houseplants from Lydia and very fine wines from Arch. Governor Bradfield’s campaign had reached the seventh week of its attack on Vernon’s albatrosses, and planned to spend a concentrated effort calling attention to Vernon’s having never gone to college. Going back to Jeff Davis, nearly all the governors of Arkansas had gone to college even if, like Orval Faubus and Win Rockefeller, they hadn’t graduated. Bradfield’s TV spots (craftily authored by Carleton Drew) were going to be careful not to offend the great mass of Arkansawyers who had never been to college themselves, but they were going to leave the indelible impression that a man without any college education is simply not qualified to lead the state government. It wouldn’t be sufficient for the Ingledew campaign to counterattack with the information that Bradfield had flunked thirty hours at Southern State and had never actually received a degree himself. Bradfield, like Faubus and Rockefeller, had at least thought enough of college to matriculate (although Carleton Drew insisted that word would never be used by the Bradfield campaign because it sounded naughty).

Now the emergency session of the Samurai were considering Cast’s suggestion that they call in a team of professors who were experts in each of the fields that Vernon had mastered in his self-education program (thirty-one so far, from art history through philosophy, but not yet including politics, which he was still in the process of mastering) and having these professors testify that Vernon was worthy of having a Ph.D in each of their fields; therefore, he was far better than a college graduate; he had, in fact, the equivalent of thirty-one doctorates.)

Day did not get a chance to tell Vernon of his own idea for putting a stop to the negative campaign of mudslinging. Nor did he tell Vernon that Juliana was building a house in Stay More and had arranged for Day to restore the arboreal landscape; he assumed Vernon would find that out soon enough from Juliana herself. He decided to try out his idea of the campaign on Arch and Lydia, perhaps at supper. But although they were sleeping at his house, they were having their supper at Vernon’s. So he tried it out on Diana, and she bought it, wholeheartedly.

This inspired him. He knew that what would really give him the confidence to present the idea to the Samurai would be not so much the approval of Lydia and Arch but the approval of the one man in whose realm of expertise it most resided. So later that night, after the meeting of the Samurai had broken up, he told Diana to make Lydia and Arch right at home and tell them he’d be back in a jiffy. Then he drove to Sharon’s and Larry’s house, the former Stay More post office (where, his first months in town, thirty years before, he’d “mailed” letters to Diana and received hers in return, every day when they were experimentally living apart from each other for a while). They were all sitting on the porch, Sharon, Larry, Monica, and Harry, enjoying the cooling darkness of early September.

“Howdy,” Day said to them, and they exchanged howdies with him, although Harry said, “Mohammed of the Mountains.”

Day smiled at Harry. “I’m taking it to the mountain, and you’re the mountain. Could I have a few minutes of your time, in private?”

Harry looked at the others and then back at Day. Then he hefted himself out of his chair and walked down the steps of the old store/post office. He brought his drink with him. “Lead on,” he said to Day.

They strolled up the road, not the main road but the Right Prong Road that Day had come in on.

“I know nothing about politics,” Day began. “And I don’t understand the refinements of negative campaigning, your bailiwick. But it has occurred to me that while the public has learned to expect that two candidates will assault each other with innuendo and accusation and slander, the public possibly has a point of saturation. Do you agree?”

Harry snorted. “If the public’s got a saturation point, I’ve never seen ’em reach it.”

“But don’t you think it’s possible, hypothetically, that if two candidates attacked each other incessantly and viciously, the public would simply tune them out eventually?”

“Yeah, it’s possible,” Harry admitted. “But calumny is like gossip for most people: you can’t get enough of it.”

“We won’t listen to gossip if it’s outrageous. If the calumny were inflated and overdone beyond a certain point, wouldn’t the public get sick of it?”

“So?”

“So I’ve been thinking. Here are Bradfield and Vernon having at each other with everything they’ve got, and you have certainly provided Vernon with an arsenal of serious accusations against the governor, but it hasn’t particularly helped. The latest polls show Vernon falling farther and farther behind. My idea is this. Instead of trying further to counteract Bradfield’s calumny, why not help it along, until it is so bloated it self-destructs? Pad it, in other words. If necessary, fabricate all kinds of sins and errors and crimes that Vernon has committed, and have him confess to them on a daily basis, until the public begins to take a ‘So what?’ attitude. The populace will be innoculated against any further scandal. If a saturation point can’t be reached, super-saturate the public!”

Day waited, but for a long time Harry Wolfe did not respond. They continued strolling, and once or twice Wolfe raised his glass to his mouth and took an audible gulp. At length he said, “You’re Vernon’s asshole buddy and you want to stick all those knives in his back?”

“Maybe,” Day said, “people would start feeling sympathetic toward a guy with a back full of knives.”

Harry continued to ponder for a while longer before saying, “It’s risky. It’s like you’re suggesting that I take my cannons and turn them around to shoot the wrong direction.”

“Good metaphor,” Day said. “Possibly in all the noise and smoke of the cannons firing there might grow up a general wish for quiet and clarity and peace. Who knows? The candidates might even be compelled to concentrate on the issues.”

“Heaven forbid!” Harry said mockingly. “I don’t know nothing about no issues.” He began laughing. He finished his drink and stopped and turned to face Day. “Mr. Whittacker, you know, I think you’ve really got something here. I’ll take it up with the others and we might even give it a try. Will you take all the blame if it backfires?”

“I’d prefer to remain anonymous,” Day said. “Is there some way you could introduce the idea as if it’s your own?”

“And if it works, I’ll be a hero?” Harry said. Day tried to catch any note of sarcasm in Harry’s words, but Harry really meant it. “I could even parlay this ploy into fat oppo jobs for the rest of my life. Only I wouldn’t be researching the opposition, I’d be researching my own man!” Harry continued laughing. He finished his drink and stared into his empty glass. “What’s this local moonshine called? Chism’s Dew? It’s pretty good stuff, you know. I could develop a real liking for it. Let’s go back to the house and get another one.” Harry turned around and began strolling homeward. “Say, you know, amongst all the other turpitudes we could leak the news that Vernon Ingledew is the head of the operation manufacturing Chism’s Dew!”

“Why not?” said Day. And permitted himself a chuckle, while he envisioned all the vilification that could be heaped on Vernon.

“I’ve got a better one!” Harry suggested. “A real one! Did you know that those two Indians use peyote? It’s part of their religion, or whatever, but I believe it’s a controlled substance and illegal. We could claim that Vernon and Juliana get high together!”

“I should have guessed you already knew about Vernon and Juliana,” Day said.

“Yeah, and we’ll throw that in too, right on top of the heap, piling the dirt so high that the people of the great state of Arkansas won’t give a flying fuck what Vernon does or does not do in his private life!” Harry began cackling. “Of course, Vernon will have to deny everything. When we hit him with the peyote, he can say, ‘Yes, I used peyote, but I didn’t inhale!’” And Harry laughed so loudly Day wondered if the others could hear.

“Just out of curiosity,” Day inquired, “how did you know that Juliana uses peyote?”

“I asked her,” Harry said.

“Does anything escape your all-seeing eye?”

“Thank you, no. Not even the possibility that, even as we speak, Juliana may be pregnant.”

“You’re kidding me!”

“For the moment, I’m just speculating. Mr. Whittacker, I take it you’re just as familiar as I am with The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks. You know, therefore, that Jacob Ingledew impregnated the Indian squaw who was, supposedly, the ancestor of Juliana Heartstays, and therefore if Juliana is trying to recapture the lost times of her people she is bent upon getting herself impregnated. No?”

“No,” Day said firmly, “because that book also makes clear that Vernon is the very last of all the Ingledews because the woman he loves, Jelena, cannot have children. Of course it doesn’t say anything about Juliana coming along many years later, but it does make quite clear that there will never be any more Ingledews after Vernon.”

“Yes, it draws a fabulous parallel between the lives of the Ingledews of Stay More and the lives of an ancient family of Arcadian Greeks, as expressed in a book in Latin Vernon found in a bookstore in Rome on his first trip around the world. The book is called De Arcadiae Architectura Antiqua, or The Archaic Architecture of Arcadia.”

“The book we’re talking about—the Arkansas architecture book—makes clear that the Roman book tells the whole story of Vernealos Anqualdou, the last of the line of Anqualdous. The last, who could have no children because the woman he loved could not bear a child.”

“And it also tells everything that will happen to Vernealos for the rest of his life—including whether or not he becomes elected as provincial eparch, or governor, of Arcadia, like his ancestor Iakobus Anqualdou.”

“Which is the reason that Vernon deposited his copy of the book in the Library of Congress with instructions that they never let him see it, because he doesn’t want to know what is going to happen to him for the rest of his life.”

“But which doesn’t stop a good pal of mine in DC from going to the Library of Congress and getting a copy made, which he sent to me, and which I have commissioned a fellow at the University of Arkansas, Professor Daniel Levine of the Classics Department, to translate for me. Any day now I’ll know not only whether or not Vernon will have a child with Juliana but also whether or not he’ll be elected governor of Arkansas in November.”

“If you believe in fairy tales,” Day said. “I find it hard to accept that a man of your cynicism and objectivity would believe that an ancient book can accurately predict what’s happening now. Shades of Zoroaster!”

“I think it’s Nostradamus whose shades you want to invoke,” Harry Wolfe corrected him, and then he thanked him for the “brilliant” idea of extirpating the negative campaign by supersaturation and he returned to the house of Larry and Sharon to get himself another Chism’s Dew.

Day was to discover that there were no trucks with tree spades for hire in Harrison. He made several calls, and discovered the closest place he could find a big tree spade was Fayetteville. He decided to go have a look at it, and, while he was at it, have a little chat with the Author, and ask him if he knew this Professor Levine, who was translating this Arcadiae Architectura Antiqua and finding out everything that happened to Vernealos Anqualdou.

Day decided not to tell Vernon that the ancient book was being translated from the Latin at Harry’s request. And of course he couldn’t tell Vernon that he himself had “planted” the idea of dumping so much scandal on Vernon that the populace would grow jaded and indifferent. But there was one thing he wanted to say to Vernon, and it was this question: “Do you use contraceptives when you’re with Juliana?”

Vernon looked baffled. “Now what would I be doing with a contraceptive in my possession? I’ve never used one in my life. I’ve never had to.”

“Don’t forget that personal motto of yours: ‘I’ll try anything once.’”

Chapter sixteen

Lydia had never particularly liked Harry Wolfe but now she had to wonder if the man wasn’t some kind of genius. She thought he was physically repulsive: obese, disheveled, constantly reeking of booze, and constantly wearing a facial expression dominated by what seemed to be a sneer contemptuous of the whole world. Once when he was thoroughly sloshed he had slapped her on the butt and she had been required to slap him on his flabby jowl, and that was the only time they had ever touched. She admired him for his sleuthing powers at the same time she was disdainful toward that entire aspect of politics which his powers fed: the intrusion of personal lives into campaigns. “Gotcha” politics. Whatever disappointment she’d had with her old boss Bill Clinton, she had always felt Clinton’s personal life should never have been an issue, as long as he performed his duties as governor and as president to the best of his considerable abilities. What we do in our bedrooms, she believed, should have no more bearing on our performance in our jobs than what we do at our dining tables.

Harry Wolfe was therefore some kind of serpent, and she had as little to do with him as possible. But now he appeared to have proposed a bit of strategy which would seem to contravene his own principles, rendering the whole apparatus of smear campaigns ineffective. Her first reaction to his idea, which she sensed was shared by her fellow Samurai, was doubt and caution. The plan could so easily go haywire. What if the public was not surfeited by all the scandal that Harry proposed heaping upon their own candidate? What if the plenitude of muckraking simply increased the public’s appetite for it? In the Samurai’s discussion, Lydia had offered this idea: “What if they, the populace, think this whole big blob of mud is actually chocolate cake? And they want seconds? And thirds?”

But the more she thought about it, the more tempting the plan seemed. It might be a huge gamble, but a gamble worth taking in view of Bradfield’s determination to concentrate his entire campaign on Vernon’s albatrosses. If Bradfield could devote a whole week of spots to each of the albatrosses, at God knows what expense, what could he do if there were two hundred albatrosses? Might not the very size of the intrusion-sheet discourage him from continuing his smears? There were still two months left until the November election. Quite possibly the people of Arkansas in their goodness and wisdom might prefer that those two months be spent in an honest contemplation of the ideological differences between the two candidates instead of their peccadilloes. Might that be too much to expect?

The Samurai decided to take an extra day and night at Stay More, in order to complete their consideration and discussion of Harry’s proposal before presenting the idea to Vernon himself. Bo certainly approved of this extension of time; Lydia suspected that it would give him more time to be with Jelena, and Lydia was the first of the Samurai, other than Bo himself, to imagine it true that Bo and Jelena were having an affair; when Lydia had called early one morning to tell Vernon that they needed to find Bo because of Bradfield’s bombshell, Vernon hadn’t seemed to know, at first, that Bo was right there in his own house! And of course the Samurai had already speculated among themselves that there was something going on between their candidate and that ravishing Indian maiden who had taken up residence in a quaint little wigwam. When Lydia had first heard this gossip, it had hurt her as if someone had slashed her with a knife, because she herself was very much in love with Vernon. One thing that made Lydia receptive to Harry’s radical scheme was that whatever hanky-panky was going on between Vernon and Juliana and Bo and Jelena would be smudged over and obscured in the onslaught of slanders.

When Lydia had made that early morning phone call to Vernon, she hadn’t expected to find him home; she had a hunch that possibly Jelena might know of Bo’s whereabouts. Lydia was irritated that her bosses—her candidate, Vernon, and his campaign manager, Bo—had both taken to mysterious disappearances without any word to her. Pine Bluff had been a fiasco, and Vernon had simply got into his helicopter right after the rally petered out. After all the work she and Carleton had done, planning and setting up the rally and getting as much publicity for it as they could squeeze out of the media, and with a considerable expenditure for TV and radio spots, posters, and what Lydia had been led to believe was a good Democratic organization in the town, a little more than one hundred people had turned out, scarcely more than the numbers of Vernon’s hired troops, the band and cheerleaders and singers and all.

Either owing to the meager crowd or because his heart was elsewhere, Vernon had not given an inspired speech, and the whole thing was desultory and discouraging. Lydia feared, against the sincerest wishes of her heart, that old-time stump speaking was dead, dead, dead, and nothing would revive it. Lydia had been left to do the post mortems and cleaning up, without any help from Carleton, who at least had the courtesy to come to her and inform her that he had after much soul-searching decided to take a lucrative offer from the Bradfield camp to switch sides. Lydia did not tell him, or anyone else, then or now, that she herself had also received a very good offer, delivered in person by Billy Joe Slade, Bradfield’s manager, and the offer was so high it should have caused her some soul-searching too but she hadn’t needed to search her soul, because she knew her soul would never give her a minute’s peace if she had accepted it.

Slade had told her that if she wouldn’t accept the exorbitant figure, they were going to offer it to Harry Wolfe. Apparently Harry had also turned them down. Could it be that Harry, for all his other shortcomings, at least possessed a conscience? Or a sense of loyalty? Once before, during the primary, the Reverend Dixon had put in a very high bid for Harry’s services, but Harry had turned him down. And Lydia knew, because her friend Monica was in charge of the payroll, that Harry hadn’t received a raise for turning down Dixon or Bradfield. Lydia wondered if she could have held out for a higher salary herself. She needed it on her resume for whatever future campaign might employ her. But she was not going to “sell out,” for any amount of money.

Still, she was not a happy camper. She wanted more than anything in this world to see Vernon Ingledew installed in the governor’s mansion, which was at least a reasonable desire, compared with her unreasonable desire to have him return her love. There was a good chance that if he were elected he would make her his press secretary and they might have some moments of intimacy behind his office door. And whether he was elected or not, she knew she’d always want to be a part of Stay More. She genuinely loved this place. If only she could relax here and have nothing political to preoccupy her, it would be heaven. She had fantasies of dressing as sometimes she’d seen the Woman Whom We Cannot Name and her new friend the Indian maiden dressing—in country calico cotton—and sitting on the porch of the old Governor Ingledew house watching the world go by…or failing to go by.

During her previous stay in Stay More, Lydia had taken a hike up to the dogtrot log cabin where Vernon’s grandmother, Latha Bourne Dill, persisted alone and fiercely independent beyond the age of a hundred, and Lydia had a delightful visit with the old woman, who knew everything about the history of Stay More. As press secretary, Lydia had an ulterior motive: perhaps a human-interest story could be publicized about the colorful old lady, who kept a yard full of cats (many more than Lydia’s half dozen), and whose pastoral kindness and keen-wittedness had been inherited by her grandson. But when Lydia had mentioned the idea of an “interview” and of photographers, the woman had said, “Miss Caple, whatever that boy Vernon does has always been okay with me, but when it comes to his wits and his ways and his twists, he takes after his momma, my daughter Sonora, and I’d just as soon not have anybody looking at me as if I had anything to do with it.” Sonora Dill Ingledew had of course been dead (breast cancer) since Vernon was only ten years old.

“What about his daddy?” Lydia had asked. “Did Vernon inherit any of his character or features?”

“You haven’t met Hank Ingledew?” Latha had asked.

“I haven’t been aware he existed,” Lydia had said. Vernon had never talked about him, nor had any of the other Samurai mentioned him, and Lydia had written nothing about him in Vernon’s press bio.

“I’m sorry to say my son-in-law and I don’t visit, but I reckon that’s as much my fault as his,” the old woman had said.

Lydia had made a mental note to make the acquaintance of John Henry “Hank” Ingledew on her next visit to Stay More, and now it was time, although now she had the weighty matter of Harry’s radical scheme to think about. She didn’t ask Vernon or Bo for their permission to visit Hank Ingledew, or for directions to the house. She asked George, who had been her favorite of these local people until she’d met Latha. George was only too glad to get away from the attentions of Thomas Bending Bear and to give Lydia a ride “up high to the yon side of Ingledew Mountain,” where Hank Ingledew lived alone in a “modern” house he had constructed for his large family back in the Fifties, just before Vernon was born. Lydia was more curious to see the house Vernon had grown up in than to meet his father. The house was indeed remote from the rest of Stay More, which somehow made Vernon’s father seem like a hermit.

Hank Ingledew was a well-preserved man past eighty, and Lydia saw at once that Vernon had fallen heir to his handsomeness, his height, and, alas, his congenital woman-shyness. Hank managed to shake Lydia’s hand while studying the rug as if searching for an invisible insect. And for the whole length of her visit he was never once able to look her in the eye. “I’ve heared about ye,” he allowed, and, gesturing toward his television set, a surprisingly large and recent model, he said, “I keep up with the news and politics and all, and I’ve known ye to work for other fellers before you went to work for my boy. Democrats one and all. I’ve got to tell ye, I’ve voted Republican all my life.”

“Really?” Lydia said. “Well, I assume that’s going to change in the next election.”

“Last I heared tell, my boy was a-fixin to run as a Democrat, and if that’s so, he won’t get no vote of mine.”

“Oh, what a thing to say!” Lydia lamented. But she had a sudden inspiration. If Harry’s proposal was accepted by the Samurai, and they did in fact embark upon an operation to heap defamation upon their own candidate, wouldn’t it look great if the public knew that Vernon’s own father wouldn’t vote for him? “Don’t tell me you have any admiration for Shoat Bradfield,” she said to him.

“He’s a upstanding member of the Republican Party, and that’s good enough for me,” Hank said.

Lydia wondered if she should try to explain Harry’s scheme to the old man, and decided against it. “Would you actually do something to help Bradfield against your own son?” she boldly asked.

“If it would keep Bradfield in office,” Hank Ingledew said. “Besides, Vernon would be a right smart happier if he’d just stick to raisin’ hogs. Right, George?”

“Sure thing,” George put in. “I’d vote for Bradfield myself if it would help keep Vernon here in Stay More. But I got to admit, I’m just as much a lifelong Democrat as you are a lifelong Republican.”

“Never held it again ye, George,” Hank said. “There’s lots of idjits in this world, and we don’t blame ’em for their mental deficiency, we just try and humor ’em along.”

“Wal, don’t ye go tryin to humor me, Hank. I can cuss the Republicans more thundery than you can cuss the Democrats.”

Lydia would have liked nothing more than to listen to George and Hank argue politics. But there was business to tend to. She asked Hank, “What if a reporter came up here and asked you to reveal all the bad things Vernon did when he was just a boy? What would you tell him?”

Hank needed more than a moment to think. “Hmm,” he said. “Well,” he said. He scratched his stubbly chin a bit and said, “Well, now.” He stared out the window and finally cleared his throat and said, “I do seem to recollect there was a time, when he wasn’t but about six or seven, when he didn’t have the sense to latch the pasture gate behind him, and the cow—we didn’t have but one cow in them days—she got out and wandered off and we had to go for purt near a whole week without ary milk.” Hank looked at George for confirmation of the severity of this deed.

“That was a real dumb thing to do,” George admitted.

Lydia kept silent and did not reveal her disappointment that no capital could be made of such a minor misdeed. At length, Hank said, “Then there was the time, he must’ve been maybe eleven or so, when he was shootin at tin cans with his BB gun, just a-tossin ’em up in the air and tryin to hit ’em, and he shot an eagle! Hit that eagle right in the eye. Didn’t kill him but put his eye out. Grady Bullen, the game warden, found the eagle and took him home and nursed him back to health and that darn eagle never would leave the Bullen place but hung around for years afterward, and Vernon used to go and watch it, but he never told Grady it was his BB gun which done the deed.”

“That might explain why Vernon is so opposed to guns,” Lydia observed.

“He is, is he?” Hank asked. “Well, heck fire, aint nobody gonna vote for the fool if he is. Ever man has got the right to keep and use all the shootin arns he needs, to pertect his fambly and kill him some game and what all.”

“Darn tootin,” George said. “Many a time I’ve told Boss that I don’t see how he can make any friends among the voters if he wants to do away with guns.”

Lydia herself greatly admired Vernon’s stance on gun control (or extirpation, not to split hairs), but she didn’t say this to the men. “Still, the two misdeeds you’ve mentioned were both accidents, more or less, wouldn’t you say? Didn’t Vernon ever deliberately do something that was wrong, or illegal, or very bad?”

“Nothing that he was ever arrested for, or even taken to account for,” Hank said. “But because I wouldn’t give him money to waste on the pitcher shows—I wanted him to have to earn his own spendin money—he used to sneak into the pitcher show, the Buffalo Theater over to Jasper. I don’t rightly know just how he got in, but he did it, more than once, until he was caught. But Tim Barker, the Buffalo’s manager, just gave me a phone call about it, and I told Vernon that I was going to cut off his—”

Hank faltered and grew red in the face. Lydia asked, “Yes? Cut off his what?”

“His nose?” Hank offered. “I just told him that what I’d been threatening to cut off ever since he was just a pup if he ever did anything real bad that I was now a-fixin to do it.” Hank chuckled. “That boy just run away from home. He was gone for three days, God knows where. But I couldn’t hold that against him, because I run away from home myself, to join the circus, when I wasn’t but the same age. We both came back, of course.”

Lydia wondered if Harry Wolfe might have better luck worming some information out of Hank Ingledew. She suspected that because she was a woman Hank was not only very shy about speaking to her but also reticent about revealing any of Vernon’s childhood or adolescent conduct that might have involved sins of the flesh.

Before the Samurai reconvened to discuss Harry’s proposal, Lydia learned from her host, Day Whittacker, of the Indian maiden’s plan to build a house (or mansion) in Stay More and of her intention to conceal it with transplanted trees. Day brought the subject up because he needed Lydia’s advice: would the busy activity of the building and transplanting attract attention from the occasional journalists and photographers who snooped around town, and, if so, might it harm Vernon’s campaign?

Now Lydia realized that if the busy activity were to occur under “normal” times, that is, when Stay More was as sleepy and undisturbed as usual, it would draw a lot of attention, but if it happened in the midst of the initial furor over all the “scandals” revealed about Vernon, it would go unnoticed or unremarked. In fact, as she thought about it, the building of the mansion might even be used as one more potential scandal: if it was true that Vernon was involved with the Indian maiden, that in itself was going to be a major scandal, and her construction of a mansion on land that Vernon had simply given her would further embellish the scandal to the point where the public, already disaffected by the reports of Vernon’s extravagant double-bubble house, which Bradfield have given considerable time and space to exposing in the sixth week of his attack on Vernon’s albatrosses. Although they had not been able to photograph the house, even from the air, they had hired an artist to render an imaginary conception of it, inaccurate and misleading but at least emphasizing that it consisted of two huge round globes bonded together. “Would anybody who chose to live in a place like this be happy in the governor’s mansion?” asked the advertisements and TV spots. It was a noisily rhetorical question, and perhaps more than Bradfield’s use of the other albatrosses it left the populace convinced that Vernon was simply not One of Us.

So Lydia’s last expedition, before the Samurai reconvened, was to interview Juliana Heartstays. Several days were needed to talk herself into it, because her jealousy of the Indian maiden was bitter and galling. Lydia had expected to find her at the wigwam, but she was instead at the home of the Woman Whom We Cannot Name. Going there to talk to her, Lydia realized that when all of the “scandals” broke and the village began to fill up with snooping newspeople, it might cause problems for the Woman Whom, who guarded her privacy, who was almost desperate not to be discovered as the famous novelist who had supposedly been murdered several years before. Lydia decided that if the Samurai did indeed decide to embark upon the campaign of super-saturation of scandal, she should have a talk with the Woman and suggest that she might want to take a vacation (go home to visit Svanetia?) for the duration of the breaking scandals.

Swallowing her animosity, Lydia gave a little white lie to Juliana Heartstays: as Vernon’s press secretary, she was intrigued by the reports that Vernon had “donated” a parcel of thirty acres, more or less, to Juliana, a descendant of the Indians who had once owned that land, and she wondered if a human interest story might be made of it.

“I’d much prefer to keep it as quiet as possible, if it’s all the same to you,” Juliana said cordially but firmly.

“But if the story gets out, we should be prepared to offer our ‘official’ version,” Lydia said. “Couldn’t we simply say that some Osages had regained possession of their tribal lands through Vernon’s generosity?”

The Indian maiden smiled, with perfect teeth. She truly was an unutterably fine-looking woman, and Lydia knew that if Juliana became a centerpiece of “Vernon’s Vices,” as Lydia was beginning to think of the scandals, her picture would not only be in every newspaper in the state but would probably appear in a few national magazines. “Vernon doesn’t like to think that he gave the land back to us,” Juliana said, “because indeed he didn’t. We simply reclaimed it.”

“Whatever,” Lydia said. “You plan to stay, right? You’re going to build a house on it?” The Indian nodded. “You’re going to become a permanent resident of Stay More, and sell your Oklahoma house?”

“I didn’t realize anyone knew anything about my Oklahoma house,” Juliana said.

“I’m just assuming that you had a home there, somewhere,” Lydia said.

“Yes, I did. I do. I haven’t put it on the market yet. I might have trouble selling it. It’s a peculiar house.”

“As peculiar as Vernon’s?”

“I haven’t seen Vernon’s house yet,” Juliana said.

“Oh,” Lydia said. “You don’t visit him. He visits you. Because of Jelena.”

The Indian maiden stopped smiling. Her look was fiercely challenging. “What do you mean by visit?”

“You and Vernon are having a relationship,” Lydia declared flatly.

Juliana Heartstays looked so stunned that for a moment Lydia wondered if possibly she’d been mistaken to believe that. “Where on earth did you get such an idea?” she demanded. Lydia simply smiling knowingly. “Who told you that?” Juliana persisted. “Was it Bo?”

“Bo hasn’t told me anything. Nor has Vernon.”

“Then who did? You’re staying with Diana and Day. Did one of them tell you they thought I was having an affair with Vernon?”

Lydia decided not to reveal to Juliana that it was practically common knowledge, or at least common rumor, among all the Samurai and everyone else in Stay More, including Day and Diana. Instead she said, “I just have a pretty good hunch. For years I worked for a newspaper, and reporters often have nothing to go on but their hunches.”

“But you’re putting two and two together and coming up with the wrong sum,” Juliana protested. “Why me?”

“You’re beautiful,” Lydia said honestly but painfully. “And I know Vernon.”

“Have you told Vernon—or anybody—of your suspicion?” Juliana asked.

“Just you,” Lydia said.

“Well, you’re dead wrong, and I hope you’ll keep your suspicion to yourself,” Juliana requested. “You had better keep it to yourself. If it gets out, I’ll hold you to blame for any trouble it causes.”

But when the Samurai got together—in the store part of Sharon and Larry’s house, the one available meeting place other than Vernon’s living room that would hold the six of them, the first subject that came up, even before anyone proposed a vote on Harry’s suggestion, was the matter of Vernon’s “recreational activity during his too-frequent visits to Stay More,” as Harry Wolfe put it. Monica Breedlove boldly delivered herself of the opinion that it was just terrible. Arch Schaffer said that as long as they were going to refer to it as “recreational activity” then they ought not begrudge the man his dalliance. Cast Sherrill said that under ordinary circumstances the story would be romantic and exciting and even thoroughly American but that the timing couldn’t be worse for a gubernatorial candidate. Bo Pharis said he was personally appalled by the situation but didn’t see that it would damage the campaign unless it “got out.”

“‘Getting it out’ is what this meeting is all about,” Lydia reminded them. “We’re here to consider Harry’s radical proposal that we disclose all the possible damaging goods on Vernon in order to give the public a stomach ache. So if we decide to do that, the crown jewel of the damaging goods is going to be Miss Juliana Heartstays.”

“You beat me to it, Lydia,” Harry said. “But I was going to make a case for bringing in the redskin lady as a kind of pièce de résistance of a full, seven-course feast that will not only give the public a belly ache but cause such dyspepsia and vomiting that they won’t have any appetite for months afterward…or at least until after the election.”

“But do we want to bring her in at all?” Bo wondered. “Couldn’t we accomplish our motive without her?”

“What have we got so far?” Arch wanted to know.

The Samurai got down to work, and each reported on whatever he or she had found, or knew about, that could be used against Vernon. Lydia related in detail her visit to Hank Ingledew, and all that she’d managed to learn from him. “We can’t do anything with the business of letting the cow out of the pasture,” she observed, “but maybe we can make something out of that shooting the eagle and sneaking into the movies. Best of all, maybe we could divulge the information that Vernon’s own father plans to vote against him.”

“No!” Arch said. “He didn’t say that.”

“He most certainly did,” Lydia maintained. “And imagine what the Bradfield campaign could do with it.”

Bo said, “Good work, Lydia. But we have to decide at what point to leak that news to the best advantage. Indeed, we have to establish some sort of order for these revelations, perhaps in ascending rank of vilification. Maybe we could start with something simple like the sneaking into the movies, and build up from that.”

“Look, guys,” Arch said, “if this fantastic scheme is going to work at all, it’s got to hit all at once, like a ton of bricks. If we just leak out one little scandal at a time, it will, to use Harry’s metaphor, be like hors d’oeuvres to whet their appetite, not quench it.”

“I stand corrected,” Bo allowed.

Cast interjected, “Could I get some clarification on one essential point? Are we going to confine ourselves to actual bad things that Vernon Ingledew has done? I mean, if we’re limited to only the truth about his past, we might not have enough food in the pot to quench anyone’s appetite. As long as we’re going to heap scandal upon him, why limit ourselves to verifiable misbehavior? Let’s fabricate aspersion and innuendo!”

There was a long silence as the Samurai considered Cast’s suggestion. Harry broke it by saying, “That’s what I assumed we’d do when I first made the suggestion. Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear.”

Bo remarked, “Yes, Harry, but it was Cast who made it clear. Brilliant idea, Cast my boy. Now let’s brainstorm!”

The rest of the meeting was a lot of fun. Each person taxed his or her imagination to come up with a whole disgraceful history for Vernon, and before the afternoon was over they had enough, as Bo put it, “to utterly crucify him, which it might do if it backfires.” Harry offered up all the most flagrant misdeeds he had anthologized throughout his sordid career. Lydia herself contributed no small portion of the outrageous sins and transgressions of Vernon Ingledew. Their detraction of him was so ingenious and thorough that they all became rather disrespectful, even antagonistic, toward their candidate. “Why are we working for this jerk?” Harry wanted to know, and his remark drew the intended laughter as well as a feeling of guilt and unease.

Vernon Ingledew slept with his mother until he was nine, at which point they were discovered in a posture that was not sleeping by Hank Ingledew, who forthwith expelled Vernon from his mother’s bed. Thereafter he systematically seduced each of his five older sisters (“Make it only four,” Monica suggested, “so it might look more credible if one of them held out.”) He also relieved his carnal appetite with the family cow. He was expelled from school in the seventh grade for persuading a girl to accompany him to the cloakroom for immoral purposes during recess, but his expulsion was rescinded when he began an affair with the school’s young principal. He was only fourteen when she had to leave her job, and the state, because she had become pregnant. Two of his sisters had to have abortions. The cow ran off and was never found.

His adult misbehavior included such things (actual) as feeding his hogs the leftover corn mash from the Chism’s still, which kept the swine constantly inebriated, the real secret of the superiority of Ingledew Ham, and (fabricated) he kept them shot full of steroids and other chemicals to enhance their growth and succulence. His immoderate income from the ham processing business was supplemented by his secret ownership of Chism’s still and the trademark for “Chism’s Dew” was registered in his name. Further, he devoted the most secluded parts of his vast acreage to the growing of marijuana, of which he and everybody else in Stay More were constant users. Although he’d been living with his first cousin Jelena since he was nineteen, when he paid her husband a large sum of money to move to California, he had confessed as his ambition to get it on with every female in Newton County, and was keeping a list; at last count, he still had a few hundred more to go.

The reason there are no churches in Stay More—the closest being the Buffalo Church four miles to the north—is that Vernon owns all the land (almost true) and has made a pact with the Devil to keep churches out. And the reason the Stay More school has been shut down for forty years is that Vernon has such unhappy memories of being in trouble during his school years (that young principal, etc.) that he hates education: the main reason he never went to college. He was now actively engaged in an orgiastic intrigue, abetted by peyote, not only with a Native American beauty but also with her homosexual manservant.

When they were all finished brainstorming, the portrait of Vernon Ingledew they possessed was so nefarious that they cringed in revulsion. “Do you think anyone will buy it?” Bo wondered.

“The point is,” Arch reminded them, “that no one will want to buy it.”

“It’s beyond my wildest dreams,” Harry Wolfe observed. “It’s the dirtiest dirt I’ve ever seen. Such a pity that almost none of it is true.”

“How are we going to leak all this stuff?” Cast wanted to know.

“I can take care of that,” Lydia assured them. She did not want, not yet anyway, to tell them that she had received a handsome offer from the Bradfield campaign to become a renegade. But she had begun to entertain a devilish stratagem: she could pretend to switch sides, and in the process leak all of these tidbits craftily so that the Bradfield campaign would use them. In effect, she would be a double agent. The prospect was almost like something you’d read in a spy thriller, and it excited her. She noticed now that everyone was looking at her, waiting for her to continue. “Just leave it to me,” she told them. “I can think of all kinds of ways to get this dirt disseminated.”

“Well, then,” Bo said. “Are we agreed that we want to do this? Or should we put it to a vote?”

“Your call, Boss,” Arch said. “But hadn’t we better find out what Vernon thinks of the whole thing?”

The meeting concluded after a lengthy discussion of whether or not they should summon Vernon forthwith to present him with the scheme they’d devised and the ugly picture of himself they’d fabricated, or perhaps have a special meeting for that purpose the following day, perhaps up at Vernon’s house. If the latter (and it was too late in the day now to think of extending this meeting), then should they make an effort to hold the meeting so that Jelena should be excluded? Should she be made privy to their falsehoods and, worse, their truths, e.g., the “orgiastic intrigues abetted by peyote”?

Cast Sherrill, who continued to be a house guest of Vernon and Jelena during these subsequent visits of the Samurai to Stay More (although he was spending more and more of his nights with Sheila Kimber at her house), and who consequently knew Jelena better than the rest of them (except Bo, of course) offered the opinion that Jelena be given full rights as participant in the “plot,” and that she might thus even be able to reveal some things, true or false, about Vernon that nobody else knew or could invent.

Harry Wolfe said, “Hell, for that matter, why don’t we ask Vernon himself to confess to any misdeeds that nobody else knows about?”

Lydia was unable to determine who fiendishly cackled at this idea; maybe all of them did. What bad people we are! she reflected. It was decided to reconvene the Samurai the following day at Vernon’s house. Arch gave Lydia a ride in his Chevy pickup to Day’s and Diana’s, where they would spend one more night. Lydia was beginning to miss her apartment in Fayetteville, and her cats. But there was one more thing she wanted to do here in Stay More. Because she had heard so much about Daniel Lyam Montross, whose bedroom/study she used, and had taken the trouble to read a copy of Some Other Place. The Right Place., which Diana had loaned her, she had developed a suspicion that his spirit—not exactly his ghost—still inhabited the place. Just last night, sometime after midnight, she had had insomnia and had taken the silver flask out of her purse and had several swallows of vodka, and—of course it was quite possible she’d just dreamed all this—a man had sat on the side of her bed and asked her for a swig, and she’d given it to him, more than once (certainly the silver flask was empty the next morning) and they had talked, and he had told her that he was going to be her protector. “What do I need protection for?” she’d asked him. You’ll see, he’d said. And the next thing she knew it was daylight and she was left with the conviction that she was waking up from what had not entirely been a dream.

After supper, Lydia asked Diana if she could tell her how to find the grave of Montross, which was supposedly nearby. Diana said she’d be very glad to take Lydia to it, but Lydia insisted that she’d prefer to visit it by herself. It wasn’t far, Diana said: you just go up that old logging trail there, straight up the mountainside a little ways, and you’ll come to a thick grove of cedar trees (which Day maintained), with a glade on a bench of the mountainside. And the tombstone is in that glade. You can’t miss it.

So in the gathering dusk, Lydia took a little hike to the cemetery-of-one, the gravestone in the clearing, and stood there reverently for several minutes to gaze upon the inscription:

DANIEL LYAM MONTROSS

June 17, 1880 – May 26, 1953

The last Montross of Dudleytown

The only Montross of Stay More

“We dream our lives, and live our sleep’s extremes.”

She recognized the last line as a quotation from his own poem, “The Dreaming.” And thought it was very appropriate and perhaps even meaningful in view of her dream (or vision) the night before. It was growing dark, and she wanted to be back to the house before she’d need a flashlight to get her there. But she felt a special kinship for Montross. The man who’d sat on her bed last night—assuming that was him, or his ghost—was extremely appealing: kind and rugged and good-natured and witty.

She closed her eyes to see his face again. And that was her last sight of anything. Suddenly something shrouded her—a blanket or a large bag—and she felt herself covered and clutched by massive arms. She tried to lash out her fists but her arms were held tightly within the cloth container. She screamed. Somebody had slipped a sack over her and was now lifting her and carrying her off! She tried to scream again but a hand clamped over her mouth within the sack and she could only mutter her scream. Nothing like this had ever happened to her before, and it was undignified and unheard-of and terrifying. Whoever was carrying her—or was there more than one?—must be very strong because she wasn’t exactly a lightweight. The feet of the person were pounding down the trail; she had enough sense of gravity to know that they were going down, and she overcame her panic enough to reach the decision to wait until they were nearer the house of Day and Diana before she tried to scream again or struggle again.

But when they were approximately where—she could only guess—the logging trail emerged onto the property of Day and Diana, a man’s voice said to her, “Hush, and you will not be harmed.” She tried to identify the voice, but it was no one’s she had heard before, not even the singular voice of Daniel Lyam Montross, so she could dismiss her fleeting thought that she was being abducted by the ghost of a man who didn’t want her visiting his tombstone. She believed the voice’s warning, and did not try to scream, although instinctively she kept trying to struggle within the confines of the sack.

They went on and on, until she knew they were no longer anywhere near Day’s and Diana’s. Finally the voice said, “Now I am going to sit you down, upon a seat, and you must not try to move until I tell you, or I will have to hurt you.”

She came down off the man’s shoulder and found herself sitting in something cushioning—her back and bottom supported almost in comfort after being carried aloft down the trail. Then she heard a motor start, and realized that she was inside of an automobile. Just what kind of automobile she couldn’t begin to guess. It didn’t sound like any car she’d heard before, just as his voice didn’t sound like any voice she’d heard before. The car began to move.

“Who are you?” she asked. But he did not answer. “Don’t you realize you could be getting yourself into real big trouble, doing this?” she demanded. He did not answer. “I assume you know who I am and that you’ve got a motive for kidnapping me, but I wonder if you realize the consequences.” When he made no response to that, she told him about the consequences. “The Samurai will track you down and bring you to justice and you’ll spend the rest of your life in jail!” That provoked no response from her abductor either, so she continued. “Are you employed by Governor Bradfield? Or his manager, Billy Joe Slade? Are they pissed off because I wouldn’t accept their offer to defect from the Ingledew campaign? Well, then, the joke’s on you, because even before you snatched me I’d made up my mind to switch over to the Bradfield team. Not only that, but I’ll tell you all you could ever possibly want to know about Vernon Ingledew’s shady history. Now why don’t you take this bag off of me and we can discuss this like civilized people?” When that had no results, she demanded, “Do we have to drive all the way to Little Rock like this?”

But they were not, apparently, going to Little Rock. After a long while on what felt like a bumpy dirt backroad, and then a longer while on a jolting logging road or forest path, the car came to a stop, and the motor was turned off, and her kidnapper said, “Now you must walk, because I can’t carry you. It’s steep and uphill from here on.”

Chapter seventeen

The bejeweled fucking fairyland that is Little Rock from the air at night on landing was beginning to pall for Harry; he scarcely gave it a glance. He’d made this trip so often he felt like a commuter, a feeling that was confirmed when the particular cab driver at the airport said “The Capital, right?” The more trips he made to Little Rock, the more he began to appreciate the occasional idyll in Stay More. A city man all his life, he never dreamed he’d develop such affection for the sticks. He’d even discovered something wondrous: Saturday nights in Stay More he didn’t seem to need as much booze to make him happy as he required elsewhere.

But now he appreciated the parallel: that this, his second and last chapter, was beginning in exactly the same way that his first, Chapter Seven, had begun: arriving in Little Rock by air, checking into the Capital Hotel, plugging in his modem, and getting ready to go out and conquer the goddamn world. It was not just closure, it was enclosure, a fucking parenthesis that seemed to suggest that life was not utter chaos after all.

There was a big difference, though. That first trip, he’d made contact with his old pal the political paragrapher Hank Endicott, made the useful acquaintances of librarian Bob Razer and of oppo man Garth Rucker, lured the latter away from his employer, and compiled some handy dossiers on the opposition. Not much, but a good week’s work, which played no small part in getting Vernon Ingledew past the primary.

Now his mission was far more serious, and far more demanding of his talents, not as a muckraker but as a sleuth. He was going to infiltrate the goddamn Bradfield organization. He was going personally to find out what they had done with poor Lydia, and he was going to rescue her. And into the bargain, giving a grand climax to the whole operation and to this his final chapter, he was going to effectuate the crafty plan to bring down Bradfield not by impugning him but by making the public sick and tired of his impugnings of Vernon Ingledew. To amuse himself before going to sleep in his nice room at the Capital, he mentally projected onto the ceiling a whole Hollywood movie of the story. His part was played by Drew Carey or John Goodman, and Lydia was played by Michele Pfeifer. Maybe they’d have to get Diane Keaton or Kathleen Turner. But central casting would really have to scrape the bottom of the barrel of slimy villains in order to cast Billy Joe Slade and Carleton Drew and Rafferty Oates and especially Governor Bradfield himself. Harry grinned with considerable satisfaction over the scene where John Goodman whips out his gun and informs those rascals that he’s been a counterspy all along, and demands to be taken to wherever they’re keeping Lydia.

But Bo hadn’t permitted Harry to purchase a gun. “If they’ve got her,” Bo had said, “and if you can somehow find out where they’re keeping her, you’ll have to go in and get her out without the use of any force. That’s too dangerous.” And Bo had impressed upon him the need for haste: the Newton County Sheriff’s department had agreed to wait not more than forty-eight hours before reporting the kidnapping to the Arkansas state police and the FBI and thus presumably to the newspapers and television. But Harry knew enough about the mechanics of kidnapping to realize that the longer they waited, the longer she was kept alive, the better her chances for coming out of the ordeal unscathed. So while he was mindful of the forty-eight hour deadline, he was in no great hurry.

One problem, as he told Hank Endicott the next day, not over drinks in the Capital bar but over coffee at a nice place called Community Bakery, was that it was only a supposition that the Bradfield people had kidnapped Lydia. In fact, as soon as the news was permitted to break (and they had agreed to keep it quiet for at least forty-eight hours, to give her time to return, and to give the Newton County sheriff’s office time to complete their investigation), all of the attention would be focused upon the Bradfield people anyhow.

“Who else would have taken her?” Hank asked.

“Well, the sheriff has been questioning everybody in Stay More,” Harry said. “Even me.”

“Is it assumed she’s been harmed?” Hank asked. “Was there any evidence of blood or anything?”

“That long-overdue thunderstorm we had yesterday morning washed away all the tracks, car tracks and people tracks, near the spot where Lydia was last seen, or rather where she had gone to inspect this little cemetery off in the woods. So it’s not even known if she actually left that cemetery. She simply failed to return to the house where she was staying.”

“Whoever took her,” Endicott said, “should have realized that she is such a well-known figure in Arkansas politics and journalism that this is going to be big news. And I’m eager to do a column on it, as soon as I can. I’m getting antsy, Harry.”

Harry had already debated with himself whether or not to reveal to Hank his plan to infiltrate the Bradfield organization, and had decided against it. He and Hank were good buddies, but you don’t even tell your best friend something so secret. You shouldn’t even tell it to yourself, for godsakes. “I’m meeting Slade and Drew and Oates this afternoon,” Harry said.

“And you’re saying what? ‘Please give Lydia back to us’?”

“I’m making them an offer they can’t refuse,” Harry said with a smile.

“Damn you, Harry, don’t keep me in the dark. If I haven’t heard from you again by sundown, I’m calling the police.”

Harry assured Hank Endicott that he would report back to him, he hoped before sundown. Then he spent the rest of the morning at the Little Rock Public Library, not that there was anything he needed to research, but just to touch bases with librarian Bob Razer, who had become his good friend since their first meeting months earlier. Razer had helped him research the dossiers on the five former chiefs of staff who had worked for Governor Bradfield, not one of them for longer than six months, and had permitted him access to some arcane databases not open to the public. Razer made no secret of his own contempt for Shoat Bradfield and was only too happy to help Harry “dethrone” him (Razer’s word). Now Harry just wanted to chat. He said nothing about Lydia’s kidnapping, nor his own plan to infiltrate the Bradfield organization. The only reference to the campaign was indirect: he told Bob Razer that he had stopped en route to the Northwest Arkansas Airport yesterday to visit with Professor Daniel Levine at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and had picked up a copy of his translation of De Architectura Antiqua Arcadiae, which Harry had mentioned to Razer before, and the existence of which Razer knew about because of his familiarity with The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks (though he was suspicious about the book because he had stopped believing in fairy tales in the fourth grade).

Harry patted his Compaq laptop. “I’ve scanned it right into my hard drive. I read most of it last night. And it does indeed reveal everything that would happen to Vernealos Anqualdou for the rest of his life. Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“Maybe you’d better not tell me,” Razer said. “It would take all the fun out of watching Ingledew rising up against Bradfield.”

Harry laughed. “I know. And I sort of wish I hadn’t already learned the outcome of the election myself.”

Harry did not tell him, because he couldn’t divulge Lydia’s kidnapping, that there was no mention in the ancient Roman text of any female on Anqualdou’s staff who was abducted by the opposition. This had slightly disappointed Harry, just as he’d been disappointed that there was no mention that Anqualdou had a crafty henchman whose job was to uncover all the secrets of the opposition, and to rescue that female assistant. The trouble with prophetic stories is that they can’t always bother themselves with every little detail of the future.

Before he could go off for his showdown with the Bradfield thugs, Harry had one more visit to make. For lunch at Cuzins, a sports café, his companion was Garth Rucker. Garth was flabbergasted that Harry didn’t order a drink, and Harry had to fabricate an excuse.

“My stomach’s been bothering me,” Harry said, which wasn’t entirely a fib. Out of consideration perhaps, Garth ordered simply a beer instead of his usual Scotch-and-soda. In their close association, Harry had gradually developed a tolerance if not a liking for the fiendish and ratfaced little fellow in tweeds and spectacles who was now officially his Deputy Director of Opposition Research, and who indeed had been earning his salary. Harry had decided that he didn’t want Garth involved in the plot to rescue Lydia, and he wasn’t even going to tell Garth that Lydia was missing, but he did explain the motive of his own trip to Little Rock: he told Garth about the scheme of killing off the negative campaign by making it too intrusive and unpalatable. Garth was incredulous at first, but the more Harry told him about the idea, and the more examples Harry offered of “Vernon’s Vices,” the more Garth began to understand and appreciate the maneuver. Garth wasn’t simple-minded, his tongue to the contrary. It had been Garth’s clever observations and hunches which had led to the discovery in Portland, Oregon, of the Reverend Dixon’s former child-mistress, the hymn-singer, and it had also been Garth’s powers of persuasion, slicker than Harry could have mustered, which persuaded the young lady to return to Arkansas.

“So very shortly you’ll be the Chief Director of Opposition Research for the Ingledew campaign,” Harry informed him.

“I will? Where are you going?” Garth wondered.

“I’m joining the Bradfield campaign,” Harry said with a smile.

“What?” Garth cried. “You couldn’t!”

“But I am. Tell me, do you think they’ll let me replace Rafferty Oates? Or just become his assistant, or what? Do you personally know Rafferty?”

“Oh, hell yes, Raff and I go way back. And he’s not going to give up his job to you, even if you are Harry Wolfe. They’ll probably have to fire him! Which they could easily do. After all, what has he done for them? Except for enhancing some of those albatrosses which he never discovered in the first place. No, I think that they’ll give him the bum’s rush as soon as you show up. But I can’t believe you’ll do it.”

“Thanks, Garth. That’s all I need to know, that Rafferty Oates is dispensable.” When lunch was over, he got Garth to give him a ride over to Republican Headquarters in its swank location on Chenal Parkway.

As they were shaking hands, Harry said, “Be sure to watch the ten o’clock news tonight. You might see me. You might see me and Lydia too.”

“Oh? Is she in town?”

“I believe she is,” Harry said, and then got out of the car and entered the site of his showdown. He was impressed with Republican Headquarters: the place looked ultra festive and ultra patriotic and ultra upper-class. If Lydia was being held hostage in Republican Headquarters, she was living in style. It lacked the homey touches that Monica had imparted to Democratic Headquarters in Fayetteville. The contrast between the two pointed up a central difference in the candidates’ support: anybody who was well off and comfortable and satisfied with life and the status quo was going to vote for Bradfield; Ingledew would pick up only the less wealthy and the discontented and people who thought too much for their own good.

His appointment was for two o’clock and he was fifteen minutes early, but they were waiting for him. “Welcome to Li’l Rawk,” Billy Joe Slade said, pumping his hand. “I ’spect it aint your first visit, though, is it? Ah moan make ya comfy.”

“Good to see you again, Harry,” Carleton Drew said. “Make me happy when I guess why you’re here.”

Did Carleton know that he’d come to get Lydia? “Guess away, Carleton,” Harry said.

Rafferty Oates’ handshake was only half-hearted and he wasn’t smiling. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure of making your acquaintance, Mr. Wolfe. And I wish I could call it a pleasure, but I can’t.”

“I doubt if anything pleases you,” Harry observed.

Billy Joe Slade asked, “Y’et yet?”

Harry had a bit of difficulty understanding him. “Excuse me?” he said.

“Y’et yet?” Slade said again, and when Harry continued his failure to grasp it, Slade pantomimed the forking of food into his mouth, and Harry realized he was asking him if he had yet eaten.

“Oh, yes, I had lunch with Garth Rucker at a place called Cuzins,” Harry declared.

They ushered him into an inner sanctum with comfortable chairs. Billy Joe closed the door and said, “Ah moan fix ya a drink. Whatja like?”

It was the second time Slade had uttered Ah moan and Harry was beginning to realize that it was short for I am going to. He shook his head. “Thanks, but I haven’t had a drop for a week. Doctor’s orders. My stomach.”

“Well, then, I reckon none us boys gonna drink nothing neither,” Billy Joe said. “But they’s sody pop ove are if ya git thirsty.” He gestured and Harry understood that ove are meant over there. Billy Joe sat down and clapped his hands together as if summoning a servant. “So. Well now yessireebob. Let’s us hear what all goodies you’ve brung us.”

“You made me an offer,” Harry said. “Remember?”

“What kind of a offer?” Slade said. “Oh. Yeah. Back when we tried to give you a job?”

“Yes. In fact, you said that if I’d tell you how much Ingledew was paying me, you’d double it.” He turned to Carleton Drew. “Did they double your salary?”

Carleton grinned. “Pretty much,” he said.

“We figured you must have got an offer you couldn’t refuse,” Harry said to him. “But we also figured you must have had other reasons for leaving us.”

“Like the leopard, I couldn’t change my spots,” Drew said. And when nobody laughed at his wit, he took the trouble to explain, “My TV spots. I’m proud of my spots, and Ingledew wouldn’t let me make them.”

“So you had an ulterior motive besides the money,” Harry said. “Likewise, I’m not just looking for money. But let’s start with that. I’m making seven a month. Will you pay me fourteen a month?”

Billy Joe Slade coughed and said, “Well heck now that’s a whole lot and I’d have to clear it with the Big Boss. But a man of your talents, shit, you’d be worth every bit of that. Why don’t you just hang on a second, and I’ll put in a quick call to the top.” Slade reached for the phone, punched one button, and said, “Martha. Billy Joe. Is he in? Let me talk to ’im.” A few moments later, he said, “Boss, yeah, just like you figured, he’s ready to talk turkey. But this is one humongous turkey. He wants fourteen a month. Yeah, that’s right. What? Well, hang on and I’ll ask him.” Slade redirected his attention to Harry. “He wants to know what you’ve got on Ingledew that we don’t already know.”

“I don’t know where to begin,” Harry said, picturing all of Vernon’s Vices in his mind. “For starters, how about this? He’s been ingesting peyote with a redskin chick who would knock your eyes out.”

“Huh? What’s pay oatie?”

“It’s a cactus that produces tubercles which have narcotic properties. It’s also called mescal.”

“Aw yeah,” Billy Joe said. “Hang on.” And he relayed this information into the phone. Then he reported back, “He wants to know how come Raff never found out nothing about that. Huh, Raff?”

“I think Wolfe is making this up,” Rafferty Oates said. “Ingledew doesn’t know any redskin chicks.”

“Have you seen his little black book?” Harry asked Oates.

“What book?” Oates wanted to know.

“He keeps this black book,” Harry said. “Only it isn’t so little. I’ve not only seen it but I’ve scanned it into my computer.” He patted his Compaq laptop. “It’s pretty damned extensive. Did you know that he has in it the names and phone numbers of hundreds of women in Newton County and all over Northwest Arkansas?”

“You’re making that up!” Raff Oates protested petulantly, but Billy Joe was back on the phone excitedly relaying this information to the Governor. The conversation continued a while longer, and then Billy Joe said, “Will do, Boss! Let the good times roll!” and he hung up and said to Raff Oates, “Boss said for you to take a walk.”

“Take a walk where?” Oates wanted to know.

“Go to N’Orleans and have a good time. Whatever. We don’t need you no more.”

“Well, screw that!” Raff recommended, snapping shut his briefcase and preparing to leave.

“Don’t let the door hit you in the ass, Raff,” Billy Joe said.

Actually, Harry was pleased to notice, the door did strike Rafferty Oates on his hip as he slammed it behind him. Harry conjectured that a man like Oates, seeking revenge for his dismissal, would promptly offer his services to the Ingledew campaign and would tell them all he knew about Bradfield’s sins. Here was a situation, now, Harry hadn’t bargained for but was potentially very useful, because in order for the anti-defamation scheme to succeed through over-saturation, the Ingledew campaign had to be able to match the Bradfield campaign’s imputations, slander for slander. That would not only give the public indigestion that much sooner, but also, just in case anybody believed any of the shit about Ingledew, it would give them plenty of fresh shit about Bradfield.

But one thing was beginning to bother Harry. Didn’t Rafferty Oates know about the kidnapping of Lydia? Why hadn’t he threatened to expose them, if he did? Or maybe only Slade and the Governor himself knew about it. Maybe they’d kept it secret even from Carleton Drew.

“Fourteen a month,” Billy Joe said to Harry. “Jesus, I don’t make that much myself! But welcome aboard. You need a office or anything? A car maybe?”

“There’s one little catch,” Harry said.

“Aw-aw!” Billy Joe exclaimed. “I was afraid of this. What is it?”

“I suppose I should have mentioned it before you told Oates to take a hike. You might want him back if you’re not willing to make this deal with me. I will make the switch and accept the fourteen a month, but like Carleton I’ve got an ulterior motive too, besides the money. I want you to let Lydia go.”

Billy Joe looked genuinely puzzled, a great job of acting. “Lydia who?” he said. “Go where?”

“Lydia Caple!” Harry snapped. “What other Lydia is there?”

Billy Joe exchanged looks with Carleton Drew, and Carleton looked as puzzled, if not more so. “Let her go?” Carleton said.

“Okay,” Harry said. “Maybe she voluntarily joined up with you people, just like I’m doing. If so, I want to know that. If you’ve forcibly taken her, I want to know that. My services for Bradfield do not begin until she appears, one way or the other, is that clear? Where is she?”

“Well, holy shit, Harry,” Billy Joe said, spreading his hands. “Fuck a duck and crying out loud. This is total news to me. Let me check with the Boss.” And he punched his phone again and said “Martha, git him quick.” And then, “Hey Boss, Harry Wolfe thinks we’ve got Lydia Caple. Look under your desk and see if she’s hiding anywheres. No kidding, Boss. Okay, here.” He handed the phone to Harry. “Boss wants a word with ya.”

Harry Wolfe spoke for the first time with his former arch nemesis, the object of all his snooping, Governor Patrick Thomas “Shoat” Bradfield, who said, “Hey, Mr. Wolfe, let me say how thrilled I am to have you as part of my team, and I sure do hope we’ll make beautiful music together. But what’s this about Lydia Caple missing? I haven’t heard a word. How come it’s not on the news?”

Harry tried to determine the degree of sincerity in the man’s words, and had to admit to himself that there was no tinge of dissembling. “She’s apparently been kidnapped,” he said. “She just disappeared. Naturally suspicion has fallen upon you.”

“Well, goddamn it, why would we kidnap her? Do they think that we’d do something like that without giving a thought to being the Number One Suspect? Of course we wouldn’t! I’m not that dumb. Here, I’m on another line to the head of the State Police, and we’ll have every available man out looking for her. Hell, we’ll call in every available man from his sleep or his fucking or his fishing spot!”

Harry was obliged to explain to the governor the agreement with the Newton County Sheriff’s Department to keep Lydia’s disappearance a secret for forty-eight hours, but he realized he was talking to a vacant line. The Governor was on another line, talking to someone else, and when he came back and Harry had to repeat himself, the Governor said, “Too late, I’ve already mobilized the entire state police. Naturally the FBI will come in too, and if they want to grill me, or grill any of my men, they’re welcome to do it. But believe me, Harry, I didn’t have anything to do with it. Now let me talk to Billy Joe again.”

And Harry passed the phone back to Billy Joe and Harry listened intently to catch any note of complicity or duplicity in Billy Joe’s voice, but Billy Joe sounded genuinely alarmed by the news. Harry’s lovely dream of the Hollywood movie disintegrated, and he realized it wouldn’t have done him any good if he’d had a pistol. Now all he could do was turn his attention to the big question: If the Bradfield people hadn’t abducted Lydia, who had?

“My God, this is just awful,” Billy Joe said to Harry when he hung up. “You might just have to hold back a little on all that juicy stuff you’ve got on Ingledew, until this is over. Boss says he’s going to call a moratorium on the whole fucking campaign until Lydia has been found.” Billy Joe turned to Carleton Drew. “He wants to go on the evening news to make an announcement to that effect. Tonight.”

When Governor Bradfield appeared on the ten o-clock news, Harry was already drunk in his room at the Capital Hotel, and had just enough sentience to make out what the governor was saying. From the moment that Lydia had first been discovered missing, Harry had denied himself the sustenance of his liquor, because he needed to remain absolutely clear-headed throughout his plot to rescue her, but now that he was convinced Bradfield hadn’t perpetrated the deed, there was nothing holding him back, and he killed off a quart between supper and the ten o’clock news. He tried to call Garth Rucker, but got no answer and could only leave a drunken message on his message machine. He succeeded in calling Hank Endicott, and Hank offered to come and help him get drunk, but he had passed the point of social drinking. He managed to slur to Hank the basic facts: it did not appear that Bradfield had anything to do with Lydia’s disappearance. Goddamn it. Watch what the fucking governor has to say on the news and then finish your fucking column and stick it in tomorrow’s paper.

The next morning’s issue of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, when Harry retrieved it from beside his door sometime in the late afternoon, did indeed have a whole column of Hank Endicott’s devoted to the disappearance of Lydia Caple, but it was overshadowed by a front page article on the subject, with lesser articles on the reactions of Shoat Bradfield and Vernon Ingledew, and even an editorial decrying the disappearance of a woman who had once been a dear colleague of the paper’s editorialists. Harry phoned room service for a turkey sandwich and another quart of bourbon, and he stayed in bed.

The next several days were a total blank in the history of Harry Wolfe. He had the vaguest of memories of having showered and dressed and gone downstairs to the Capital Bar and spent some time there staring at the TV, and of a barmaid who was nice to him for a while but then became rude and summoned some goons to return him to his room. Or maybe that whole scene was just one of the several weird dreams he had, off and on, in the course of those several days. His first clear awareness of anything, eventually, was of the red light on his bedside phone. It kept flashing. Somebody was trying to give him a message. He picked up the phone and identified himself and was told that a Garth Rucker had been trying to reach him. He punched in Garth’s number.

“For fuck sake, Harry,” Garth said. “Where have you been? I’ve been trying for days to get you.”

“I’ve been indisposed,” Harry said.

“Drunk, you mean?” Garth said. “Did Bradfield turn you down or something? Or, more likely, you know something about all of this and you’re keeping it to yourself by hiding away with a bottle.”

“That sounds sort of like it,” Harry admitted.

“Did you see this morning’s paper?”

“What day is this?” Harry asked. When Garth told him the day of the week and the date of the month, Harry had to admit that he hadn’t seen a newspaper in recent memory.

“Or watched TV, even?” Garth wanted to know.

“I was watching some TV down in the bar the other night,” Harry allowed.

“Well, you’re in the dark. Sorry I woke you up. But I am the present holder of your previous job, and my services have been requested in the search for Lydia. Especially because, as today’s paper said, Vernon Ingledew is offering for her safe return a reward of one hundred thousand dollars.”

Harry whistled, and then could say only “Wow.”

“Go out and get yourself a newspaper,” Garth said. “No, you can just read mine. I’ll be there in half an hour, and if you need a ride anywhere, be ready to go.”

Harry asked room service for a pot of coffee, and then he retrieved the day’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette from outside his door, scanned the headlines and found the story not on the front page but inside. Vernon Ingledew was indeed offering $100,000 for information leading to the safe return of Lydia Caple, whose abduction he decried as “an act which, if it is political, casts all politics in an ugly light.”

While Harry was in the shower, the phone rang, and he stepped out dripping to get it, in case it might be Garth again. But it was his new boss, Governor Bradfield, and he was not in a good mood. He said he’d been trying for three days to reach Harry. “I know you’re a mystery man and you hide yourself and lurk in the dark and all that crap, but you sure are hard to reach.”

“Sorry,” Harry said. “That’s just the way I am. What’s up?”

“Have you fully convinced yourself that I am not in any way responsible for Lydia Caple’s kidnapping?”

“I’d already done that last time I talked to you,” Harry said.

“I am strongly tempted to match Vernon’s offer, and make it two hundred thousand dollars. But our campaign coffers are running low.”

“That’s white of you,” Harry said. “Even the thought.”

“But as you know, we’re not going to do anything more in the way of campaigning, negative or otherwise, until Lydia is found, which could happen any moment now that the reward is in place. So I thought I’d keep you busy with a little assignment, if you have nothing better to do, and I assume you have nothing better to do, right?”

“I always have something better to do,” Harry said.

“Maybe not better than this. You know you mentioned some Native American woman that Ingledew was involved with, smoking dope and whatever. That intrigues me. Where’d she come from?”

“Oklahoma,” Harry said.

“But Ingledew is keeping her in Stay More?”

“Maybe keeping isn’t the word. She’s richer than he is, I’d guess,” Harry said. “So what do you want me to do about it?”

“I want you to check her out,” Bradfield said. “I want you to find out everything about her. I want to know her whole history, everything she’s ever done, all the men she’s been involved with, everything. I want a complete dossier on the girl.”

“That’s a tall order,” Harry muttered.

“I’m paying you fourteen thousand dollars a month,” Bradfield reminded him. “Plus expenses. Get your ass in gear, and if you have to, go over to Oklahoma and talk to everybody who ever knew this girl. Prove to me that you’re as good as they say you are.” Without waiting for Harry to say “Yes, sir” or “Righto” or anything, the Governor disconnected.

Harry told Garth Rucker about his new assignment. “Want to drive me to Pawhuska, Oklahoma?” Harry asked.

“I’m not beholden to you that much,” Garth protested.

“Okay, forget it,” Harry said. “We could just start in Stay More. Maybe the Indian would tell us most of what we need to know.”

“‘We’?” Garth said. “I’m not your assistant any more.”

“But don’t you want to sniff around and see if you can’t win a hundred thou?”

They drove to Stay More. Or as close to it as they could get. There was a roadblock a mile from the village set up by state troopers, who wanted to know their business. Harry told the troopers that he and Garth both worked for Vernon Ingledew and were friends of Lydia Caple. The trooper radioed somebody else and gave Garth permission to drive on, but warned him that they might have trouble getting past the FBI roadblock farther down the road. And sure enough, the FBI agents wouldn’t let them proceed. The agent in charge explained that so many people, eager to get the reward, were trying to enter Stay More that the troopers turned those back and the FBI were interested in anybody who got past the troopers as possible suspects.

“Can I make a phone call?” Harry asked the agent and he borrowed Garth’s cell phone and called the number of Larry and Sharon in the village, his usual host and hostess during his visits to Stay More. Monica answered.

“Harry,” she said. “Where are you?”

“Right outside of Stay More, at the FBI roadblock. Garth’s driving.”

“You might not get any closer,” she said. “It’s a madhouse around here, with all the cops and FBI. I don’t think Stay More has ever had as many people in it, and everybody seems to think that this is the command center or information office. Sharon and Larry have gone to Harrison to stay in a motel until it’s all over. So has Ekaterina.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Harry said. “I was hoping to have my room for a night or two.”

“Well, I’m sure Larry and Sharon wouldn’t mind if I let you in. But what are you doing here? I thought you had defected to the Bradfield camp.”

“To all intents and purposes,” Harry said. “But Garth and I are still pals, and he’s driving me. Can you tell me how to reach Bo?”

“He and Arch and Cast are up at Vernon’s,” she said.

“Do you know if Bo is packing his Nokia? I need a number to reach him.”

“It’s a very private number,” Monica declared. “I don’t know if he’d want me to give it to you.”

“Monica, honey, if you must know, I’m just pretending to be working for Bradfield. I’m as loyal as you are.” There, Harry said to himself: I’ve said it.

The FBI agent asked them to step out of their car, and took them to a large van, like a house trailer, where they were fingerprinted then separated from each other and interrogated at length. Garth was finally permitted to leave and left word for Harry that he’d contact him later, but meanwhile they were keeping Harry, because, he learned, his name was on the “short list” of suspects. They asked Harry all kinds of questions, and they wanted his driver’s license for identification, but he had to explain he’d had to surrender it in dc after a DWI conviction. The only identification he had was his old Social Security Card, and they wanted him to duplicate the signature on it, but he’d got the card when he was only fourteen and his signature had changed considerably since then. He tried his best to sign his name as it had once been signed, and fortunately among the several FBI agents was a signature expert who could determine that his present signature still bore certain characteristics similar to his fourteen-year-old signature.

They grilled him for the better part of an hour, wanting to know when he’d last seen Lydia and what was the nature of their “working” relationship as well as their “personal” relationship. Wasn’t it true that they were rivals within the Ingledew organization? Wasn’t it true that because Lydia was nominally Harry’s boss—since oppo men answer to press secretaries—that he resented her?

Finally they said to him, “You can make one phone call,” and he wanted to know if he needed a lawyer. “You haven’t been arrested,” they told him. “Yet.” So he called the special Nokia number of Bo’s that Monica had given him.

“Busy?” he asked Bo.

No, Bo told him, they were just loafing around and waiting for suppertime, and Harry was welcome to join them for supper. “If you can get away,” Bo said. “Garth arrived a little while ago and told me they’ve got you in custody.”

“Bo,” Harry said, “could you talk to them? Can you tell them that I would have no reason on God’s earth to have kidnapped Lydia?”

“Why would they believe me?” Bo said. “They’ve got my name on their list of suspects too. I take it, by the way, that your Little Rock operation was a failure. Are you completely convinced that Bradfield had nothing to do with Lydia’s disappearance?”

“Yeah, he’s innocent,” Harry declared, believing it.

“But you went ahead and made the switch…or pretended to.”

“I did a good job of pretending,” Harry said, and hoped the Nokia cell line was secure.

“So if you’re now part of the opposition, what are you doing in Stay More? Spying on us already?”

Harry told him about his assignment from Bradfield: to compile a dossier on Juliana. He supposed he’d have to go to Oklahoma to do most of it, but he might as well start here.

“If you wanted to interview Juliana,” Bo said, “you might have to go to Oklahoma anyway, because she and Ben have gone back to her house there. But I could tell you all you need to know about Juliana.”

“Her whole history? Bradfield wants to know everything about her, the works: every detail of her life. I suppose it’s academic if she’s gone for good, and out of Vernon’s life.”

“Oh, she’ll be back,” Bo declared. “Eventually. It was just getting too crowded around here with all these state troopers and FBI agents.”

“Bradfield is paying me fourteen a month.”

“You’re not worth it.”

Monica came and got him. The FBI agent told him not to leave town until they’d had further opportunities to talk with him. Monica drove him to Larry and Sharon’s house. She herself was dressing up to go to the dinner at Vernon’s, and although Harry was invited, he didn’t much feel like it, especially because he had already been replaced by Garth Rucker and would be considered a turn-coat. So Monica showed him what was available in the fridge and freezer, plenty for supper, and she produced a stoneware demijohn of Chism’s Dew, and Harry got comfortable with his hosts’ copy of the text of The Choiring of the Trees, his favorite of all the Harington novels, and he spent his evening drinking and refreshing his memory of those parts of the novel which told about the fabled “glen of the waterfall,” which had figured importantly as a setting in several of the Stay More novels and was especially crucial to Choiring. He was asleep—or passed out—when Monica returned, and she must have lifted the book from his lap.

The next morning the FBI wanted to talk with him some more, and he obliged. He had nothing to hide, and he didn’t need a lawyer. No, he told them, he had no idea, since he’d never been there, where the cemetery of Daniel Lyam Montross was located. They tested him, trying to trick him, but he really had nothing whatever to hide.

They let him go, and he took a stroll out across the fields to the double-wigwam that Thomas Bending Bear had, with the help of George Dinsmore, constructed for Juliana Heartstays. It was still very much there, its arched doorway open, and a few of the younger free-ranging pigs wandering into it. He shooed them away and stepped inside and looked around. There were just a few items: woven mats, a bed of sorts, some cooking utensils. He probed and pried but found nothing of interest. Nothing in writing; he might as well have been transported back to the dawn of the Osages in preliterate times. The only thing of interest that attracted his professional eye was outside the wigwam, in the dirt: the imprint of the tire track of a Pierce-Arrow.

He returned to Larry and Sharon’s house and made a couple of sandwiches which he packed into a paper sack with some fruit and chips. He poured himself a last drink of the Chism’s Dew and took one final glance at the copy of The Choiring of the Trees and studied a particular passage of it again.

“Where are you going?” Monica asked him, but he simply said that he was restless and needed some exercise, and had decided to take a hike. He’d see her at suppertime.

Then he climbed to the first benches on Ledbetter Mountain behind Larry and Sharon’s house. He passed through what he realized, from his reading of Lightning Bug, was the old orchard that had once been Latha Bourne’s. When he reached the first bench of the mountain, he had to pause a long time for breath, realizing how out of shape he was, and realizing also his mistake: he should have brought along a jar of water to serve as a canteen. He grew impossibly thirsty. But he climbed on, and in time found a spring trickling out of the earth, and knelt to drink.

It was almost noon before he finally located what had been the sheep pastures of Nail Chism, the hero of Choiring, and from there he followed the instructions as given by Latha Bourne in describing it in a letter to Nail:

There’s this one place, way up against the corner of your upper forty, where the two tree lines sort of converge at the edge of the pasture on what looks like a dead corner up against the mountainside, and is a real dark shade of green, like the mouth of a cave, and you feel sucked into it, or drawn up thataway, and when you get into it you see there’s an old road there, just a trail, if you know the spot I mean, and if you follow that trail up through the woods for quite a ways, a mile or more, with the woods growing deeper and darker, you come to this glade where a waterfall comes down off the very top of the mountain, as if it was gushing up out of some powerful spring up there. The glade is sunny, with the sun shining right on the waterfall, but it’s dark all around, and dark in these several sort of half-caves where it looks like Indians must have lived. It was kind of scary, and I didn’t stay up there very long, but while I was there I thought of you, a lot, and I had a strange vision as if I could see you just living and dwelling in that hidden glade.

Harry found the trail. He not only found the trail, but he detected quite clearly, coming from a different direction, the tracks of the tires of an antique automobile once popular and widely owned by the oil-rich Indians of Oklahoma, and at that moment he knew the hundred thousand dollars was his, and he even began to think about ways to spend it. The tracks were fairly fresh, and in celebration of finding them Harry stopped and sat on a rock and ate his lunch, and had no trouble finding a spring where he could lap up enough to wash the sandwiches down. Fastidiously, he spread his handkerchief for a tablecloth, and ate slowly and leisurely, in no hurry at all now. When he was finished, he dusted the crumbs off his clothing, enjoyed a cigarette, and then he went on, the trail growing steep and the tire tracks finally stopping but being replaced by clear footprints: many footprints, the prints of a big man and the smaller prints of two—no, three different women, as well as of a dog. He happily joined his footprints to theirs.

Harry Wolfe had never in his life been out in such a wilderness, and the very wildness of the forest, the fragrances of it, the bird-sounds, filled him with awe, he who was so blasé about everything. He had not yet quite reached the glen of the waterfall when the dog got wind of him and began barking and then appeared.

The dog approached him and snarled ferociously but Harry held out his hand for the dog to sniff in recognition of him. And Harry said, “Good dog, Threasher. Nice dog, Threasher. That’s a boy.”

Chapter eighteen

From the moment back in March when she had first eagerly joined the campaign, she had constantly enjoyed a sense of being on top of things. She was not only an in-charge manager but also a take-charge person, quick to see what needed to be done and doing it herself if she couldn’t teach her underlings how to do it. She required virtually no supervision from those among the Samurai who outranked her (as all of them did); in fact, the most common expression among all of them, whenever anybody needed to find out something or to get something done, was “Ask Monica.” She had her fingers on all the strings, and she knew many things that nobody else knew.

For instance, she knew that unless the campaign started an active fundraising drive, they would be all out of money within a matter of weeks. And if anybody did claim the reward for finding Lydia, they’d not only be flat broke but in serious debt. She had been meaning for some time now to approach Vernon and ask him if he was aware of how close to insolvency the campaign was, and that was before he’d made that sensational offer of a reward. She knew that fabulously wealthy Diana or almost equally rich Juliana could help, but only to a point, since there was a $2,500 cap on contributions. Bo and Arch were going to have to get off their duffs and solicit hundreds of such amounts from the state’s usual political contributors.

The money problem didn’t really bother her. What troubled her most right now—what in fact actually frightened her—was the way she no longer felt in charge, of the campaign or even of her own destiny. Oh, these FBI guys and state troopers deferred to her as if she were the commanding general of the whole operation, and she could make them all jump through hoops if she wanted. She had chosen to reveal her first name to none of them, and she distinguished among them by whether they called her “Ms. Breedlove,” “Miss Breedlove,” or “Ma’am.” Although the FBI’s base was on the front porch of the Woman’s—Ekaterina’s—temporarily abandoned house, just about everybody else, including a lot of the FBI agents themselves, considered the old store/post office, Larry’s and Sharon’s house, to be the nerve center of the investigation, and they acted as if Monica were in charge of it all.

But from the moment poor Lydia had disappeared, Monica felt she was losing her authority, or her ability to make anything happen. She herself couldn’t find Lydia, and had no idea what might have happened to her. She had a clear intuition that Lydia was still alive, and when one of the FBI agents had reported to her (as if she were in charge and could say something significant about it) that Lydia’s pets (a dog named Beanbag and several cats) had been abducted from her apartment in Fayetteville, Monica understood that whoever Lydia’s kidnappers were, they weren’t compounding their crime by exterminating her pets; they were compassionate enough to kidnap her pets too because Lydia missed them so much. Wherever Lydia was being held—and it could be anywhere in the Ozarks or the whole state of Arkansas—she at least had the comfort now of having her pets with her. The FBI guys didn’t believe Monica’s theory when she told them this, but she assured them that the kidnapping of the pets was good news.

Still, Monica couldn’t help dwelling upon the possibility that she herself might be kidnapped—and would the kidnappers bother to take her dogs and cats also? Hazel Maguire practically lived now in Monica’s Fayetteville apartment, because Monica was spending so much time in Stay More—even before this hubbub surrounding Lydia’s appearance, and Hazel was in charge of feeding the dogs and cats…and protecting them from kidnappers.

“If you hear of my disappearance,” she told Hazel by phone just this morning, “take the animals and move into some out-of-town motel where nobody knows where you are.” She told Hazel that Harry Wolfe too had been kidnapped, or was missing for several nights now, and that the FBI and state troopers were keeping a round-the-clock watch on Monica, for her protection. And presumably on Bo, Arch and Cast as well, the only other remainders of the Seven Samurai. Monica tried to explain to her favorite among the FBI guys, at least the man who was most respectful and even obsequious toward her and called her “Ma’am”, that Harry Wolfe was no longer in Ingledew’s campaign anyhow, that he had recently defected to the Bradfield team, so whoever had a political motive for kidnapping Lydia would not have kidnapped Harry for the same reason.

She was scared, and she didn’t sleep well at night, not even with a wide-awake sheriff’s deputy sitting in the next room. This latest kidnapping, and the renewed investigation surrounding it, was a guarantee that Larry and Sharon were not going to come home, and it was lonely in this house without Harry, even if there were always deputies or troopers or agents watching over her. Bo told Monica that if she wanted to, she should feel free to go on back to Fayetteville, where her presence could be used in campaign headquarters, even if the campaign was in limbo. He also told her that he’d request constant protective surveillance for her in Fayetteville. She told Bo she’d just as soon stay more in Stay More, if she could be useful here. She didn’t love the town as much as she had before its population had filled up with all the agents and cops, but it was still, as she had once suggested to the Samurai, a better place for real campaign headquarters than Fayetteville. And apparently Bo, Arch and Cast, not to mention Vernon himself, liked it here too, for a variety of reasons: Cast, as she well knew, was deeply involved with a local girl, Sheila Kimber, and could scarcely bear to spend a moment away from her. And Bo…just as Monica knew practically everything about everyone (except who might have kidnapped Lydia), she knew that Bo was head over heels into an affair with Jelena Ingledew, and possibly even Vernon knew about it but couldn’t feel too jealous because he himself was scandalously involved with the Indian Juliana.

Now that Indian woman and her pansy bodyguard had left Stay More—for the same reason Larry and Sharon and Ekaterina had left: it was just too overpopulated and raucous—and presumably Vernon would have to start paying attention to Jelena again. That was fine with Monica; she’d much rather be jealous of Jelena than of Juliana.

The truth that Monica had been facing for some time now was that she was hopelessly in love with Vernon Ingledew, not because he was so powerful and possibly could become much more powerful as governor but because he was just such a very nice man, the kindest man she’d ever known, as well as the smartest. She hated the idea that he was being unfaithful to Jelena. At churches all over Arkansas, when Monica had given her standard Ingledew-is-really-a-Christian-even-if-he-doesn’t-think-so speech to youth groups and ladies’ socials and men’s Bible Classes and such, she had invariably been required to answer questions about Vernon’s living out of wedlock with his first cousin, and she had mastered a lovely little set speech in which she pointed out that they were common-law husband-and-wife (which was true) and they had simply avoided marriage because first-cousin marriages were not a good idea.

There was no way that Monica was going to be able to give any speeches defending Vernon’s affair with that Indian woman. Even though she was skeptical of the Samurai’s plan to counterattack Bradfield’s dirty politics by supersaturating the public with Vernon’s real and imagined vices, she knew that it was the only way that they could slip the fact of Juliana Heartstays past the public’s curiosity.

Just as Cast Sherrill had been required to take over Carleton Drew’s responsibilities after the latter had defected, the disappearance of Lydia had thrust Monica into a position as substitute press secretary for the Ingledew campaign, and she’d been required to deal with the newsmen and TV crews who had slipped into Stay More in search of developments about the kidnappings, and, during moments when there were no new leads at all in the search for Lydia and Harry, taken to quizzing Monica about the progress of the campaign, and, with Cast’s help, she’d started giving daily briefings to the media. Governor Bradfield had gone on television to announce that while he still fervently prayed that Lydia and Harry would be found, it was time to return to business as usual, and therefore he was rescinding the moratorium on politics which he had declared. Then Bradfield had the effrontery to suggest what he called a fourteenth albatross: that Lydia and Harry were missing because they had become disillusioned with Vernon Ingledew, with the implicit suggestion that Vernon himself might have done away with them.

One by one the state troopers and sheriff’s deputies disappeared from Stay More. One by one the FBI agents packed up their gear and left town, most of them having the courtesy to say goodbye to Monica and to thank her for her help. Only a skeleton crew of state troopers and sheriff’s men were still bivouacked in town, assigned to protecting any more Samurai from being kidnapped. Surely the newsmen were growing tired of hearing Monica announce the same thing at each day’s briefing: Vernon Ingledew refused to continue the campaign until Lydia and Harry were found, even if Harry had defected to the Bradfield camp before he was kidnapped.

“But what if they’re both dead?” a reporter had asked her.

Monica shuddered, but replied, “Vernon Ingledew will make another statement if that should prove to be the case.”

Larry and Sharon returned to their home, and thanked Monica for having taken such good care of it during their absence. Ekaterina did not return to her home. Had Larry and Sharon seen her in Harrison? No, they suspected she might even have gone to a larger city, or even gone home to Georgia or Svanetia or wherever.

Now that Larry and Sharon were returned, Monica felt tempted to take Bo’s advice and go on back to Fayetteville. She missed her pets; it had been a long time. Sharon suggested that Monica could go to Fayetteville and get her pets and bring them here to live. Monica appreciated her hospitality but knew that she was putting a strain on it, especially with the deputy who had been assigned to protect her and had moved into what had been Harry’s room.

Larry and Sharon wanted to know all about Harry, whose disappearance disturbed them as much as, if not more so than, Lydia’s (after all, Lydia had “belonged” to Day and Diana, whereas Harry was theirs). Monica told them that she’d been the last to see Harry, that morning when he’d told her he was restless and needed some exercise, and had decided to take a hike. She hadn’t bothered to look out the windows to see which way he was hiking, north, east, south or west. The state troopers had brought a pack of bloodhounds, and Monica had fetched Harry’s pillowcase, which bore his scent, for the dogs to sniff. But a whole day of the hounds roving the countryside had not apparently picked up that scent. Everybody currently in the Stay More population had been questioned, but nobody else had seen Harry. It was almost as if Monica had uttered an enchantment which made him vanish, but if that were so she had no witching words to make him reappear. It never occurred to any of the searchers—as it would eventually occur to Arch Schaffer before he personally took up the quest in the next chapter—to glance at the copy of The Choiring of the Trees that Harry had left open facedown at a crucial passage.

“Next chapter?” Monica said aloud to herself, and began wondering why she had thought those words, and decided that life is sort of like a book and that there would be another chapter after this one. She did not feel, as Harry himself and Day Whittacker felt, that she was actually a character in a novel which had a beginning, middle, and, if not an end, a promise of a future.

But she definitely had a feeling that everything which was happening—or failing to happen—was quickly turning into past tense, into something over and done with and finished and final, irrevocable, which she could no longer control with her managerial skills. She really ought to go on back to Fayetteville. She told Larry and Sharon that she intended to go back to Fayetteville, in another day or so.

Then Vernon came to see her. It was a warm day in early October, unusually warm, almost like summer still, so they sat on the front porch, Monica in the swing that so many people young and old had sat in during the heyday of this building’s service as store and post office. Vernon sat in the captain’s chair.

He still could not look at her (would he ever be able to?) but at least he could talk freely, although for a long minute they could only sit there like a couple of country people enjoying the store porch and watching the autumn color emblazon the surrounding trees. And then he spoke.

“I’m awfully sorry about Lydia. I know what she meant to you. Don’t you worry, she’ll turn up.”

“I sure hope so,” she said.

“It looks like you’re my press secretary now,” he said to the post that held up the roof of the porch.

“If you say so,” she said, and did not tell him that she’d been acting in that capacity for many days now. “I couldn’t even begin to replace Lydia, though.”

“I’ll bet you could,” he said. “You’re like her in so many ways. Whether you know it or not, you’ve tried real hard to be like her. You’ve watched her so much that you even seem like her. You don’t look like her, or sound quite exactly like her, but in many ways you’re better than she.”

Monica’s heart skipped a few beats, and she realized that when Vernon spoke these last words he was looking directly at her, for the first time. Now it was she who could not look at him. Her eyes could only study her hands in her lap. She didn’t know what to say. She thought of saying, “If you say so,” but she had already said that and didn’t want to sound repetitious. Finally she managed to say, “That’s real kind, sir. It makes me proud. But you don’t really need a press secretary if you’ve canceled the campaign until after Lydia is found. And after she’s found, of course she will be your press secretary again.”

“Certainly we hope that Lydia will turn up any minute now, safe and sound,” he said. “But if she does, that doesn’t mean you’ll lose your new job to her. You’ll still be press secretary. And after I’m elected, you’ll be my press secretary for four years in Little Rock. Would you like that?”

Oh, she would like that! Again she hung her head modestly and said, “That would be just fine. But right now I’m supposed to be running campaign headquarters in Fayetteville.”

“We’ll get somebody else to run the headquarters,” he said. “You’d rather be in Stay More anyway, wouldn’t you?”

She almost told him of Sharon’s and Larry’s offer to let her keep her dogs and cats here. She didn’t want to get too chummy. Instead she voiced a concern: “But when Lydia comes back, and finds out I’ve got her job, what will you do with her?”

“If Lydia comes back—when Lydia comes back—we’ll appoint her to a different job. Maybe we’ll give her Bo’s job. I’m thinking of firing Bo.”

Monica caught his eyes. “You are? How come?”

“I think you know why,” he said.

She had thought that it was her own secret that she knew everybody else’s secrets, but somehow she hadn’t been able to hide it from her boss. It put her on the spot. All she could answer was kind of flippant. “I could make a pretty good guess.” But then she couldn’t resist adding, and surprised herself at how much her voice sounded like Lydia’s, “But how could you fire him for that, when you yourself have been fooling around?”

Vernon laughed. “I don’t hold Bo’s liaison against him. What I don’t like is that he’s so wrapped up in it he can’t concentrate on his work.” Vernon laughed again, and added, “All of this is strictly between you and me, I hope you understand.”

“Does he know you know?”

“Not yet.” Although she waited to hear him add something to that, such as But he probably suspects I do or I’m going to let him know soon, Vernon added nothing.

“As your press secretary, what spin am I to put upon these various Stay More liaisons?” she asked, surprised at herself for her matter-of-fact firmness, and added quickly, “Assuming, of course, that we resume the campaign.”

“You don’t have to worry about Juliana, because we probably won’t see her again until after the election.”

Monica was thrilled to hear that, but wondered how Vernon knew. Of course quite possibly Juliana and Vernon had one last fling before she left town, during which she had told him—or he had requested of her—that she would become invisible until after the election.

“Doesn’t that weaken the plan of the Samurai to overload the public with your sins, to the point where nobody will care anymore?”

Again that laugh of Vernon’s. Monica was beginning to wonder if she possessed a sense of humor she didn’t fully understand. “I like the way you put that,” he said. “I haven’t heard the crackpot plan described so succinctly. But no, I can assure you the Samurai have such a long list of my sins ready to glut the public that Juliana’s absence from the list will scarcely be noticed. You’ve seen the list, haven’t you?”

She nodded. She had a copy of it, nearly a hundred real and brazenly fabricated instances of Vernon’s misconduct, enough to make the most slavering citizen surfeited, jaded, and eventually indifferent. “Let me ask you,” she said. “Are you keeping in touch with Juliana? Have you phoned her? Or vice versa?”

Vernon studied her for a moment as if he were trying to determine why she would be asking that question. His reply wasn’t evasive but just pensive. “No, I haven’t. I don’t have her number in Oklahoma, which is unlisted. She has her own reasons, I suppose, for not calling me.”

“You’re not even sure that she’s in Oklahoma?”

“No.”

“How do you know she’s coming back after the election?”

“Well, look,” he said, and gestured in the direction of the wigwam, where there was much activity going on: workmen were laying the foundations for her mansion. Just this morning a fleet of rumbling cement trucks had groaned into town and out to the construction site of Juliana’s house. Monica also knew that Day Whittacker was busy in the woods marking trees to be uprooted and transplanted laboriously to Juliana’s homesite.

“If she’s not coming back until after the election,” Monica asked boldly, “and there’s no way you can contact her, how can you ask her for a financial contribution to the campaign, or to your generous reward offer?”

Again he studied her as if it were taking him a while to answer his own question about why she would be asking that question. “I wasn’t planning to ask her that,” he said.

“Sir,” she said, not comfortable to be calling him sir but needing to preface such a statement respectfully, “the campaign is nearly broke. You need money. Much money, and soon.”

He smiled. “You really do know everything, don’t you?”

“Not quite everything.” She was proud of her restraint in not telling him that she had seen and studied the FBI’s files on Lydia, as well as on Juliana Heartstays and Harry Wolfe. The agents who had been so deferential to her hadn’t even questioned her right to read the files.

“I’ll take care of the money,” he said. And he rose and patted her on the shoulder and went off into the world to get money or whatever he had to do.

As long as the campaign was still in abeyance, Monica didn’t have much to do in her new position as press secretary, and the few stragglers among the newsmen and TV people who had invaded Stay More finally gave up and went on back to their cities. The town was almost back to normal. Monica wished that Ekaterina would come back, because Monica had really enjoyed talking with her. That mysterious woman from Svanetia knew all kinds of things about Stay More that nobody else knew. But Ekaterina did not come back, and her big house, now that the FBI were no longer using its porch as a command center, seemed forlorn. Monica wasn’t bored; she found time to read a novel that Larry loaned her, called Butterfly Weed, which she found very interesting not only because it was about Stay More but also because it was full of people named Breedlove, her ex-husband’s family.

On the day that her private sheriff’s deputy politely informed her that he was being recalled back to Jasper, the county seat, and that there wasn’t much danger she’d be kidnapped too—although he said to her in parting, “Watch your back, sweetheart”—she had another visit, this time from Bo Pharis. Bo even sat in the same porch chair that Vernon had sat in, and Monica again sat in the swing, although the weather had turned a bit chilly and they both kept their coats on.

He started with a question, “Monica, honey, did you ever see the movie called The Seven Samurai?” She knew the allusion but hadn’t seen the movie, so she had to shake her head. Bo gave her a plot synopsis, and pointed out, “One by one, the Samurai are killed defending the village, until in the end there are only three left. I too lost my sheriff’s deputy this morning, but I’m not complaining, and I’m not nervous. You shouldn’t be, either. If we followed the script exactly, the remaining three would be Cast, Arch, and myself. But I don’t believe that life follows art. Do you?”

She knew a lot about art, and she appreciated that Bo was being cultural with her, and was avoiding, at least for the moment, politics. “I always believed that art’s job was to follow life,” she said. “Was there a Samurai like me in the movie? How did she get killed?”

“None of them were women,” he said. “You know, I’ve thought about renting that film from a video store and showing it to all of us. But it might disturb us. The capture of Lydia and Harry are just a bit too analogous to the movie.”

“But in the end,” Monica said, “the village is saved, the bandits are destroyed, and goodness triumphs, right? That’s all that matters.”

Bo smiled at her. “I’m glad you’re philosophical about it.” And then he abruptly changed the subject. “Now, if you will, tell me: what did Vernon say about me?”

The question caught her by surprise, and of course she wasn’t going to reveal any of the contents of Vernon’s conversation with her to anybody. She certainly wasn’t going to tell Bo that his job was in danger. So she lied. “We didn’t mention you,” she said.

“No? What did you talk about?”

“Lydia, of course. He’s giving me her job. If that’s all right with you?”

“Think you can handle it?”

“What’s to handle? I don’t have anything to do, until we get the campaign back in gear.”

“Okay, that’s the main thing I wanted to talk to you about. I am curious if Vernon mentioned me in any way, shape, or form, but my main motive for this conversation is to say this: certainly we hope the two missing Samurai will be restored to us, but we simply cannot afford to keep the campaign in hiatus. The election is less than a month away, and the Bradfield campaign is back in full steam. If we’re going to beat Bradfield, we’ve got to proceed with Plan B: the self-smear procedure revealing Vernon’s Vices.”

“Try telling Vernon that. He won’t let us use it until Lydia is found.”

“I’m afraid that Vernon and I are not communicating these days.”

“Then how did you know that he’d talked with me?”

“I was watching, from a distance. I saw the two of you here on this porch. For quite a while.”

“Why aren’t you and Vernon communicating?” she asked with a straight face.

“There’s been a misunderstanding between us,” Bo replied.

“Is the misunderstanding named Jelena?” she asked.

He shot her a look that was part astonishment, part annoyance. “So Vernon did talk to you about me! Did he say anything about me and Jelena?”

Press secretaries, if they aren’t born that way, must learn to be good liars. But what she said wasn’t a lie: “Vernon was not my source of information about you and Jelena.”

“Then who was?”

“Bo, this is a small town. It’s a very small town. It’s practically an unpopulated town.”

“Monica, I’m still your boss, and I request that you tell me not only who told it to you, but what was said.”

“If newspeople are permitted to protect their sources,” she declared, “I think press secretaries should be able to protect theirs too. I’m not telling, sorry.”

“Okay, but can you tell me what you know about me and Jelena?”

“Just that you’ve put yourself in a compromising position for a candidate’s campaign manager. In other words, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

He winced. And then he blurted, “But we’re in love!” Having blurted, he blushed.

“Really? Does Jelena know this?”

“She certainly does.”

“Maybe she’s using you,” Monica suggested.

“Using me? How?”

“She doesn’t want to move to Little Rock if Vernon is elected governor. So maybe she hopes that you can help her avoid that. I mean, not that she hopes you can keep him from getting elected. But that if he does move to Little Rock, you can steal her away.”

Bo Pharis studied her. “Monica,” he said, “you’re a lot more perspicacious than anyone gives you credit for.”

She wasn’t completely sure what the word meant, but she knew she was being complimented. “You’re not planning to become Vernon’s chief of staff, are you?” she asked.

“Heaven forbid!” he exclaimed. “I wouldn’t want to live in Little Rock if I were made CEO of Alltel!”

“So what are your plans after the election? Are you going to take Jelena back to Cincinnati?”

“I couldn’t go back to Cincinnati if I were made CEO of Proctor and Gamble!”

“Then you plan to stay more in Stay More,” she declared.

He smiled. “That’s not outside the realm of possibility.”

“Well,” Monica sighed, “I suppose if we’re going to go ahead and publicize Vernon’s Vices, we might as well throw in all the juicy details of your affair with Jelena.” One thing Lydia had told her, before her disappearance, was that once all of the monotonous revelations of Vernon’s Vices had been piled up, they could get away with anything; they could reveal the affairs between Vernon and Juliana, and Bo and Jelena, without consequence, because if the public was truly inoculated against scandal, one more scandal wouldn’t even be noticed. (“We could even reveal,” Lydia had suggested to Monica, “that Vernon is using you more flagrantly than Bill Clinton used that other Monica.”)

“I’d rather keep that quiet, if we can,” Bo said. “My hope is that with all the other tidbits in that flapping flock of a hundred albatrosses, the public won’t need to see the lame bird of the candidate’s common-law wife losing her heart to the candidate’s campaign manager.”

Monica studied him for a moment before replying, “If you say so, I’ll do what I can to keep a lid on it.”

“Okay. Tomorrow is VV-Day. Tomorrow we leak to the Bradfield people the whole list of a hundred of Vernon’s worst iniquities. How do we make the leak?”

Monica knew it was a rhetorical question asked of himself, but since she was taking charge in so many other ways, she answered it for him. “Send Bradfield a fax from Harry. Tell him that Harry is being held captive by the Ingledew campaign—no connection with Lydia’s kidnapping—and that he’s alive and well but they won’t let him go because he had defected to Bradfield. He has escaped his captors just long enough to access this fax machine, on which he sends the enclosed: the list of one hundred trespasses of Vernon Ingledew.”

“Monica, you’re a genius.”

“If you say so.”

That night she had a third visitor, in the middle of the night, in the middle, alas, of only one of her dreams, in which Lydia appeared to her and congratulated her on the way she had taken over the press secretary’s job. Lydia said she was alive and well and even happy, since she had her pets with her. “Where are you?” Monica called out, in the dream, and called it again louder, and then louder, and opened her eyes to see Sharon, who told her she must have been having a nightmare.

But although that was only a dream, dreams have a way of getting us ready for life, so it did not surprise Monica when, before breakfast, upon going out onto the porch to stretch and watch the sun come up over Dinsmore Hill, she found on the edge of the porch a heavy rock weighting down a folded sheet of paper, which she took and unfolded and discovered a message written to herself, and signed by Lydia. Her first thought, since she’d just suggested to Bo the idea of forging a fax under Harry’s name, was that somebody was playing a cruel joke on her. But it was unquestionably Lydia’s handwriting. And it said:

Dear dear Monica: My captors are allowing me to write and send one note, like when you’re arrested and allowed one phone call. You’re my choice; you’re the one I want most to know that I’m still alive, and I’m not being mistreated or abused in any way, and I’m fairly well-fed, and as you may know I even have my precious cats and my dog with me, and they are just fine too. For whatever it’s worth, my fellow prisoner is Harry Wolfe, who hasn’t been acting like a prisoner at all.

I am making a good guess that you’ve already replaced me as press secretary, and that doesn’t bother me the slightest. I know you can do a great job. My captors told me that you were virtually the commanding officer during the busy operations of the state troopers, sheriff, FBI, et al. You’re a multi-talented woman, Monica, and I’m proud of you, and proud if I was able to teach you anything during our long friendship. You will go far.

I suppose it’s time to go ahead and put into effect the precarious Operation Vernon’s Vices, if you haven’t done so already. We should have started much earlier, but my kidnapping distracted everybody. I wish I could be there to make sure that it’s handled adroitly, but I have the utmost confidence in you, dear Monica.

My captors wish for me to request of you that you do not reveal this message or its contents to anybody. You must agree to this. They say they will harm me if you do not. If you have received this message, and agree to keep it to yourself, indicate your willingness by opening the shade in your room’s window which you customarily keep closed. Just for one day and night. Burn this sheet of paper, now.

I hope I’ll see you again, when the election is over, and I know our man Vernon is going to be victorious. Don’t waste any prayers on me, honey. Pray for him.

Love, Lydia.

How had this been delivered to her? She searched the dirt in front of the porch, and found a set of a man’s footprints, but could tell nothing about them. Possibly a plaster cast should be taken of them, but how could she request that without revealing the reason? It was terribly frustrating not to be able to tell anyone that Lydia was alive and well. But she went at once into her room and opened the shade that covered her window. It made her feel exposed, and she’d have to be careful tonight to turn off the light before undressing or anything. She did not like being ordered around, by Lydia’s captors or anybody, and for this reason she did not burn Lydia’s note but folded it several times and buried it in the bottom of her purse.

Later that morning she called Cast Sherrill, who was staying, as usual, at his girlfriend Sheila’s house, having abandoned his room at the Ingledew double-bubble even before he’d become involved with Sheila and Bo had become involved with Jelena. Cast had speculated, to Monica, that the affair between Bo and Jelena might not have developed if he, Cast, had still been resident up there.

Now she told Cast, who of course had replaced Carleton Drew as their media expert just as she had replaced Lydia and that creepy Garth Rucker had replaced Harry, that today was VV-Day, and that she was getting ready to use Larry’s fax machine to send “Harry’s” message to Bradfield, along with the list of a hundred of Vernon’s Vices. Monica wanted Cast to be prepared for the media blitz.

“Have you cleared this with Vernon?” Cast wanted to know. “You know he won’t allow it as long as Lydia is missing.” Monica was in a bind. If only she were able to get word somehow to Vernon that Lydia was alive and well, Vernon might consent to the full resumption of the campaign. But the shade in her room was up, and open, a reminder to her that she was giving her solemn word not to reveal Lydia’s existence to a soul.

A kindly soul, a fourth visitor, appeared to Monica later that morning. It was Arch, who had continued to stay at the house of Day and Diana, and who was nominally second-in-command, or, as far as Monica was concerned, since Bo was no longer on speaking terms with Vernon, and since Arch once before had been required to take command when Bo was missing, was now in charge. Monica liked Arch more than any other Samurai, next to Lydia. He was a person you could feel comfortable with, and open up with and feel close to, and trust and have confidence in, and who you could feel completely untroubled speaking prepositions at the end of sentences to.

“How goes it?” Arch said, sitting himself down in the same captain’s chair where Vernon and Bo had sat. Somehow he seemed like he belonged to such a chair more fittingly than they had.

“Well, in case you haven’t heard, it’s VV-Day,” she said.

“That’s what Bo tells me,” Arch said. “Are we all ready?”

“Except for having obtained approval from the candidate himself,” she said.

“Which he won’t give without Lydia,” Arch observed.

“Arch,” she said, and realized this wouldn’t be directly violating the covenant of the open shade, “I know Lydia’s alive. I just have a powerful hunch. Call it woman’s intuition, or better yet call it the result of being on the same wavelength with Lydia for many years. And also she appeared to me in a dream last night, and told me she was alive and well.”

“I’ve never stopped believing she’s alive and well,” Arch said. “And not only that, but I think she’s probably being held somewhere in the vicinity.” He swept his arms to encompass the world around them. “Anywhere out there in some abandoned house or deep holler or the forest fastness, she could be a prisoner.”

“But who is holding her? And why?” Monica said, and wondered, since her captors could deliver her message to Monica, why they hadn’t ever bothered to deliver a ransom note. Whoever it was didn’t need any ransom. Whoever—and Monica began to have a new suspicion—was too rich to need any ransom and must have some other motive.

“I have a hunch,” Arch said. “Day and Diana and I were talking about it last night. The three of us were searching our memories to recall anything Lydia might have said the last time we saw her, which was at suppertime just before she went up to look at the grave at Daniel Lyam Montross. The four of us had sat around the table after dessert and we all had talked a while about Montross. Lydia had been reading about him in another of Harington’s novels.

“Lydia and I had agreed beforehand that we wouldn’t reveal to Day and Diana the plot of the Samurai to dump all of Vernon’s Vices on the public, even though I knew that it had been Day’s idea in the first place.

“But these were not the things that we remembered had been talked about after supper that night. It was Diana who recalled that Lydia had asked them—or us, including me—what we thought of Juliana’s plan to build a house and become a permanent resident of that part of Stay More that had belonged to her ancestors.

“And it was Day who recalled the exact words that Lydia had spoken. ‘Do you realize Juliana Heartstays has no idea that all of us know about her affair with Vernon?’ And Lydia told us how she’d gone to interview Juliana, on the pretext that the public would be fascinated with the story of how Juliana was building a new home on her ancestral lands, which Vernon had given to her, and that the conversation had led to Lydia’s knowledge of, or suspicion of, Juliana’s affair with Vernon, and that Juliana had become upset and alarmed that Lydia knew.

“And Lydia told us one other fragment of the conversation. It was my turn—not Diana’s or Day’s—to remember almost her exact words: that Juliana had said to her, ‘You had better keep it to yourself. If it gets out, I’ll hold you to blame for any trouble it causes.’”

Things were meshing for Monica now. She said, “So Juliana went on believing that only Lydia knew about her affair with Vernon.”

“Right,” Arch said. “You’re starting to catch on. And you’ll recall also how Juliana had come to Stay More in the first place intending to wipe out all the Ingledews. You’ll recall how her manservant had a whole arsenal of weapons in the trunk of that Pierce-Arrow.”

Monica wanted so desperately to tell Arch about Lydia’s message to her, which had convinced Monica that whoever was keeping Lydia was somewhere in the neighborhood. But she couldn’t violate that part of the open-shade agreement. She asked Arch, “So why didn’t the FBI consider them prime suspects?”

“What did the FBI know about them? The FBI had to let them leave town along with several other people, like your hosts Larry and Sharon, and Ekaterina, but they had never said or done anything while they were in Stay More that would have made the FBI suspicious of them.”

Monica told Arch about having read the FBI file on Juliana, which contained nothing suspicious or even interesting, except that her childhood had been marred by abuse, from both her father and an uncle. Juliana had never been in any trouble with the law.

“Did they have a file on Ben?” Arch asked. Monica shook her head, and Arch said, “Maybe they should have. I suspect he may have had some trouble with the law.”

“So you think that Juliana and Ben were the kidnappers, and that they’re still somewhere in the neighborhood?”

“That’s my hunch,” Arch said, “and I’m going to follow it. Could you let me have a look at Harry’s room?”

The past tense is coming to an end, Monica thought, knowing they were nearing the end of her chapter, after which time would shift. Time would take a dramatic leap into the present tense. She said, “I suppose we’d have to ask Larry and Sharon permission for that.” But Larry and Sharon had gone to Jasper for the day. So she took Arch into the house and let him into Harry’s room. There wasn’t much there: Harry’s suitcase, which contained a few changes of clothes and his shaving kit. He had left nothing much behind, and the FBI had already gone through it.

Arch tapped the black Compaq laptop on the table. “This his computer?” he asked. “Or Larry’s?”

“Its Harry’s,” she declared. “But I’m sure it’s password protected.”

Arch found the copy of The Choiring of the Trees. “The novel he was reading,” Monica said. “I haven’t read it myself. I’ve been planning to.”

“You ought to. It’s great,” Arch declared, careful to keep it open as he had found it. “This must have been the page he was reading just before he took off. Get me a blank sheet of paper.”

She got him the paper, and he wrote down on it a long passage describing a sheep pasture and an old road and a trail leading through the woods to a glen of a waterfall. Monica’s eye caught one phrase: “several sort of half-caves where it looks like Indians must have lived.” She brightened, and knew the past tense was near an end.

“Take me with you,” she requested.

“Sorry, honey,” he said. “It’s too dangerous. And besides, aren’t you supposed to be putting VV-Day into effect?”

She nods, and the past tense is past.

In the present tense, she doesn’t even tell Arch that half of that hundred thousand he’s about to win ought to be hers.

Chapter nineteen

His first big problem is to find that pasture on Ledbetter Mountain where those two upper corners converge upon a hidden entry to the woodland trail leading to the glen of the waterfall. He asks Day and Diana, when he goes to change into his hiking boots and warm outdoor clothes, if they know where Nail Chism’s upper pasture was located, but not being natives of Stay More, they do not. They want to know where he’s going. He simply tells them that in the absence of anything better to do he wants to visit the old Chism home place, as described in The Choiring of the Trees. Diana offers to go with him (Day is very busy planning the transplanting of huge trees) but he thanks her and says he’ll find it by himself.

Diana packs a picnic lunch for him, with a bottle of good Chateauneuf-du-Pape, and he takes also a spare gallon of water in plastic jugs. He wears his Big Smith bib overalls with a flannel shirt and a light jacket. He unlocks the toolbox on his Chevy Silverado 4-by-4 and gets out the German Luger and checks his supply of ammunition. His father had brought the Luger back from the Great War in 1946, a magnificent weapon. The holster has a wooden back that is designed to serve as a stock so the pistol can be converted into a rifle. He has never used it as such, but he knows how to do it. He hopes fervently not to need it. He can’t remember the last time he shot anything. He is a member in good standing of Handgun Control, Inc. and completely supports Vernon on the extirpation of all firearms. He decides not to wear the holster strapped to his overalls waist but just to leave it on the seat of the Chevy, ready to hand.

All the rest of the morning he drives the back roads and trails on and around Ledbetter Mountain, looking for any sign of a promising turn-off where perhaps tire tracks would indicate a Pierce-Arrow having turned repeatedly from the road and entered. He broods just a bit over the fact that this is VV-Day and that his presence and advice and authority might be needed. He consoles himself with the thought that if his hunch is correct, what he is doing is far, far more important than VV-Day. He also broods just a bit over being alone. He has asked himself if he ought to have someone to help him or back him up, and has realized the foolhardiness of making himself into a lone paladin. If the search is successful, does he want all the reward money to himself? No, he doesn’t need nor want the reward, nor even the glory nor even anyone knowing that it is he who has found Lydia and Harry. He considers that after he’s found them, he’ll take them back to Stay More and make them promise that they’ll never tell anyone who has found them. Two women (both natural blondes) have already offered to accompany him on his quest, and he has turned them both down. Because they are women? No, Monica could hold her own in any job requiring a man’s strength or wits. He just doesn’t want anybody else. If he is so certain of his hunch, and so certain now just where the kidnappers are hiding, as Harry has been certain before him, why doesn’t he just notify the sheriff or the state police? Let them do it. Well, why hadn’t Harry? Maybe Harry too had said to himself what Arch says now to himself, “If this doesn’t work, there’s nobody to blame but me.” The big difference between him and Harry, of course, is that Harry didn’t have any weapons.

Odd that he should be thinking about this matter of being alone when he happens to run across George Dinsmore. George is in his Explorer and they roll down their windows as the vehicles meet and stop on a high backroad. They exchange howdies. They exchange comments on the weather (partly cloudy, occasional sun, upper 40s Fahrenheit).

“Just out for a drive, maybe?” George says.

“Yeah, I’m just looking for the old Chism place that I read about in a book,” Arch says.

“Which old Chism place was that?” George wonders. “The Chisms was thick as possums all over this here mountain.”

“Where Nail Chism grew up and raised sheep,” Arch says.

“Aw, yeah,” George says. “The Seth Chism place. But I misdoubt if you could git to it, even in that four by four truck. And there aint nothin up there left to look at, nohow.”

“No old trail that still leads to it?”

George seems to need a moment a think. “Not from this side of mountain, I reckon not. If you could find the old Bourne place, you could cut back up through one of them loggin trails behind it, and maybe you’d come out in the Chism back forty.”

“Could you tell me how to find the old Bourne place?”

“I could show you. I couldn’t rightly tell you.”

“I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”

“No trouble a-tall. Just follow me.” George drives on down the road and waits while Arch finds a place wide enough to turn in and back up and turn around. Then Arch follows him as they negotiate a few forks in the road and reach the east face of Ledbetter Mountain. It is close to noon when they finally come across a long-abandoned home place, of which nothing remains except the stone chimney and the stone well with its pulley hoist collapsed. They pull into the yard and stop. Arch notices that the high weeds of the yard and the wagon path to wherever the barn was, weeds that have been killed by frost but are still thick and tousled, have been mashed down in parallel indentations as if by the tires of a car. He gets out of his truck and takes a close look and discovers that there are fresh tire tracks beneath the weeds.

“Looks like somebody else beat you to it,” George observes, and gets out of his Explorer to take a close look at the tire tracks. “Don’t look like anybody’s tracks I’ve ever seen before, except on that there Pierce-Arrer that them injuns has got.”

George and Arch look at each other for a moment, and Arch watches George’s face as it begins to take on the lineaments of comprehension. Arch has been wondering if he should reveal his actual mission to George, but has decided not to. He still wants to go alone, even if it might be a great advantage in this wilderness to have George as a guide and back-up. But George is a sharp old hillbilly, and in the same moment that Arch observes George’s face reaching awareness, George has also developed a suspicion of why Arch might be trying to find the Chism place. “Well,” is all Arch can say.

“Well hell,” George says. “You aint lookin for the Chism place just on account of some book you read. You’re maybe trying to find how Nail Chism’s upper pasture is a-hiding the way you git to that there lost holler where the waterfall is at.”

“You caught me,” Arch admits. “I’ve got a real strong suspicion that’s where Lydia is, and these tracks sort of confirm it, don’t they?”

“Now how come a nice feller like big ole Ben would want to take her off?”

“That’s what we all want to know, when we find him…and her. He was probably just following orders from his boss. And she had her own good reasons for wanting to silence Lydia.”

“I’ll be switched,” George says. He thinks just a little while more, and then he asks, “Are we gonna ride in your rig or mine?”

“I was planning to go alone,” Arch says.

“You want all that reward money to yourself, do ye?”

“I don’t want any of the reward money,” Arch says.

“Hell, Vernon wouldn’t pay it to me, nohow. I’m just a employee of his’n.”

“So I’ll just go on by myself, then,” Arch declares.

“You don’t think you could stop me, do ye?”

“Probably not.”

“Let’s go in your crate. Might scrape hell out of the bottom and knock off the tailpipe.”

So they go in the Chevy, George first retrieving from the Explorer his shotgun. Getting in, George notices and admires the Luger. They follow the tracks up the back of the property and across a rusty fallen barbed-wire fence and into the woods. There the tracks become clearer as the tracks leave the weeds behind and impress themselves into the dirt of the forest. It is an ancient trail, and Arch follows it, up and up the mountain, his vehicle slipping and lurching and jolting and straining. “Maybe we should have taken yours,” he admits. He has never driven a 4-by-4 onto a path as wild as this, and he cannot believe that a Pierce-Arrow would have been able to negotiate it without drives in all four wheels. “Maybe we ought to go on foot,” he suggests, but George tells him they are still a good long ways from their destination.

“Aint been up this way since I was a boy,” George declares, “but I reckon I can still find it.”

Eventually the trail levels off and breaks out into a pasture, an old pasture grown with brush and briars and weeds. Arch smiles to see that one corner of the pasture is up against a steep part of the mountain, and that in the darkness of that corner can be detected the entry as described in that passage of The Choiring of the Trees.

“That’s it, huh?” he asks, and drives to that corner and discovers there the same trail that will take them to the glen of the waterfall. “Here we are,” Arch says. “We just follow this, right?”

“If we can,” George says.

“Let’s stop for a bite first. You haven’t had lunch, have you?”

“Naw, but there aint no McDonald’s or Wendy’s hereabouts.”

Arch fetches the sack that Diana has prepared for him, and tells George who gave it to him. There are enough sandwiches in there to feed a platoon. And he discovers a bunch of paper cups. Did Diana think he’d have company? He opens the bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape and pours a cup for George. Arch doesn’t want to drink enough to cloud his mind, but he does want to drink enough of it to wash down the excellent sandwiches Diana has prepared for him.

While they are eating and drinking, he spies the cigarette butt out there on the ground and he fetches it and shows it to George. “Pall Mall,” he says. “That’s Harry’s brand.”

“I sure do hope they’re still alive and kicking,” George says.

“We’ll soon find out,” Arch says, cranking the truck and driving on.

“There’s one samwich left,” George says. “You want it?”

“You can have it,” Arch says.

“Maybe we better save it for the dog,” George declares. “You know them injuns has got this pointer name of Threasher, who’ll come a-yappin at us when we git close. Maybe he’ll hush if we throw him some lunch meat.”

“There might also be Lydia’s dog,” Arch remarks. “Let’s hope the dogs like roast beef.”

The trail comes to an end when the tire tracks of the Pierce-Arrow they’ve been following abruptly turn off into a thick brake of cedars and disappear. There is but a footpath from there on.

“What’s in there?” Arch asks, pointing to the cedar trees, as he stops the car and gets out.

“I’ll cover your back,” George offers with a grin.

Arch walks into the brake and discovers a makeshift but substantial shed, one end open, constructed of scrap boards and tree branches and the same basketry interweaving as the wigwam down in the valley. It is obviously the work of Ben, intended as a garage for the Pierce-Arrow, but the car isn’t there.

He returns to his Chevy. “That’s where the Pierce-Arrow ought to be,” he tells George. “There’s a primitive sort of garage behind those cedar trees. But there’s no car in it.”

“I reckon we’ll have to go on foot from here,” George says. George carries the shotgun in one hand and the meat for the dogs in the other. Arch straps the Luger in its holster to his waist, and puts his Motorola cell phone into the bib pocket of his overalls. George too has a tiny Nokia in his jacket pocket, but neither man has mentioned calling back into the village, or to George’s boss, to let them know what they’re doing.

They haven’t gone far on the footpath when they hear the motor, and turn to look back down the trail to see the Pierce-Arrow arriving behind their vehicle. Ben is alone in it, and after he stops and gets out, he walks only a slight distance toward them, and waits. They retrace their steps toward him. He is holding a shotgun cradled in his arm put pointing toward them.

“Is that you, George?” Ben calls. “Who’s that with you?”

“Just Archie Schaffer,” George says, and Arch isn’t sure how he feels about that “just,” which sounds somehow belittling.

They walk on, until they are face to face. George and Ben have their shotguns pointed at each other, but Ben suddenly reaches out with both arms and bear-hugs George mightily and even lifts him up above the ground. “I’ve missed you!” Ben exclaims.

“Nothing was stopping you from calling me to let me know you was okay,” George says, and pats his Nokia. “You know my number.”

Ben laughs. “Oh, yeah. Sure,” he says sarcastically. “I couldn’t call my own mother to wish her a happy birthday.” And then, remembering his manners, he holds his hand out to Arch for a handshake. “Mr. Schaffer,” he says.

“Mr. Bending Bear,” Arch says, shaking his hand.

The Indian says something in his Osage language which Arch can’t understand, but Arch can tell from the tone of it that Ben is not very happy that Arch is here.

George says, “First big question, of course, is have you been taking real good care of Lydia Caple and Harry Wolfe?”

“You’ll soon see for yourselves,” Ben says, a bit petulantly, as if the question impugned his hospitality. “But first I must ask you gentlemen to put your weapons down on the ground.” And he passes the muzzle of the shotgun back and forth between them. George lays his shotgun down, and Arch removes the Luger and its holster from his waist and lays it down, and Ben picks up the two weapons and takes them to the Pierce-Arrow, where he opens the trunk and puts them in, but, before locking it, requests, “I’d also appreciate having possession of your cell phones.” They give him their Nokia and Motorola and he adds them to the guns and locks them in the trunk. “Now,” he says, “if you’ll give me a hand with the groceries, I won’t have to make two trips.” Ben opens the rear door of the Pierce-Arrow, and loads their arms with grocery sacks bearing the imprint of the one supermarket in Jasper. “Would you mind getting that sack of cat food?” Ben asks Arch, who takes up the 20-pound bag of Special Kitty®. Ben, holding his shotgun casually in the same hand with a bag of groceries, motions them back onto the trail. “It’s not quite a mile,” Ben says. “I would have preferred to have built the garage much farther in, but neither my car nor yours could negotiate the crossings of the little creek that winds through the hollow. A little exercise never hurts anyone, does it?”

“I reckon not,” George allows. They have to walk across some foot-logs to get across that creek, and that is tricky with arms full of grocery sacks. The little creek, Arch realizes, is probably the run-off of that fabled waterfall, whose cascade in the distance he seems to be able to hear already.

“Monica has her shade up,” Ben says to Arch offhandedly as if just commenting on the weather. Arch doesn’t know what he’s talking about, unless, in addition to being some kind of homosexual, Ben is also a peeping tom. When he gives Ben a quizzical look, the latter asks, “She didn’t tell you about the shade?” Arch shakes his head. “Have you talked to Monica today?” Arch nods his head. “What did you talk about?”

“All kinds of things. The campaign. The weather. The possibility that whoever kidnapped Lydia is still somewhere not too far from Stay More.”

“Monica didn’t tell you about a message she had from Lydia?”

“No, she didn’t,” Arch says, wondering why she hadn’t.

“Then what are you fellows doing here?” Ben wants to know.

“I suppose the same that Harry was doing here: trying to find Lydia.”

“Well, you’ll soon see both of them,” Ben declares, and guides them onward into the glen of the waterfall, where suddenly two dogs come charging toward them, yapping and woofing. They sniff around Arch and George until they’re satisfied that since Ben is with them, they’re not intruders. “Threasher and Lydia’s dog Beanbag,” Arch declares, and gives them a pat. Arch looks around at the glen and the bluffs surrounding it, and the cascading waterfall, a sylvan paradise. There are ferns growing everywhere, and mosses on everything, and big old virgin trees that nearly blot out the sky even without their leaves. Arch has read about this place in several of Harington’s books, which didn’t do justice to it. The bluffs surrounding the glen are pocked with the dark mouths of caverns, and the largest of these mouths has been partially covered over with the same sort of basketry-and-board construction of which Ben had made the garage. There is a door, and Ben holds it open for them with pride that comes from having made the door. They enter the snug confines of the large shelter, one commodious cavern extending deep back under the bluff. There are four people sitting on improvised chairs at a table rigged from branches and boards beside a large open fire, its smoke vented through the top of the shelter’s front wall: there are the hostages Lydia and Harry, and their captor Juliana. And there is Ekaterina. Or is Ekaterina the captor?

“You idiots,” Harry says jovially to Arch and George, rising to meet them and shaking their hands. “What makes you think you could do something that I couldn’t do?”

“We were armed,” Arch says. “For a while.” And then he asks, “Are you okay, Harry?”

“At least I’m not tied up any more,” Harry says.

“Ben, you’ve got to stop taking captives,” Juliana says. “We’ll run out of beds.” She gestures at the rear of the cavern, where there are several beds made from ticking filled with leaves. Then she addresses Arch and George, “Welcome to our cozy but temporary home. I’m sure we can make up beds for two more. But here, let’s put away those groceries.” Juliana and Cat and Lydia sort and store in various niches of the cavern the groceries, and then Juliana says, “I’m sorry we can’t offer anything better to drink than sassafras tea or its cousin, sarsaparilla.” So everyone sits around the fire with their drinks (Arch has never had sarsaparilla before, and discovers it is just carbonated sassafras tea), and Juliana asks Arch, “So how did you find us, when all the resources of the law failed to do so?”

“The law but not Harry Wolfe,” Arch says. “We used the same method he did. I took the liberty of looking to see what he’d been reading lately, and came across the key passage in The Choiring of the Trees.”

“Hey!” Harry protests. “You didn’t get into my computer!”

“Yeah, I did, but that’s all I saw. I didn’t peek at your porno. I just read the directions on how to get here. I knew this glen of the waterfall has traditionally been a really good hiding place, going all the way back to the Bluff-dweller Indians who used to live here.”

“Ah, yes,” Juliana says. “The Bluff Dwellers. We’ve taken over one of their shelters, just as my ancestors did when they first came to Stay More, long before the white man, and found that the Bluff Dwellers had lived here for hundreds of years.” Juliana smiles somewhat apologetically. “I suppose we could never have blamed the Panthers for usurping our ancestral lands, when after all we usurped the lands of the Bluff Dwellers.”

“But they were already long gone when your ancestors got here, weren’t they?” Arch observes.

“Yes, although I can’t imagine why they would’ve wanted to leave. Not a place like this.”

Ekaterina speaks up. “It’s assumed that disease, an epidemic perhaps, did away with the Bluff Dwellers. And it’s quite possible that the Osage who inhabited the valley down below never discovered this lost hollow.”

They, all seven of them, just sit around for the rest of the afternoon talking about Indians and computers. Then Juliana says, “If you gentlemen would like to go explore the hollow and have a close look at the waterfall, while we womenfolk prepare supper, we’ll trust you to return in time to eat with us. But just to be sure you don’t attempt to escape, I’ll have to ask Ben to guard you.”

Harry, who seems to have been allowed to explore the neighborhood previously, acts as their guide and conducts them, under Ben’s supervision, on a little tour of the hollow, and Harry points out things to them: the fact that there is another cavern concealed behind the waterfall, and there are in fact not one but two waterfalls which seem to be one because of the closeness of their juxtaposition although they come from different springs. Harry shows them a few artifacts left behind by the Bluff Dwellers and unmolested by later explorers: shards of pottery, fragments of cloth woven of grasses, and a few graves where Bluff Dwellers were buried. The late afternoon sunlight enhances the autumn color in the trees and makes the waterfalls seem like a deluge of diamonds. When this is all over, Arch tells himself, I’ve got to bring Beverly and Eliot up here to see all of this.

At supper they are treated to the fruits of Threasher’s labors, an assortment of the same dishes that had been served at the great banquet Arch had missed (he’d been canoeing the Mulberry River): tiny fried turtle pies made from an ancient Osage recipe, and a hearty turtle stew made from an ancient Svanetian recipe, the two cultures alike in their ability to create fabulous feasts from humble reptiles. Arch isn’t sure he’ll like the stuff, but after watching George Dinsmore attack his first few bites with gusto, Arch gingerly nibbles a turtle pie and discovers it’s delicious and even has thoughts about suggesting its inclusion in the Tyson line. But such a meal deserves some imported beers and good wines, and there is only water and coffee to wash it down. Still he thoroughly enjoys it, as well as the Svanetian dessert, a churchkhela, fabulous, which Ekaterina explains is a walnut roll made with walnuts and muscadines foraged right here in the lost hollow.

“That was terrific,” Arch comments, when supper is over. “I could almost make up my mind that I don’t want to leave.”

“That’s good,” Juliana says, “because you’re not going to leave.”

“Never?” Arch says, becoming a bit alarmed.

“Not until the election is over,” she says, “and maybe not until—when? January?—Vernon has been sworn in as the new governor.”

Arch is beginning to understand why Lydia was kidnapped. But now he takes this opportunity to ask Juliana to answer the question that has most bothered him: why did they take Lydia in the first place?

“Maybe I should let Lydia answer that,” Juliana responds.

“Before I explain,” Lydia says. “Let me ask Arch and George something. Did either or both of you guys know, sometime back in the summer, that Juliana and Vernon were carrying on together?”

“I don’t know about Arch,” George declares, “but naturally I did, on account of I was in charge of lighting down that helicopter beside that there wigwam in the middle of the night so that they could get together.”

“I was possibly one of the first to know,” Arch admits. “Because Vernon sort of asked my permission. That is, he wondered what effect it could have on the campaign. But it was common knowledge, or gossip, among all of the Samurai.”

“See?” Lydia says challengingly to Juliana. “I told you that everybody knew! Harry knew, didn’t you, Harry?”

Harry nods. “Nothing ever happens anywhere that I don’t know about.”

Juliana broods. There is a long silence, and then Lydia explains to Arch, “Juliana had me kidnapped because she thought I was the only one who knew about her and Vernon and she wanted to ensure my silence.”

Arch fixes Juliana with a harsh look. “Excuse me, but that was a pretty stupid thing to do.”

Juliana bristles at his remark, and then protests, “I don’t think you understand, Mr. Schaffer. I never intended any harm to Lydia…or to Harry or you and George. I wanted to hold her incommunicado for the remainder of the campaign, to keep her from revealing anything about Vernon and me which could damage his candidacy. I intended to release her as soon as he got elected.”

“And how,” Arch wants to know, “did you intend to keep her from revealing to the authorities who had kidnapped her?”

Juliana does not answer. She hangs her head and Arch knows she can’t answer because she’d never considered it.

“For that matter,” he goes on, “how are you going to keep us—Harry and George and me—from disclosing who kidnapped us?”

At once, he regrets having asked it, because there is only one answer: they would have to kill them to keep them from it.

Arch takes a deep breath and suggests, “Maybe if you’d just release them, and we could take them back, nobody would have to know what you did. We could just tell everybody that Lydia had got lost in the woods and Harry had got lost trying to find her, and we would all agree with a solemn oath that we’d never implicate you and Ben.”

“That would be nice,” Juliana says. “But I’ll have to sleep on it. Does anyone want more coffee?”

For the rest of the evening they talk about other things, as if the serious topic just discussed is just too serious to continue. Ekaterina tells the story of a group of Osages during the nineteenth century who were pursued by the U.S. Cavalry and fled into a lost hollow in the hills perhaps very similar to this glen of the waterfall. All attempts to find them failed. They were given up for dead or lost. But twenty years later the same Indians rode out of the hollow. And they hadn’t aged a day!

“I’ve heard that story,” Juliana says. “But of course it’s just a legend.”

“I believe it,” Harry says. “Not only have I not aged a day since I’ve been here, I’ve subtracted all the days from my age!”

They laugh, and Lydia observes, “So has old Beanbag. So have I for that matter.”

Arch sneaks a glance at his hands, as if he might discover they are younger. He allows himself the fantasy that if he stayed here, he’d find time stuck in the present tense forever. But he is concerned about Beverly and Eliot. He usually calls them once a day, about this time of evening, to wish them goodnight and to ask Eliot how she’s doing in school and all. He realizes that in a day or two the newspapers will be full of these latest disappearances, and Hank Endicott will be commenting on how the Samurai are reduced from seven to only three, as in the film The Seven Samurai, and if Shoat Bradfield isn’t the guilty party he probably knows something about it. Arch realizes Lydia is still talking, and she’s asking him a question. “Arch, what’s happening with the plan to divulge all of Vernon’s Vices to the Bradfield people?”

Arch looks nervously at Juliana, and asks Lydia, “Does she know about the scheme?”

Juliana answers for herself, “Yes, Lydia told me all about it. How ironic that I went to such pains to protect Vernon when you people are hatching such a plot.”

“Well,” Arch says, “today was supposed to be VV-Day. Monica was going to go ahead and leak the list of Vernon’s Vices to the Bradfield campaign. Vernon himself called a moratorium on campaigning until you, Lydia, return safe and sound, and the Samurai—what’s left of us—are violating that moratorium with VV-Day. But Monica is convinced that you are safe and sound. She even had a dream about you last night.”

“Bless her heart. And she got my letter this morning?” Lydia asks.

“I couldn’t tell you that. If she did, she didn’t tell me.”

“She wasn’t supposed to,” Ben puts in. “She had to agree to not telling anyone and to leave her window shade up as a signal that she agreed to it, and when I went to Jasper this morning I noticed her shade was up.”

“Tell me,” Arch says to Ben, “how can you drive the Pierce-Arrow into Stay More without anybody seeing you?”

“I don’t drive into Stay More,” Ben says. “I leave the car on a back road above the village, and sneak in on foot.”

“And nobody has ever noticed the Pierce-Arrow there, or on the road to Jasper?” Arch asks and looks at George for confirmation.

“I seen it a time or two,” George allows.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Arch wants to know.

“Aw, I figured ole Ben was jist being standoffish,” George says. “I had no idee he was involved in this kidnap business.”

It grows late, and Juliana announces that she wants to sleep in order to resolve a solution to this problem. Ben prepares two new beds for the two new guests by stuffing ticking-sacks with leaves in the rear of the cavern. Juliana hears but rejects Arch’s request to phone his family just to let them know that he’s okay. One by one the seven people, using flashlights to see their way, use the latrine that Ben has erected in the woods nearby. When his turn comes, Arch realizes he could quite easily use the flashlight to make his way on back to his truck and to escape. But he does not. He couldn’t leave the others. Harm might come to them if he did. He returns to the cave and crawls into his bed. Everyone essentially is in the same huge bedroom, but he is some fifty or sixty feet away from where the women are sleeping, although George’s bed is not far from his. Arch has never slept on a mattress made of ticking stuffed with leaves, and although he can hear the leaves rustling whenever he turns he is surprised at how comfortable it is, and he has three blankets over him to keep him warm, and perhaps because of the excitement and activity of this busy day he drops quickly off into a deep and restful sleep.

Sometime in the middle of the night he is awakened by the sound of a voice loudly whispering, “No, now, you jist caint do that. I won’t stand for it.” And another voice whimpering. And then silence.

Arch listens for a brief moment before falling back into his heavy slumber. And when he awakens again, the sunlight is shining over the top of the cavern’s front wall.

He climbs out of bed, and finds all the others up. Everyone except Harry, but Harry’s bed is empty. Ekaterina is standing at the fireplace with a frying pan in her hand and she asks Arch how he likes his eggs.

Juliana asks him, “Did you sleep well?”

“Like a baby,” Arch says. “I haven’t slept so well in ages, and I didn’t have a moment of trouble with my sleep apnea. I’ve had this condition for some time, and tried various medicines without much luck. But it didn’t bother me at all last night.”

“Maybe you don’t want to leave,” she suggests.

“Yeah, I’ve considered staying as long as you have to keep me,” Arch says. “Until Vernon is sworn in. But believe me, Juliana, Vernon’s not going to get sworn in if you’ve got three of his best campaign strategists in captivity. Not to mention his helicopter pilot and general factotum.”

“I’ve considered that,” she says. “And I’ve given serious consideration to your kind offer to keep the kidnapping a secret if we let all of you go. You’re an honest man, Arch Schaffer, and I’ll trust you that you will keep a solemn oath never to give us away.”

“Do you mean you’ll do it?” Arch asks, elated.

“Let’s all have breakfast and discuss the details,” she says. “As soon as Harry gets back.”

She has scarcely spoken these words when the door opens and Harry comes in, wrapped in a large towel, his hair wet. He hops on one foot and then the other and says, “Brrr! It’s a cold morning.” Then, seeing the way Arch is looking at him, he explains, “Every day before breakfast I take a shower in the waterfall. Nothing like that ice water to get the circulation going! And to keep from wanting a cigarette.”

He is soon dressed and joins them for breakfast. They eat and wait for someone to bring up the serious matter again. Ekaterina is the first to speak. “Just let me say that I hope no one will ever mention my involvement in this escapade. I can’t bear publicity.”

Arch understands. He isn’t sure just how much “involvement” she has had, but he knows that it would never do if her name reached the outside world.

Juliana remarks wistfully, “I’d like to go off in the woods by myself and let go of a good loud scream.”

Harry chuckles and says, “I recall a bit of advice I heard one time: ‘If you are falling off the mountain, stop screaming and flap your arms. If that doesn’t work, you can always go back to screaming.’”

There isn’t much laughter.

Arch, whose chapter this is, stuck in the present tense, will take upon himself the privilege of switching it to the future tense, because only in the future tense will solutions happen, and that is how he will be able to think about getting back to “civilization.” He will wonder, or will observe, just as Monica will have observed the shift from past tense into present tense, that they all will have been transported into the future tense. A practical man, he will even try testing it. He will pour himself another cup of coffee, and will notice carefully that he did not pour himself a cup, nor does he pour himself a cup, but he will pour himself a cup. And he will realize that maybe it will be appropriate, because although they will have to give up this sylvan Paradise of the glen of the waterfall, this storied hide-away of magical grottoes and arbors, they will in a sense be permitted to leave parts of themselves here forever. Arch will smile. But then he will recall that while this idyllic dell will have had such purposes long ago as sheltering Nail Chism after his escape from prison, and sheltering McPherson’s raiders (who also called themselves Samurai) during the war games of The Great War, it was also the place where Sull Jerram was assassinated, and where Daniel Lyam Montross likewise was killed, and where Dawny Harington at the age of not quite six was lost in the woods. It will be not entirely a place of Arcadian memories, Arch will realize.

So when he will hear the sound of the helicopters, it will be almost as if he will have invented them himself. The four hostages and three captors will rush outside the cavern to look up at the sky and see the helicopters, several of them, hovering above. More suddenly than they will be able to think, the woods of the sylvan dell will disgorge dozens of men, all dressed in black, and all armed to the teeth. With precision and incredible speed the men will surround the seven former occupants of the cave, and will seemingly know the difference between the good guys and the bad guys, separating them from each other. These helmeted and black-clad men will immediately and quickly take captive Thomas Bending Bear, who will offer only minimal resistance. And then they will also place handcuffs on Juliana Heartstays.

Juliana will scream at Arch, “You tricked us!”

Arch will reply, “I didn’t have anything to do with this.” Except to invent the future tense, he will say to himself.

Dozens more of this SWAT team will arrive, until the glen of the waterfall will be practically filled with them. The swarm of helicopters overhead will drift away. One of the SWAT team, who will be dressed like all of the others in black but will have curly blonde hair, and will be female, will rush to Lydia and exchange powerful hugs with her.

“You always looked good in black,” Lydia will say to her.

“Don’t I?” Monica will say.

Chapter twenty

He will think often of the basic belief of Taoism, that we must be passive, like nature. He will sometimes chant aloud to himself, like a mantra, Wei wu wei: to do without doing, to act without action. He will decide to do nothing more to get himself elected governor. He will honor those few engagements already scheduled, but he will permit his Samurai to make no new ones nor to do anything beyond what will have already been done (and having given the opposition all those secrets was plenty) to win further votes. He will realize that his crucial mistake in running for governor was not that he will have failed to prevent all these things from happening around him and to him but that he will have failed to remember that central precept of The Tao: let well enough alone. He will deeply regret that he was not pu shih: independent and uninvolved and truly removed from all these things that will have happened.

“It’s okay,” Harry Wolfe will console him. “You aren’t going to win, anyhow.” Harry will have returned to drinking, after his idyll in the woods. Not serious nor bilious drinking but enough to liberate his tongue. After consulting with Vernon, he will be planning to make one last flight to Little Rock, where he will attempt to get Bradfield to accept this fabrication: that the Ingledew campaign, who had kidnapped him (and from whom he had escaped just long enough to fax those hundred damaging calumnies to Bradfield), will have permitted him to follow his hunch and attempt to find and rescue Lydia, only to have been captured himself. Which will have explained to the Bradfield people what Harry will have been doing kidnapped by the Indians instead of by Ingledew.

“That’s fine with me,” Vernon will confide to Harry. “But out of curiosity, just what makes you so sure?”

And tipsy Harry will say, “Do you recall a little donation you made to the Library of Congress many years ago, an old Roman book called De Architectura Antiqua Arcadiae, which tells the story of an Arcadian Greek named Vernealos Anqualdou? Well, I took the liberty—and the trouble—of having a friend in dc make me a copy, which I commissioned a professor at the University in Fayetteville to translate from the Latin for me. I take it you haven’t read it yourself, even though you read Latin.”

“I don’t want to read it,” Vernon will tell Harry. “I gave it to the Library of Congress on condition that they never let me see it.”

“But don’t you want to know whether or not Vernealos won the election to become governor of Arcadia?”

Vernon will recall the conversation he had with Day Whittacker, before the primary, over this whole matter of magic realism and Day’s awareness of the contents of Thirteen Albatrosses (or, Falling Off the Mountain). Vernon had wanted Day to tell him the outcome of the primary, but Day had claimed he hadn’t got that far yet. Now here will be Harry Wolfe, offering to tell him—or indeed, having already told him by saying “You aren’t going to win, anyhow,” the outcome of the election in which his metafictional ancestor, Vernealos Anqualdou, was running for governor of ancient Arcadia.

“You’ve already told me, haven’t you?” Vernon will say.

“But it was close,” Harry will elaborate. “It was real close.”

“Did that campaign also involve the brilliant scheme to publicize one hundred of Anqualdou’s vices, in order to inoculate the voters against scandal?”

Harry will chuckle. “Not exactly. But Anqualdou is figuratively stabbed in the back by his best friend, who corresponds to your Day Whittacker, the author of our brilliant scheme. Oops. I wasn’t supposed to tell you that.”

“Tell me more,” Vernon will request.

The revelation that Day was the originator of Operation Vernon’s Vices will disturb Vernon, and once he will have sent Harry on his way he will go out looking for Day, to get him to confirm or deny the imputation.

Harry Wolfe will return, for a final time, to Little Rock, where he will remain with Bradfield’s people, watching the Vernon’s Vices scheme going beautifully, watching the electorate growing increasingly fed up with any mention of either candidate’s unsavory past or present, watching Bradfield becoming apoplectically frustrated over Vernon’s refusal to answer to or comment upon any of the new charges brought against him, watching the final opinion polls going awry (13 percent Bradfield, 12 percent Ingledew, 8 percent other candidates, 19 percent undecided, 48 percent totally indifferent) for the last few days of the campaign, and the election itself, in which Harry will not be able to vote, even if he were so disposed, because he is not an Arkansas citizen, a condition he will eventually remedy. Although he will have been offered, even before the election, a good job in the Bradfield administration, and will later also receive offers elsewhere in the country to be an oppo man for important candidates the following year, Harry will surprise all those who will have known him by joining a Franciscan monastery near the Ozark village of Witts Springs. In time, Vernon will receive a letter from him, a humble letter, a self-deprecating letter, an apologetic letter. “Only God should be permitted to make predictions,” it will conclude. “And He already has.”

“Did Harry tell you?” Day will ask of Vernon, who will have found him at the construction site of Juliana’s mansion, where with a crew of men he will be excavating an enormous hole for the transplantation of a seventy-year-old red oak tree. “Well, damn him! And anyhow, I just planted the seed with him. He and the rest of your Samurai developed it into a workable scheme.”

“It has certainly worked,” Vernon will observe.

“I’ll say! Apparently the voters are completely disgusted with you and Bradfield both.”

“Not disgusted,” Vernon will correct him. “Just overdosed and apathetic.” The newspaper editorials will have agreed that Shoat Bradfield will have appeared to have committed an act of desperation by revealing all of Vernon’s Vices. Hank Endicott will have commented, “Aren’t we all a little sick and tired of hearing what’s wrong with Vernon Ingledew?”

“Diana and I may not vote,” Day will say.

Vernon will know that it’s just good-natured ribbing. “Bo tells me that a low turnout at the polls will probably be in my favor.”

“Oh? So you’re back on speaking terms with Bo? You didn’t fire him?”

“I couldn’t. He said that if I fired him, he’d keep on working for me voluntarily, because he’s determined to see me get elected governor. He said he’d personally canvass door to door if need be.”

“He wants you out of Stay More,” Day will observe. “But if you spoke with him, did you and he finally discuss this little matter of your mutual interest in Jelena?”

“You want to report all the little details to Diana,” Vernon will laugh and punch him on the shoulder. “And also to your friend the Author. Speaking of whom, and the matter of revelations and metafictions and all that, did you know that Harry possesses an English translation of the Latin De Architectura Antiqua Arcadiae?”

“Yes, he told me.”

“Did he tell you he knows how the story ends? So you can tell your Author friend how this story ends?”

“Harry didn’t say anything about endings. And as you ought to know, none of my Author friend’s books ever have endings. He won’t allow them.”

“But Thirteen Albatrosses (or, Falling Off the Mountain), as you call it, is going to have to say whether or not I win the election, and that’s going to be the end.”

“No, it’s not. It’s probably more a beginning than an ending.”

“Don’t you want to know what Harry said happens in that ancient election in Arcadia?”

“I’d rather not know,” Day will say. “And I’m sorry that you’ve found out.”

Vernon will be sorry too, but he will not blame the knowledge of it for the depression that will hit him and will last for the remaining days of the campaign. He will attempt to shake himself out of the depression by reawakening his former self, in its customary milieu: his secluded study, his “nest” in the top of the double-bubble, where he will go to read books on quantum theory, his next biannual course of study. Never mind that elsewhere on the premises his true love Jelena will be living it up with his unfired campaign manager. Usually, when weather permits, they will be out in Jelena’s “secret” garden.

Vernon, turning a page of D.Z. Albert’s Quantum Mechanics and Experience, will smile to himself, thinking that Jelena for all of her intelligence will have never realized that her secret garden will not have been a secret from him, Vernon, for the simple reason that each and every time George had brought the helicopter down to its landing pad Vernon had spied the secret garden from the air. He will not yet have confronted her with his knowledge of it. Just as he will not yet have confronted her with his awareness of her affair with Bolin Pharis, which, for that matter, she will not have attempted to hide from him, as she will have hidden her Bible, her journal, her cigarettes, her chocolates, and her little TV set, the existence of all of which he has known about for quite some time.

The only mystery about Jelena remaining to him will be the question: Why has she tried to keep all those things secret but has really made no effort to keep her love of Bo a secret? Possibly because, just as he will have persuaded himself that it is indeed possible for a man to love two women equally, she has persuaded herself that her love for Bo has not diminished her love for Vernon. Because if it will have, there will have been no sign of it; she will still sleep with Vernon whenever he will be at home, or whenever he will come to bed after late hours in his study, and she will still bring him his lunch while he is reading in his study, and she will still kiss him and hug him and speak sweetly to him and, as far as their daily conduct will be concerned, Bo Pharis might very well never have existed, even if he is living permanently in the guest room.

Oh, of course Vernon will miss Juliana, and not just sexually (although Jelena’s desire for Vernon will also be undiminished by the presence and the prowess of Bo). Juliana and Thomas Bending Bear will be inmates of the Washington County Jail, awaiting trial sometime in December or January. They will have obtained the very best legal counsel available, but their team of high-powered lawyers will not have been able to arrange bond for them because of the severity of their crime: not one but four kidnappings. All the newspapers will have given front-page coverage to the dramatic rescue effort that will have been engineered by Vernon’s new press secretary, Monica Breedlove, which will have sent into the wilderness a SWAT team to liberate the four members of Vernon’s staff being held hostage by, as the newspapers will have put it, “a pair of deranged Indians.”

The expensive lawyers will have been tight-lipped about any possible motive their clients had for the kidnappings, other than a wish to depopulate their ancestral lands. There will have been no mention of, nor implied connection to, Vernon Ingledew. Another team of lawyers, according to the newspapers, will have arranged quickly for the release of the woman who will be identified as Ekaterina Vladimirovna Dadeshkeliani, 49, whose address will be given as Stay More but who will not be revealed to have the pseudonym “V. Kelian,” by which she will have once been known to many readers of American fiction. The lawyers will convince the arraigning judge that she will have had no real part in the kidnapping and was simply visiting the Native Americans, who were friends of hers. Upon her release, she will return only briefly to her home, the former Jacob Ingledew house, and will close it up, remaining only long enough to tell Vernon that she is taking an extended vacation back home to Svanetia and Georgia, but will vote for him by absentee ballot. With her house vacant once again, the village will soon return to its sleepy tranquillity, in which it will drowse forevermore.

Vernon will go on loving Jelena (and sharing her with Bo) for as long as he can stand missing the very sight, sound and scent of Juliana, and then he will ask Arch Schaffer to see if there will not be some way that Vernon could quietly, secretly visit Ben and Juliana in jail. Arch will agree to look into it and to use his connections in the Washington County legal establishment. Arch Schaffer will always have been good at pulling strings. His conduct in the closing days of the campaign will be exemplary and beyond the call the duty; he will even surpass Bo in his zeal to get Vernon elected. And when it will all be over, and his leave at Tyson’s will be up, Arch will return to his old familiar desk at Tyson Corporate Headquarters, where he will exercise the same zeal and string-pulling, as well as his trademark bonhomie, to help his company and to further his career. In time, Arch Schaffer will be moved upstairs to become CEO of the Tyson empire, which he will vastly extend, until Tyson’s, having acquired the nation’s largest beef producer and then the nation’s largest pork producer, will become purely and simply the largest meat producer in the world (including a line of turtle-meat fried pies).

Although Arch will have urged Vernon to throw his heart into the last days of the campaign, Vernon cannot. Vernon will justify his new pessimism and Taoist passivity, not to mention the prediction of that old Latin book on Arcadian architecture, on the grounds that he will have become practically broke. But Monica, who will decline the reward of a hundred thousand dollars on the grounds that Vernon can’t afford it, will have been almost right: the campaign coffers will indeed have diminished to nothing. But those funds, which he had set aside back in February after first deciding to try his hand at politics, were only a part of his fortune; he will still possess enough money to keep him (and Jelena and Juliana and Bo and Sharon and Larry and Monica and anybody else who asks) comfortable forever. Once the hectic campaign is but an unpleasant memory, talented Cast Sherrill, who will marry Sheila Kimber of Stay More, will be appointed to the position of Director of Media, Public and Governmental Affairs for Ingledew Ham, and will help extend its markets to the four corners of the globe.

But Vernon will have solemnly promised himself (and Jelena) that once his “political allotment” is spent, he will not dip into the rest of his fortune, and therefore economy measures will have to have been taken in the last days of the campaign. One of the first of these will be the use of the helicopter. The panoply of Vernon’s accompaniment—the marching band, the choir, the cheerleaders, most of whom will have had to return to their colleges for the fall semester anyhow—will disappear, and even the largesse of his feasts will no longer feature Ingledew ham but just hot dogs and hamburgers. So the last use of the helicopter, the last stump speech of the campaign, indeed the last stump speech that will ever be delivered in the state of Arkansas, will occur at the town of Mountain View, where seventeen people, five of them children, and three dogs, will listen to Vernon make a halfhearted chat promising that under his leadership things will get better in the state of Arkansas. Afterwards, after dropping Vernon off at Stay More, George will fly the helicopter back to its lessor in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Vernon will personally drive over there to bring George home. On the way back to Arkansas, Vernon will ask him, “George, if by some miracle I were to get elected, what kind of job could I give you in Little Rock? How about Highway Commissioner? Or Director of Veteran’s Affairs? I could make you Adjutant General, how about that?”

“You cain’t scare me, Boss,” George will respond. “You aint gonna git elected and you aint gonna do no such of a thing as that. Why would you punish me like that? Aint I been good to you?” George will insist that if, in the dog’s chance Boss will git hisself elected, and will give George his druthers, he’ll a whole heap druther keep on working at the pig plant until he reaches retirement, which is just around the corner anyhow.

And sure enough, that is precisely what will become of George. He will continue to manage Ingledew Ham, and will work closely with Cast Sherrill in expanding its operations and making it global. He will be given a nice bonus upon his retirement at sixty-seven, and will live happily in Stay More to a very ripe old age.

But for now, Vernon will tell George that he plans to stop in Fayetteville on the way back to Stay More, and Vernon will say, “George, I’m planning to say hello to Juliana and Ben. Do you want to say anything to Ben?”

George will ponder, but will say, “Naw, you can jist tell ’im we’re all pullin for him, and we hope he gits out soon.”

“It’s not likely they’re going to get out for a long time,” Vernon tells him.

“Then jist say I’ll miss him,” George will tell Vernon. “He was my friend.”

Arch Schaffer will have arranged for Vernon to enter the Washington County Jail without attracting any attention and to have as much time as he wants to visit with the defendants.

Vernon will first visit with Ben, who will be brought from his cell in an outlandish bright-orange jail jumpsuit, with his hands shackled to his waist, and will sit across a table from Vernon, who will convey to him George’s good wishes and the fact that George misses him and will continue to miss him.

“But you didn’t come here to see me,” Ben will remark.

“No, but I want to thank you for having been so kind and considerate to Lydia during her detainment. I want you to know that I understand why you were ordered to kidnap her. I am still your friend, I hope.”

Ben will laugh. “That’s nice. You know, I came to Arkansas in the first place intending to kill you, so maybe it’s fortunate I’m just facing a kidnap rap, not a murder rap.”

“Take care of yourself, Ben.” Vernon will not be able to shake his hand, which is manacled to his waist.

Ben will be led away and then they will bring Juliana to him. She too will be dressed in a day-glow orange jail jumpsuit and will have her wrists cuffed and attached by a thin but strong chain to a chain around her waist. She will not be able to hug him. He will give her an awkward embrace, but will be aware that a guard will be standing with his hands folded, directly behind her.

Vernon will speak to the guard. “Would you mind if we had some privacy for a few minutes?”

“I aint sposed to let her out a my sight,” the guard will say.

“She’s not going anywhere,” Vernon will say.

“Still and all…” the guard will hesitate.

“Do you know who I am?” Vernon will ask him.

“Yessir, you’re the next governor of Arkansas. Leastways if my vote means anything. My old lady don’t plan to vote for you, but I sure do.”

“Thank you. So could you just step outside for a few minutes?”

“Well…” the guard will continue to hesitate. “Don’t tell nobody I did it.” And he will leave the room, and leave them alone.

And they will kiss. It will be a lovers’ kiss, serious and urgent and eloquent, her solid breasts mashed against his heart. But she will burst into tears as they will be sitting down across the table from each other, and between her sobs she will say, “I made such a mess of things.”

“You did indeed,” he will agree, forcing himself despite his shyness to look her in the eye, “but Lydia doesn’t hold it against you, and Harry doesn’t, and I certainly don’t.”

She will stop crying and will change the subject, grinning at him. “You’re such a bad boy. They let us watch TV, you know, and I’ve heard about all those awful things that Governor Bradfield says you did. Is any of that stuff true?”

“Believe as much of it as you want to believe,” he will offer, and his shyness will make him remove his eyes from hers.

“I don’t want to believe any of it.”

“Then don’t. It’s all just politics.”

“But I told myself, if people are going to vote for you despite all your sins, then one more sin won’t make any difference, if they knew about me.”

“They don’t know about you yet,” he will say, and will try to look at her again. “Maybe Bradfield is saving you for next week, the last week before the election. But truly it won’t make any difference if he does, not after all those awful things he’s already revealed about me. The public simply doesn’t care any more.”

“So if I wanted to, I could live in the governor’s mansion with you, and the public wouldn’t care?”

He will put his hand over hers. “Juliana, I don’t think I’m going to be elected. Really.”

“Don’t say that!” she will plead, and then she will offer, “Let me pay for a media blitz or anything. Let me buy you the election.”

“That’s generous of you, but it would be illegal. I’ve resigned myself to defeat. As I once explained to you, this whole campaign has just been a part of my education in politics. Now I need to learn how to lose.”

“But—” She will tilt her head and toss her lovely long black hair and will say “But—” again before finding the words. “But Ben and I are counting on you to become governor so you can pardon us if we’re sent to prison.” When he will not comment immediately on that, she will say, “You know our lawyers think there’s a chance we’ll have to serve time, maybe years and years. I’ve heard so much about how people like Ben get treated in prison. You’ve got to become governor so you can keep that from happening!”

“Maybe it can be arranged that Ben won’t be kept with the general prison population,” Vernon will suggest.

Juliana will resume crying, not sobbing this time but allowing the tears to flow down her cheeks. “You know what I do with all my free time here? I have fantasies about living in the governor’s mansion with you, and decorating it and turning one room into a nursery and throwing parties and thumbing my nose at prying reporters. Wouldn’t we have fun?”

“I’d be delighted,” he will say, to console her, but he will be slightly disturbed about that reference to a nursery. “Especially since Jelena has made it clear she’d never want to live in the governor’s mansion herself.”

Juliana will laugh with pleasure. “I’ll just take her place! She’ll stay in Stay More and Bo can have her.”

“That would appear to be the likely arrangement,” he will observe, but then will insist, “assuming I got elected. Believe me, it seems much more probable that you and I won’t be living it up together in the governor’s mansion.”

“Then you can just come to my Stay More mansion any time you feel like it.”

“Juliana,” he will say with dead seriousness, “it’s not probable you’ll be living there. It’s more likely you’ll be living for a number of years in prison.”

“But I can’t have my…I don’t want to let the…. Prison’s no place to have a…” She will struggle to find the words, but then the guard will return.

“Folks, let’s say our goodbyes,” the guard will suggest.

Juliana will say hers: “If you don’t get elected, and therefore you can’t pardon me, will you pardon me anyway?”

“There is nothing for me to pardon you for,” he will say.

Moments of silence will pass during which they will be able to hold each other only with their eyes. He will reach across the table and touch her hands as they are held to her waist. He will smile and try to think of something cheerful to say. The guard will take one of her arms gently and raise her to her feet.

Wanting not to lose the conversation, she will ask, “Is my house still going up?”

“Last time I looked, they were nailing on the rafters,” he will tell her.

“Whatever happens,” she will say, “I intend to live there. Some day. For the rest of my life.”

“Our lives will be long,” he will predict, accurately enough. And then they can merely touch hands before the guard leads her away.

For a while afterwards, for a little while at least, he will have regained his determination to be elected governor, just so he will be able to issue a pardon for Juliana and Ben.

George will suggest, since they will be only a few blocks away, that they ought to drop by campaign headquarters and say hello. So they will go there next. Vernon will be surprised to find the place a hive of activity: everybody will be on the telephone or the fax machine or the computers’ email, and Monica will be using two telephones and a laptop simultaneously. Lydia Caple, although she will have gracefully surrendered her position as press secretary to Monica, will be very much in the middle of things.

“I just thought I’d better hang around and keep an eye on Monica,” Lydia will say to Vernon. “But she doesn’t need any advice from me. Now you be a good boy and say howdy to all these people.”

Everyone will be looking adoringly at their candidate. Vernon will obligingly go from person to person, shaking hands, smiling encouragingly, and thanking the person for doing such good and hard work. Most of them will be female, and Vernon will feel a bit panicky in his shyness, but, having gained the practice with Juliana, he will force himself to look each of the women in the eye.

“Our office at that statehouse will be a picnic compared with this,” Monica will say to him, when her turn will come to shake his hand.

“Indeed it will,” he will say. “Especially if you’re in charge there too.”

He will have intended to have another chat with Monica, to tell her to take it easy for the rest of the campaign because it’s all a lost cause anyhow, but somehow he will not be able to say such things to her. And she will go on.

In the new year, Lydia Caple will give herself a long vacation before she returns to politics again. She will fulfill a long dream by taking a safari into darkest Kenya, and will follow that up with a bicycle tour of Tuscany. But she will be heard to say, and in fact will be quoted in the Democrat-Gazette as having said, that none of her adventures will have equaled the weeks she had spent in a lost hollow with a great waterfall near Stay More, Arkansas.

Her penultimate words to Vernon will be, “I know nooks and crannies of the governor’s office at the statehouse that I’ll be waiting to show to you.” And then, at the door to campaign headquarters, her ultimate words to him will be, “Straighten your shoulders. Walk like you have somewhere to get to.”

The newspapers, all of them, that last week of the campaign, will have little or nothing to say about the campaign or the candidates. “What else is there to say?” Hank Endicott will demand in print, of his journalistic colleagues, of the public, and especially of himself. And then will attempt an answer: “It’s all been said.”

Vernon will drive George back home to Stay More. This time, when he will notice, as he has noticed every time he’s come back to Stay More after being away, how the very sight of home sends little tinglings up his spine, he will decide, spontaneously but conclusively, that he will not want to leave again. He will want to hole up in his study and forget this damned election and become the world’s foremost authority on quantum theory. But first he will simply drive around what’s left of Stay More, taking it all in. It will seem that the hogs who overrun the place will be looking at him and grinning at him, as if they know, all of them, that he will be home to stay. His drive will take him by the construction site for Juliana’s mansion, just to observe the progress. They will have not merely nailed on the rafters but will have completed the roofing: it is going to be a fabulous house, not just a vast enlargement of the wigwam but an elaboration upon it, as if the wigwam is the statement of a theme that the mansion will endlessly embellish. It will make his own “double bubble” seem somehow very old-fashioned and outmoded.

So his first thoughts, as he approaches home, will not be the formulation of the long-delayed serious chat with Jelena, but rather will center upon what he needs to do to his property to make the house seem not like some Sixties freak but a truly postmodern dwelling belonging to the 21st Century…or better yet, timeless. In fact, this will still be very much on his mind when he enters for the first time Jelena’s secret garden and finds her there down on her knees, planting bulbs, alone except for that overstuffed feline which she had named after him.

She will appear to levitate suddenly at his approach. Jumping up, she will protest, “Don’t sneak up on me like that!” And then, wiping the soil off her hands so that she will not get any on him, she will give him a hug and a kiss and will ask, “How did you know where I was? How did you know about this?” sweeping her hand to indicate the expanse of the secret garden, where now in November nothing will be growing but everything will still have been arranged by the loving hands of a woman who will be a genius and an artist as well as a descendant of Governor Jacob Ingledew.

He will ask her if she has not realized that her secret garden is visible from the air, and that he has often landed nearby in the helicopter. Hadn’t she heard the helicopter? “Why did you want to hide the garden from me?” he will ask.

She will ponder the question before answering. “I wanted just one thing in all the world that was my very own,” she will say.

“But you shared it with Bo,” he will point out.

“How did you know that?” she will bristle. “Did Bo tell you?”

“No, I just assumed that since he shares your interest in gardening you’d want him to see it.”

“I did.”

“But you didn’t share with him your other secrets, which are your very own.”

“What other secrets?”

He will name them: her Bible, her journal, her little TV set, her box of chocolates, her cigarettes, and her vibrator.

She will blush, but will become angry. “You snoop! Do you search through everything in the house looking for my secrets?”

“Not deliberately. But over the years it’s hard to keep all those things hidden. For example, sometimes there is the smell of tobacco smoke on your breath.”

“Why haven’t you ever told me?”

“You’re entitled to your own life. If I had told you I knew you read the Bible, even if I told you I approved of it, you might quit. If I told you I knew you made yourself come with a vibrator, you’d be so embarrassed it might screw up our whole relationship.”

“If you’ve found my journal, did you read it?”

“I did not. I swear. You’re entitled to your own life.”

“You keep saying that. Are you getting ready to tell me that when you’ve moved into the Executive Mansion in Little Rock, it’s all right for me to have my own life here with Bo?”

“I’m not moving into the Executive Mansion.”

“You’re not?”

“No. I’m reclaiming full possession of my house, and I’m going to stay in it. Where is Bo, by the way?” Vernon will decide that his next act would be to evict his former campaign manager from the premises.

“He’s over at Sheila Kimber’s house, working with Cast Sherrill. They’re brainstorming a strategy to reawaken the public’s interest in the campaign and get you elected.”

“Well, you can tell him—no, I’ll tell him myself, that I have ceased running. I am no longer a candidate for governor of Arkansas. It’s obvious why he’s knocking himself out to get me elected. He just wants to get me into the Governor’s Mansion so he can have my house and my true love all to himself.”

“Bo doesn’t want your study.”

“I’m talking about you. And don’t try telling me that Bo doesn’t want you. Or hasn’t been having you.”

“I’ve never tried to keep Bo a secret from you. Except maybe the first night, when you asked me if I knew that he sleeps in the nude and I lied and said I didn’t.”

“The two of you have been conspiring behind my back, not only in bed but also in the process of plotting your life here together after I’ve gone away to Little Rock to live for four years. Don’t deny it.”

“I won’t deny we’ve talked about it. But I’ve never told Bo that I would, or could, live with that arrangement. In fact, I think that if I tried to do that, after a few months of it I’d miss you so much I’d change my mind about living in Little Rock.”

“You would?” Vernon will be incredulous.

Jelena will smile, and Vernon will notice, as if he will not have noticed it before, that there will always have been a certain charm about her smile, a certain cuteness and warmth, which Juliana’s broader and more beaming smile does not possess. For all her glamour and sexiness, Juliana lacked the sort of down-home sweetness that Jelena possessed. “I suppose I could stand it for just four years,” Jelena will say. “It would be kind of like a sentence to prison, but I can imagine that a woman sent to prison for four years could endure it with the thoughts of her eventual freedom.”

Vernon will of course catch the allusion she is making to Juliana. “It’s purely academic anyhow,” he will point out, “since my chances of getting elected have disappeared.”

“But Bo and Cast—and no doubt all the rest of the Samurai—are busting their asses to make your chances reappear.”

Vernon will smile at that allusion to Monica’s remark in her original letter, which had got the whole thing started. Then he will ponder the fact that when he and Jelena had made one of their extended trips away from Stay More—in the Sixties they’d gone all the way around the world for months, and in the course of his courses of study they had lived in Ireland and Japan and New York City for long stretches of time—they had simply closed up the double-bubble house, draining the pipes, and George had kept a periodic check on the place (break-ins were unknown in that part of the Ozarks). “If we closed the house for four years,” he will now ask her, still purely hypothetically, “could you live without your secret garden? Could you live without Bo?”

“Why would we have to close it? Couldn’t we visit on weekends?”

Vernon will think about that. “I suppose we could,” he will say.

“As for Bo,” she will say, “I suppose I could live without him. But I know I could never live without you.”

When he will be an old man, and you may be sure that he will live to an age as old as all his Ingledew forebears, Vernon will look back at his long life and reflect that in the entire course of it there were only two moments that he will regret. One was when he was a boy of ten, and his cousin Jelena, eighteen, was walking down the aisle of the school/churchhouse to marry Mark Duckworth and she paused to whisper into little Vernon’s ear, “I was going to wait and marry you when you grew up. Will you marry me when you grow up? If you say ‘yes,’ I’ll call off this wedding.” And Vernon looked into her eyes to understand if she were teasing him, and, understanding that she was serious, shook his head and declared, “I will never marry.” And even though he was right, and never would get married, he would always, will always, regret that he had not said “Yes.” The other thing he will regret is that when, in her secret garden, Jelena will have said, “I could never live without you,” he will not have, immediately and passionately, enfolded her in his arms and will not have taken her straightway to bed or even to a soft patch of the cool November secret garden.

Instead, he will say, “I’m going up to my study for a while. I’ll see you at supper.”

And the moment will have been lost. Just as he will have expected the election to be lost. From his study he will call Sheila Kimber’s house and will ask to speak to Bo and without giving Bo a chance to say a word he will tell him that he has made up his mind to do nothing further to gain the statehouse, that in accordance with Taoist principles he will strive no more, that while he will be deeply appreciative of Bo’s and Cast’s efforts he will not be interested in hearing what scheme they are hatching up to reestablish the reputation that was tarnished by the one hundred Vices, and that Vernon will intend to remain here in his study until such time as he will have utterly mastered quantum mechanics, and if Bo will need a place to sleep tonight he had ought to ask Sheila and Cast if they have an extra bed. Thanks, and goodbye.

Vernon will, at least, not only sleep with his beloved Jelena this night, but also, in accordance with Taoist principles, will withhold his own orgasm until she will have had more than enough of them.

The next morning, after a good workout in his gym in the annex, and a three-mile run, he will seclude himself in his study and virtually memorize three books on quantum theory. Then he will go out to his lab, also in the annex, and will conduct some experiments involving reduced temperatures, magnets, electrons, and superconductivity. At supper Jelena will offer him a thick sheaf of the day’s phone and fax messages, but he will politely tell her that he will have managed to get through the entire day without one single thought of politics, and this will be no time for him to break that incredible willpower.

In fact, the only time he will think about politics will be a couple of days later when he will have decided to pay a long overdue visit to his father, John Henry “Hank” Ingledew. He will not have hated his father or anything like that, but will simply not have had much to say to him.

“I changed my mind, boy,” Hank Ingledew will say to his son. “Come Tuesday, I’m a-fixin to vote fer ye.”

Vernon will be flabbergasted, because his father will have been a life-long die-hard Republican. “You don’t have to do that, Dad. I don’t want you going against your beliefs just on account of I’m your son.”

“Boy, you may think I live up here by myself on this mountain without knowing nothing about what’s going on in this world. But I read the papers. And I watch the TV. And I have reached the solemn conclusion that Shoat Bradfield is a lowdown miserable eggsucking son of a bitch.”

In not quite the same words, former governor and senator David Pryor, the best-loved former politician in Arkansas, will lam-baste Bradfield on election eve. Vernon will relent and permit Jelena to bring her little television set out from under its dishcloth in the pantry (where he will have discovered it months before while searching for a jar of marmalade) because Jelena will have heard from Cast (who will have arranged it) that the popular Pryor will be planning to make an important television appearance, not as a paid political advertisement but at the invitation of the networks: all the local affiliates of NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox will broadcast the interview. “I have refrained from speaking out on this election before now,” Pryor will declare to his statewide audience, “because I didn’t think Vernon Ingledew would need any help from me, considering all the other endorsements he has had. But now it would appear that there are still a few voters in this great state of ours who plan to vote for Bradfield. Friends, you must not allow this to happen. You people know that I can be trusted, so please trust me when I tell you this: Shoat Bradfield is beneath contempt. In all my years in politics, I have not encountered a more despicable excuse for a man. He is an embarrassment to the whole state of Arkansas. He must be driven from office, and Vernon Ingledew is the man to drive him!”

Despite this ringing endorsement, and all the commentary which will follow it, in which dozens of the state’s celebrities—solons, academics, business leaders, writers (including the Author) and a movie star or two (all recruited and arranged by Cast) will be interviewed and will be unanimous in concurring with Pryor that Shoat Bradfield is disgraceful (“He makes my flesh crawl,” the Author will comment to an interviewer at KHOG, a Fayetteville affiliate of ABC), Vernon will not change his mind about being passive in the best Taoist tradition. But he will do one thing that is active rather than passive: he will decide to vote, and, of course, he will have been persuaded by all those people on Jelena’s TV set not to vote for that wretch Bradfield.

Because of Stay More’s declining population over the years, Swain’s Creek Township will no longer have a polling place; the nearest such will be in Parthenon, itself scarcely more than a dying village, some seven miles away. On election day morning, Jelena will prepare and serve to Vernon his favorite breakfast, Swedish pancakes. While eating it, he will read the morning paper, in which the lead editorial will call him the lesser of two evils, one columnist will call Bradfield “the more experienced of two blunderers,” while Hank Endicott will observe, “When all the mud is cleared away, Vernon Ingledew is still at least recognizable.” After breakfast, Vernon will get into Jelena’s Isuzu and allow her to drive him to Parthenon. By coincidence they will be casting their votes there at the same time as Diana and Day, Sharon and Larry, George, and Vernon’s father, the sum of eligible voters at Stay More. Eight votes right there.

But statewide, voters will stay away from the polls in droves. Or voters will go to the polls to vote for their county judge or sheriff but will leave blank the boxes marked Bradfield and Ingledew. All of those close to him will urge Vernon to accompany them to campaign headquarters in Fayetteville for the counting and announcing of the vote totals, but Vernon will elect to remain at home. Jelena will elect to remain with him, but he will not again allow her to get that little TV out of the pantry, so the only way she will be able to find out how the tabulations will be going is from phone messages from campaign headquarters, where Monica will be busy as ever but will take a moment now and again to call Jelena and tell her that Vernon is ahead in Pulaski and Washington counties but Bradfield is ahead everywhere else.

Throughout the evening, the vote totals will show Bradfield slightly ahead. “Maybe you were right,” Jelena will remark to Vernon at her bedtime, which she will defer. “It looks like the bastard has got it.” Just to make conversation, Vernon will tell her about De Architectura Antiqua Arcadiae, and about what Harry Wolfe had said. Jelena will remember the book; she will remember Vernon’s having found it and blown the dust off it in an obscure basement bookstore in Rome, during their travels around the world. She will remember his refusal to read it and his donation of it to the Library of Congress.

“According to Harry,” Vernon will tell her, “it was a close vote. But Vernealos lost.”

The phone will ring several times before midnight with requests from television stations who will want to capture Vernon’s concession speech, if he will give one. He will not. “I conceded a couple of weeks ago,” he will remark, off the record, to one caller. And then he will announce to Jelena that he must get up to his study and resume his investigation of quantum mechanics. He will kiss her goodnight. She will turn on the message machine of the phone and go to bed.

The messages on the machine the next morning she will take and collate and bring to him in bed with a cup of coffee. Bradfield will have maintained his slim lead until the absentee ballots will have been tabulated. Customarily absentee votes come from people who are travelers, and travelers are usually broader if not more intelligent than non-travelers. (“The Arkansas Traveler” is a figure of legend.) The absentees will have been nearly all for Vernon Ingledew, and will have been sufficient to elect him as the next governor of Arkansas. Briefly and quickly now but in no particular order: the Author and his wife Kim will be invited to the inaugural gala in Little Rock, and will attend, and will dance, but will not be given an opportunity to speak to the new governor himself. Arch will introduce them to Bo and to Cast, and they will overhear the three Samurai standing proudly together as Arch will remark, “The people always win,” a take-off on the state’s motto, Regnat Populus.

Vernon Ingledew will not succeed in extirpating the public school system, nor the hospitals, nor the prisons, although the latter will be radically overhauled. His attempt to abolish or even to reform the school system will die in the Legislature, and his attempt to extirpate hospitals will languish in committee for the duration of his term.

He will succeed in extirpating the smoking of tobacco, although it will take him his entire term to eradicate the weed entirely. He will not quite succeed in extirpating firearms, but will make the ownership or possession of a handgun virtually impossible.

Most notable about the Ingledew administration will be that it will be so inconspicuous and low profile. In accordance with the ideas of The Tao, the less you do about governing people the better your government will proceed.

Also, such an inconspicuous approach will allow you to accomplish things without attracting a lot of attention. Vernon will pardon Juliana and Ben from their prison sentences with scarcely any mention in the newspapers, just in time for them to return to live in Stay More in Juliana’s fabulous new mansion surrounded by Day Whittacker’s forest and there give birth to her baby.

But that will be another story, another episode in the story that will never end.

Acknowledgments to the First Edition

Thirteen Albatrosses (or, Falling Off the Mountain) is not purely a work of the imagination. Like its predecessor or first half of its parentheses or bookends, The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, the Acknowledgements to which began identically, this novel conflates real people and fictional characters. I have always been amused by authors’ declarations that “any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental,” tantamount to declaring the characters pasteboard and unconvincing. There are real people in this novel, and I have used their actual names and identities, to the point of my publisher’s lawyers asking me to have them sign a “character release,” the document title suggesting to some of them that I have requested their relinquishing their character, if they possessed any to begin with.

In the Acknowledgements to The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks I bemoaned my exile or isolation in the pastoral state of Vermont, where I lived and taught and wrote for many years, and I thanked the many people with whom I had corresponded, not one of whom I had met, and I even thanked the people who had written me appreciatively about my previous novels, only two of whom I’d met. I was consumed with homesickness for my native state, Arkansas, a situation I alleviated some twenty years ago when I came back home to live for good and marry Kim.

Several years ago two students signed up for my evening art history course, Twentieth Century European Art: one of them was Barbara Pryor, wife of the distinguished former governor and United States senator from Arkansas, David Pryor. The other was Archie Schaffer III, vice president for public relations at giant Tyson Foods. In the course of time both Barbara and Archie became my good friends, and when I decided finally to ask Vernon Ingledew to run for governor in a new novel, I sought their advice. Archie and I discussed Vernon’s candidacy over several lunches and in the course of time exchanged dozens of emails about it, and naturally I decided, with his permission, to appoint Archie as one of the Vernon’s campaign staff. I am deeply grateful for all of his help and for his permission to use him as not just a character but a key player in this story. His daughter Eliot also signed a “character release.”

While I have met with Arch frequently, I have yet to meet Monica Breedlove, who is just as real as he is but lives in Louisiana and hardly ever visits Arkansas again since the days she was one of Bill Clinton’s aides in the statehouse. Her expertise in politics made her a logical person for that part in the Samurai’s machinations and I thank her for her willingness to jump in and help.

Other people in the book who are “real” include Bob Razer at the Little Rock Public Library, my longtime advocate among Arkansas readers, and of course both former Arkansas governors and U.S. Senators, Dale Bumpers and David Pryor. My colleague at the University of Arkansas, Professor Daniel Levine of the Classics Department, while he may not actually have undertaken the translation of De Architectura Antiqua Arcadiae, furnished the title for it.

One of my art history majors, Rhonda Pitman, is an Indian from Oklahoma, and she provided me with much information about her people, particularly women such as Juliana Heartstays.

The first people to hear me describe this project were my beloved wife Kim’s parents, Micky and Jacque Gunn, lifelong observers of the Arkansas political scene, and they encouraged their son-in-law’s idea for a novel about the subject. The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, same number of chapters, same setting, also about Ingledews, but written when Bill Clinton was getting his law degree at Yale, was dedicated to my father and mother. This end of the parenthesis is dedicated to my father-in-law and mother-in-law.

When the novel was finished, its first readers included Barbara Pryor and also Lisa Morgan, whose responses to the story are greatly appreciated. The first truly to sense the merit and appeal of the story was my editor, Tom Bissell, who did such a bang-up edit on the book that I hereby appoint him honorary Eighth Samurai.

Just before launching the writing of the novel, at Arch Schaffer’s suggestion we held a grand picnic at Stay More (or “Drakes Creek” as its model is known), with former governor David Pryor attending, and his wife Barbara along with the wives of all the rest of us, who ate not turtles but a fabulous pot of beans and a cake furnished by the present occupant of the “Governor Ingledew” house, who is not the Woman Whom We Cannot Came, because we can name her, Jo Lewis. Also at the picnic, in addition to the President’s cousin, Roy Clinton, was my good friend Roy Reed, author of the recent biography of former governor Orval Faubus, which had considerable influence on this novel, and Michael Dabrishus, head of Special Collections at the University.

It was a splendid occasion, for which Arch furnished the beverages, and I gave a reading from the first half of the parenthesis, the story of the idiots who gathered on the Ingledew store porch, which is still standing, and served as a platform for our picnic. The final words of the Acknowledgments for that first half of the parenthesis still echo in my ears: “Most of these structures no longer stand, but that fact makes them no less ‘real.’ They stood, and that is, like all of us, what matters.”

There are still real buildings standing at Stay More. And there are real people in the pages of this novel. But nothing that happens in this novel ever actually took place, except in your mind, where it matters most.

Praise for Donald Harington’s With

“With is among the best of many fine novels produced by Harington, and may be, for all its expansive humanity, his finest yet…. With, in short, is a novel about everything that matters…. If any more life-affirming, more surprising, more beautifully written novel has been published in recent years, I've missed it. Don’t you, fellow readers, miss this one.” The Boston Globe

“With is a joy to read…as whimsical as a paper-doll show while being deeply rooted in the earth; it gives the Garden of Eden myth a happy ending, and should find the wide readership that Harington so richly deserves.” The Washington Post

“A sweet, lightly erotic fable about coming of age, real love and the gravitational force exerted by a sense of place…surprising, puckish, poignant…a fictive crazy quilt that accomplishes many things, none of which will leave its readers on steady ground.” Time Out New York

“Transforming a kidnapping plot into an epic rural fable and then a touchingly poignant love story, Harington crafts a wildly imaginative tour de force…this powerful effort should further enhance his reputation as one of the great undiscovered novelists of our time.” Publishers Weekly, starred review

“It’s sexy, funny, and reaches a splendid crescendo as Robin grows into the full power of her womanhood, becoming both an Eve conceived in innocence but elevated beyond it to knowledge, and the crucial element in what can only be called a creation myth. A key work in Harington’s one-of-a-kind oeuvre.” Kirkus, starred review

“Imagine if Larry McMurtry somehow teamed with Laura Ingalls Wilder to craft a postmodern, magical realist fable that dropped her frontier homestead on the outskirts of his modern-day Thalia. That’'s the neat trick Harington pulls off with this richly imagined, lovingly rendered exploration of the unintended consequences of human—and animal—desire.” Booklist starred review

“…a marvelous story of improbable growth, heroic resolve, and life-giving love. With is still a Harington novel—which is to say a work of sprightly, delightful humor. But With mixes the light with the very dark…With conjures a magic that is exceptional even for Harington.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

“Arkansas novelist Donald Harington has tilled his corner of the Ozarks for nearly 40 years, and the soil shows no signs of exhaustion. His yarns defy classification—one reason you haven’t seen them on a rack at your neighborhood supermarket. They combine old-fashioned, down home storytelling with postmodern, Nabokovian trickery…one of America’s rarer literary sensibilities.” LA Times

“A beautiful and terrifying story of self-reliance and flowering self-discovery…. Always a treat, Mr. Harington’s novels are stylistically inventive, warm and funny. Capturing the best in “Arkansas Traveler” mountain wit, with a depth rarely matched in modern fiction, Mr. Harington’s novels are not to be missed.” Ghoti Magazine

“…With is many things: a crime story, a love story and a ghost story. It is a tale of survival and a homage to the natural world. It is a literary tour de force that takes readers on a wild ride—emphasis on the wild. With starts out like Lolita, then detours through Swiss Family Robinson before allowing its Odysseus to get back home to his true love. It sounds wacky and it is, but here’s the thing, here’s the marvelous thing: It works…. This is a clever, sensual, empathetic and, above all, moving book, and it should have lots of readers.” The News & Observer

“Don Harington plumbs the resources of the novel form, from grammar and syntax—pronouns, verb tenses—to topics such as the missing father and genres such as animal fable, ghost story and Biblical myth…a rare entertainment…he is among our most daring Makers.” The Providence Journal

“Harington makes the novel more and more formally playful by revealing deeper and deeper layers to the story and its narrator…burying ideas deep in the tale and only revealing them slowly and gradually, a story as striptease. As a result, the final hundred pages are as finely imagined and gorgeously whimsical as anything you’re likely to read this year.” Book Reporter.com

“The Arkansas novelist takes us to an imaginative place where we care deeply about each personality. And the ending, oh my, the ending. Suspense story. Love story. Ghost story. Coming-of-age story. Take your pick. Each one accurately describes this Ozarkian world you’ll love to inhabit.” Southern Living

“If you aren't considered America's greatest novelist, there's a certain cachet to being known as ‘America's greatest unknown novelist.’ A number of contemporaries, colleagues and critics have put Donald Harington on that unknown throne—and he is certainly a legitimate pretender and contender…in With, we return to Stay More for a tale that may be the author’s most magical, mystical tour.” The Philadelphia Inquirer

“…if readers give themselves to this demanding, suspenseful and joyful novel, it will thrive in their hearts and imaginations. The success of With depends not only on readers’ willingness to go along with Harington on this perilous, inevitable, lovely journey, but on the exuberantly homely, humble and poetic Ozark language with which he fills the book. For almost 500 pages, this irresistible tide of unique talk and narration individualized for humans and animals, sweeps you along.” The Memphis Commercial Appeal

“…will surprise and delight you…. Harington’s writing is at once playful and serious, tender, sexy, tragic, brutal and redemptive…. He never falters, and you never doubt him for a second.” Bookpage

For Brian Walter

and Lynnea Brumbaugh-Walter

who believed

Contents

Part One: Parted with

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Chapter six

Chapter seven

Chapter eight

Chapter nine

Chapter ten

Part Two: Sleeping with

Chapter eleven

Chapter twelve

Chapter thirteen

Chapter fourteen

Chapter fifteen

Chapter sixteen

Chapter seventeen

Chapter eighteen

Chapter nineteen

Chapter twenty

Part Three: Without

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

Part Four: Within

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

Part Five: Whither with her

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

Part One:

Parted with

Chapter one

She tried to run away. You’re not supposed to do that, it’s a blow to the whole idea of devotion, and she ran away not because she lost even a smidgin of the true blue faith that bound her to him forever but simply because she began to believe that he might do her greater harm than he already had, might even do away with her.

She had been bad. He had told her to watch the truck, to stay with the truck, to guard the damn truck, and she had done her best, patient as only she knew how to be patient, as he had gone away with his arms full with a box and then had come back by and by and had taken another box and disappeared once again and then kept on doing that, box after box, and she had yearned to go with him, the late afternoon had been coming on, and he had been gone such a long, long time, and she had convinced herself that there was nobody else around, nobody was going to bother the stuff left in the truck, she couldn’t catch the faintest wind of any person anywhere for miles, and therefore what harm could it be if she just explored a little bit, not going far from the truck, keeping it always within range, and keeping a closer guard for the first sign of his return? But a deer with two fawns had come into view and she had been thrilled to pieces, especially by the fawns, so cute and innocent and curious, and before she had realized what she was doing, she had followed them off into the woods for a considerable distance before she had realized that she had completely lost touch with the truck.

And when she had returned, he had been there, and he had been furious. The very tone of his voice had hacked and slashed her, and then he had taken a stick and had beaten her with it. She had protested and whined but he had kept on beating her until she could hardly stand up. Then he had told her to get back onto the truck and stay there and not even think about leaving it again. He had taken another box and gone away once more, and she had lain in the truckbed among the few remaining boxes and had inspected some places on her ribs and her legs where he had actually drawn blood. She had been very sad. She had understood why he had beaten her, and she was terribly ashamed for having disobeyed him and abandoned the truck, and she had been miserable in her guilt and in her unhappiness.

The next day he had done the same thing, going into a town to a store and loading up the truck and driving it back and up, up the mountain road so rough and bouncy she was nearly thrown out of the truckbed, more than once, and then making her stay with the truck all afternoon while he unloaded it, box by box, sack by sack. And the next day, the same. And the next.

Now she thought and thought about the whole situation, and felt a nagging wonder about the possibility that somebody else might be a lot nicer to her than he was. Mostly he was good to her, but ever since he had taken her away from her mother he had not shown her much affection or even much attention, except when he had needed her for something. He had provided a good home for her, and had fed her well, and she had liked the place a lot, but now it appeared that he was getting ready to move, and she didn’t think she wanted to move. Why else would he be toting all those boxes and sacks up here to the different place? Once or twice (or was it three times?) in the beginning he had allowed her to walk with him to the different place and look it over. The truck could not get to it, or even near it, and she managed to understand why. The road ended at a deep gully where rains had washed the road away. And even if the road had not been washed away there, the road later fell to pieces all over the place, and they had to go down into deep ravines, so steep she sometimes slipped if she didn’t watch her footing, and very hard to climb out of, and once they climbed out of it they were on a very narrow bluff ledge that scared her with its height and danger. She tried to picture him alone with his arms full of those boxes and bags trying to climb down into those ravines and then back up out of them and across that awful bluff ledge, and she could almost understand why he would be in such a bad mood that he would beat her unmercifully. Then after trekking up and down through all that rough rocky land and across that bluff ledge and into the deep dark forest again, the road, or path, what barely remained visible of it, climbed sharply and trickled out for good, rising to an old homestead in a bramble-clogged meadow on the very top of the mountain. She had been stunned by her first view of the old house, and of the house’s view of distant miles of mountains. She could tell that nobody had been up there for a long, long time. It was in her nature to search, upon first seeing any strange house, for signs that might betray any information about the inhabitants. But there was no information whatsoever there. After he had taken her inside the house and she got a whiff of the interior, she began to sort through a cluster of old stale smells, not one of which was familiar to her, except that of rodents. Clearly whoever had lived here had departed ages ago.

Behind the house, near an orchard that was swallowed up in brush and briars, were the remains of an old barn, and there she could detect the fact, barely, that it had once been inhabited by a cow and a pair of mules. There was the rodent smell again. Another building, smaller than the barn, but unlike it not in danger of collapse, was just an open shed with benches along its walls and an assortment of round wooden drums or casks unlike any in her acquaintance. There was one other tiny little building by itself between the barn and the house, its door ajar, and inside she saw a bench-like seat that had two large holes cut in it. There was a distinct odor of fresh poop overlying an assortment of ancient poop-smells, and she assumed that he had been using this little building to do his business.

A few of the small things which he had already moved into this place had come from his house, and thus she managed to understand that he was indeed planning to transfer the contents of that house, her home, to this place. She didn’t like it. Or did she? Strangeness, unfamiliarity in any form disturbed her at the same time that it piqued her curiosity. She was adaptable and could easily learn to enjoy life here, if that was what he wanted. But why did he want it?

Why was he going to take her away from her home and move her into this strange, stranded dwelling-place? So many times already he had taken the truck, empty, to huge stores in big towns, where he had loaded it up and brought it up here and slowly unloaded it, a box or a bag at a time, and carried it to the remote house. Maybe he just liked all the exercise. But why did she have to stay with the truck? In the beginning it had been fun to watch but now it was old and dull and she was tired of it. And she had no idea how much longer it would go on. He had been mean to beat her so cruelly. She began to think seriously about the startling idea of running away. First she had to think seriously about where she would go if she did run away, and to consider what her chances would be of an alternative existence elsewhere. Then she had to make a mental list of all the things she didn’t like about him.

What he called her, for instance. Bitch. On the surface, there was nothing wrong with that, because that’s what she was, but it was such a neutral name, no affection in it, and the way he said it sometimes made it sound like he was cursing her. She had a perfectly nice name, Hreapha, and it was a great pity that he would not call her that. Probably he just couldn’t pronounce it properly. It was a name that she liked to declaim to the entire world, enthusiastically or warningly, depending on the occasion. “Hreapha! Hreapha!” she often declared. It was what she told him whenever he returned to her after one of his foot-trips to carry boxes to the old house, but when she’d said “Hreapha” after his return the time she’d gone to watch the deer and fawns she had meant for the sound of it to carry abject apology, and yet he had beaten her viciously anyway.

The name had been given to her by her mother, whose name was Whuphvoff. Her mother had taught her everything she knew about the world, especially how to fight and take care of herself. She had never known her father, whose name was Ralph-Alf, but her mother had often described Ralph-Alf as beautiful and irresistible, albeit not half her size. Her mother had spent most of her life in dwellings; her father was strictly the outdoor type. Hreapha had sextuplet brothers and sisters, but while still young one by one the others had been removed from the family until only Hreapha remained to enjoy her mother’s company and instruction, and this she had for a long time, until her mother had taught her everything she knew about the world.

Then one day he had taken her away from her mother and quite possibly Hreapha had never forgiven him for that, and she made note of it now as one more reason for running away. He had never even bothered to tell her what his name was. She had grieved for her mother unceasingly, but he had said, “Bitch, you aint never gon lay eyes on your maw again, so you might as well snap out of it.” And oh, if only he had done anything to help, like taking her out for a run or a walk or even playing fetch with her in the yard, but he just left her all alone to endure her loss. Her mother had explained to her the enormous benefits of being loyal and devoted to one’s master, but Hreapha had rarely taken pleasure in any such benefits with this man.

He had two vehicles, and when he took the truck he always made her ride in the back, even in the coldest part of winter. Riding in back was not without its satisfactions: she had a full exposure to all the fascinating smells and sights that ordinarily she could only get by sticking her head out the window, which she couldn’t do when he kept the window rolled up because of the cold. When he took her, as he sometimes did, in the other vehicle, she was permitted to sit on the seat beside him and sometimes, if it wasn’t too cold, to stick her head out the window on that side. The other vehicle had no back end like a truck, just a back seat, with a wire fence separating it from the front seat. That vehicle also had lights on the roof that sometimes flashed. When the lights flashed there sometimes came from deep within the vehicle a hideous screaming sound as if the vehicle was going through angry death throes. Then the vehicle would stop behind another vehicle alongside the highway and he would get out and go over and talk not nicely to the other person and give that person a slip of paper.

He usually did not take her with him on these trips in the flashing, screaming vehicle, in which he departed nearly every morning, leaving Hreapha to entertain herself in the front or back yard. But one time she happened to be riding with him when the person he stopped and spoke not nicely to took a metal thing that he pointed and it made a loud explosive noise and caused the windshield over Hreapha’s head to be punctured in three different places, and then her master had taken another metal thing and pointed it at the man and made the loud explosive noise and the man had fallen down. He had searched through the other vehicle for a long time, and from its trunk had taken a large canvas bag and put it into the trunk of his own vehicle. Returning to her, he had remarked, “Well, now, Poochie-wooch, me and you are in the goddamn clover!” She had no idea what he meant but she was delighted that he had called her something other than Bitch.

That had been the last time that the flashing, screaming vehicle had ever been used. From then on, he didn’t go off to whatever his dealings were each day but stayed home, day after day. As the weather warmed he even went fishing, and took Hreapha with him, and she greatly enjoyed that although she could not begin to imagine why anyone would want to eat a fish. But then he gave up fishing and started taking the truck to those huge stores in several different towns and loading it up with all those boxes and bags. In the beginning, at least, she had loved all that travel.

Hreapha understood how important the boxes and bags must have been to him. So he could almost be forgiven for his anger at her for her failure that one time to guard the truck constantly. She told herself she could let that go, his beating her. But there were so many other things she couldn’t let go. One of them had happened not too long ago on a night so cold she had dreaded the thought of trying to sleep in the backyard in the crude little house he had made for her, lined only with a stinky old blanket. He had surprised her by, instead of putting her out at the usual time, suddenly saying to her, “Hey, Bitch, how’d you like to sleep in the house tonight?” His breath had reeked of the beverage that made him stumble when he walked.

Hreapha had never slept in a house, and she knew that only masters and mistresses and their children were allowed to do that. She could not for the life of her understand why he was making such an invitation, and she could only sit and stare quizzically at him as he repeated himself. She got up and walked in a circle twice as if searching for a proper place to lie down and spend the night. It didn’t matter. The hard kitchen floor was good enough, and warm enough. He pointed to a place there. She licked his hand, and then lay on the floor. He poured some more of his brownish liquid into his glass and then poured some into a saucer, which he set before her, saying, “Here, old gal, try a snort.” Dutifully she dipped her tongue into the liquid but it was penetrating and burning, and she left it alone. “Hey, come on!” he said, “Let’s us me and you tie one on!” She whimpered, as if to tell him thanks just the same but she really didn’t care for any of that beverage.

After a while during which he repeated his invitations to drink, he became unhappy with her. “Goddamn,” he said. “Thankless mutt. I got a mind to leave you here when I move away.” Then he kicked her. He opened the kitchen door and kicked her again, and as she scampered out of the house he kicked her several more times. “I hope you freeze to death!” he yelled, before slamming the door on her.

The memory of that night remained with her now as she pondered the decision to run away. She was tired of living in dread and expectation that he might hurt her again, as he had then, and recently when he’d beaten her with the stick for failing to guard the truck. She knew that he had increased his use of the beverage that made him stumble when he walked. She had been in the back of the truck when he had stopped at the places where he obtained the beverages. They were in two different towns and he had to drive a long way to get to them. But she knew they were the beverage-places because as soon as he had loaded the truck he opened one of the boxes and took one of the bottles to the truck’s cab and began drinking from it. He had loaded many, many boxes of the bottles into the truck, and later had carried them, laboriously, carefully, into and out of all the ravines, over the rough trail that led up to the new place. Hreapha bore no illusions about her intelligence but she knew she was smart enough to realize that if several sips from the bottle made him get loopy and rocky, then he had taken possession of enough entire boxes full of bottles to cause him to fly over the moon or kill himself, whichever came first.

Part of her felt an obligation to stay and protect him, if she could. Her protective instincts were all-consuming and she was even proud of them. But a stronger part of her, perhaps not a natural part of her, was self-protective and therefore selfish.

There was only one box left in the truck, and he would soon be coming back to get it. She jumped down from the truck. She had thought about which way to go; her compass or simply her sense of the whereabouts of her in-habit told her that the tiny town that had become her home lay south but that south was also the direction of the different place, albeit uphill. So she had better head north, and go downhill. She decided to wait until he came back into view, so he could watch her taking leave of him.

Her mother had once explained to her the meaning of a most common imprecation of people: bad dog. Her mother had told her that she could expect to be called a bad dog if she ever, ever did anything contrary to the best interests of people. Her mother told her that the imprecation was meant as a corrective but it usually just had the effect of causing undue guilt and remorse and anxiety. Her mother had advised her to always remember that regardless of how good she was, she would always be somebody’s bad dog.

Now he came back into view. She watched him as he approached the truck, and she said “Hreapha!” to him in a way that clearly meant “goodbye.” And then she said, Bad man. And turned and ran.

Chapter two

Let her go. In his whole life he’d known only a few dogs as good as she was, but damned if she was worth the bother of chasing after her or trying to find her. Driving the truck back down the mountain, bouncing over the twisting, unbearable trail or what was left of it, he thought he caught a glimpse of her in his headlights, and he stopped and turned off the engine and called to her. “Bitch!” he hollered and only then for the first time regretted that he’d never bothered to give her a real name. It sounded like he was cursing her and challenging her to defy him and show her head. He tried sounding gentler. “Bitchie old girl,” he called. “Come on back.” He took his flashlight from the glove compartment and shined it around through the deep, dark woods. “Poochie-wooch,” he called, pleadingly, but already he was debating with himself whether to get another dog or try to do without. It would really be stupid not to have a dog, just as a watchdog in case anybody ever found the old Madewell place, which wasn’t likely, since nobody but himself had ever found the place in many a year. In fact the first time he’d gone up there with Bitch to reconnoiter the place, he was surprised to discover in the dust on the floor his own footprints and nobody else’s, and yet it had to be nearly twenty years since he’d last set foot there, that time he’d been out searching for that kidnapper Montross that he’d finally found and killed, not anywhere near that place but far down below it, in a glen by a waterfall.

That had been his first accomplishment as a state trooper, and now, twenty years later, still only a sergeant in highway patrol although he’d tried for years to get into the criminal investigation division, he had completed his last act as a state trooper, which had made possible this fulfillment of his dream, as well as his retirement. He wasn’t even concerned about the possibility that somebody still held a title to the old Madewell place, or leastways to the hundreds of acres of forest that it was on. He doubted that old Gabe Madewell had actually sold it to anybody when he pulled up stakes after the war and headed for California. Gabe had been a barrel-maker all his life—he tried to remember what the trade was called, something like somebody’s family name, Carver or Turner or Cutter or somebody—but the market had dried up on Madewell and he took his wife and kid and just left everything there like it was, resting on top of one of the highest mountains in Newton County and practically impossible to get to nowadays.

“Well, just you stay out there, Bitch, and see if I care!” he hollered, starting the engine again. “I hope you starve to death!” He went on down the mountain, jouncing over the ledges in the road as if he were driving down steep steps. The poor truck was probably not going to hold up for more than a couple more trips, and he began to think about what he’d bring with him on those last trips. He was putting off bringing the crates of chickens, and he still wasn’t certain about trying to bring the davenport, but knew the time was coming when he’d have to make up his mind whether or not to try to bring it. How in hell was he going to get the davenport down into those ravines and back up and especially across that goddamn ledge? He could carry it over his back much of the way, and maybe use ropes to raise and lower it in the roughest places. Any way you sliced it there was going to be hell to pay, but by God he’d sat or laid on that davenport since he was just a kid, and his mother had loved it, and he sure wasn’t going to put it in the yard sale he was planning on having next Saturday “before going to California.” He laughed. That was a good one. And everybody believed it. Or anybody who gave a rat’s fart what he did or where he went. He had told so many people he was pushing off for California that he halfway believed it himself.

He knew Bitch wouldn’t starve to death in the woods. She was a smart dog and could probably catch something to eat, coons or possums or squirrels. He thought of the three fifty-pound bags of Purina Dog Chow that he had taken the trouble to tote up to the Madewell place, one hundred and fifty pounds of doggie nuggets just to feed Bitch with. Hell, if she was so damn smart she’d probably get it into her head to go on back up to the Madewell place and get in there somehow and chew open one of those bags of Purina. He wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find her there with a big grin on her face the next time he came back.

But more’n likely she’d just keep on a-walking until she came to somebody’s house who would feed her. The nearest house in this direction was a mile or more, down toward Parthenon, and he didn’t even know for sure who lived there. It was an old farmhouse some ways beyond where this trail met up with the dirt road from Wayton to Parthenon. He rarely saw the folks who lived there; he’d waved at the woman once or twice as he went by. If the woman had happened to notice him driving the truck up the road so many times loaded up with stuff, she might have wondered. But once he got that davenport and those chickens up there, assuming the poor truck could make that next-to-last trip, she’d never see him go by again, because the last trip would be made in the dark of the wee hours, with his passenger.

He’d be “gone to California.” Which is where near about everybody from this part of the country had gone anyhow. His mom and dad had gone out there, and died out there. His sister Betty June wrote him once or twice a year from some place called Santa Monica, where she was doing real well. He figured he’d probably have to answer her latest letter, which he hardly ever did, just to let her know that he didn’t live in Stay More any more and not to write him there any more. He wouldn’t tell her he was “gone to California” or she’d expect him to come visit her.

But now he could go spend a couple more nights at home and get ready for that yard sale and heft that davenport up onto his back experimentally just to see if it would fit and how heavy it was. He knew he didn’t need to have the yard sale, not for the money anyhow. The only reason he was having it was to make it look a little more convincing that he was really leaving for good. He’d had a realtor’s FOR SALE sign in his yard for weeks now, and might not ever find a buyer for such a rundown old place, but he didn’t need that money either. He didn’t need any money. He’d bought himself a steel fireproof Sentry® security chest and put all the money in it, except for what he thought he’d need to buy whatever he needed to stock his new home, and he’d buried it under the front porch up there at the Madewell place, and he didn’t expect he’d have to dig it up for a good long while. It was dirty money anyhow, probably collected from all kinds of poor folks addicted to the dope that they’d had to buy with it.

His CID buddies—not friends because he didn’t have a one but good old acquaintances from way back, Lieutenant Morrow’s men in Company e of the Criminal Investigation Division at Harrison—had been puzzled about what had become of the money, but they hadn’t suspected him, or even questioned him about it. His twenty years of service were spotless, and made him eligible for the retirement he’d taken, and nobody thought to make any connection between his retirement and his shooting of that drug runner, except that, as he’d put it, he was damned tired of being shot at, and it was time to hang it up.

They assumed that if the DOA perp had made a delivery in Tulsa and was on his way back to Memphis, he must have had a huge amount of cash on him, which maybe he could have dropped off somewhere or laundered or something. Why had the guy been so far off course, not taking I-40 but US 65? Maybe he’d taken the money to Branson and delivered it to one of the mob who hung out there. The case was closed, although some shady-looking characters had been reported sniffing around Harrison to see if they couldn’t find the money.

The buried security chest had about four hundred thousand still left in it; he hadn’t counted, but he’d spent only about forty or fifty. He’d bought everything he could possibly want, including a real fine set of the best firearms, with enough ammo to last forever, but he had the sense not to do any conspicuous spending, like getting a new truck, which is why he hoped this old crate would hold out for just a few more trips, a couple more shopping trips and then a trip to take the davenport and chickens and a final trip to take the girl.

And of course during those last shopping trips he’d also be shopping for the girl herself. Tomorrow he planned to park the truck alongside one or more of the elementary schools and maybe visit some of the playgrounds and parks. He registered what he had just thought, and realized the ambiguity: no, he wasn’t fixing to shop for the girl, meaning do some shopping on her behalf, which he had already finished. He was fixing to shop the available display of eligible girls and pick out one: shopping for a girl.

He’d already got her whatever she’d be a-needing at the Harrison Wal-Mart, where he’d bought her a whole bunch of some clothes and shoes and stuff, telling the saleslady they were for his daughter and not knowing her exact sizes but only able to say what you’d expect a girl of seven or eight to wear, summer, fall, winter, spring. The saleslady had helped him load up three carts and just said, “Your girl is sure going to be thrilled with all this.” And he’d said, “I hope she will.” Then he’d gone to the toy department and filled three more carts with enough dolls and toys and games and stuffed animals to serve as birthday and Christmas presents for years to come.

Sog Alan went on home to spend the night, had all the good bourbon he could handle, went to put Bitch out and realized she wasn’t in anymore, then went to sleep. Next day fairly late he took his truck and headed to Harrison for one more shopping trip, reflecting that one more ought to do it, and he’d better avoid visiting any of the places he’d already shopped, although he’d tried to spread his shopping out among as many different stores as possible. He’d already used almost all the various supermarkets in Harrison, Berryville, Huntsville, and driven down to Russellville for others, gone all the way to Eureka Springs for his huge hoard of good liquor, and picked up odds and ends at small stores all over creation, buying several cartons of cigarettes at each of maybe a dozen different places. He had enough smokes to last at least a couple of years, and then he’d just have to plant some tobacco and grow his own. He had seeds enough to grow anything in creation.

Now this time he pulled into a discount supermarket up over on the east side of Harrison where he hadn’t been before, and, as usual, loaded up a couple of carts with all kinds of stuff he was buying by the case load or carton or gross.

The check-out clerk, a real pretty but saucy gal, rang up his stuff and said, “Twenty-four quart jars of pickled pigs’ feet? You must really hanker after this stuff.”

“I’m partial to it,” he admitted, and truly it was one of his concerns, that he might some day run out of them. He liked them on occasion, not every week or even every month but he liked them.

“Are you going into hibernation in the early spring?” she asked. “Or do you have a family of thirty-seven to feed?”

He smiled. “Something like that,” he said.

She studied him. “Say,” she said. “Aren’t you Sergeant Alan? I know who you are. You stopped me in Valley Springs and gave me a ticket that wiped out all my savings!”

“What was that name?” he asked.

“Karen Kerr,” she said.

“Yeah, I do believe I remember you, on account of that name that sounds phony. I reckoned as how it might just be a alias, but it’s sure-enough your real name, aint it?”

“It’s not my maiden name,” she said.

“I seem to recollect you was doing fifty or so in a thirty-five mile zone.”

“I was late for work, and I nearly got fired.”

“Well, I reckon you told the judge that, but the law is the law. Aint my fault you broke it.”

“I’ll get a boy to help you bag and load all this stuff.”

“I can do it.”

After driving away he reached for a cigarette and found the slip of paper with a list of a whole bunch of other stuff he’d meant to buy at that market, and he looked it over and swore at the items he’d have to go back for, or get somewheres else: Vienna sausages, canned orange juice, Pet milk, and coffee, for godsakes: he already had several cases of big-can coffee but it was something he couldn’t grow and he drank his share of it and was bound to run out by and by.

He stopped, turned around, and drove back to the big parking lot of the supermarket, where he parked inconspicuously and turned off the motor and just sat and waited patiently for a long, long time to see when Karen Kerr might leave work. Whenever she took off, he could go back in that store for the rest of the stuff on his list, including beef jerky: somebody had told him that beef jerky would keep forever. He wouldn’t take the chance of her seeing him load up a lot of other stuff.

For a while as he waited he entertained himself by watching an occasional youngster go by. School had let out and kids were either going grocery-shopping with their moms or in some cases by themselves or with their friends, and every now and again he’d see a pretty cute one, and imagine in his mind what it would be like if she was the one. But not one of those he saw really grabbed him. He knew that when he found the girl of his dreams he would know it on the instant.

He went around to the back of the truck to fish in one of the sacks for the new issue of Police Gazette he’d just bought. He reached to give Bitch a little pat on the head and found her missing and realized she wasn’t his dog anymore. Then he sat and read through Police Gazette, a lively tabloid which was his favorite reading-matter, shoot, practically his only reading matter, and he knew that he was going to miss it in the months and years ahead. It was always a real pleasure to come across the articles on the disappearance of kids, that had lots of photographs. He knew backward and forward what made up the profile of a so-called child molester, which he wasn’t, because he hadn’t never in his life molested nobody. Sure, he’d done a couple of naughty things with a couple of little bitty old gals, but not against their will, and he was hoping that the companion of his coming months and years would never once have any occasion to feel that what he was doing was against her will. He had for several years assisted his buddy Jack Samples in the CID’s pedo squad, helping Jack make collars and interrogations, and in their time they had nabbed dozens of fellers who were genuine pure-dee pervert molesters, old boys who raped and killed tykes and even tots. Jack had once said to him, “Sog, I be damned if you aint got a nose on you that can smell out pedos where I’d never of found ’em.” He hadn’t told Jack the reason he could find pedos so easy was because he really felt a kind of…not brotherhood or nothing but a real understanding of the way their minds worked and their hearts felt and their dicks stood. Your typical straight-up-and-down pedo generally had in his house a huge assortment of dirty pictures of kids, and unprintable printed matter that showed photos of ’em naked and even doing things to each other, and over the years him and Jack had confiscated such a heap of this stuff that Jack hadn’t even noticed that Sog had “borrowed” a good little bit of it. His favorite, which he’d looked at so often it was falling apart, was a book called Nudist Moppets, and he was planning on keeping that up there at the Madewell place, although he hoped he wouldn’t really need it because his truelove would want to romp and play without a stitch.

He decided that the next little gal who came along would get herself undressed by him in his mind, right then and there. And then here she came. Walking right in front of his truck, as he quickly stripped off her dress, was not just a girl but the girl of his dreams. He knew it so surely he put her dress right back on her, to be nice. The cutest thing you ever did see. Blonde and blue-eyed and full-lipped—oh, those lips were something else! And she turned her head and saw him and smiled at him with all kinds of eagerness and readiness. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen any child with a smile like that. And her skin! Her skin was so soft and fresh and touchable that Sog had to restrain himself from getting out right then and there and giving her a big squeeze. His heart swole within his shirt and his dick swole within his pants; it was the first spontaneous hard-on he’d had in God knows when. But he could only sit and watch as she went on walking by and strolled over to the part of the parking lot where the employees kept their cars, and she went up to this blue Camaro and tried the door and then just stood there beside it, for a long little while, as Sog wracked his brain for a sure-fire way to grab her and take her away right there in broad daylight. Eventually it dawned on him, maybe because he recognized that Camaro, that this lovely little lady, his intended, might be waiting on that selfsame Karen Kerr that he was waiting to see come out of the store.

A bright idea hit him. He could just start up the truck and drive right up beside her and say, “Your mother’s in the hospital, and I’ve been sent to take you there!” It wasn’t an original ruse, he’d heard variations of it used by other abductors that he and Jack Samples had caught, but it might just work. The problem was, he hadn’t finished all his shopping, and he didn’t intend to get the girl until everything was ready for her. While he was pondering this quandary, Karen Kerr came out of the supermarket and sure enough walked right over to that Camaro. He nearly perished with envy when the girl gave her mom a big hug, both of those soft arms reaching around her mother’s waist. And then the girl commenced a-talking, and never stopped. She got in the car with her mother and they drove off, and Sog waited just a bit and followed them, keeping at a distance but close enough that he could tell the girl just went on talking and a-talking.

They didn’t drive too awful far. He found out where they lived, on the east side of Harrison not far from the Fairgrounds, on just a old country road with no neighbors in view. It wasn’t much of a house.

And then he drove on back to that supermarket to finish his shopping. By the time he got the load up the mountain it would be too dark to tote any of it to the house but he might just sleep there in the truck and get a early start the next day transporting it on foot along the terrible mile of ravines and the rocky ledge along the bluff and a godforsaken forest trail. Who knows? Tonight or any time tomorrow he might even get a visit from old Bitch with her tail betwixt her legs and a shit-eating grin on her face.

Chapter three

She had made it clear to Robin that she should never come to the store except in an emergency. But Robin just couldn’t wait, she was so excited with the news that Kelly Brewer had invited her to a sleep-over birthday party. At least Robin hadn’t come inside the store, where Mr. Purvis would have seen her, but waited at the car, which wasn’t an awfully smart thing to do. In a sense that violated Karen’s rule that Robin should never be alone in public. Karen was going to have to have a talk with her about the fact that she seemed to be forgetting a lot of her rules, or else was deliberately flauting them. Robin seemed to be growing more willful and reckless, along with acquiring a reputation in school for being something of a bully. Possibly Robin was upset by the absence of her father. She seemed to have changed since the divorce last Thanksgiving. Robin’s second grade teacher, Miss Moore, had called Karen in for a conference, with the principal sitting in, to discuss Robin’s behavior problems, specifically, as Miss Moore put it, “her need to bombard others with her presence.” Their solution, surprisingly, was to promote Robin. They felt that Robin was too precocious and too intelligent, already reading at fourth-grade level, and promoting her would not only put her where she belonged but also would remove her from those classmates she had been bullying. “She’s just too smart for her friends,” Miss Moore had said. Of course Robin didn’t want to be promoted, and Karen had said she would have to think about it.

Karen’s mother, who fortunately didn’t live in Harrison but down the road twenty miles at Pindall, tried to tell Karen that there were two reasons Robin was becoming so headstrong; one was because Karen was needlessly over-protective and the other because Robin never saw her father any more. Or saw him rarely. Billy had returned to town only once since the divorce, and had tried to take Robin to the roller rink, but Karen had been afraid he might try to abduct her (such things often happened) and she had refused to let Robin leave the house with him. If that made Robin tough and rude, and caused her to pick on other kids, then it was more Billy’s fault than it was Karen’s. It had been Billy who had taught Robin some kind of rough sport called taekwondo, which probably had helped Billy over his frustration at not having the son he’d so desperately wanted, but it didn’t do anything for poor Robin other than leave her prancing around the house kicking out her feet and chopping the air with her hands in an extremely unfeminine manner.

Driving home, listening to Robin run on and on about that birthday party, not able to get a word of caution in edgewise, Karen was happy that Robin seemed so lively and animated in contrast to her usual self these days. It reminded Karen of what an incredibly sweet child Robin had once been. She had been, as they say, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, full of love and wonder and joy, singing her childish songs all the time. Robin had had a speech impediment that made her unable to sound her r’s and l’s properly, so that she said even her own name as “Wobbin,” a charming pronunciation, really. But the kids in the first grade had called her Wobbinhood and teased her with songs about The Wed Wed Wobbin Comes Bob Bob Bobbin Along…until Robin discovered that she could smack them a good one and get them to shut up. Although Karen couldn’t afford it, and Billy wouldn’t help, Karen had spent some money on a speech pathologist for Robin, and now at least she could say her own name correctly, except when she got too excited, as she was now:

“And Gwetchen Scott will be there! And Webecca McGraw! And so will Bevewwy Nichols!”

When Robin paused to catch her breath, Karen asked, “Have all their folks given them permission to spend the night?”

“You better believe it,” Robin said.

“How do you know? What if I called their mothers and asked them?”

Robin stopped bubbling and scowled. “Why would you have to do that?”

“Have any of those girls ever been to a slumber party before?”

“Sure. Gwetchen had one last month but she didn’t invite me.”

“That’s pretty young for sleeping over, don’t you think?”

“How would I know? I’ve never been invited.”

“You don’t have to get surly with me, Miss. I wasn’t invited to my first slumber party until I was eleven or twelve.”

“I’m not you,” Robin said, which was her second-most favorite expression, the first being the two words, “But, Mommy…”

“Let’s just talk about it later while we fix supper.”

Karen decided to stuff Robin with her favorite food, spaghetti (which she had early pronounced as “basketti” and still said that way for the fun of it) and then perhaps Robin would be less moody when Karen rejected her request to attend Kelly’s birthday slumber party.

Robin helped in the kitchen, as she’d been taught to do. Robin wasn’t allowed to use the stove, but she could time the boiling of the spaghetti noodles and tell Karen when they were done so Karen could strain them. It was also Robin’s job to stir the Kool-Aid and put the ice cubes into the glasses, as well as to set the table. While they worked, Robin broached the subject again. “It just surprised me so that Kelly would ask me. I didn’t think she liked me at all.”

“Because you usually make fun of her?”

“I don’t make fun of her. But everybody in Miss Moore’s class loves her to pieces, and they don’t know what a crybaby she is.”

Karen smiled wryly, trying to remember the last time that Robin had cried. “Maybe if she’s still a crybaby, she’s not old enough to be having a slumber party.”

“Becky said she’d give Kelly fifty cents if she could get through the whole party and sleep-over without ever crying,” Robin declared, “and I think Kelly has made up her mind to try and see if she can. Being eight is too old to cry.”

“If it’s Saturday night, probably all you girls will stay up past midnight talking and goofing off and you’ll be too sleepy to go to Sunday school and church the next day.”

“Mommy,” Robin said. “Why do you really not want me to go?”

Karen needed a moment to ponder the question. “We’ve never spent a night apart except when you stay at Grandma’s house,” Karen said. “I’ll be lonesome without you.”

“Do you want to come?” Robin invited, and laughed at the image. “You’d have to take Kelly a present.”

“Speaking of which, where do you plan to get the money to buy Kelly something? You know we just don’t have any.” Before Karen had been hit with that hideous ticket for speeding, she’d used up a good chunk of her savings account getting Robin the bicycle, which had been a big mistake, because she couldn’t let Robin ride off on it without supervision, and Robin simply wasn’t the outdoor sort anyhow, preferring to stay in the house most of the time.

“But Mommy, it might only be a couple of dollars. If you don’t have it, Grandma would give it to me.”

“She would, and she’d also hop all over me if I wouldn’t let you go, isn’t that a fact?”

Robin smiled. “She could sure make trouble if you wouldn’t.”

It was hard enough to raise a child without help from a spouse. But it was harder to raise a child with too much help from a parent. Karen’s mother had her own ideas about childrearing…which hadn’t been so bad, as far as Karen herself had developed. Louisa Spurlock believed that only God should supervise the comings and goings and growing of a kid, that leaving well enough alone and in God’s hands was all the watching-out that a parent needed to do. But Louisa still enjoyed the help and companionship of a husband, although Grandpa Spurlock wasn’t Karen’s father and therefore not the real forebear of the golden-haired beauty whom he doted on so much. Leo Spurlock was so infatuated with Robin that it made Karen uneasy. She had stopped just short of telling Robin not to sit on her grandfather’s lap.

Men, Karen was convinced, were mostly creeps. The world was full of old goats who couldn’t think of anything else but sex, unless it was simply ways to make the opposite sex feel miserable. Her boss, Mr. Purvis, had tried so many times to get into her pants that she’d finally had to report him to the police, and this lecherous cop had sneered and drooled as he explained to her that she wouldn’t have a case without witnesses and it was pretty hard to prove anyhow and his advice was, if she couldn’t stand the thought of giving old Purvis a little enjoyment, to just try not to get into a situation she couldn’t get out of.

Cops were just as bad, or worse, than the bad guys. Take that jerk she’d seen again this afternoon, buying out the store, that Sergeant Alan of the state police. He had given her the ticket for going a little too fast on a stretch of Highway 65 where everybody else was going the same speed she was. That guy was a typical tough, unfeeling, uncouth law officer: getting into middle age, paunchy, thick, the image of a redneck, and probably the owner of an extensive private collection of pornography.

“Do you know how fast you were going?” he’d asked her when he stopped her.

“No, I don’t,” she’d said honestly.

He’d laughed and said, “Then I can write anything I want on this ticket, can’t I?”

“Why are you picking on me?” she’d asked him. “All those other people are going the same speed I was.”

“What other people?” he’d said.

“Look!” she’d said, and pointed. “Look at that guy! He’s going faster than I was.”

“I’ll catch him,” he’d said, and had finished writing out the ticket for her.

Robin was eating her salad quickly, to get it out of the way before touching the spaghetti. Robin hated salad, or anything green, but Karen had demanded that she eat what was good for her, so Robin had developed a habit of quickly finishing anything she didn’t like before starting on what she did like.

Karen reflected that if she’d flirted with that cop, maybe he would have let her off. Or maybe not. Maybe he had a quota to fill, so many tickets to write each day, in order to earn his bonuses and feed that family of thirty-seven that he was buying all that food for. Karen shook her head, and laughed.

“What’s funny?” Robin asked.

“I was just thinking about a man at the store today who bought a whole case—that’s twenty-four quart jars—of pickled pigs’ feet.”

“What’s that?” Robin wanted to know.

“When they butcher hogs and take off all the bacon and hams and good parts, they’ve got leftovers like feet, which they preserve by pickling, and sell cheaply.”

“Ew,” Robin said. “That’s gross.”

“You’ve never had any, and I hope you never have to.”

“What did he look like?” Robin asked.

“Why do you ask?”

“Anybody who eats lots of pickled pigs’ feet must look weird. Maybe like a monster.”

“He’s a state trooper,” Karen said, “although he wasn’t in uniform.” She attempted to describe him: mid-forties, strong build but potbellied, plain grizzled brown hair, bushy eyebrows. “He might not look weird but he certainly wasn’t good-looking. Just an old country boy without a brain in his head. He was buying case loads of everything. Maybe the state police are going to have a big picnic.”

Robin laughed, and said, “A zillion pigs chomping on pigs’ feet!” Then she said, “Let’s not get off the subject, okay?”

“What subject?”

“I want to go to Kelly’s slumber party.”

Karen sighed. This was going to be difficult. She tried to tell herself that Kelly’s parents, whom she’d never met, were thoroughly responsible people and would do a proper job of riding herd on the party. They would make sure nobody got hurt and that all of them behaved themselves, as much as girls of seven and eight possibly could. Maybe the parents would even make sure the kids put out the lights and went to sleep before dawn came. Still, Karen would worry herself sick the whole time Robin was away.

The whole idea just wouldn’t work. Robin had a daily schedule that she was required to observe, from the time she woke up until the time she went to bed, that included her chores around the house and her homework, as well as her “fun” things like watching television and reading comic books and talking on the telephone and playing with her paper dolls, most of which she’d made herself. She was particularly responsible for strict observance of the rules while Karen was at work and Robin was home alone. She was not allowed to invite her friends over unless Karen was home. Robin had memorized the numbers for the fire department, the family doctor, the police, and Karen’s place of employment. Robin was allowed to use the vacuum cleaner but not the toaster, the electric can opener, the mixer or the stove.

Robin was permitted to check the mailbox quickly when the school bus dropped her off, but then she had to go directly to the front door and unlock it with her key that was kept in a special pocket under the lid of her lunchbox. Karen had timed her: it took only twenty seconds for her to step down from the bus, glance into the mailbox and then walk to the front door and, before unlocking it, check the house for any sign of a broken window or anything that didn’t look right. Karen had requested that the bus driver wait those twenty seconds until Robin was inside before driving off. If Robin noticed anything about the house that didn’t look right, she was supposed to get back onto the bus and ride back to the school and phone for Karen from there. After actually entering the house and locking it from the inside, including the deadbolt, Robin was supposed to give the house its inspection, looking for anything amiss: back door ajar or unlocked, windows not closed, any smell of smoke or gas or anything suspicious.

If anyone phoned for Karen while she was gone, unless it was Grandma, Robin was required to tell the caller that Karen couldn’t come to the phone and to take a message, and never to tell the caller that she was home alone. Robin was not to unlock the door for anyone except Grandma and Grandpa, and they had a special code knock which Grandpa called shave-and-a-haircut-six-bits; a rhythm of knocks that was easily recognizable, so if Robin heard a voice on the other side of the door saying, “Open up, it’s your Grandma,” even if it sounded just like Grandma, she was not to open the door unless she’d heard that code knock.

Despite all these rules and procedures, Karen still worried constantly about leaving Robin home alone. And today Robin had violated her routine by coming to the store to meet Karen instead of taking the school bus home. That was not excusable, and Karen considered punishing Robin for it by forbidding her from attending the birthday sleep-over. If nothing else could persuade Robin to back down, Karen might have to resort to that.

“Did you just walk from school to the store?” Karen asked her daughter. Robin nodded. It was only a few blocks from Woodland Heights Elementary to the store, but still, Robin knew she was not allowed to walk alone. “That’s not permitted, you know. You must never forget ‘stranger danger.’”

“I never forget,” Robin said.

“What if a man had driven up beside you and told you that I was in the hospital and he’d been sent to pick you up?”

“I would’ve told him that I know where the hospital is and I could walk there by myself, thank you very much.”

Karen smiled. “That’s good, but what if he had tried to get out and grab you?”

“I would have given him a chagi in the nuts.”

“A what in the what?”

Robin stood up from the table and said, “Chagi means kick in taekwondo. Watch.” And she delivered a swift kick into the groin of an imaginary man who somehow took the form of mean old Sergeant Alan in Karen’s mind.

“I didn’t know you knew those words,” Karen said.

“And if that doesn’t crumple him up,” Robin declared, “I’ll give him a chireugi right in his windpipe.” And she demonstrated, making a spear of her fingers and thrusting them toward his neck.

Karen flinched. “Wow. That hurt, I bet.”

Robin dusted her hands together, and sat back down. “Next question.”

“I wish you wouldn’t drum your fingers on the table,” Karen said. It was a bad habit that had gotten worse in recent months. On one hand, it was clear proof that a career as a concert pianist was waiting for Robin, if only they could afford piano lessons. On the other hand, it was annoying and showed a complete lack of patience. “Tell you what,” Karen offered, “if you’ll clean your room, and I mean clean it, I’ll give you two dollars to buy Kelly a birthday present.”

Robin thought about that. “You mean that I could take to the party?”

“How else would you get it there? Mail it?”

Chapter four

Few things frightened her. She was scared of thunder but not of the lightning that went with it. Thinking about this, and about the explanation that her mother had tried to give her about the connection between lightning and thunder, how the latter is the sound of the former (even though this was hard to grasp because she often saw the lightning long before she heard the thunder), she decided that what most frightened her about thunder was the noise. Not just because it was so crashing and booming but because it was inexplicable. What was happening? Was the whole world blowing up and coming to an end? She had lived through many thunderstorms and always found that the next day the world was just as it had always been, but every time she heard a sudden loud noise (gunshots too and, at least once in her short life, the fireworks that accompany July 4th) the sound seemed to be suggesting mass destruction.

And because she was not afraid of the lightning, or of any sudden light, or of light in any of its forms (not even the moon, although it sometimes seemed to be an intruder), she was not afraid of the absence of light either. The dark did not bother her at all. This seemed to her an unreasonable lack of fear, when she ought to be rightly apprehensive about all the unseen things out there in the dark which could cause her harm. Often she could hear them, and smell them without being able to see them, but she reflected that their odor and their sound were fearsome but not their invisibility. She hated the high-pitched echo-shrieking of bats; she knew they had to do it to find their way around in the dark, but she couldn’t stand the sound of it.

She didn’t need to make any sounds to find her way around in the dark, and so now she trotted easily and effortlessly down the remains of the old logging trail that meandered up the north face of Madewell Mountain. But her tongue, hanging out of her mouth to catch all the night’s fragrances, was becoming dry. She was very thirsty, and hoped she’d soon catch a sniff of a spring bubbling out of the earth, or a rivulet in a ravine, and she realized too it was well past her suppertime, with no prospect of anything to eat in the offing. Sure, she could catch a squirrel or a rabbit, or even one of the night birds whose plaintive advertisements for a mate filled the air sweetly with pleasant sounds, but the simple fact was that she had never in her life killed a thing. Not a thing. Well, of course she’d caused the demise of various fleas who had burrowed into her coat and fallen victim to her chomping. But that was self-protective murder.

She encountered along the trail many creatures, edible and inedible, none of whom could understand her attempts to communicate with them: a porcupine, a green turtle, an armadillo, a family of raccoons, and a possum. In the dark she could see clearly enough to tell what an ugly creature the possum was, but she knew from experience that possums were good folk, and friendly, and she was sorry she didn’t know their language. Overhead were flying squirrels whose sounds were too mild to frighten her but noisy enough to be distracting. There was also an occasional owl, whose hoot stopped her in her tracks and reversed her ears.

After a long time the logging trail met up with a larger trail, a dirt road, and she came to a habitation. She and the other dog caught wind of each other at the same instant. The other loudly announced her name: “Arphrowf!”

“Hreapha!” she answered.

Soon they met, and took turns sniffing each other’s identities. Arphrowf wanted to know where in tarnation she thought she was a-heading, this time of night. Hreapha explained that she’d been up on the mountain with her master, but had decided to revolt against him and to disaffiliate herself from his activities. Good gracious to Betsy, said Arphrowf, you don’t mean to tell me. I never in all my born days heard tell of nobody a-quittin out like that. Hreapha explained, He wasn’t a very nice man. I had all I could take.

Say, said Arphrowf, does he by any chance drive a old beat-up Chevy pick-up? I reckon I’ve seen that feller go past here a hundrit times lately. And wasn’t that you a-settin in the back end? Amidst all kinds of passels and totes and plunder? Where’s he a-haulin all that freight?

Hreapha sat for a spell (she needed the rest) and told her new friend all about how her former master had taken possession of an old farmstead up on the mountaintop and was apparently stocking it up with enough food and supplies to last forever, including enough hard liquor to enable a flight over the moon or an early death, whichever came first. She asked Arphrowf if she’d ever been up there to that old abandoned house. Her new friend said, I caint say as how I have. I think I know where it is, though. It’s just too fur and snaky for me to want to mess with. Hreapha observed that she hadn’t seen any snakes yet. Then she asked, You wouldn’t happen to have any surplus food lying around loose, would you? Arphrowf apologized: I done et in the forepart of the evening and they won’t be a-layin out my breffust till the sun comes up. But you’re shore welcome to stay and share it with me.

I guess I’d better be getting on, Hreapha declared.

Don’t be rushing off. Stay more and we’ll visit till they lay out the chow.

I thank you, Hreapha said. I reckon I’ll see you again sometime. “Hreapha!”

“Arphrowf!” her friend bade her goodbye.

Hreapha possessed an unerring sense that told her which way to go to meet up with her in-habit in what remained of the tiny village where she’d lived recently and where she still had a friend or two. While this sense depended upon a collaboration between her ineffable internal compass and her memory of the complex of odors she had sniffed the many, many times she had been in the pickup on this road, it was primarily a knowledge of that part of herself she had left behind at home, which her mother had told her was called her in-habit: an invisible, unsmellable presence, a second self beyond the senses. So now she headed down the dirt road that would lead there sooner or later. Hreapha was a little sad to be leaving Arphrowf, who was a good old friendly country girl, and she had ever-so-briefly considered the possibility of hanging around and seeing if Arphrowf’s people might want to have her, or at least feed her. But she believed her chances for a meal or a new master might be better in or near the village. Home is home, after all, where your in-habit remains and never wants to leave. There was even the possibility that after her former master had completely moved out of his house, she could move back into it, and continue to enjoy living there, in her old familiar home, the only real home she’d ever known, and if she didn’t have a master, if nobody took possession of the house after he had left it, she could just count on a friend or two to help her forage for food. Possibly, even if somebody did take possession of that house, they might adopt her! She really did have a bright future, and her steps quickened as she trotted along the road. Almost as if in celebration, she came to a spring trickling out of the roadside bank, with a small pool where it fell, and she quenched her thirst at length before trotting onward.

It was a long way to the village, and she passed very few houses along the road, most of them vacant, and the few inhabited ones domains of her kindred, who continued sleeping or perfunctorily called their names to her as she trotted past. She knew none of them, and only occasionally called her name back to them.

The only difficulty she had on the long road was an abrupt encounter with a striped skunk. She recognized it instantly and knew that if she antagonized it she’d carry its foul squirtings on her face for days and days. In her own language she tried to assure the skunk that she meant no harm and simply wanted to go her own way, but the skunk spoke a complex foreign language and began circling her with its tail raised and then, at the instant she sensed the animal was about to fire its fetid spray, Hreapha took off, running as hard as her legs would carry her. Thus she escaped the full brunt of the foul vapors, but not entirely their all-encompassing effect. Further along the road she had to stop and burrow her nose into the dirt and hold it there for a long time until the worst of the hideous smell had gone.

She still carried the awful stink when she finally arrived on the outskirts of the village sometime after daybreak, at one of the very few houses still occupied, where lived a very good friend of hers, a big shaggy fellow named Yowrfrowr. He was always thrilled to see her, especially because his only companions other than his mistress were the countless cats who filled the front yard. Yowrfrowr was a jovial and gentle fellow, but he had little affection for or tolerance of his yard mates, who were now eyeing Hreapha with mean and unwelcoming looks.

“Yowrfrowr!” he greeted her, but then he backed away from her and said, Ew pee-you, that kitty must’ve had a pole down its back!

Sorry, she said. I guess I didn’t jump out of its way fast enough.

They’re a botheration and a pestilence this time of spring, Yowrfrowr observed. A body can’t take a little constitutional without the danger of being squirted by one of their fulsome atomizers.

Hreapha didn’t always understand Yowrfrowr’s language, which she assumed could be the result of the fact that he was purebred, not of mixed ancestry as she was. He was well-behaved and kind, as well as extremely good-looking, and she thought she liked him more than any other dog of her acquaintance, although he did constantly hint at his sexual attraction toward her.

You wouldn’t happen to have any of your breakfast left over, would you? She asked.

Didn’t that bastard give you enough to eat? Yowrfrowr demanded.

He doesn’t know I’m in town, she said. But even if he did, I wouldn’t want him to feed me. I’ve forsaken him.

Yowrfrowr’s big soulful eyes grew enormous. You what?

I just decided I don’t want to live with him anymore. So I ran away.

High time! Yowrfrowr exclaimed. Though I must say I’ve never heard of such apostasy before. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

But I haven’t had anything to eat since yesterday breakfast, Hreapha said, and I’ve been walking for miles and miles.

Yowrfrowr tilted his head and looked at her sideways. Miles and miles? It’s less than a mile from here to his house.

He has another house. He’s moving. Way off to some godforsaken run-down homestead on the mountaintop far north of here.

No wonder you left him. He has no right to take you away from this town…and from me. Yowrfrowr winked at her.

So? She reminded him of her request. I’d really appreciate a bite or two.

Sweetheart, I’d give you all my breakfast if I still had any. Truth is, I’ve cleaned the dish, at least those morsels which I could beat the blasted felines to. But tell you what: I could go over there and scratch on the door and whine piteously and maybe she’d come out and give me some more.

Which, bless his heart, he proceeded to do. You hide behind that bush, he told her, and then he scratched at the door and whined for a while. As the door opened, he said “Yowrfrowr!” eagerly. The old woman stood there looking down at him. Yowrfrowr had once explained to Hreapha that his mistress was the oldest woman in town, was the grandmother of some of the others who still lived nearby, and was also, despite her age, the most beautiful creature on earth. Her only grave flaw, her hamartia, was her fondness for worthless felines.

The woman said to him, “What’s bothering you, Xenophon?” The woman never called him Yowrfrowr. Usually she just called him “Fun” for short, or sometimes “Funny.”

He rose up on his hind legs, holding his forepaws in a begging gesture, smiling broadly all the while. Hreapha thought he was indeed funny, perhaps ludicrous. The cats averted their faces in disgust.

When that failed to convey his message he went to his empty food bowl and nudged it with his nose toward the old woman’s feet. “You want more food?” she said. “Good heavens, boy, I gave you as much as you always get. You don’t want to get fat.” She scratched him behind the ears and closed the door.

Well, you tried, Hreapha told him. Thank you.

I know where there’s a dead pigeon, he declared. If one of those mewly pussies hasn’t found it first.

Thanks, but I’ll be running along, she said.

His soulful eyes looked heartbroken. Aw, dearest, don’t depart, he whined with theatrical emphasis. Stay more and let’s frolic.

I know what ‘frolic’ means to you, you old goat. “Hreapha!” She turned tail.

“Yowrfrowr!” he called after her mournfully.

As she went on, she reflected that there might come a time when she’d gladly eat that dead pigeon. But if worst came to worst, she could catch and kill one of the chickens at home, although that would surely outrage him if he knew it was her, not to mention violating her principles about not killing anything but fleas. She trotted down into the main street of the village, which was deserted. She had explored it many times and never found any sign of recent activity or life in it. There wasn’t much left to it: a few empty houses, one of them big; a couple of stores, a big one and a little one, both long abandoned. She had explored the pile of hewn stones that Yowrfrowr told her had once been a bank where people kept their money, and a huge cellar which had been the foundation of a gristmill.

The derelict village wasn’t her destination. That was another half mile or so beyond it, up the main road that led out of it. She passed one other occupied house, and spoke only briefly with Ouruff, who wasn’t very sociable because she was preoccupied with the rearing of a litter of puppies and didn’t have time for Hreapha. They were practically next-door neighbors, although the house where Hreapha had lived was another quarter-mile beyond Ouruff’s house. She didn’t want to ask Ouruff for food, because she knew that Ouruff was still nursing and needed to eat everything she could lay her paws on. How’s the pups? Hreapha asked politely as she moseyed on past. Jist a-feelin hunkydory, Ouruff said. Stay more and take a look-see.

Got to be getting on, Hreapha declared. “Hreapha!”

She arrived at home. Or what used to be home. Although her in-habit was clearly there, and glad to see her, the pickup wasn’t there. She hadn’t expected it to be, didn’t want it to be. She went at once to her food dish, just an old green plastic bowl that he hadn’t washed in ages. It was empty, of course. What had she expected? Well, she knew how absent-minded he was, and half-hoped that he might have put food out for her, just from force of habit. She looked around for the chickens, who were ordinarily free-ranging and had the run of the place and even left their droppings in Hreapha’s favorite spots. But they were all gone! Hreapha visited their coop but they weren’t there either. Had he also taken the chickens to the other place?

She sighed, and suddenly remembered that the back yard was a cemetery for a great number of bones that she had interred in the course of time, and she had but to remember the best and biggest one, and she could dig it up and gnaw happily on it. She had dug up the back yard not just to bury bones but also to make herself a den, to keep warm in cold weather and keep cool in hot weather, and a number of pits she had dug simply out of boredom. But most of the holes had been for the burial of bones, which he had generously thrown to her after gnawing most of the meat off himself.

The disinterred bone might not provide much substance for her stomach but the very act of chewing on it kept her from feeling hungry, and it also controlled tartar and prevented build-up and gum disease.

Hreapha spent the rest of the morning digging up and gnawing bones. There was still some water, rather stale, in her water bowl. Everything around her had her stamp on it; these were her things and smelled like her and therefore belonged to her, and she was happy among her possessions. Eschewing her doghouse with its stinky blanket, she climbed down into one of her holes and curled up and took a long nap.

As usual, her sleep was full of dreams. She knew that the purpose of dreams, sometimes disturbing and sometimes blissful but always mysterious and puzzling, was to help her make some sense out of her life, and to know what to do day by day. Sometimes she dreamed of being chased by people, other dogs, and monsters. Sometimes she dreamed of chasing people, other dogs, or monsters. Sometimes she had dreams of being able to fly like a bird. Sometimes she had weird dreams: once she was required to put on a dress and a hat to cover her nakedness. Most often though, she dreamed of houses: big houses, little houses, henhouses, doghouses. Doors. Attics. Porches. Windows. Kitchens. Roofs. Bedrooms. None of the houses were actually places she had ever seen or lived in. Always the houses in her dreams were dilapidated, even the doghouses, and had been abandoned, were not being used, although each of them was inhabited by at least one in-habit. And they were not necessarily empty. They were cluttered, and it was somehow her responsibility to move the clutter.

Whatever she dreamed during her long nap this afternoon, she woke up from it having come to a most disturbing decision. She looked over the rim of the hole in which she had slept and noticed that there was no sign of him or the pickup. Much as she liked this house, which was her home, she was going to abandon it. She was going to reverse her direction and hike all the way back up to that mountaintop, to that other house where her master was moving. For the life of her, she could not understand why she decided to do this. But she knew she must do it. Something in her dreams had persuaded her.

She gnawed on one more bone and did not bother to bury the remains of it. She took a long drink of the unfresh water. She considered stopping to tell Yowrfrowr where she was going, but she did not. She summoned up her in-habit and said to it, I’m sorry but you’ve outgrown this place. Let’s go.

Chapter five

He decided to take the chickens first, as a warm-up for the much harder task of carrying the davenport. He’d already had plenty of exercise chasing them down and catching them and putting them into the two crates. The crates were the real McCoy, the same kind that Tyson used to coop and ship all their birds in, made of wood that could rail in twelve to fifteen four-pound hens, and he’d helped himself to a couple of them several weeks before when he was still driving the cruiser and a Tyson truck had stopped along the highway. But the crates were big and he had to use both hands to lift and carry each one of them, and it was real tricky. In fact it was a son of a bitch. He’d toted so many boxes and sacks on this same path so many times that he knew almost every step by heart and could do it in the dark, although part of it amounted practically to no-hands mountain-climbing, getting his boot up into this crack and then raising the other boot above it to that crack. Christ almighty. For the pure hell of it, he’d tried to calculate just how far he’d gone already, moving everything into the Madewell place. It was just under a mile from where he had to leave the pickup to the front door of the old house. That meant that it was practically a two-mile round trip. Multiply that by the number of sacks and boxes and bags he’d carried, and it came to the equivalent of walking all the way to Little Rock and back. But any fool walking to Little Rock would stick to the nice smooth road, and his route had been steep down and steep up, reminding him of the old joke that if you was to iron Newton County out flat it would cover the whole state of Texas.

And he’d never had to carry anything as big as a chicken crate. That was one hell of a hefty job, and it lathered him with sweat not from the heat but the nervousness of it. And then there was the damn birds a-cackling the whole time and even pecking his goddamn fingers. He sure did relish fried chicken and he had to have his scrambled eggs two or three mornings a week, but he just didn’t know if it was worth all the trouble.

On the trickiest part of the trail, that goddamn ledge against the bluff that was just barely wide enough to stand on, he had to turn sideways and hold the crate sideways and move sideways a step at a time, bit by slow bit. That ledge was such tough going that even Bitch had shied away from it. He hated to remember Bitch now. He truly wished he’d been nicer to her.

His thoughts lost on the damned dog, he took a misstep, lost his balance, lost his hold on the crate, tripped, and the whole fucking crate went flying off the bluff and it was kind of a miracle he didn’t go flying after it. It landed in a treetop down below, the tree boughs breaking the fall so the crate and birds weren’t smashed into the ground. But the impact tore open the crate’s door and the birds flew out. Some of them landed on branches of the tree, others fell to the ground, a couple of them lay motionless as if dead, but all the damn chickens were out there loose. He wasn’t going to try to climb down there and recover them, and he knew he couldn’t get that crate out of the tree. The hell with it. Their wings was clipped, and they might come home to roost, ha ha. He figured they’d find their way on up to the house, those that didn’t get eaten by foxes or bobcats or whatever was waiting for them out there in the woods.

He went back to the truck and got the other crate and was even more careful transporting it, sweating and winded both, and especially careful along that ledge where he’d lost the first crate. The second crate contained a rooster, at least, and he could start in to breeding the flock right away, and as soon as the eggs hatched he’d have nearly as many as he’d lost.

He reflected that all of this labor of hauling and carrying all the supplies for his new home had been a peck of trouble but it had slimmed him down a good bit. His beer gut didn’t hang out over his belt buckle anymore. His biceps were thicker than he’d ever known them to be. He was in good shape for doing the repairs that needed to be done on the house, which was the first big job as soon as he got the girl moved in and settled.

He got the second crate of chickens to the house successfully and turned them loose beside the henhouse, then opened a bag of chicken mash and broadcast it liberally around the yard, near the henhouse. He didn’t intend to feed the chickens regularly, and had only one thirty-pound bag of mash. When that ran out, they’d have to learn to feed themselves on bugs and worms and whatever they could catch. But the mash would tell them that this was their new home and they’d better stay here and maybe they’d better cackle loud enough for those other chickens down below to come up and join ’em.

Sog dusted his hands and made himself a little drink of Jack Daniels before going back for the davenport. He’d prefer to have his drink on the rocks, but the only rocks he was ever going to have up here was the real rock kind of rock. No ice. He sipped his drink and watched the chickens out in the tall grass a-scratching around for the mash he’d scattered. He hoped the girl would be partial to fried chicken as much as he was, and maybe even learn how to cook it. Serafina, his first wife, had been the best chicken-fryer in the country; must’ve been something she put in the batter. Fina had been just too good to last, and he’d had her for just a few years after he’d come home from Korea and found out her man Gene had been killed there, and had taken her and her sweet little daughter Brigit into his house. Brigit had been just five at the time, and he’d waited patiently for two years before he’d ever tried anything with her, and then he made sure that she really wanted to do it and that she understood it was just between him and her and never to be told to a soul, and he rewarded her as much as he could, and sweet Brigit had just loved him to pieces and was completely heartbroke when her mother decided to move on. Fina never found out about them. She just didn’t like living in a dying town like Stay More, and she didn’t think Sog had much future. At least that’s what she tried to say in the note that he found when he come home from work one day. He was so pissed he went out and wrote tickets all over the place, stopping everybody for everything, especially for driving one mile over the speed limit.

He could still enjoy Brigit in his fantasies, although it had been fifteen years since last he’d enjoyed her in the flesh. The funny thing was, and this was something he’d been asking himself about, this girl of his dreams that he had found and was going to be moving into this house any day now didn’t look anything at all like Brigit. She was far lovelier, for one thing. Brigit had been real cute, black hair in bangs and a cute little mouth with just the right size lips, but this Harrison girl that was his truelove was just something else, completely.

He finished his drink and went back for the davenport. It was clouding up and looked like it might come on to rain, which they sure needed. It hadn’t rained a drop so far this April. He told himself that if he could just somehow get that big couch into his new home, the very worst would be all over. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the davenport wound up in a treetop like the chicken crate, but he was bound and determined to get his dear mother’s favorite possession into his final home. The experience with the first crate of chickens was good in the sense that it had taught him there was no way he could get the davenport along that same narrow ledge. He had plenty of rope and was going to have to figure out a way to rig the rope over a tree limb on top of the bluff and tie it around the davenport and either swing the davenport over and across the ledge or else hoist it all the way up the bluff. But first he had to get the davenport through those ravines. He’d already carried the davenport upside down on his back to get it into the pickup, and he knew it weighed just about a hundred and fifty pounds. That wouldn’t break his back, stout as he was, but the footing was sure going to be tough going.

It took Sog all of an hour to lug that davenport on his back down into and up out of the three ravines that had to be traversed before he could reach that precarious ledge. He was just climbing out of the last ravine, huffing and puffing and sweating like a studhorse, when sure enough it come onto a rain, just a light sprinkle at first. He told himself not to hurry because getting the davenport across that ledge had to be done carefully, but by the time he’d rigged his ropes and tied them proper and was ready to swing the davenport across, it had commenced to rain pretty steady and he sure hated his mother’s davenport getting drenched like that. In his impatience he climbed aboard the davenport and rode it as it swung across the ledge, and he grabbed aholt of a tree trunk on the other side, telling himself what a smart boy he was to have devised that system of ropes for getting the davenport beyond that ledge…although if it hadn’t worked he and the davenport both would have crashed a hundred feet down to the earth below.

Getting the davenport the rest of the way through the forest was fairly easy and he cleared the front door of the Madewell house just as thunder crashed and a real toad-strangling downpour hit. He righted the davenport into its place in the living room, and admired it there for a long moment before he went to shut the front door and just as he did a flash of lightning illuminated a creature dashing into Madewell’s shop out across the way. The open-ended shed was the place where Madewell had rived his staves and assembled his barrels and buckets and piggins and churns, and it had a little forge in it for the metal bands. That creature wasn’t no wild beast of the woods. Damned if it wasn’t old Bitch, sure looked like. He wasn’t going out in this downpour to investigate. If she took a notion to come on to the house, he’d be nice to her. He wondered if maybe she’d never really left but had just been hanging around here waiting for him.

Sog made himself another Jack D and sat on the davenport and enjoyed it. The davenport was wet but not too wet, and it would dry off. It was going to be real comfy a-sitting here with his truelove, and he could hardly wait to do it. After all this work, there were just two things left: holding the yard sale Saturday, and finding some way to take possession of his truelove. He wished he knew her name, so he could think of her by name instead of just “truelove.” He knew her last name, which was on their mailbox: Kerr. He hoped she would have a real nice first name. He sure didn’t have a very good one hisself, although his grandpap had explained to him that Sugrue, which was his grandpap’s family name, was a distinguished Irish name that went all the way back to the Irish Siocfhraidh, meaning victory and peace. Kids in school had started calling him Sog in the first grade, although the teacher called him Sugrue all the way through the eighth. He didn’t mind, except Sog sounded a little like soggy, which everything was getting in this downpour. He had told his second wife, Arlene, to call him Sugrue instead of Sog, but she had preferred to call him Daddy, though of course they never had any children, and she was just a overgrown child herself, which was probably what had drawn him to her in the first place. Every bit of thirty-five when she’d married him, she was just a little bitty old slip of a girl, flat-chested and baby-faced. She could have passed for ten or less. Most people thought she was his daughter, or even his granddaughter, for heavensakes. But she sure wasn’t innocent. Nor sweet. Nor fresh. She’d had a fairly wild past that he never learned all the particulars of, but he suspected she might even have been a whore at one time. He’d rescued her from a guy who beat her and was now serving time at Cummins. Worst of all about Arlene, compared with a genuine girlchild, was that she wouldn’t mind him; he never could tell her what to do, and she was headstrong and did as she pleased. Arlene hadn’t lasted as long as Fina before she commenced complaining that he simply couldn’t hold out long enough for her. She had a fancy name for it that she taunted him with: premature ejaculator. She said his fuse was too short. One day she said, “You go off too fast so I’m going off, period.” And she left him. Just like that. Fuck her.

As the rain kept beating down, Sog figured this would be a good time to check the place for leaks. Gabe Madewell and his daddy Braxton who’d built this place had been real craftsmen, and the same tight workmanship they’d put into all those barrels and buckets and piggins and churns had gone into the house. The roof was covered with cedar shingles that Brax Madewell had rived with even more care than he’d rived his white oak staves, and those shingles was still tight and solid, although the ones on the north side was all covered with moss. Except for a couple of window lights that Sog was going to have to replace (and he had lugged in a box full of glass pre-cut to the exact size of the window lights), the house was tight, a miracle in view of how long it had been abandoned. Why hadn’t anybody ever wanted to take it over after Gabe Madewell left? Probably because they couldn’t find it! No, honestly, the only reason anybody would want the place, assuming they knew it was there, would be because of one of two things: either they wanted to become a barrel-maker like Madewell or, like Sog, they wanted it as a hideaway, a hermitage.

There was, Sog discovered, one leak in the roof, which was coming down into the smaller bedroom which Sog was using entirely as a storage room, with boxes stacked to the ceiling, a ceiling which was steadily dripping water upon the boxes. Hastily Sog took a bucket and climbed his stepladder and positioned the bucket to catch the drip of the leak. He watched the bucket for a while to assure himself that it wouldn’t fill up and overflow for a good long time. Then he resumed his inspection of the house and took satisfaction in seeing that it was practically all ready for the arrival of his truelove. It was a good old house. They had everything they needed for years. And it was reasonably clean. When he’d first entered it, it had been inhabited by a pair of buzzards who’d laid their eggs right on the floor and hatched ’em and there was a bunch of godawful ugly baby birds a-screaming and also a-puking. One of them baby birds could hit you with puke from twenty feet away. Once he’d shot ’em or shooed ’em off, he had to clean up the terrible mess they’d left behind. Buzzards was the unsightliest, grossest bird on earth, and they’d probably flown in through one of those missing windows. Sog wasn’t superstitious, not compared with most of these here so-called Ozark hillbillies, and he didn’t believe the superstition that buzzards will puke upon any man who commits incest. It didn’t matter to Sog because he would never think of committing incest anyhow if he had a real daughter. But he did believe, or knew for a fact, that buzzards are a sure sign winter is over, that there will not be another freeze after buzzards are seen. It hardly ever froze in April anyhow, but Sog knew when he saw the buzzards that good times as well as good weather lay ahead. He also believed what was simply a matter of fact: buzzards will fly and soar and hover over anything dead.

Late in the afternoon the rain stopped. Sog went out to the workshop, where he thought he’d seen Bitch disappear. She wasn’t there. Sog even peered into the two big barrels that for some reason Madewell had left behind and not sold with his other barrels. Sog intended to use one of them as an old-fashioned rain barrel, to collect water, although there was a good deep well behind the house, still with its operating pulley, to which Sog had attached a new chain and a new galvanized tin bucket. He didn’t think they’d ever run out of water, but wanted the rain barrel for insurance, and maybe just as a kind of tribute to old Madewell, who had made all of this possible.

“Bitchie babe?” he called. But she wasn’t around. Maybe he’d just imagined her. Or maybe it was her ghost. Yeah, probably she’d been eaten by a coyote or a bear off in the woods and her ghost was here to keep him company. But just in case it was her, he opened one of the bags of Purina Dog Chow, filled a new plastic dish he’d bought in the pet aisle of a supermarket, and set it out for her.

Then he hiked back to the pickup, and drove to Harrison. He checked the gas gauge and noted it was getting low. He didn’t need a full tank. He needed just enough to make this trip to Harrison, then one more trip to Stay More for the yard sale and one last trip to Harrison to pick up his truelove.

Chapter six

If you stare and stare at a mirror, and not because you’re getting dressed or fixing your hair, does it mean that you’re vain? She liked to just look at herself and try to imagine what she’d look like when she was eighteen or twenty. If she wasn’t badly mistaken, she would be a dish, which is what her grandfather often called her. Grandpa Spurlock liked to say to her, “Honey, you’re going to break hearts all over the place.” She’d had explained to her what he meant when he called her a bombshell, and she knew what he meant when he called her “cutie pie” and “turtledove” and “chickabiddy” but she had trouble understanding what he meant when he called her “jailbait” and especially when he called her a “killer,” because she couldn’t be blamed if somebody’s heart broke over her and they died. She would never deliberately kill anybody, although actually she might kill Jimmy Chaney if he didn’t back off. Today at school during that horrible thunderstorm he got very flirty with her and even talked nasty. Thunder petrified her, and Miss Moore had stopped teaching the class and allowed them to take cover in the cloakroom, and Jimmy had snuggled up beside her. He said he was going to crash the birthday party and sleep with her. Jimmy was really the only boy she liked, usually, but he was ill-behaved and unpleasant, the same as all boys are. And possibly he had a wicked mind. She would never forget the time last fall when he’d come over to her house after school, breaking the strict rule that she was never allowed any visitors—girl or boy—when her mother wasn’t there, and the fact that he wasn’t supposed to be there made her dizzy and so titillated she didn’t know what she was doing, and she probably encouraged him. He suggested that they ought to uncover their genitals and show them to each other. “Parts,” he had said, and maybe if he had used some other word she might have been willing, but the fact of the matter was that she didn’t have any parts. There was nothing there. This in itself didn’t bother her too much—she had taken shower-baths with her mother at a very early age and one time she and Becky McGraw had not only shown each other theirs but had drawn pictures of each other’s, so she knew this was a fact of the way all females were made, without parts.

But she hadn’t wanted to compare what she didn’t have with whatever he did have. She’d never seen a part. She had heard several things it was called besides “part”—the thought of that word made her giggle at the idea that it could be replaced, like automobile parts. Becky said it was just called “thing.” Beverly knew it was properly called “doodad.” Gretchen had heard it referred to as “pecker.” Only Kelly had ever actually seen one, belonging to her father, and she said it was called “weenie” and attempted to describe it, and the two little pouches drooping from it, called, everybody knew, “nuts,” although sometimes simply “balls.” Robin had never seen a weenie and doubted that it looked anything at all like a hot-dog-type weenie, or frankfurter. Although blessed with a fabulous imagination, she had difficulty imagining what it looked like, and just out of curiosity she nearly allowed Jimmy to take down his pants. But instead she had told him that she was very sorry to have to tell him that they would both have to wait until they were much older before they could exchange peeks as he suggested. “You’re so smart you won’t ever have any fun,” he said.

Once a couple of years ago while she was sitting on Grandpa Spurlock’s lap and he was telling her one of his stories—he told such great stories about the old-time folks who had lived in these Ozark mountains—she had noticed some kind of bump or lump beneath her bottom and reached down to squeeze it and ask, “Grampa, what is that?” And he had squirmed and got real red in the face and said, “Aw, Cupcake, that’s jist my mousy. Don’t you be a-foolin with it.” And she hadn’t tried to squeeze it again. But later when her friends were talking about what a part could be called, she contributed “mousy,” although she didn’t say she’d learned it from her step-grandfather.

She just loved Grandpa Spurlock. He was the only male she knew (including Jimmy and Mr. Palmer, her Sunday school teacher, and Dr. Vanderpool, her pediatrician) toward whom she really felt respect and affection. She knew he wasn’t really her grandfather but just married to her grandmother. Still, she felt closer to him than to her mother, who was so strict and distracted, or even her dear grandmother, who was so religious she had once told Robin she didn’t care what she did so long as she got into Heaven, by and by.

The reason she was thinking of Grandpa this afternoon was not because of his mousy but because she was playing with her paper dolls, and every time she did that she thought of him, because one of her paper dolls was Grandpa Spurlock. It had been he who had given her a book of punch-out paper-dolls when she was four, and who, upon discovering that she liked to create her own paper dolls, had provided her with reams of paper and pasteboard with which to cut them out and clothe them. He had even given her a very good pair of scissors so that she didn’t have to use her mother’s, although her mother was very upset at the idea of Robin owning something so sharp and pointed. Although Grandpa Spurlock had also given her Paddington, her beloved teddy bear without whom she could not sleep at night, it was the paper dolls that really made her think of him, and even name one after him as a citizen, in fact the mayor, of her little town. Robin had created a whole village of paper dolls: men, women and children, families named White, and Brown, and Green, and Black, and Gray, and she had her hands full managing their wardrobes, not to mention inventing a life story for each one of them, and creating enough struggles and entanglements among them to give drama to her private world. Paddington sat in the chair opposite and watched her solemnly while she snipped and snipped and snipped. Her village, which was called Robinsville, even contained a paper bear named Paddington.

In fact she was running out of paper, but Grandpa had promised to bring some more the next time he came, and she hoped he might even come today.

Now it often happened in Robin’s life that whenever she thought about something, or was hoping for something, that that something actually came to pass, it really occurred, it appeared as if by magic, the magic that was in Robin’s head. It made her feel powerful and it made her wonder if she had the ability to perceive things that other people could not.

Anyway, there came a knock at the door. There were hardly ever any knocks at the door. Once in a great while there might be a couple of women selling a religious magazine and she had to tell them that she was not allowed to open the door. Robin ran to the door and called, “Who is it?”

And the voice said, “It’s your grandpa. Open up.”

And she turned the deadbolt and was about to open the door, ready to jump into his arms and be lifted up, when suddenly she realized that he had not knocked with the code, shave-and-a-haircut-six-bits.

“You didn’t knock wight,” she called to him, sorry that the return of her speech impediment robbed her voice of authority.

“I didn’t? Well, drat my hide.” He sure sounded like Grandpa. “How’s this?” And he knocked a sort of knock knockedy-knock knock that sounded like the code. But it wasn’t quite it. Robin fled to the living room window and peered out. Grandpa’s car was not out there. It was just an old pickup truck.

She returned to the door. “What’s your name?” she called.

“Grandpa.”

“What do people call you?”

There was a silence, too long, on the other side, and she was convinced that this man, whoever he was, was a stranger, and therefore a danger. “Please open the door,” he said.

“Go away,” she said. “You’re not my grandpa and if you don’t go away I’ll call the police.”

“I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down,” he said.

She couldn’t help giggling. “Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin!” she said.

She could hear him making some exaggerated breathing and blowing on the other side of the door, huffing and puffing. Then he said, “Piggy-wiggy, that didn’t work. Your house won’t blow down. I don’t rightly recollect how the rest of it goes. Does the big bad wolf climb down your chimney next?”

He sure sounded like Grandpa, and she wondered if Grandpa was just playing with her. “No,” she corrected him, “you’re supposed to say you’ll take me at six o’clock in the morning to Farmer Smith’s turnip patch.”

“Okay. Will you meet me at six o’clock in the morning?”

“I’ll be there at five o’clock but with a bunch of police.”

“Piggy-wiggy, I aint the big bad wolf, no foolin. I’m your lover boy. Me and you are fated to spend the rest of our lifes together, so we might as well get started right here and now.”

She thought, Something may be wrong with me, but I will never be in love. I will never have a lover boy. I love Paddington so much, but he’s not really a boy. She said, “I’m going to count to ten and if you’re not gone I’m calling the police.”

“Don’t you even want to see my face? For all you know, I could be your Prince Charming. Open the door and have a look.”

“You sure don’t sound like anybody’s Prince Charming,” she said. “Now get! One…two…three….”

“Awright, I’m a-going, but you’ll be sorry you turned me away. I’m fated to have ye, and I’ll have ye one way or t’other, wait and see.”

She waited, not commenting on that, and she waited, and finally she heard the truck start up. She ran to the window and looked out and got just a glimpse of him in profile driving away. He was just some old guy. Not a Prince Charming at all. More like the frog before he turned into the prince.

She returned to Robinsville and tried to resume her supervision of the lives of its citizens or at least of their wardrobes, but she was breathing hard and could feel her insides were all out of whack. She thought of calling the police anyway. Or calling her mother. Yes, she had better call her mother at the store. She went to the phone and started dialing but was stopped by the realization that if she reported this visitor to her mother there was no way on God’s earth that she would be allowed to attend Kelly’s birthday slumber party. It was bad enough already that Robin had refrained from telling her mother that Kelly’s parents planned to take all the girls to the roller rink for the earlier part of the birthday party. Robin loved the roller rink more than any other place in Harrison, but her mother would never, ever let her go there, and if she knew that Kelly’s parents were planning to include it as part of the party she wouldn’t let Robin go. Robin sighed, and put the phone down.

There came another knock at the door! She actually jumped. But wasn’t it the code knock? She went to the door and called, “Who is it?”

And the voice said, “It’s your grandpa. Open up.”

He was back! Whatever bluster and courage she had had during his first visit was now lost. She thought she would faint. “What’s your name?” she asked.

She recognized his laughter. “Why, Leo Spurlock, I reckon,” he said. “Last time I looked, anyhow.”

She ran to the window again and looked out and sure enough it was Grandpa’s car out there. She opened the door and leaped into his arms.

“Cupcake, you’re trembling,” he said. “Did I give you a scare?”

“No, but there was a man here. He was pretending to be you. Where’s Grandma?”

“Aw, she wanted me to drop her off at the shoe store. Which means I don’t have to go get her for another hour. So I thought I’d just run out and bring you some more cutting paper. I’ve got two reams in the car, one white and one colored.” He returned to his car and brought her the big packages of paper, which would provide a summer and fall wardrobe for everybody in Robinsville. Then he sat in his favorite chair and patted his lap for her to sit in it, but she was getting too old for that. “What’s this about somebody pretending to be me?” he asked.

She sat on the sofa and started telling him the whole story of the stranger’s visit, but she got only as far as the huffing and puffing part when Grandpa laughed and said, “That’s a great story, sugar bun, but you sure it aint jist a story?”

“He was here, just a little while ago, just before you came.”

“Hmmm,” said Grandpa. “I seen a feller in a pickup driving down the road as I was coming in.”

“That was him. He was in an old pickup.”

“Didn’t git a good look at him but he shore didn’t look like me.”

“I told him I was gonna call the police, and he went away.”

“Well, you know, there’s lots of fellers like that in this world. Your beauty just swept him off his feet and he didn’t know what he was doing.”

“But he never saw me!” she protested.

“Might’ve seen you get off the school bus.” Grandpa nodded his head and kept on nodding it, as if that was the answer to the whole matter. Some stranger had seen her get off the school bus, had greatly admired her and even—what was the word? yes: lust—the stranger had lusted after her and wanted her body. Miss Moore had given the class information about why it was so necessary for both girls and boys to avoid strangers and not allow themselves to be lured, and afterward Becky had said to Robin, “I still don’t get it. Why would a stranger go to all that trouble? What does he want?” and Gretchen had said, “Silly, he wants to fuck you!” Robin had heard that word several times and had a fairly good idea of what it meant. It was something very wicked that some people did for fun and nastiness. Gretchen had tried to tell them that mommies and daddies did it too, and Robin had become so angry at Gretchen she hadn’t spoken to her since then. “Why don’t you sit on my lap,” Grandpa said, “and I’ll tell you a story or two, like old times.”

She realized she had never been alone with Grandpa before, without Grandma or her mother present. She wasn’t comfortable, and that bothered her, especially because she adored her grandfather. “I was hoping,” she said, “that I could ride my bike with you here to look after me.” She had a perfectly wonderful bicycle, the most expensive thing that was her very own, but she hardly ever got to ride it. Her mother wouldn’t let her go out and ride it off by herself, and the only times she could ride it was when her mother would supervise her, and there were hardly any times like that. She really needed the exercise. Since the weather had started warming up, at school recess the girls (and boys too) had taken to removing their shoes and socks to play their games, but Robin hated to go barefoot. She could understand why other kids liked it and liked the feel of the cool earth or grass under their feet, but Robin couldn’t stand it. So she had been avoiding the recess games, and wasn’t getting enough exercise. When it got too bad, she could always skip her rope by herself, which she often did, alone in the house, in relief against all that sitting-down to manage Robinsville, but skipping rope or even practicing her taekwondo moves wasn’t as much fun as riding the bicycle. Her father one time had taken her to a martial arts class where the taekwondo teacher had told her she would be a black belt within six months if she came to class regularly. But of course her mother wouldn’t let her go, and her father just didn’t come around any more.

“Okey-doke, I reckon,” Grandpa said. “If you’re a-hankerin to ride your bike, I ’spect I could oblige ye.”

So she put on her jacket and got her key and locked the house and Grandpa got in his car and drove it slowly behind her while she rode her bicycle down the road. It felt so good. She liked to pump with her legs and feel the wind in her face. It really wasn’t very cold. She liked to swing the bike frame back and forth as she pumped harder. Soon she had left Grandpa a good ways behind. If only she had her dog running along beside her. But she’d never had a dog, or a cat, because her mother said it was out of the question. She would simply adore having a good dog, and have it now running with its tongue hanging out beside her bicycle. Bicycle riding was really the only time she liked to be outdoors. Not that she was a stay-at-home, and she certainly wasn’t allergic to fresh air, but she just had no appreciation for the world of nature, and woods bothered her. She disliked the few times that the teacher had taken the class on a “nature walk,” and she had no interest whatever in being able to identify trees or plants or flowers or anything. Even the Sunday school teacher had once tried to take the class out into the woods to discover how God was out there in those woods, but she never found Him. If she were God she wouldn’t want to be in the woods. “I have never seen God,” she told her mother later, and from then onward refused to say her prayers at night or anytime.

Now she stopped peddling and squeezed the brakes on the handlebar. Right there up ahead beside the road was that man parked in his pickup truck. She looked behind her to see how far Grandpa’s car was. She couldn’t see it. She shouldn’t look over her shoulder like that while the bike was still moving. She lost her balance and before she could stop the bike or get her balance she had crashed into the earth.

Chapter seven

My goodness alive but wasn’t she the pertiest little thing that ever walked God’s earth—or rode a bike on it? He didn’t much believe in God; he’d seen or heard about too damn many plum loco things in this world to believe that nobody as smart as God was supposed to be could possibly have saw fit to allow it, let alone have planned it in the first place, but whenever he laid his eyes upon Robin he was struck all of a heap with the certainty that nobody but God Hisself could have had the cleverness to have created somebody so splendid. Oftentimes he wondered if Louisa had looked like that when she was just a young ’un. He’d seen photos of Louisa looking tiny and cute, but nothing at all like her granddaughter, why, there was scarce even a family resemblance. Of course it was hard to think of Louisa without resentment. Even besides the fact she hadn’t wanted him to touch her for years and years, she was so all-fired churchy and had to go three times a week and drag him along with her, she had also made it hard for him to give Robin all the loving she needed. When that worthless asswipe Billy Kerr had taken to fooling around and then split for good, Leo had wanted to step in and take his place as a kind of daddy for Robin, but Louisa had suspicioned that he had the hots for Karen and wanted to take Billy’s place in bed, which wasn’t true at all, not at all. Karen was a sightly-enough woman, and Leo couldn’t understand why she hadn’t found herself another man, but he didn’t have any sort of attraction to her whatsoever. He just wanted to be a daddy for Robin. He wanted to take her to her martial arts classes that Billy had been taking her to but that Karen couldn’t find the time for. He wanted especially to take her out to the roller rink now and again, because she was already real good at what was called “artistic” skating, and if she got a chance to keep it up, why, there was just no telling how far she could go, maybe even switch to ice skates by and by and become another Sonja Henie or one of those such as Leo liked to watch on the TV. But damn her hide, Louisa had not allowed him to follow his intention to do all those things for Robin. The best he could do was buy her toys and things and make sure she had all she needed to follow her interest in paper dolls and paper things. He’d been allowed to help her in that line all he liked. In fact, not only had he started it all when he gave her a book full of paper dolls a few years before, but he had also demonstrated to her something that she ought to have learned from Karen or somebody but nobody had ever bothered to learn her: you can make yourself a whole string of paper dolls holding hands if you just fold up a sheet of paper proper and then cut just the profile of the doll, so that when you unfold your paper you’ve got a whole line of identical ones. As soon as she learned how to do that, Robin had to give a different name to each and every one of the identical dolls in the string, and that was how she got started a-populating her whole town full of little paper people, which she called Robinsville, and wasn’t that clever of her? Robin was not only the pertiest thing he’d ever seen, and the smartest to boot, but she had an imagination that would make you shake your head in wonder and keep on a-shaking it.

Leo had a thing for paper himself. He had also shown her how to take a sheet and fold it just right so that it became an airplane that would really fly. You had to do it just right. It was a trick Leo had learned in the Navy. He wanted to take Robin up one of the hills in Harrison and show her how to launch them paper planes out across the air and watch ’em fly and fly and just fly away. But he had to make do with being allowed to just take her out in the back yard and let her fly her planes back there, and they didn’t go very far without a drift of wind to catch ’em.

Today was the first time he’d ever been truly alone with Robin, and here he was with just a back view of her a-riding along ahead of him, with that golden hair a-streaming out behind her. Personally he liked the hair better in braids, which Karen was real good at fixing when she wasn’t too busy, but now Robin had taken the braids out so she could have her hair blowing in the wind while she rode the bike. And all he could do was foller and watch.

Leo took his foot off the gas, and coasted, and let his thoughts coast too. When he returned his attention to the road, he noticed that Robin had done pedaled right out of sight! He mashed the gas again and cleared the little curve in the road, and Christ all Jesus! If she hadn’t done had a wreck! Her and the bike were all crumpled up flat on the earth.

Leo braked to jump out just at the same time that another feller was rushing up to her. Blamed if it wasn’t that feller he’d seen a little bit before, the one that Robin thought maybe had been knocking on her door. He and the feller got to her at the same moment. Him and the other feller each bent down and took one of her arms.

She wasn’t hurt bad, maybe a scrape or two, and she wasn’t even crying. Leo had never in her life known her to cry, over anything. But she was in great pain, he could tell.

The other feller was trying to lift her up too, and he was a pretty big and stout feller, half again as big as Leo, and sure enough he just lifted her up easy as a loaf of bread and made as if to carry her to his pick-up.

“Grampa,” she says through her big lips that was all twisted in pain.

“Yeah, it’s Grampa,” says the other feller. What the heck? And started a-carrying her toward his truck.

“Hold on!” says Leo and grabbed aholt of one of her arms. “I’m her grampa!”

“The hell you say,” says the feller, tough and mean. “I’m her grampa.”

Leo had never met Billy Kerr’s dad, who lived over in Oklahoma somewheres and had never been to Harrison as far as Leo knew about, and he wondered, could this maybe be Billy Kerr’s daddy? If that was so, then he’d really be her grandfather because Leo wasn’t actually her blood grandfather.

“Well, I got to her first,” Leo says, somewhat lamely, and wraps his arms around her possessively.

“But I picked her up first,” the other feller says, in all truth. “How do I know you’re her grandfather?”

“Ask her?” Leo says.

The feller looked down at Robin and says, “Is this man really your grandfather?”

“Well, no, not really,” Robin says. “But his wife is my grandmother. Oh, I hurt!” And she walked to Leo’s car and opened the door and sat down. She made some painful faces and then she bit her lip and says, “Besides, you’re that creep that tried to break into my house!”

“Is that a fact?” Leo wanted to know, and says these words to that man.

“Goshdarn, I wasn’t trying to break into her house. I just wanted to talk to her, and see if she’d maybe seen my lost dog. My damn dog is lost and I can’t find her.”

“Is that a fact?” Leo says. “Then how come you’re a-claimin to be her grandfather?”

“I didn’t know who ye was,” the other feller says to Leo. “For all I knew, ye might’ve been one of them there child molesters, and I was just a-claiming to be her grandfather to get rid of you.”

Leo knew that if the other feller really wanted to, he could whop Leo upside his head and lay him out cold, and make off with Robin as easy as pie. The fact that he wasn’t whopping Leo meant that maybe he really was looking for that pore lost doggie. “Well,” Leo says, “I sure hope you find that there lost dog, and we’ll keep a eye out for it.”

“What’s the dog’s name?” Robin says.

“Bitch,” the feller says, and for a second Leo felt his hackles a-rising, thinking the feller is cussing at Robin. But Leo thought about it for a while and decided the feller wasn’t cussing. Then Leo put Robin’s bike into the trunk of his car, half a-hanging out with a bent wheel and fender that would need some work. He got in the car and drove off with Robin.

He took her back to her house. “I reckon we ort to of ast him what the dog looks like,” Leo says.

“He’s not looking for a dog,” Robin says. “That’s just an old trick that bad men use to lure children with. That’s what Miss Moore told us, anyhow.”

“What if a dog was to show up?” Leo wondered.

Back at the house, after unloading the bike, he got into the medicine cabinet and found some antiseptic ointment and some Band-Aids and tended to Robin’s elbow and her knee. “Say, listen, Cupcake,” he said to her, “if your maw wonders what happened to your knee and elbow, I reckon ye better just tell her you had a accident at school or something. It wouldn’t do for her to know that I allowed you to go out on your bike.”

“Okay,” Robin agreed. “And I’m not going to say anything at all about that man. Mommy said that I can go tomorrow night to a friend’s sleep-over birthday party. She wouldn’t let me go if she knew I’d been bothered by a strange man.”

“I guess not,” Leo said. “I know your momma.” Fact was, Karen Kerr was the awfullest worrywart he’d ever known, and it was a wonder she ever allowed the poor child to do nothing.

“Also,” Robin confided in him, “Kelly’s parents—it’s Kelly’s birthday party—they’re going to take us six girls to the roller rink for a special birthday party there before the slumber party, and I didn’t even tell Mommy about that. She really wouldn’t let me go if she knew about that.”

“I hope ye have a good time,” Leo said, and wondered if there was some excuse he could give Louisa tomorrow evening so’s he could come all the way back into Harrison and go to that roller rink himself. Not to skate, because he’d never been on skates in his life, but just to watch. Thinking of Louisa, he said, “Now I’d best run and get your grandma, and we’ll see you in a bit, maybe before your maw gets home.

He drove to downtown Harrison and Louisa was standing outside the shoe store waiting for him. She had just one box of shoes under her arm, which at least was an accomplishment. Sometimes she spent the whole afternoon in there and never got nothing.

“Where’ve you been?” she wanted to know.

“Aw, I just dropped in at the pool hall to see some buddies,” he said.

“You don’t have any buddies,” she said.

Leo didn’t like that. Matter of fact, he did have fellers all over the place that he could pass the time of day with. Maybe not ary a one of them that he’d lay down his life for, or vicey versa, but Louisa made him out to sound like some kind of hermit.

“Where was it ye aimed to go next?” he asked.

“We might as well get on out to Karen’s,” she said.

He drove on back to Karen and Robin’s place, the second time today. Third, come to think of it, counting the trip down the road behind her bike.

As they were getting out of the car, Louisa said, “Where’s those reams of paper you got for Robin?”

Leo realized he’d already given them to her. “Uh, I reckon I must’ve went off and forgot ’em,” he said.

“What?” Louisa was upset. “We just stopped at the Wal-Mart for them a little while ago.” Louisa peered into the back seat in search of the Wal-Mart sack, which, Leo realized, was probably in plain view on the table at which Robin had spread out Robinsville.

Leo hung his head. It sure took a heap of sneakiness to get anything past Louisa. He had never been able to learn all the tricks and ruses that most fellers use in order just to have a little fun in this sorry life. “Louisa,” he announced solemnly, “in my old age I seem to be getting more and more absent-minded. I’ll be durned if I didn’t already drop off them reams of paper.”

She squinted her eyes at him. “Leo Spurlock!” she exclaimed. “You don’t mean to tell me you’ve already been out here by yourself? And that little girl all alone?”

He nodded, feebly.

She hauled off and slapped him. Hoo boy it stung like the dickens and knocked his glasses off. It wasn’t the first time she’d hit him, and he knew it wasn’t going to be the last. “I never did nothing,” he protested, truthfully.

“You get back in the car, and you just sit there,” she commanded him. “You just sit there and I’ll visit with Robin and come out when I’m good and ready.”

She went up to the door and knocked. After a while, she hollered, “It’s your grandma. Open up.”

Leo rolled down the window and hollered, “You forgot you’re supposed to knock the shave-and-a-haircut-six-bits.”

Louisa knocked proper, and Robin let her in.

Leo just sat there, for a long time. By and by Karen come home. She parked and come over to him. “Leo, what are you sitting out here for?” she asked.

Leo coughed. He coughed because he didn’t know what to say, but the act of coughing provided him with a excuse. “I been feelin porely. I jist might have something I don’t want Robin to catch.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Karen said. “Mother won’t be long. I’ve got to take Robin downtown to shop for a birthday present for a party she’s going to tomorrow night.”

“Yeah, Robin told me all about that party,” he said.

“So you have seen her?” she said and looked at him peculiar. “I thought you meant you didn’t want to see her so she wouldn’t catch anything from you.”

Leo come mighty close to smiting hisself on the brow on account of his stupidity in not knowing how to pass even the time of day without sticking his foot in his mouth. Was there ever a feller on earth who had more sawdust where his brains ort to be?

Chapter eight

Okay, okay. Let’s us just clamp on the blinders and hold our horses. He was not just going too fast and reckless but he was doing it assbackwards, all on the edge and itchy to get the girl. He knew damn well that he’d have to hold that fucking yard sale before he took possession of her, and it wasn’t advertised until tomorrow morning. Probably nobody would show up for it, but he had to have it anyhow just for the look of things.

He’d meant this visit to Harrison, his next to last, to be only a sort of reconnaissance, to see whichaway the wind was blowing and get the lay of the land. He just wanted a good idea of the girl’s comings and goings, and if there was maybe any chance she ever went anyplace by herself. But coming into town he realized he was driving too fast at the same moment he heard the siren and saw in the rearview mirror the blue lights flashing atop the trooper’s cruiser.

It was old Hedge Larrabee, who he’d trained years before. “License and registration,” old Hedge said from behind his dark sunglasses, without even bothering to take a good look at him.

“Hedge, you dipshit,” Sog said. “It’s me.”

“Sarge?” old Hedge said, and for a second looked like he was about to salute. “Goshdawg, Sarge, I thought you’d gone to Californy. You were doing sixty-five in a forty mile zone, did you know?”

“Yeah, Hedge, I’m heading for Californy the day after tomorrow.”

“Well, good luck and God bless and all that crap,” Hedge said. “You take it easy now, you hear?” Hedge turned to go but then he turned back. “Sarge, if you’re going to Californy, you’d better have this heap looked at. You’ve got hardly any tread on the tires, and the whole damn muffler is about to come loose.”

“I’ll probably junk it and take the bus,” Sog declared, and drove on. He’d gone hardly half a mile before he discovered how heavy his foot on the gas was, and had to force himself to let up. Then he drove on out the road to the Kerr place and parked near it so he could sit there and watch for the school bus to let the girl out. He wished he knew her first name so he could think of her as something besides “the girl” or his truelove or whatever. After a while the school bus pulled up, and she got off and his heart swole mightily, once again amazed at how beautiful she was. He waited for the school bus to drive off, but the driver just sat there watching until she had checked the mailbox and then gone to the front door and let herself in. She had her key inside her lunchbox.

He hadn’t meant to try anything today, but the very thought of her being alone in that house was just too much for him. He and Jack Samples had known of several cases where the kid was so trusting or just plain gullible that they would open the door for anybody. He thought he might as well give it a try. He drove on a little and parked out front, and went up and knocked on the door.

But it wouldn’t work. He pretended to be her grandpa, but she wasn’t fooled. In the first of what he knew would be thousands of conversations in the years to come, he discovered right off the bat how smart and clever she was. He couldn’t get her to open the door, and finally he gave up, and drove down the road a ways and parked and sat there for a good bit thinking about the ways that he might possibly take her into his custody. He could just bust out a window in the house. There wasn’t no other neighbors within view, and even if she hollered probably nobody would hear her. But he didn’t want to scare her too bad, and he put on his thinking cap to see if he couldn’t come up with the words to keep her gentled down. He already told her that him and her was fated to spend the rest of their lifes together and that he was her lover-boy, but he doubted she’d believed him. Shit, when you got right down to it, he was old enough to be her grandpa, and she would probably prefer a much younger guy to spend the rest of her life with.

“Lord, lord,” Sog said aloud, “help me to find a way to get her to go with me to our new home.” Sog wasn’t hardly religious at all, and when he said this prayer he wasn’t even picturing the Lord Above, but he was sure earnest in his request.

And be damn if, at the very moment he said those words, she didn’t appear! Riding her bike! “Thank you, Lord!” he said. But when she caught sight of him she threw on her brakes or something and the bike crashed.

And then here came that feller who turned out to be her real granddaddy, or her step-granddaddy leastways, a guy some years older than Sog and kind of puny and Sog was prepared to fight him for the girl, but then he figured it was already bad enough that he was letting the man get a good look at him so that later on when Robin disappeared the man would be able to describe him and maybe even help ’em draw a picture of him. Up at CID they had a real sketch artist who could talk to you and get you to give him enough info about a suspect to get his likeness down exact on a piece of paper.

So Sog he figured he’d better get on out of there, and he drove off, hoping the feller hadn’t bothered to take down his license number or nothing. But come to think on it, the feller didn’t seem to be loaded with brains.

He went to the drive-in for a couple of cheeseburgers and a milkshake. He was going to miss cheeseburgers and milkshakes and maybe these was his last ones, because tomorrow evening, his last evening here in town before heading off home with his beloved, he intended to have his “last meal,” that is to say, his last restaurant meal, and he’d already decided on Western Sizzlin’, where he could get himself a nice big cut of steak, something he’d never be having again up there on the mountain. He’d considered but rejected the idea of keeping some beef cattle up there; it would be just too hard to get them up there unless he carried them when they were still calfs, and he might not be able to do that. Probably a calf weighed more than a davenport and was harder to manage and carry unless it was tranquilized.

Thinking of tranquilizers, he remembered that he’d already given some thought to the possibility of using some chloroform on the girl. But buying some of the stuff was out of the question. You can’t get it at the drugstore. He’d thought of trying to get some from a vet with the excuse of using it to put his old sick dog to sleep (his dog, if he still had her, was young and fit), but there again, when the news of the girl’s kidnapping was announced, the vet might remember him and put two and two together.

No, his best bet was just to make his own. A few years back he’d arrested this guy in Yellville who ran a meth lab and made a lot of other chemical stuff besides, and the feller had told him how to make chloroform real easy: you just take you some Chlorox bleach and mix in a little acetone with it and stir it up. Hell, he could get the fixings for that right over at Wal-Mart. What would have acetone in it? Why, any old nail polish remover would do.

So he went to Wal-Mart once again. He knew he probably wouldn’t run into that saleslady who had sold him all the clothes and toys and stuff for his girl, because that was a different department. First he went to the laundry soap aisle and picked up a jug of Chlorox bleach. He reflected that he was sure going to miss being able to take his dirty clothes to the coin-op laundry in Jasper. But they were going to live in the manner of the old-timers and wouldn’t need such as that. There was a big old black iron kettle or wash pot that the Madewells had left behind, and such had been good enough for his grandmother to boil up enough water for a wash of clothes, and it would be good enough for him, and maybe the girl too if she really wanted to help could learn how to do laundry.

Then he headed for the cosmetics aisle to get the nail polish remover. He was checking the back of the bottle to make sure it said acetone on it when he looked up, and here come that woman Karen Kerr with her daughter his darling! Sog ducked behind the aisle just in time and they didn’t see him. He spied on ’em from a distance, ready to duck if they looked his way, and saw that the girl was picking out a bright pink bottle of what looked like bubble bath mix. His head was filled with visions of her in a bubble bath. They wouldn’t have a bathtub as such up on the mountain but there was a big galvanized tub with handles that they could carry around and set up on the kitchen floor to fill with hot water from the stove and maybe even both of ’em get in it at the same time.

From a distance Sog followed when they went on to the greeting card aisle and the girl got a package of bright wrapping paper and then spent a while picking out a card from the rack that said “Birthdays.” Sog didn’t have to be a genius to figure it out: the girl was planning to give a friend a birthday present of bubble bath stuff and maybe even go to a birthday party. Maybe a party where they’d be playing in the yard or something and Sog could watch for a chance to grab her and chloroform her. But probably the party would be tomorrow, Saturday, when Sog had to be out at Stay More running the goddamn yard sale.

Sog kept himself hidden until they’d left the store, and then he went back to the cosmetic aisle and got a whole case of that bubble bath mix and put it in the cart with his Chlorox bleach and nail polish remover. Then just a couple more things: he needed some sponges, one good one for the chloroform, plus a little plastic bucket to mix the stuff in, and a wooden spoon to stir it. Then he was all set.

If he’d had the sense God gave to people to pound sand in a rat hole, he would have gone on home to Stay More and done a few things to get that yard sale ready and then got a good night’s sleep in preparation for the biggest day of his life tomorrow. But, idiot that he was, he had to drive once more down the road to the Kerr place, or near enough to it to park down the road and spy on it, just to see if anything was going on. There was always a chance the birthday party was being held there, and always a chance it was this evening instead of tomorrow. His burning eagerness to get it all over with had already cost him a bad moment or two and now here he was a-scheming to try something else. As he sat there, he even thought about the idea of asking Karen Kerr for a date sometime, and taking her out, and step by step making friends and then watching for a chance to make his move on the girl. But no, the girl would recognize him if he tried that. And besides it was just too damned slow. He had to act now, and get his business all settled so him and the girl could live happy ever after up on the blessed mountaintop. There was only two ways to abduct a kid, Jack Samples had once told him, one, by ruse, the other, by blitz. It was time to blitz.

The house was still, but the car was in the driveway, so they were home. By and by the lights went on as it come on to dark. As he sat there pondering, Sog finally made up his mind what he had to do: he had to get Karen to open the door and then he was going to chloroform her first, and then, after she was down, he would chloroform the girl.

He got out his stuff, and set the bucket on the seat beside him, and commenced to do his chemistry. He poured a pint or so of the Chlorox bleach into the bucket, then tossed in several dollops of the nail polish remover, then took the wooden spoon and began to stir ’em together. Whew, did those fumes stink. He figured he’d better protect himself against it, and was fishing in his pocket for his handkerchief to wrap around his nose when it suddenly got too black to be just plain dark.

When he came to, the black was being replaced by a sliver of light in the east. He looked at his watch, and although his watch said five-thirty, his mind was only thinking about his determination to get rid of the watch as soon as he was settled on the mountaintop. Next his mind became aware of how his whole damn head felt—like it was being pounded into a rat hole. Next it was not his head screaming for his awareness of its pain, but his stomach. He had just enough mind left to think to get the fucking door open, and then he puked out into the road. He went on puking until there wasn’t nothing left. Then he had sense enough to pour out what he’d already mixed in the bucket. He started up the truck and turned it around and headed for the highway, and at the first culvert he passed he slowed down just enough to toss the Chlorox and the acetone out into the ditch. He had to stop once more to puke, and then he headed for Stay More.

And goddamn it all to hell if he wasn’t stopped by the fucking state police once again! And wouldn’t you know it was ole Hedge again.

“I wasn’t doing sixty-five,” Sog protested.

“Naw, Sarge, you was only doing forty. But you was driving erratic. Better let me sniff your breath.” Hedge got his face up close and drew a big breath and said, “Wowee, have you been drinking varnish?”

“I aint been drinking,” Sog said.

“What are you out this time o’ night for?” Hedge wanted to know. “Or early morning, I ort to say.”

Sog thought fast. “Some friends of mine were giving me a goodbye party.”

“’Scuse me, Sarge,” Hedge said, “but you aint got no friends.” Sog wouldn’t challenge the accuracy of that shitty observation, so Hedge went on, “And if you was at a party, you would of been drinking, wouldn’t you of?”

“Hedge, I wouldn’t take a drop because I knew you’d catch me,” Sog said. “Now if you’ll just let me go on, I’ll drive more careful.”

“You better do that, Boss,” Hedge said. “Oops, you aint my boss or nobody’s any more, are you?”

“Then you ort to be glad of that,” Sog said and drove off fast. Tomorrow—or, more exactly, today—when he came back to Harrison, coming and going he’d have to take back-roads to stay out of Hedge Larrabee’s territory.

It’s forty twisting miles from Harrison to Stay More. As soon as he got home, he popped a fistful of aspirin, which helped just a little, took half a glass of bourbon, which helped more, and then dragged what possessions he had left out into the yard. Just as he figured, almost nobody showed up for his yard sale. Stay More was practically a ghost town anyhow, and only a few people from hereabouts took a notion to come. George Dinsmore came and offered to buy his chickens, and he had to explain he’d already sold ’em. Latha Bourne, who used to be postmistress of Stay More before it lost the PO to Parthenon, offered to buy his davenport, and he had to explain he’d already sold it.

Mid-afternoon he stuck the unsold stuff back into the house and shut it up and locked it, which he never had done before. He taped a sheet of paper on the door: GONE TO CALIFORNIA. He took one quick drive around what little was left of the town, including the old empty schoolhouse across the creek, taking a kind of farewell look. If it hadn’t been for his headache he might have allowed himself to get nostalgic over the scenes of his boyhood but he wanted to just tell them all to go to hell.

Back in Harrison for the last time, he skipped the last supper at Western Sizzlin’ because his stomach still wasn’t settled.

He took up his spy post near the Kerr place and waited and followed when Karen Kerr drove the girl away and across town to somebody else’s house, and left her there, probably for that birthday party. The girl was carrying the gift-wrapped bubble bath. He parked down the street for a stake-out on that house, and hadn’t been waiting very long before two of the cars took a whole bunch of the girls, six or seven of them, back across town to a roller skating rink.

There is kind of a little balcony at one end of the roller rink, where the skaters stop and step out to take a breath of air or to goof off or whatever. Sog drove his truck around behind the roller rink so that he could watch that little balcony.

It began to get dark. Usually two or more of the girls would appear on that balcony together. Sog got out and stood so he could reach up to the balcony, which wasn’t very far above the ground. His eyes was level with the rink floor and he could see inside the rink, where a whole bunch of skaters was a-gliding all over the place, and there in the midst of them was his truelove, doing all kinds of fancy turns and spins and even leaps. She took his breath away. And he loved her more than ever.

He waited patiently, and just like they say, everything comes to him who waits. By and by, she come out onto the balcony by herself, breathing hard after all those stunts. She was too winded to put up any struggle. He grabbed her and gagged her and took her away.

Chapter nine

She didn’t mean for him to see her. She intended to take possession of the yards and fields and to let her in-habit know that this was her new home, and live in peaceful co-existence with the mean bastard without being his dog. She kept herself hidden in the grass, spying on him while he brought in a crate filled with chickens from the old home and turned them loose in the yard near the dilapidated henhouse, then broadcast chicken feed around the yard. The chickens discovered her while scratching around for their feed, but they knew her and did not even bother to cackle in recognition, and of course she wasn’t making a sound. Later she watched with great interest as he appeared, coming up the trail from the forest with some enormous thing on his back. It took her a while to recognize it, possibly because it was upside down and didn’t seem to belong on a man’s back out in the woods, but she caught a distant whiff of its scent and realized it was the big soft feel-good piece of furniture that had been in the old house, that she herself had once tried to sleep upon because it was so comfortable. He had kicked her off of it, and had said, “Bitch, don’t never let me catch you on there again.” Well, she reflected, whatever doubts she might have had that he intended to forsake the old place entirely and move into this mountaintop homestead were now laid to rest. He loved that piece of furniture more than he loved anything else in this world. That piece of furniture was his wife, and now the new home was complete.

When she had heard the first distant thunderclaps she had cringed and burrowed her belly into the earth, lowering her ear flaps down over her ears. But then the thunder came nearer and louder and the hard blankets of water fell from the sky and she started losing her mind, and decided to make a mad dash for safety and shelter in the building that had been a workshop. She didn’t care if he saw her or not. Inside the workshop she was protected from the waterfall but not from the terrible noise, and she took a leap and landed inside of one of those tall round wooden things, where she cowered and trembled. The walls of the wood around her offered only a little protection against the crash of the thunder, and once again she was convinced that the world was coming to an end. Eventually the hideous noise stopped, and she had to make three or four jumps before she could extricate herself from that deep drum. She sniffed the air and detected that he was approaching just in time for her to hide herself in a dark corner of the shop.

It was while she was hiding that she became unmistakably aware of an in-habit that was so present and clinging that for an instant she thought another person had been there recently. But like all in-habits, it had no scent. And yet this in-habit was so powerful she knew it had been around for a long, long time, and she had to choke herself to keep from calling “Hreapha!” to it, which would have given away her hiding place to him, who was now peering into the wooden drum as if searching for her, and then was calling “Bitchie babe?” in such a gentle voice she was tempted to answer him. She could almost see the in-habit shying away from him. No, she couldn’t see, but she could perceive, and this in-habit was a tousle-haired boy in overalls. She wanted to lick his hand, which he held out to her, but she didn’t want the man to see her. She waited until the man was gone, and then she attempted to lick the in-habit’s hand, but the hand, darn it, simply was not there.

One night she and Yowrfrowr had taken a stroll together to the Stay More cemetery, an interesting place to play, and Hreapha had detected her very first ghost, if that is what it was. Yowrfrowr had nudged her and cautioned her not to call her name to it, because ghosts hate barking. So they had both pretended the ghost wasn’t there, and it had gone away.

What’s the difference, she had asked Yowrfrowr, between a ghost and an in-habit?

A whole world of difference, my dear, he had said. The primary difference is that ghosts are the spirits of creatures who no longer live. In-habits are the spirits of creatures who are still alive.

Do you mean that when an in-habit dies it becomes a ghost?

Yowrfrowr had chuckled and grinned. Not exactly, he had said. Many ghosts have never been in-habits. And many in-habits never become ghosts. An in-habit is part of someone who loves a particular place so very much that regardless of where they go they always leave their in-habit behind. If I should ever have to leave Stay More, perish the thought of that unlikelihood, my in-habit will fiercely take possession of this whole damn town.

She had only been able to look at him with wonder, trying to understand just what an in-habit was.

Yowrfrowr had gone on grinning. Now if you’ll hold still, he had said, my in-habit would like to climb up on the back of your in-habit.

You’re as silly as you look, she’d said, and had run away from him.

Now she perceived that the man had gone, perhaps back to the truck for another piece of furniture, and she came out of hiding. Her hunger pangs were getting the better of her, and she was nearly tempted to turn one of those chickens into a ghost. But she knew all the chickens personally, although they had never exchanged names or made any attempt to communicate beyond Hreapha occasionally beseeching them to stop defecating all over her favorite lying-places.

She went up to the house and discovered to her delight that he had left out a bowl of her favorite kind of commercial chow on the porch. So he knew she was there! He was going to feed her! This would be ideal, to share the premises with him without any servitude to him, or any ill-treatment from him, and yet retain the right to be regularly provided for. She decided that when he came back again she would say “Hreapha!” at least once, just in gratitude. She licked the bowl clean.

But he did not come back. She waited a long time and then took a hike the harsh mile down the mountain to the place where he customarily left his pickup, but it was not there. She supposed he had gone back to Stay More for yet another load. Returning up the mountain trail, stepping gingerly along the ledge where not even goats could step and telling herself not to look down, she couldn’t help looking down at the sound of some familiar cackling, and she noticed, far down below, a whole flock of her feathered friends from the old place. Looking closer, she saw the smashed crate that had been their container in the treetop. Brainy as she was, it didn’t take her long to surmise that he must have accidentally dropped a crate of the chickens while negotiating the treacherous trail.

It took her a while, more than a while, to find a way to get down there. But she did, and announced to the chickens that she intended to shepherd them to their new home. Of course they couldn’t understand her language, but she went on communicating, reassuringly, telling them that her great-grandfather on her mother’s side, whose name was Yiprarrk, had been a sheep dog, and knew how to herd the animals and get them to move in the desired direction. She thus had inherited at least a semblance of the ability to herd creatures. She went up behind a big fat hen and snapped “Hreapha!” and sure enough the hen moved in the desired direction, although casting Hreapha a malevolent and supercilious look. There was a rooster who responded to Hreapha’s commands by attempting to rise up and stab her with his spurs, screaming all the while in a way that damaged her ears, and she practically had to get into a cockfight in order to convince him to accompany his harem.

It was slow work. All the rest of the afternoon was consumed in trying to get the birds moving in the same direction, up through the dark woods to the place where the remains of the trail could be picked up and they could march more smoothly toward their new home. A few stubborn hens ran the wrong way and she had to chase them down and pretend to bite them in order to get them turned around. She had shouted “Hreapha!” so many times that she was perishing of thirst. Surely Grandpa Yiprarrk had not had to work so very hard.

But she was permitted the elation of job satisfaction when finally, as evening came on, she managed to get all fifteen of the hens (and even that rooster) to the yard of the henhouse, where the sight of their former companions cheered them up so much they would have apologized to Hreapha if they could have. Although the henhouse looked as if a strong wind might blow it down, it was still usable, and inside it the former owner had attached wicker baskets lined with straw to the walls, which served as nests for the laying hens. Hreapha could see into one of the lower ones and was pleased to notice that it already contained an egg, which, after all, was what hens were supposed to do.

Hreapha did not understand any of the varied clucks, chirps, squawks, cackles, chuckles or chirrs with which the chickens communicated, but she managed to deduce that the newly arrived hens were inquiring of the already-settled hens about the possibility of drinking-water, a possibility that Hreapha herself needed to settle at once. One of the established hens peeped or piped an answer, and led her sisters a short distance up the hillside to a tiny building, just a shed of two sloping roofs and nothing else, which covered a spring emerging from the earth. The overflow of the spring collected in a small pool large enough for Hreapha and the chickens to jointly slake their thirst.

She was glad to know of the existence of that tiny springhouse. Going inside, she discovered how cool it was in there. The low temperature helped to freshen her body after its exertions, and she was so comfortable she lay down beside the spring and went to sleep. Not one of the chickens had made any attempt to thank her for helping them find their way home, but she would discover, in the days and months ahead, that they were all extremely polite and friendly to her, and they made an effort to refrain from defecating on her favorite napping spots.

In fact, the very next day, when the man had still not returned, and Hreapha could not devise a method for breaking into the house to get at the bags of commercial dog chow (there was a missing window-pane but it was too high for her to leap through), a chicken appeared at the patch of grass where Hreapha was lying, sat down, stared Hreapha in the eye, clucked, and then stood up and walked away, leaving an egg behind. Hreapha studied the egg. She was almost certain that the hen intended it as a gift. She was touched. Hreapha had never eaten an egg. Yowrfrowr had once explained to her the meaning of “egg-sucking dog,” which was often considered an insult, he said, but it was quite possible, he assured her, to puncture an egg with your teeth and then suck the contents out of it. He himself had not tried it, but he knew from other dogs that it was delicious, although a dog who developed a taste for eggs was considered worthless at guarding the henhouse and therefore was customarily shot. Yowrfrowr had said, Still, I would much rather be an egg-sucking dog than a shit-eating dog. And he had also told her about coprophagy, which was commonplace among certain malnourished dogs and probably, she realized, accounted for their bad breath.

“Hreapha!” she called after the generous hen in a way meant to express her thanks, and then she punctured and sucked the egg, which constituted her only victuals for the day, since she could not bring herself, as the chickens did, to scavenge for worms and bugs and, Hreapha noticed, the early lettuce that was beginning to appear in the soil of the vegetable garden the man was attempting to start.

Night came again, and still the man had not returned. To amuse herself, for she had absolutely nothing else to do, she tried to imagine what was keeping him. She even imagined the worst: his truck had fallen off the mountain. Such things happened. Maybe, she conjectured, he had consumed too much of the beverage that made him stagger and had actually flown over the moon, or even suffered an early demise. Yowrfrowr had told her that just a few years previously men had actually landed on the moon, but not because they had been loaded up on spirituous beverages. You can’t do it, he assured her. But you can certainly drink enough to bring about your death. She imagined what life would be like for her here if he was truly dead and she was alone but for the chickens. Possibly, given time, she would find a way to get inside the house and into those bags of commercial chow. Or possibly she would just have to become a wild dog, a feral dog, howling at the moon. It was not a happy thought but it was not outside the realm of possibility. But no, she could not imagine life without human company, and she knew she’d probably have to go back to Stay More and hope to find somebody who needed her. The trouble was, there were so very few people still living in Stay More.

Thus, despite whatever revulsion and bitterness she had sometimes felt for him, her heart leapt up and her tail began oscillating crazily when she detected, shortly after dawn of the following day, his imminent arrival. Despite her resolve to keep herself hidden from him, she could not help shouting “Hreapha! Hreapha!” joyfully, and dancing in circles.

He was coming up the trail with yet another piece of furniture on his back. What was it? No, it was not furniture. And it was not exactly on his back, but draped over his shoulder. As he came nearer, and she continued calling her name in exuberant greeting, she perceived that the furniture was a person, a small person with long light hair, a little female person.

At the moment of this perception, he took the person down off his shoulder and stood her on her feet and said to her, “Look, here comes our doggie!”

And she ran to join them.

She danced around them, jumping up and down continually, her tail going a mile a minute, her voice announcing her name over and over. But almost at once she saw that the little female person, the charming girlchild, was extremely unhappy. Hreapha could smell the girl’s unhappiness, and her fear and her panic.

“Down, Bitch,” he said, and she stopped dancing. Then he addressed the child, “She shore aint much to look at, is she? But she’s the smartest dog ever there was. Now I aim to let ye walk on the rest o’ the way to our house yonder. I don’t reckon you’ll try to run away, now will ye? Just wait till ye see what-all I’ve got for you.”

And then, with him leading the way and the girl following slowly behind, her back bent and her head down, and Hreapha trotting last, they made their way up to the house.

“Why, lookee here,” he said, “I do believe all our chickens has done come home to roost. We’ll shore have all the eggs we can eat and plenty of fried chicken besides. And that rooster will get us out of bed in the morning.” He opened the door, and they all went inside the house. Hreapha could see the opened bag of commercial chow through the door to another room, and she couldn’t wait for him to dole her out some of it. “Now you jist sit here on the davenport and get comfy,” he said to the girl, “and I’ll make a little fire in the stove to keep ye warm. Are you chilly? And then I’ll scare us up some breakfast. How bout some pancakes and syrup?”

The girl did not answer.

“Jam or jelly or molasses instead of syrup?” he wanted to know. But she would not answer. “I reckon I could run out and see if our hens has laid any eggs yet, and fry you up a bunch of eggs, if you’d druther have ’em.” The girl made no response. “Listen, sugar, you got to eat you some breakfast and keep up your strength,” he said. “I’m starving myself.”

The girl did not answer, so he disappeared into the kitchen and Hreapha listened to him banging around some pots and pans in there. Hreapha studied the girl, who looked as if she wanted to jump up and run out the door. Hreapha tried to understand who she was and what she was doing here. Could she possibly be his daughter perhaps, long lost and now home? Granddaughter, even? Was she conceivably a stray he had found somewhere, or who had followed him home? Part of Hreapha felt a certain jealousy, if not resentment. She knew she was going to have to share the place with this girl. But part of her felt a powerful sense of attraction and protection. The child was lovely, and innocent and uncorrupt, and potentially loads of fun. Hreapha wagged her tail and moved closer to the girl and nuzzled her ankle.

The girl spoke her first words. “Get away from me!” And she kicked Hreapha, who whimpered and backed off.

Chapter ten

And he wapped a wag awound her eyes so she could not see. And he knotted it too tight. And the twuck started up and she could not tell where they were going. And she could not bweathe. And then he. And the twuck went on and on. O why is this happening why why why? And then he finally started to talk. “I don’t aim to hurt ye,” he said. And he said. He said. She could not see him in the dark. And she knew it was him. It was him who. But why? The twuck went on and on. Bouncy bouncing bouncy. And she tried to cwy but could not. Why not? She wanted to cwy but the gag in her mouth kept her from cwying, yeah, she would cwy except for the gag. But she could not cwy with her eyes either. And why? And she was just too scared to cwy. And no, and no, she had not cwied since she was three years old. A long time ago. Why? And she heard him talk again. “Are you cold?” And she would not nod or shake her head. She had stopped sweating. All that skating had made her sweat, was why she’d skated out onto the balcony to catch the breeze. And she heard him talk again. “Here, let me put this blanket on ye.” And she felt the blanket on her, which she did not need because she was still all wet with sweat and the twuck’s heater was running and it was hot. And she was too scared to cry. And in the dark she reached with her hand to feel for where the door was, and she reached for the door handle. And she heard him talk again, heard him yell, “Hey now! Don’t do that! Take your hand off there!” And felt him reach across and grab her hand. “You don’t want to be trying to open the door, honey. If you was to open the door and you was to try to jump out, it would kill you!”

And the twuck went on and on. The woad was wough, the wough woad went up and down, the woad started to climb, and it climbed and climbed and she wondered if maybe they were on their way to Heaven, and maybe she had already died and he was some kind of angel who was taking her to Heaven, and there really was a God and God lived at the end of this climbing woad. Yes. But then she thought no, no, he was not an angel but the Devil and he was not taking her to Heaven but to Hell because she had committed the terrible sin of vanity, too gosh proud of herself because her skating made all the other girls look like clumsy yo-yos, which they were. None of them could skate backward as she could, no. Nor do heel-to-heel spins. She put them all to utter shame and now she was paying the price for her dazzle. That was why. And the twuck stopped. And she heard him talk again. “Now, sugar, I’m a-taking off the gag, though I cain’t take off the blindfold just yet.” And he took the gag out of her mouth. “You can scream if you take a notion, but won’t nobody hear ye. We’re way off away from everybody.” And she did not scream. She could not cry and she could not scream. And the twuck started to move again and it climbed and climbed and bounced and bounced and she could not imagine that there was a woad anywhere in the world that climbed and turned and twisted and bounced like this woad. And she heard him speak again, talking very loud over the sounds the twuck was making. “You can talk now, sweetheart. You can tell me your name.” And she could not talk. No talk. She would not talk. “My name’s Sugrue Alan. You can call me Sugrue. Can you say ‘Sugrue’?” And she would not say anything. “I reckon I’ve gave ye a bad fright, but there aint nothing you need to fear from me. Like I told ye the other day, me and you are fated to spend the rest of our lifes together, and I mean to love ye more’n you’ve ever been loved. So I sure do hope that you can get over your scare and learn to be mine and—” His voice was lost behind a horrible sound, a scraping grinding wrenching banging. She jumped. “Well, there went the goldarn muffler!” he said, and drove on, the twuck motor so noisy that surely God could hear it if He was anywhere, but He was not.

And the woad went up and up and up and then the twuck stopped, the noisy motor went off, and then she heard him speak again. “This here’s as far as the trail can reach. Good thing too on account of they’s just a drop or two of gas left. I reckon I’ll just take off your blindfold now, but you won’t be able to see nothing, out there in the dark. We’re nearly home but there’s still the worst mile to go and we caint do it in the dark, so we might as well just get cozy here in the truck and wait until daylight, when we can see to find our way along the rest of the trail. I promise ye you’ll be tickled to pieces with your new home as soon as you can lay eyes on it, come dayspring.” And she would not speak, nor move, nor see, nor feel, nor be. “You might as well go to sleep, honey,” he said to her. “You could stretch out here on the seat, or even put your head in my lap or whatever you want to do to get comfy.” And it was late at night, and then it was later at night, and she was very sleepy, very sleepy, but she could not sleep without Paddington. She really really needed to sleep but she could not sleep without Paddington. Of course she wanted her mommy but she wanted her bear even more. She could sleep without her mommy but she could not sleep without her bear. And she began to think that she might never see him again.

“Here, no wonder you caint sleep with them there skates still on your feet. Let’s take ’em off.” And he got out of the truck and came around to her side and opened the door and lifted her feet and untied the skates and removed them and tossed them into the back of the truck. “Don’t reckon you’d ever have no use for ’em no more, which is a shame, the way you was flying around that roller rink looked like you’d been born on skates.”

So then yes maybe he was the Devil punishing her for her vanity at the skating rink. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“What’s that?” he said. “You said something, didn’t ye? I was afraid you’d turned deaf and dumb on me. Did you say your name is Sarah?”

But she could not say anything else. He got back into his seat and talked a while more and told her she had better try to sleep and he said sleep so many times that the sound of the word put him to sleep. He even snored. She waited a while and then she gently opened her door and got out. Behind the twuck must have been the woad they had come up on. If she could follow that woad and get down there before he woke up, she would be free. But it was so dark, and nothing scared her more than the dark did, and the gravel hurt her feet in her sockies and worst of all she hated the woods. She walked just a few steps beyond the truck before she realized she was already lost, and there were monsters out there in the woods waiting for her who were much worse monsters than he was.

She returned to the truck, glad to be back, but could not sleep. It was very cold now. She wrapped the blanket tightly around herself. She imagined her mother somewhere crying. She imagined Kelly and Rebecca and Gretchen and Beverly still wide awake at the slumber party, maybe crying too, and Kelly’s party was ruined and maybe the parents came and got the other girls and took them home. And Grandma and Grandpa were at Mommy’s house with the lights on and staying up all night waiting for her to come home. And if all those people could be staying awake there was no reason for her to sleep.

But she must have drifted off out of sheer exhaustion because the next thing she knew he was shaking her shoulder and there was some light out and she could see all the trees surrounding them in the deep, deep forest. “Time to get on up home,” he said. “Watch your step getting out, because there’s lots of wood up under the truck.” She got out and he got out and she saw that while she had slept he had crammed many sticks and logs up underneath the truck. “Now you’d better stand back on over here,” he said, and led her a good ways off from the truck to the edge of a steep ravine and then he went back and knelt down and started a fire in the sticks and logs which blazed up and roared and then there was a whooshing boom as whatever gasoline left in the tank caught fire and exploded. And the truck burned. And in the back of it her skates, that weren’t her skates but just rented from the roller rink and which she’d have to pay for if she lost them, her skates must’ve burned too. When he came back to her he was smoking a cigarette. She really hated people who smoked.

He watched the truck burn for a while, and then he said, “I reckon I ought to put the blindfold back on ye for the last awful mile, but it wouldn’t make no difference nohow even if you could see where we’re a-going, because you’d never be able to hike it by yourself. Now you’d better get on my back.” And he picked her up and put her up on his back, and then he climbed down into that ravine, so steep she yelped in fright, and he said, “Don’t worry, honeybunch, I’ve done this a many and a many a time.” And he reached the bottom of the gorge and climbed up out the other side, and went on. And then there was another ravine, with water in the bottom of it that he had to step across on rocks. And then another ravine with a tree-trunk fallen over the water at the bottom of it that he walked across carefully like a tightrope walker, and then climbed way up out of it like a mountain climber. If she had not been so frightened she would have enjoyed the ride. It was thrilling. “Here comes the tricky part,” he said, and it was really the worst part: on a narrow ledge across a bluff high above the forest below he had to turn sideways and walk sideways, holding her to his chest, saying, “Dropped a whole crate of chickens here yesterday morning, but don’t ye worry, girl, I don’t aim to drop you. Close your eyes if it skeers ye too much.” And she had to close her eyes.

When she opened her eyes there were no more ravines or ledges but just a little path that climbed up through the deep dark forest, and he carried her a little ways on his shoulder up that path until it escaped from the forest and they were in a wide field rolling up to the top of the mountain, and there stood a house! “Yonder’s our home,” he said as if she hadn’t already noticed it. And as they climbed to it, she could see for miles and miles out across the valleys and mountains all around. Everything blue and green and it was almost like Paradise, so maybe this was some kind of Heaven. He took her off his shoulder and stood her on her feet and said, “You can walk from here.” And coming to meet them was a dog. He pointed, “Look, here comes our doggie!”

It was the ugliest dog she had ever seen, some kind of mongrel cur, mostly white, not very big, and it was barking and prancing around and swishing its little tail back and forth, and for a moment she thought the dog was going to jump her. “Down, Bitch!’ he said and the dog stopped dancing. And they went on to the house and they went in it. It was a very old house and it was all dusty and faded and there were cobwebs all over the place. There was a fairly clean sofa and he had her sit on it while he built a fire in the room’s heater-stove to warm it up, and then he went to fix her some breakfast.

The hideous dog was trying to lick her ankle. “Get away from me!” she said to it, kicking, and it backed off whimpering.

The man came running from the kitchen. “Hey, you talked! Is Bitch bothering you?” He opened the front door and gave the revolting dog a hard kick that knocked it outside, and he shut the door after it. “If she ever bothers you, just let her know who’s boss.”

She was, come to think of it, hungry, and he had her sit at a small table in the kitchen near the kitchen stove, one of those old-fashioned iron wood-burning stoves, not a great big one but a sort of squat one that was cute, and it was very warm and nice. He gave her scrambled eggs with some kind of oval-shaped meat stuff. “That’s Spam,” he said. “I reckon we won’t have fresh meat unless I can shoot a razorback one of these days. Now what do you like to drink with your breakfast? You don’t drink coffee, I bet.”

And she spoke. “Milk,” she said.

“Well, I hope you don’t mind powdered milk too awful much,” he apologized and fixed her a glass of something that just sort of tasted a little bit like milk. “‘Course they’s Pet Milk too, but it’s even worse.”

He talked all the time they had their breakfast but she did not say another word. He apologized a lot. He apologized for the cobwebs, saying he’d been too busy trying to get the place stocked up and ready for her and starting a little spring vegetable garden and all, and he intended to give the place a thorough dusting and cleaning today or tomorrow. He apologized for the darkness of the kitchen, saying the windows needed to be washed and of course there wasn’t no lectric lights. He apologized for not having no orange juice, just something called Tang which was the same color and wasn’t very cold because there wasn’t no ice. He apologized for not having no ice cubes. He apologized for the awful dog. She waited to hear him apologize for having kidnapped her, but he did not. “Just tell me anything you need whenever,” he said.

“I need to go to the bathroom,” she said.

He hit himself on the forehead. “Now why didn’t that cross my mind? ‘Course, we aint got any indoor facilities, ha ha. No runnin water. But I’ll show you to our outdoor accommodation, ha hawr.” He started to lead her out of the house, but stopped. “I reckon you need something to put on your feet.” And he ran into the other room, leaving her. She was really desperate to pee. It had been such a long time and she had tried to hold it but now she couldn’t hold it any longer. Her panties started to get wet. He came back with a whole bunch of shoes. “Just take your pick,” he said, and she was amazed to see so many nice shoes, nearly all of them in her size, and she picked out the prettiest pair of sneakers she’d ever had. And put them on, real quick, hoping she wouldn’t pee any more until he showed her where the bathroom was. He had to help her tie them because she still had not completely mastered the tying of shoes.

The bathroom, if that is what it was, was outside about a hundred feet from the house, off where the woods started. It was just a shack, and there was a bench sort of thing with two holes cut in it. “I’ll just wait outside here, this time,” he said, and closed the door after her leaving her alone in it. His voice called, “Have you got enough paper in there?” And she looked and there was a roll of toilet paper on a stob on the wall. She pulled down her blue jeans and her already wet panties and tried to sit on the hole. She had never been in one of these outhouses before although she had heard about them. She hadn’t been told they were so smelly. The hole was too big for her and she had to be careful not to fall into it.

After a long time he called, “Are you okay in there?” But it was so hard and awful and stinky and sad and she could not say anything. But she finished and got out of there.

“Now,” he said, “do you want to take a look at all the rest of the place, and see where the well’s at, and the henhouse yonder, and what’s left of the barn and all? Or would you rather see the real surprise I’ve got for ye?”

“It’s cold out here,” she said. So they went back in the house, and first he let her take her pick of several jackets which he had bought for her. They were all very neat jackets and warm and comfy and beautiful, especially the one she picked and tried on, which was a perfect fit.

Then he said, “And here comes your first surprise!” And he went into the other room and came back with the biggest doll she’d ever seen. It was nearly as big as she was, and was dressed better than she’d ever dressed, with a yellow/orange kimono type of dress, and fancy shoes. She had long dark hair and long eyelashes and such a sweet look on her face. If Robin had been a couple of years younger she would have adored the doll, but she had outgrown dolls of this nature, and much preferred her paper dolls.

“You don’t like it?” he said, and demonstrated how it had a string with a ring on it that you pull to make her change her great big eyes from orange to green to blue to pink. “I got one with dark hair so’s I could tell you’uns apart! Hawr hoo!” The man had an ugly laugh, nearly as ugly as his dog.

She sat on the sofa with the doll beside her and pretended to allow the doll to join in their conversation. She wanted the doll as a witness. She asked him the first of the many, many questions she would ask him.

“Are you going to take me home?”

His face got all wrinkled up. “Why, hon,” he said, “I figured you knew that I never intended to do no such a thing as that. We’re here forever, don’t ye know? Just you and me. This is your home.”

She asked him the second question. “Why did you pick me?”

“That’s easy,” he said. “I picked you on account of you’re the pertiest gal I ever laid eyes on in my entire life. Lord if you aint. They just don’t make ’em the least bit pertier than you are.”

She asked him the third question. “Are you going to fuck me?”

Part Two:

Sleeping with

Chapter eleven

It took all of whatever sawdust he had for brains to devise a way to get out of the house Saturday night. He knew that there was lots of fellers on this earth who just “went out with the boys,” but nobody never bothered to tell him how they got away with it. She was right that he didn’t have no buddies to speak of, so he couldn’t have used that as a excuse anyhow. In all the years he’d been married to her, she had never let him leave the house on Saturday night, or any other night as far as that matter goes, and now that she was ticked off at him on account of his going out to see Robin by himself yesterday afternoon she was keeping a close watch on him and spending all her time thinking up ways to punish him.

He thought of the idea of putting something or another into her iced tea at suppertime that would knock her out for the evening. Of course she’d be madder than a wet hen whenever she woke up, but at least he would’ve been able to spend the whole evening at the roller rink watching his sweet Robin on her skates.

When he was mighty close to giving up on the whole idea, it suddenly hit him that he did have a good relative if not a buddy, Benny Samuels, a cousin, living down the road at Western Grove, and Benny owed him a couple of favors and now was a good time to call in one of them. So he watched for a chance when Louisa was busy and he phoned Benny and whispered into the phone what he wanted him to do, and sure enough a little while later the phone rang and Louisa answered it and Benny told her that his wife was in the hospital and he was all alone and could Leo please come over and keep him company for just a little while tonight? Louisa told him she’d think about it, and hung up. She was suspicious, and said maybe she’d better go with him to keep Benny company, but at the last minute she said all right but don’t you stay too long, you hear me? And you take your pickup and leave me with the car. And he hopped in his pickup and tore off lickety-split out of there and got to the Harrison roller rink just as the girls was hitting the floor.

And didn’t he have him one heck of a swell time! He got him an Orange Crush sody pop and a sack of pork skins and he sat in the bleachers sort of place with the other spectators, moms and dads and the folks who were handling the birthday party, part of which they had right there in the rink, with favors and hats and tooters handed out, and they let Leo participate, so he didn’t need that sody pop and pork skins because they was handing out fresh pizza and then birthday cake. And wasn’t Robin just thrilled to pieces to have her grandpappy there! And after the party part was over and they’d et all the cake and the girls went back out onto the floor to do their skating, she more than once hollered, “Grampa, watch me!” as if he needed to be told, because he couldn’t take his eyes off of her. She was a sight to behold, and he was just a little afraid she was a-fixing to hurt herself with one of them jumps and spins and turns and even skating backward besides!

He wondered what happened. At the far end of the rink was this little balcony place where the skaters sometimes stepped out between numbers to grab a breath of fresh air, and he never took his eyes off her but she went out there, and it was dark, and the next thing he knew it looked like some feller just reached up and plucked her right off the balcony! Leo started to run out across the floor, but they hollered at him because you aint supposed to be on the floor if you aint wearing skates. So he had to turn around and run out the front door and around the side of the rink to reach that balcony. And she was plumb gone. Not a sign of her. He couldn’t believe it, and wondered if his old eyes was a-playing some kind of crazy trick on him. He looked around all over for her. Not a trace. He went back into the rink and looked around in there, thinking maybe she’d not really gone on the balcony, or maybe gone to the Ladies’ or something. But he couldn’t find her nowhere. He started to ask. He asked the little girl that they was giving the party for, “Say, have you seen Robin?” But she hadn’t. He got the same answer from the other girls. He went to the manager of the rink and said, “Excuse me but it seems like my little granddaughter has turned up missing.” And the manager asks her name and he tells him and the manager gets on the P.A. and booms out, “WILL MISS ROBIN KERR PLEASE COME TO THE FRONT DESK?” and they wait and wait and then the manager says on the P.A., “HAS ANYBODY SEEN MISS ROBIN KERR?”

After a good long while, the manager says to Leo, “Maybe her momma came and got her.”

“I doubt it,” Leo says. “I think maybe you’d better get the cops to come over.” So the manager makes a phone call.

By the time the police arrived, the skating had all come to a halt, and all the girls and their parents that brought ’em was just milling around talking to one another and looking as sick with worry as Leo felt himself.

One of the officers set in to asking him a bunch of questions. What was the victim’s full name? What was the victim’s age? What was the victim’s physical description? What was the victim wearing? When and where had he last seen her? Leo led the officer over to the balcony and told him about the feller plucking her off of there. You’re sure it was a man, then? the officer asks. “Couldn’t no woman have just snatched her like that,” Leo said. What was the man wearing? the officer asked. How old was he? “I’m sorry, I didn’t get a good look at him.” Leo said. “You see, he was out here in the dark and it happened so fast.” And you say you’re her grandfather? “Well, actually I’m just married to her grandmother.”

Somebody was tearing at the back of his jacket and he turned around and there was Karen. “LEO! WHAT HAPPENED?” she hollered. Leo explained to the officer that this lady was the girl’s mother, and the officer helpfully explained the situation to her so Leo didn’t have to do it. But Karen looked like she was fixing to murder the officer. “BUT WHAT WAS SHE DOING HERE AT THIS ROLLER RINK?!?!” Karen screeched, and the officer looked at Leo and waited for Leo to explain because the officer sure didn’t know what she had been doing here at the roller rink. And because he didn’t know, both of them were staring at Leo waiting for him to explain.

“Skating,” Leo said, and that was all he could say for the moment.

“DID YOU BRING HER HERE?!” she yells into his face.

There was a crowd of people gathered around them, girls and parents and cops and sheriff’s deputies and state troopers, and somebody in that crowd must’ve been a friend of Karen’s or maybe a mother of one of the other girls, because the woman said, “Karen, we were having the party here. Didn’t Robin tell you?”

“NO SHE DID NOT!” Karen screamed. “DO YOU THINK I WOULD HAVE LET HER GO TO THE GODDAMN PARTY IF I’D KNOWN YOU WERE TAKING HER TO THIS PLACE?” Karen broke down and commenced bawling. Leo tried to hold her and for a moment she looked as if she was going to let him hug her but then she backed off from him and cried, “I want my mother! Where’s my mother?”

“She didn’t come with me,” Leo admitted, and, thinking of Louisa, said to himself, Boy, am I going to be up ole Shit Creek without nothing to steer with.

“She didn’t come with you,” Karen said. “She didn’t come with you, huh? So she didn’t come with you.” And then she says, still calm but very loud, “LEO, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH HER?”

“I reckon she’s just a-settin at the TV up at the house,” he says.

Karen bursts out laughing. “So you’ve just got her at your house? And Mother’s with her?”

It got through Leo’s sawdust that they were talking about different hers. “Aw, I thought you meant your mother. I haven’t done nothing with Robin. She’s been kidnapped.”

A policeman spoke to Karen. “Ma’am, let me ask you: are you married?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” she wanted to know.

“Yes or no, ma’am, please.”

“No, I’m divorced.”

“Then maybe the girl’s father came and got her. That often happens, you know, especially if there’s any kind of custody dispute.”

“Then Billy has got her!” Karen said. “That asshole! Oh, it’s just like him!” And Karen commenced bawling again.

The cop said, “Let’s get off the rink and go sit down and you can tell us how to find him.”

Everybody got off the rink, and a table was set up with chairs around it, and other people sat in those bleachers, and each of the girls at the birthday had to answer a few questions before she was allowed to go, and one by one the parents took the kids away. Leo figured the best thing for him to do was just slip on out and get on home and maybe even pretend to Louisa that he didn’t know nothing about nothing. But as he was stepping slowly and softly toward the door, a cop came and took his arm and said, “I hope you’re not going anywhere.”

“My wife,” he said, “she’s the girl’s grandma, and I reckon I ought to go get her.”

“We’ll send a trooper to pick her up,” the cop said. “We need you here. Have a seat.”

The place was really filling up with all kinds of officers and the FBI besides. Somebody was even taking flash photos of that balcony and running a tape measure across it like you did when somebody has a wreck.

Leo was mighty glad to have all those law enforcement people surrounding him for protection when Louisa arrived, or else she might’ve killed him on the spot. It took a couple of ’em to hold her back from attacking him. Her behavior was really inexcusable and was probably the reason they decided to keep him for questioning. He didn’t relish spending a night in jail but it was sure a lot better than spending the night at home with her. Either way he wouldn’t have been able to sleep a wink. It wasn’t the disgrace of being arrested that preyed on his mind as much as the fact of Robin’s disappearance. She meant the world to him and now she was gone. They could suspect him all they wanted to and it wouldn’t bring her back.

They fed him a good breakfast at the jail and there was a TV with the morning news having a big story on Robin, and her picture broadcast for all the world to see. It wasn’t one of her best pictures and didn’t do justice to her beauty. Right soon after breakfast a feller from the state police, name of Jack Samples, who was in charge of child molesters, and two of Lieutenant Samples’ men, sat Leo down at a table and commenced asking him a bunch of questions. They had even checked him out and found his Navy rap sheet, which mentioned that he’d spent some time in the brig after being caught during shore leave with a eleven-year-old whore. That had been twenty years ago, goddammit, but they acted like he’d just been picked up last night.

They grilled him. What was his exact relationship to the victim? What was the nature and extent of that exact relationship? Had the victim ever said or done anything inappropriate or of a sexual character during that relationship? Had he ever said or done anything inappropriate or of a sexual character during that relationship? Had he ever fondled her? Where had he touched her? Had he sat her upon his lap? When and how often and with what conclusion? What sort of kisses had he given her and received from her? Was it true that he had given her a large stuffed bear, named Paddington, whom she regularly slept with?

Leo did a lot of sweating during this interview, but the worst had only just begun. Maybe he had given the wrong answers to the questions because by and by they started in to trying to get him to confess where he had taken her and where he was keeping her. In the trunk of his car maybe? Tied up in the woods somewhere? In an abandoned house somewhere? They promised him they would try to get him off lightly if only he would confess and lead them to the girl. Did he want to spend the rest of his life in prison? No? Then why didn’t he come clean and help them find the girl?

Trying desperately to divert attention away from his own innocent self, Leo suddenly remembered the man from the other day, the man who Robin said had pretended to be him, the man they’d later encountered out on the road after Robin’s bike wreck who at first claimed to be her grandfather because, as he’d said later, he had suspected that Leo was a child molester and wanted to protect her against him. The sawdust began to sift away as Leo realized that man was probably the number one suspect. Maybe that man was some kind of stalker who wanted Robin specifically and had taken the trouble to follow her to the roller rink and abduct her.

Leo told the officers all that he could remember about the man and what he had done and said. He concluded, “Maybe he was just looking for his lost dog, like he said, but that could’ve just been a excuse.”

The officers looked at each other, and mumbled some stuff to one another, and then Jack Samples said, “Or maybe he was your partner in this deal. Maybe he was the one who actually grabbed her at the rink but you put him up to it. Huh?” All Leo could do was shake his head vigorously and keep on a-shaking it. They led him off to another room and hooked him up to a bunch of wires and stuff that was some kind of lie-detector machine. Then they asked him all kinds of questions, including all of the questions they’d already asked him, and he did his best to tell the honest-to-God truth. He told the truth when they point-blank asked him if he knew where she was. When they were all done, and he was plumb wore out, he said, “Well, did I pass?” but they didn’t say yes or no.

Finally one of them asked him, “Do you think you can describe this man you were talking about?”

And later that morning they brought in a police sketch artist who wanted to do something called a “composite,” and the feller started off with simple questions to Leo like age, height, weight, hair color, eye color, etc., and then got to more complicated ones like how close together the eyes was, and how long the nose was and how much the ears stuck out. Leo had a pretty hard time trying to remember just what the guy had looked like day before yesterday, and finally when the artist had come up with a sketch and showed it to him Leo had to offer his humble opinion that it didn’t look too awful much like the feller. “His eyebrows was bushier than that, and his mouth was some wider,” Leo criticized the artwork.

By mid-afternoon they had a sketch that was a fair likeness of the guy. Jack Samples studied it and laughed and said, “Aw shit, that sort of looks like old Sog!” But nobody took the trouble to tell him who this Old Sog was. They made copies of the picture and sent ’em out to the press, and it appeared on the evening news and Leo was even a little proud, as if he’d drawed the picture himself.

Jack Samples said to him, “Well, I guess you’re free to go, for now. Probably the girl wasn’t even abducted, she was just a runaway.”

“On roller skates?” Leo said, and somehow they all thought that was funny, and laughed. But Leo wasn’t laughing. One of the cops, not Samples, had told him that in most sexual kidnappings the child is never found alive, and Leo was starting to get powerfully haunted by the notion that poor Robin could be dead and raped somewhere at this very moment. His heart poured out for her, and for his loss of her. She had been the light of his life. Such as his shitty life had been. Now some real son of a bitch who had made careful plans and carried them out had removed Leo’s darling little girl from this earth. Leo did not intend to take it laying down.

He drove on home, prepared to face the worst yet. It’s twenty miles from Harrison to Pindall and that gave him plenty of time to think about what he would say to Louisa. But by the time he got there he realized there was only one thing he was going to say to her: “Screw you.” Honest.

So he was even disappointed when he got there and discovered she wasn’t there for him to say that to. The car was gone. He suddenly remembered that this was Sunday and if she wasn’t at one of her constant church services or meetings or whatever, she was most likely keeping Karen company during this time of grief and anxiety and waiting.

Leo went up to the bedroom and got his revolver out of the closet and took hold of a fistful of bullets. Then he turned right around and drove those twenty miles back to Harrison. He didn’t go to Karen’s. He went to the roller rink.

It’s funny how things come to you. Maybe because of not having any sleep the night before and being in a kind of daze still, or maybe because without even thinking it out loud he had already determined that if need be he would spend the rest of his life searching for the girl, he suddenly experienced a flash of a minor little detail that he hadn’t even known he had noticed: that feller’s pickup didn’t hardly have no tread to speak of on the tires. They was bald.

Leo searched the parking lot behind the roller rink until he found some bald tracks in the mud, and they went out onto the highway turning south, but he lost the tracks on the asphalt. He started driving slow down that asphalt road, watching every little side road that he came to for any sign of the bald tracks again.

It was the slow but steady beginning of Leo Spurlock’s long, long quest.

Chapter twelve

How in hell was he supposed to answer a question like that? He was struck all of a heap that she would use that word, which didn’t belong on the sweet lips of such an innocent child. And yet. And yet, he couldn’t help but be kind of excited by it, because the way she used it seemed to mean that she at least knew what it was and therefore he might not have to learn her as much as he thought he’d have to learn her.

Even so, he choked on his coffee and needed a minute to gentle down. And then he asked, “Where’d you pick up that word?”

“Everybody knows it,” she said, staring him straight in the eye, feisty and brash as all get out.

“Sweet little girls don’t know it,” he said.

“You should hear all the words Gretchen Scott knows,” she declared. “She knows all of them.”

“Who’s Gretchen Scott?”

“One of my best friends at school.”

“Did Gretchen tell you what that word means? Did she explain what happens when you go to bed with somebody?”

“Sort of,” she said. “But you’re not answering my question. Is that what you’re going to do to me?”

“Not today,” he said, and that was all he could think to say, which was true. He didn’t intend to rush things. He wasn’t one of these here goddamn rapists. Aw, of course he knew what statutory rape was, but this wasn’t the same thing. He really hoped that whatever they did would be consensual on her part. He wasn’t never going to force her to do nothing. And besides for some strange reason he wasn’t feeling an awful lot of lust, not at the moment, anyhow. He’d thought for a while that he wouldn’t be able to hold himself back, once he got ahold of her, but now that he had her he didn’t seem to have the itch in his britches that he’d expected.

“But tomorrow maybe?” she said. “Or sometime?”

“Not if you don’t feel like it,” he declared, and then, because the subject was something that ought not be discussed too much but just acted upon whenever the occasion called for it, he decided to change the subject. “It’s warming up out there,” he observed. “You want to take a look at the place?”

“I want to brush my teeth,” she said.

“Fine and dandy. What color toothbrush do you want?”

“Blue.”

He got her a nice blue toothbrush out of the box of new toothbrushes, and then, because she’d never brushed her teeth without running water, which they didn’t have, he showed her the new system of using the wash basin and a gourd dipper filled with water from the water bucket. He had to hold the dipper for her at first, but she got the hang of it, and brushed her teeth and then he wanted to show her how to draw water herself. He took her out to the well, and showed her how to let the well bucket run down on its chain down and down deep into the well and then you let the bucket submerge itself and you pull it up on the pulley with the chain. She had a struggle, at first, pulling that chain with the bucket full on the other end of it, but she finally got it up and then he showed her how to pour the well bucket into the kitchen bucket and take it to the house and set it on the bucket shelf and put the gourd dipper in it.

“See?” he said. “Nothing to it.”

She frowned. “It’s not nearly as easy as just turning the faucet handle.”

“If you think that aint easy, let’s see if you can split some stove wood,” and he took her out to the woodpile, where a chopping stump was surrounded by a good stack of logs he’d dragged in from the woods and cut up with his chain-saw. The chain-saw was one of the few things he’d sold at the yard sale. He hated to let it go but knew they had to learn how to cut timber with just a axe and crosscut. He had some doubts about showing her how to use the axe, not that he was afraid she’d hurt herself but she might just get it into her head to take a whack at him while he was asleep or something. But that was just a risk he’d have to take, because he wanted her to do her share of helping with the stove wood. He started off with little pieces, propped steady on the chopping stump, and made sure she stood with the axe in such a way that it wouldn’t slip and hurt her. Bitch was watching them, and the girl asked him to make the dog go away. Then she missed her first few licks but got the hang of it and actually managed to split a piece in two. “Hey, you did it!” he said and tried to give her a hug, but she backed off from him. Then he showed her where the stove wood was stacked in a big wooden box beside the kitchen door. Even if she wasn’t very good at splitting wood with the axe, she could be handy at toting the wood to the wood box.

He showed her the little springhouse, and explained it was the nearest thing they had to a refrigerator. If they had any fresh cow’s milk or butter, which they didn’t and never would, they could keep it in the springhouse. He did have some powdered lemonade mix and directly he’d show her how to mix a jar of it and get it cooled in the springhouse. “We could keep our Kool-Aid here too,” she offered, and it was the first thing she’d said that made it sound like she really wanted to participate in this life. That made him happy but he was real sorry to realize that it had never occurred to him to buy any Kool-Aid mix because he never used the stuff himself.

“Sweetheart, I really do hate to tell ye, but it complete slipped my mind to get us any Kool-Aid,” he said.

She looked as if she was about to cry, and he wished she would, just to prove that she still knew how to cry. “You’re not ever going to the store again?” she said and he wasn’t sure whether it was just a statement of fact or maybe a question. Either way, it didn’t need to be said.

He showed her the rest of the place—the barn, which they wouldn’t have no use for since they didn’t have any cows or mules or any need to store hay. And it looked like it might fall on their heads anyhow, and he told her she’d better not even play around in or near the barn. That wasn’t true of the shop, which was still a pretty sturdy shed and still had all the tools and stuff that Gabe Madewell had just abandoned when he pulled up stakes. He explained to her that this had been the workshop of the barrel-maker who had lived here but hit the trail some twenty-odd years before. He showed her one of the two barrels that had been left behind and attempted to explain how the staves were cut from the white oak timber in the surrounding forests and shaped to go inside the steel bands to make a barrel that was probably used for whiskey. Madewell had also made wooden buckets and tubs and churns, and there was still one churn left behind, never used but slightly damaged. Sog showed it to her and explained how it would have been used to make butter. They wouldn’t have no use for it, but it sure was a handsome piece of woodwork to look at. “There was some kind of name for the work he did, which was a family name or something—Turner or Carver or Cutter.”

“Cooper,” she said.

“Yeah, that’s it! How’d you know it?”

“I read it in a book,” she said. Then she asked, “Why did he build his house way off up here on this mountain?”

“Well, I believe it was probably his daddy, Braxton Madewell, who was also a cooper, who built the place way back around the turn of the century. I reckon he built it here because it was handy to all the timber.”

“How far is the nearest neighbor?” she asked.

He started to answer but then realized it could be a trick question. “If you was a crow and could fly, and headed thataway,” he pointed toward the south, “you might fly over a house where people still lived in about three mile or so, in a place called Stay More, just a ghost town, really. But there just aint no way to go from here to there on foot.” He decided to tell her about Adam Madewell. Gabe had a boy named Adam who’d been several years behind Sog at the Stay More school, and Adam had to walk it, getting up before daylight every morning and hiking four miles over the roughest trail you could imagine and him not but a first or second grader, just a kid, hiking eight miles round-trip every day of the school year, carrying his dinner pail and his schoolbooks in places where he practically had to do mountain-climbing, until finally he’d had some kind of accident at home, helping his daddy make barrels and gashing his leg so badly he couldn’t walk on it, and they never saw him again at the schoolhouse. Ad Madewell had been a real smart and proud and hardworking kid at school, and the teacher, Miss Jerram, had loved him and was sorry to see him go, or rather stay, because he must’ve stayed home from school for a couple of years before they left for California and the school itself didn’t last much longer than that. But folks on the store porch—Latha Bourne’s General Store—used to kid Ad because his paw and maw never did come to town for anything. “Hey, Ad,” they’d say, “why don’t ye show ’em that trail you come in on?” Adam’s trail, which went through a lost holler with a big waterfall in it, had been washed away after he quit using it, and now there wasn’t a sign of it, although Sog had been in that lost holler one time and in fact had shot a bad man there when he was with the state police.

“You were a policeman?” the girl asked.

“Yeah, that’s what I did most all of my life,” he said.

The girl was staring at him in a way that bothered him, as if she was trying to picture him in his uniform or just trying to figure out why a law-abiding officer of the law would do something illegal like stealing a little girl. “What did you shoot the bad man for?” she asked.

“He had kidnapped a little girl,” Sog said, and felt he might even be blushing. “Yeah, I know, it sounds ironic, don’t it? As it turned out, this feller, Dan Montross was his name, just an old hermit, he was the girl’s grandfather. But I didn’t know that.”

She fixed him with that look again and said, “Somebody is going to shoot you.” She sounded like she meant it. He hated to hear her talk mean like that.

“They’ve got to find me first,” he said.

It wasn’t a good day. Both of them were tired from lack of sleep the night before, but he had a lot to do, and there was plenty he could find for her to do. He asked her what she’d like for lunch and she said a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He had plenty of jars of peanut butter and plenty of jars of jelly, but no bread. He explained that bread gets stale, and it gets moldy, and you can’t keep it in a jar, and he hadn’t thought to buy even one loaf to hold them until they could make some. He had all the fixings for making bread and he intended to show her soon how to do it and how to bake it in the woodstove, and maybe bake some pies and cakes and biscuits while they were at it. But not today. They had all kinds of crackers, plain saltines as well as fancy ones, and he asked her if she could just make do with peanut butter and jelly on crackers. For himself he had a hankering for some pig’s feet, and opened a jar and forked a couple of ’em out. He fixed himself a generous glass of Jack D to wash them down with.

“I’m going to throw up,” the girl declared.

“You aint even et yet,” he said.

“If you eat that stuff, I won’t feel like eating,” she said.

“Here, try a little taste. Won’t kill you, and they’re scrumptious when you get to know them.”

She got up from the table and left the kitchen, taking her plate of peanut-buttered crackers with her.

“Don’t eat on the davenport!” he called after her. “My momma wouldn’t never let me eat a-settin there.”

After lunch he had to go work a while on covering the trail to where the truck had been parked. He asked her if she didn’t feel like taking a little nap. She claimed she didn’t. What did she feel like doing then? What would she ordinarily be doing this time of day on a Sunday afternoon? She said she’d be working on Wobbinsville. What’s Wobbinsville? he asked. Just a town she made up for her paper dolls to live in, she said. Did he have any paper she could use to cut some paper dolls and clothes for them? Well, of course they had enough toilet paper to last for a few years, but he had to apologize that there wasn’t any other paper except the brown paper sacks that stuff had come in from the grocery. That would do, I guess, she said, if you could let me use the scissors.

Sog looked and he looked in the boxes of kitchen gadgets he’d brought from home, and there wasn’t no pair of scissors to be found nowhere. Maybe it was just as well. He didn’t want her fooling around with something sharp like a pair of scissors that she could stab him with. But he went out and searched the shop for scissors. There was a pair of what looked like sheep shears, but that wasn’t the same thing. “Bitch,” he said to the dog, “you haven’t seen any scissors anywhere, have you?” Bitch was a real smart dog but she couldn’t answer that one. He went back to the house and informed the girl, “I sure do hate to have to tell you but it appears they just aint no scissors nowhere.”

She hung her head and for a moment there he was almost sure she was finally going to let herself cry. But she didn’t. He went into the storeroom and rummaged through the toys he’d got for her, and brought out a little Fisher Price xylophone which had different colored bars and he showed her how it would play itself if you pulled it across the floor. But maybe she just wasn’t musically inclined. There was a whole bunch of board games but they required two or more to play and he was going to be busy all afternoon. He went ahead and showed her the one called What Shall I Be? Career Game for Girls, which features a nurse, a teacher, a airline hostess, a model, a ballet dancer, and a actress. He promised to play the game with her later, but right now he had work to do. She could maybe learn it by herself. No? Well, he wasn’t going to drag out any more of the stuff right now, because he had to save it so that he’d have something to give her at Christmastimes and on her birthdays.

“You’d better try to take a little nap,” he urged. “Come on and I’ll show you our bedroom.” He took her in there, where he had rehabilitated the old iron bedstead and springs the Madewells had left behind along with a real mattress stuffed with feathers, so soft he figured it must’ve been goose down. “You never slept on a featherbed before?” he asked, and when she shook her head, he said, “Well, just climb up there and see if you don’t fall right to sleep.”

She laid down and closed her eyes and he tiptoed out and on out of the house and told Bitch to keep an eye on the door. He told Bitch it was okay for the girl to go to the outhouse if she had to but not to go anywheres else. Then he took his axe and shovel and hiked the mile back to where the truck, or what was left of it, was still smoldering. The embers had died out enough that he could commence cutting a lot of saplings and brush and stacking them on top of the remains of the truck to cover it up. He didn’t think anybody would ever come up the old trail this far, but if they did they wouldn’t see nothing but a brush pile. Then he went over the trail to the house, walking backward and covering up any signs of the path and covering them with brush. All of this wasn’t so much to keep anyone from finding the path as it was to keep her from finding it.

When he was done late in the afternoon it was time to give thought to supper, and he considered killing one of the chickens. But he was just too blamed tired and sleepy himself to bother with it. The girl, however, wasn’t asleep. She was talking to that big doll he’d given her. He was pleased to see she’d found some use for the doll. “What would you like for supper?” he asked her.

“Basketti,” she said.

“Say what?” he said and she repeated herself and it finally dawned on him that she was just baby-talking spaghetti. That too was something he didn’t have in stock. “Wop food,” he said.

“What?” she said. “It’s my favorite of everything.”

“It’s what Eye-talians eat,” he said. “I never could abide it, nor even tried it. Like pizza, it’s for Wops.”

“I love pizza,” she said.

“Well, I’m sorry but we just don’t have the makings of any of that Wop food.”

And again she seemed right on the edge of hauling off and having herself a good cry. This has been a bad day, he reflected, but he was confident that given the passage of time she could learn to overcome all her likes and dislikes. For supper he opened a can of beef stew and for dessert they had canned peaches with cookies. At least there was plenty of cookies, enough bags to last them until they learned how to make them.

When he lit up after dessert she said, “Please don’t smoke.”

“You’ll get used to it,” he assured her.

After supper they played board games. He had a good one called Dealer’s Choice that involves purchasing cars and maintaining a used car lot, with lots of vintage car cards. But she didn’t like it much. It grew dark and he lit one of the kerosene lamps and he tried to show her how to do it but she said she was not allowed to play with matches. “You don’t play with ’em,” he said. “You just light the darn lamp with ’em.” They tried a game called Clue but it seemed to be over her head and maybe his too. They briefly played a game called Sorry, and fooled around just a bit with a game called Charge It: The Family Credit Card Game. They played a board game called Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the object of which was to help Goldilocks escape. Then it was bedtime. Well, actually, he had thrown his wristwatch that they’d given him at retirement off the bluff and didn’t know what time it was, and maybe it was early, but he was bushed. He didn’t feel a smidgin of desire. He told her that tonight he’d sleep on the davenport and she could have the featherbed all to herself. She told him that she couldn’t sleep without Paddington, and it took her a while to explain just who the hell this Paddington was. He went into the storeroom and came back with a stuffed rabbit, a big one, and told her to give it a hug and pretend it was Paddington. Then he tucked her in, in her nice new flannel jammies, and gave her a little kiss on the forehead.

“Mommy always leaves on the night light,” she said. “I can’t sleep in the dark.”

“Well, tough titty,” he snapped, growing short. “As you can see we don’t have no lectricity up here.” He could leave a kerosene lamp turned down real low but that was dangerous and he didn’t want to try it. Ditto the idea of leaving a candle lit. He had an emergency flashlight with enough spare batteries to last until maybe she got old enough to grow out of her stupid little fear of the dark. So he set up that flashlight but she complained it was too bright. He covered it with a handkerchief and said goodnight, wiping his brow and thinking this sure has been a shitty day.

In the morning she was gone. And the feather mattress was soaked. She had really done wee-wee all over it. He dragged the mattress out of the house into the sunlight, and wondered how much air and sunlight would be required to dry it out and remove the smell.

Bitch was just sitting there and didn’t even bother to wag her tail. “Which way did she go?” he asked. “Did you happen to notice?”

Chapter thirteen

She wished she had some friends handy to help her make sense of this whole situation. Her haunch really hurt where he had kicked her out the door, which seemed to be his way of saying that she was being replaced by the girl. She had examined the child closely and determined that the girl probably could not fetch or beg, nor guard the henhouse nor bite intruders. So the girl was intended for some other purpose which escaped Hreapha. If that purpose was companionship, the girl obviously was not going to be very companionable, agreeable, or even pleasant. Maybe the man was just giving her a trial. Maybe the girl had found him somewhere on his travels and had decided to follow him home and see if he wanted to keep her. Hreapha’s own mother, Whuphvoff, had once upon a time when she was young secured her own position in a good family by that maneuver: she had just followed a boy home and the boy had said, “Mom, she followed me home. Can I keep her?” and Whuphvoff had thus been absorbed into a good family, where Hreapha had been eventually born. Hreapha’s mother told her that she hoped she would never have to resort to that method of securing a family, but it was something to keep in the back of her mind, where Hreapha already had so many things stored that they were crowding into the front.

The very fact that the man was probably preparing breakfast for the new girl (Hreapha could smell the coffee and some kind of awful prepared meat frying) and had neglected to fill Hreapha’s dish made her sure that her place in this world was being supplanted by the newcomer. After a while the man came out and ran to the henhouse where he gathered up two handfuls of eggs, and Hreapha whimpered her name softly to him in hopes he would notice her and remember to feed her, but he did not. She had not had anything to eat since that thoughtful egg that the charitable hen had laid for her yesterday, and she was getting very hungry.

Later the man brought the girl out of the house and showed her to the little building where people poop, and again Hreapha made mild whimperings to call attention to herself, and again she was ignored. And after that, they came out again so that the man could show the newcomer how to draw water from the well. During the operation, Hreapha positioned herself nearby and tried to look nice and eager and hopeful without outright begging, but again it did not dawn on the man that he had neglected to feed his faithful dog. Next the man attempted to show the newcomer how to chop wood, and after repeated attempts the girl was able to split a piece of it. Well now, at least that’s something I couldn’t ever do, Hreapha reflected. Nor could she draw water from the well. She did not need to, because, as she next discovered, the man was showing the girl to the springhouse, which was a perfectly good source of water. Hreapha followed, maintaining all the while her pleasant hopeful look and posture, but the man and the girl were caught up in a discussion about something called Kool-Aid and neither of them gave Hreapha a glance.

Later in their tour of the premises, the girl was shown the barn and warned to stay away from it and then shown the shop, which, Hreapha had long since discovered, the in-habit liked to inhabit and where he could usually be found. Or, since “found” doesn’t apply to in-habits, perhaps “detected” was the word. The in-habit studied the girl with great attention and curiosity but did not reveal himself to her. Nor did the man discover the in-habit. The man did, however, begin to talk about the in-habit, or rather about the in-habit when the in-habit had actually inhabited the place, as a young schoolboy named Adam Madewell. Hreapha listened with great interest to what was said about Adam, and wished she could communicate with Adam In-habit and compare notes with him about his impressions of this newcomer. Did he think she was just a stray who had followed the man home? Should we keep her? Could we keep her? Even though the girl was not sociable, certainly not to Hreapha, whom she seemed to dislike intensely, the girl was, after all, lovely, even if she could not fetch and beg, and she might be loads of fun. Didn’t Adam think so? But Hreapha did not know how to ask these questions of Adam, and wasn’t sure he could answer. That would come later.

And then she heard the girl say to the man, “Somebody is going to shoot you.” It did not sound very sociable at all.

And she heard the man answer, “They’ve got to find me first.”

After they had gone inside to have their lunch and she was left with only the prospect of becoming an egg-sucking dog, she pondered these statements and reasoned that the man was perhaps hiding from someone who wanted to shoot him. That would help explain all the trouble the man had taken to relocate, to abandon the house in the village of Stay More and stock up this mountain hideaway with enough food to last forever and enough drink to fly over the moon. It also gave Hreapha notice that one of her duties in the foreseeable future might be to protect the man against somebody trying to shoot him.

Later, the man threw her some kind of small bones that had been pickled and were virtually inedible, so she did not try to eat them, but went on starving. Later still the man came out and rummaged through the shop and finally took notice of Hreapha and said to her, “Bitch, you haven’t seen any scissors anywhere, have you?”

She stood on her hind legs in a begging posture, licking her chops and wagging her tail and sparkling her eyes in an attempt to communicate If you’ll give me some food I’ll find some scissors for you. But he could not hear her, and went back into the house.

And still later, after Hreapha had gone to the henhouse and actually drooled upon an egg but resisted the overpowering urge to suck it, the man came out once again and said to her, “Bitch, keep an eye on this door. If she comes out to use the privy, that’s okay, but don’t let her wander off. You hear me?” Once again Hreapha rose up on her hind legs in the begging posture, licking her chops and smiling hopefully, but once again the man failed to get her message, and she began to conclude that he might actually be pretty dense. He took his shovel and his axe and disappeared down the trail in the direction of the truck’s parking place.

Hreapha obediently guarded the door for a long time but the girl did not come out. Hreapha was bored. She’d much rather have followed the man to the truck, or accompanied the child to the privy, but there was nothing to do, and nothing to think about except her empty stomach. She was nodding off and ready for an afternoon nap when out of the corner of her eye she noticed a hawk circling overhead. She knew it was a red-tailed hawk. Even though she was colorblind like all her kindred, she had learned from Yowrfrowr that it was called a red-tailed hawk, even though it didn’t have a tail, at least not like a dog’s. Anyway, the big bird landed on a high tree limb and just sat there giving the evil eye to Hreapha and then to the various chickens who were pecking around in the yard. What intimidating eyes the hawk had! Hreapha tried to return the bird’s malevolent stare, but couldn’t maintain eye contact. It occurred to her that the hawk was sizing her up, trying to determine if there would be any resistance if the hawk made off with one of the hens. “HREAPHA!” Hreapha declared, letting the hawk know that Hreapha intended to protect the flock.

But Hreapha’s warning went unheeded. Suddenly with a hideous bloodcurdling scream the hawk dived from its perch and headed straight for the selfsame hen who had benevolently provided Hreapha with the only sustenance she’d had in ages, a single egg.

Hreapha sprang into action. She reached the hen too late to spare it from being snatched in the hawk’s talons but she was quick enough to leap and seize the hawk’s head in her mouth, feeling its skull crunch beneath her teeth. The hawk screamed even louder, the sound deafening and petrifying Hreapha, who hung on for dear life as the three of them plummeted back to earth.

The hen’s life was spared and she ran off squawking bloody murder. The hawk continued to thrash and shriek for a few interminable moments and then lay still. It was the first time that Hreapha had ever killed anything (if we do not count assorted sinister fleas). She was too stunned to move, for a long time. She could only stand and contemplate the dead hawk, a really huge bird with an enormous wingspan, now disheveled and askew. There was another hawk circling high overhead, possibly the wife or husband of this slain bird, but the other hawk did not come down to investigate.

Good dog! said a voice behind her, and she, having never been called that before, turned eagerly, only to see nothing, or rather only to perceive the presence of the in-habit, who, at least, had demonstrated that he could communicate.

After a while, first looking around to see if she was observed by anyone “real” and noticing that all the hens and the two roosters were watching her with awe, Hreapha ate the hawk.

It was not easy. It was in fact very messy. The feathers got in the way of the meat, and Hreapha had to constantly spit out mouthfuls of feathers. She eschewed the drumsticks and the wings but chewed the breast and thighs and made a welcome meal of it. The meat was somewhat gamy—although Hreapha had absolutely no other game to compare it with. Perhaps “wild” would be a better word, and Hreapha was somewhat concerned that eating this hawk might make her feral and even vicious. But her hunger pangs were temporarily eradicated.

When the man came home from whatever he’d been doing with the shovel and axe, obviously tired from his work, he saw the remains of the hawk and hollered, “Goddamn it, Bitch, have you been eating one of the chickens?” She cowered and whined, and he kicked the hawk’s remains preparatory to kicking her. When he did so, the enormous wingspan and the beaked head became evident to him and he said, “Well, what do you know? It’s a hawk!” He stood there looking at the hawk and counting the chickens and taxing his limited intelligence and finally said, “This hawk must’ve got in a fight with a fox or something. Shitfire, what kind of watchdog are you?”

He went on to the house and she did not see him again until he came out at bedtime to use the pooping-perch. It was dark and after the lamps were extinguished within the house it remained dark and quiet for the rest of the night. Hreapha brooded about what kind of watchdog she was. His mention of a fox reminded her that the chickens had more to fear from foxes than from hawks. More than once at the old place in Stay More she had had to chase foxes away from the henhouse, and had fought a couple of them, and knew that they were mean. She understood that foxes were dogs and therefore her cousins, but she intensely disliked them. And vice versa.

She napped fitfully through the night, perhaps dreaming a time or two. It seemed that in one of her dreams she was a hawk, soaring high above Madewell Mountain with a fine view of this homestead, which, however, was completely abandoned again, except for its in-habits. But now there were three in-habits, including that of a female dog.

She woke at dawn from this dream at the scent of the girl-child stepping out the front door. “Shhh!” the girl said to Hreapha with her finger over her lips, and then left the premises. In one hand she was carrying a flashlight, not lit; in the other hand a small paper sack which had the scent of edibles, possibly crackers.

Naturally Hreapha followed, but once they had left the yard the girl turned and stomped her foot and hissed at her, “Get home!” and swished her hands holding the flashlight and sack. Naturally Hreapha did not get home but waited just a while and resumed following the child, who seemed to be trying to find the path that led to the trail that led to the truck’s parking place, but she could not find it. If the girl had asked Hreapha politely, the latter, who could easily smell the trail, would have shown her where it was. But the girl tried to find it by herself and got extremely off course. Hreapha said “Hreapha” in a gentle way that was meant to correct her bearings, but the girl picked up a rock and threw it at her. It missed. “Get home!” she said again, and threw some more rocks. None of the rocks succeeded in finding its mark. But Hreapha understood that the girl did not want her company. She waited, and allowed the girl to wander on out of sight, and waited some more, and then easily picked up the scent and followed unseen from a distance.

The child really had no idea where she was going, and began drifting southward instead of northeastward where the truck parking place was. Soon, Hreapha perceived, the child was hopelessly lost, but she kept plodding on, and circling back, while getting deeper into the tall white oak forest. Even from a distance Hreapha could smell the child’s extreme fear and panic as well as her unreasonable determination. Nothing smells worse than unreasonable determination.

It had not been too awfully long ago when Hreapha herself had reached the momentous decision to run away, and thus she understood and empathized with the girl, and even wondered if possibly the man had beaten the girl with a stick as he had Hreapha. But the essential difference between this girl’s running away and Hreapha’s was that the latter at least had some idea of where she was going, and this girl had none whatsoever.

At least the act of running away made it pretty clear to Hreapha that the girl was not a stray who had followed him home.

After a while the girl came upon a marvelous but useless discovery: there was a pond of water where beavers had felled trees and made a beaver dam. From a distance Hreapha could smell the animals’ scent, although she knew they were nocturnal and would not be visible now. She was delighted to discover that beaver were living here on the mountainside so near the farmstead, and she was keen to investigate their dam and lodge, but did not want to be seen by the girl. The girl herself had paused in her flight to study the pond and the beavers’ log structures, which seemed to fascinate her, as if she knew what sort of creature had built this remarkable edifice.

Hreapha was fascinated too, but she realized the man would be waking soon and would be exceedingly angry at finding that Hreapha had abandoned her post. So Hreapha ran home quickly. And just in time. The door opened and the man struggled to drag an entire piece of bedding out of the house. Having seen him transporting a davenport on his back, Hreapha was not surprised to find him in this act, but she soon perceived that the bedding bore the strong scent of the girl’s marking. Hreapha herself did a lot of marking, as was the nature of any canine, but the girl was not a canine and Hreapha did not understand why she had so thoroughly marked the bed, unless it was a kind of defiant farewell gesture to the man.

The man dragged the mattress on out into the yard, where he left it, and then he turned to Hreapha. “Which way did she go?” he asked. “Did you happen to notice?”

Of course this was one of those occasional situations when Hreapha wished that she could use the human language, but all she could do was turn a circle, reverse the circle, and then begin trotting in the exact direction from whence she had just trotted. Although the man’s thinking faculties were somewhat slow, even retarded, he managed to understand that she intended to lead him in that direction, so he followed her. She led him out across the field and to the edge of the woods and into the woods and down into a dale and over a knoll and into the deeper woods and down the hillside to a little stream which flowed and flowed and culminated in a beaver pond. She was not unmindful that she was thus betraying the child, if indeed the child was trying to run away. But her first allegiances and responsibilities, after all, were to her master, bastard though he was.

The girl was not at the beaver pond. The man paused for only a moment to marvel at the beavers’ engineering achievement, then he said to Hreapha, “Well, Bitch? So where is she?” For a moment Hreapha wondered if maybe the girl had gone underwater with the beavers into their lodge, a ridiculous conjecture. But she sniffed along the sluiceway of the dam for a while and picked up the girl’s scent again, and followed it not very far to a glade in the sunlight where the child was sitting on a rock, nibbling on a cracker.

“Get home!” the girl snapped at Hreapha and began looking for a rock to throw at her. But at that moment the man came into view, and she stood up and tried to run away. The man quickly caught up with her and swept her up off her feet and held her in the air.

“Honeybunch!” he said. “You don’t know what you’re doing. You could get real bad lost out here and just perish!”

The girl’s eyes were dampening and it looked as if she were trying very hard to cry. But she did not. He set her down, and put his hand on her shoulder and steered her in the direction of home. Hreapha followed happily along after, and the man stopped to reach down to pat his dog on the head. It was the first time she’d ever been patted. “Good ole Bitchie,” he said, and he said to the girl, “she might not have the sense to keep the foxes or hawks away from the chickens, but she knew how to find you. If it weren’t for her, you’d of got hopeless lost out here and you’d of been et by the bears or the wolves, I guarantee you.”

The girl kicked at Hreapha and connected, right in the ribs. “I hate your dog and I hate you,” she said. “I want to go home.”

“We’re going home, sweetheart,” he said. They came again to the beaver pond. “How about me and you come over here sometime and do some fishing?” he suggested.

Chapter fourteen

In the days ahead she acquired a mission in life: to do away with that horrible dog. Watching her captor shave one morning, watching him open the blade and sharpen it on the leather strop and mix the soap in a dish and brush it on his cheeks and then lift his nose with his thumb while he drew the blade slowly down across his upper lip, she plotted the idea of getting that razor and sneaking up on the dog while the dog was asleep and slashing its throat. Then the next time she ran away there would be no dog to follow her and she could just keep on walking and walking and if she started early enough in the morning she might find that place called Stay More before the sun went down and there might be somebody still living there.

The awful dog slept a lot, and in the days ahead she watched for a chance when the man wasn’t around or not watching and she could snatch his razor and slash the dog’s throat. The man was spending a lot of time in his garden, so it would be easy to do it while he was out there if his back was turned or if she could find the dog sleeping somewhere where he couldn’t see her from the garden.

Day after day, he tried to get her to help with the garden, but she would not. They had their first real fight about that. Usually the man tried to be nice to her, and he hadn’t lost his temper yet, and he hadn’t even been angry at her for wetting the bed, which had compelled her to apologize to him for the first and only time, saying she couldn’t help it and she didn’t mean to and she wouldn’t do it again, although she did do it again, every night of the nights ahead, until finally he made her sleep on what he called a “pallet”: just some quilts on some pillows on the floor. And she wet that pallet too, and he made her put it out each morning to dry and air in the sunshine.

But they had a fight about the garden, because she didn’t want anything to do with it, and she came close to having to use her taekwondo on him.

“Darn your little hide, you want to eat, don’t you?” he said. “And not just today but this summer and next fall and winter? It’s hard work to raise a little truck garden but it pays off in the long run.”

“I hate veggies,” she said.

“How come?”

“Because they’re green! If I wanted to eat something green, I would eat grass or leaves.”

“Shoot, I’m planting lots out there that’s not green. Maters aint green. Crookneck squash aint green. Taters aint green. Hell, corn aint green. Don’t you like corn on the cob? Roastin ears?”

Come to think of it, she did, but it had never occurred to her that corn on the cob was something you could grow. It came from the store, like all the many other things that came from the store which they would never ever have again because they’d never go to the store again. Bananas, for example. She loved bananas, and liked them sliced on her Fruit Loops at breakfast. But she couldn’t even have any Fruit Loops because he hadn’t bought any, although he had Wheaties and Corn Chex, which didn’t taste very good with that powdered milk on them instead of cream.

“If you could grow bananas in that garden, I’d help you plant them,” she said.

“I’m sorry about the bananas,” he said. “But late this summer there will be pawpaws aplenty hereabouts, and a pawpaw is just as good as a banana if you develop a taste for it.”

She had never seen a pawpaw and didn’t like the sound of it. She didn’t tell him that the main reason she wouldn’t work in the garden is that she had to watch for a chance to catch the dog sleeping and slash its throat. But there were other reasons. When he was out there working hard and sweating it made him smell bad, and she hated to get close to him. She had already told him his breath was bad but that wasn’t because of the garden work, it was because of his bad teeth and his cigarettes and all that whiskey he drank. She couldn’t imagine any woman wanting to be married to him, and she certainly wasn’t going to even pretend to be his wife. It was bad enough she had to be near him at the kitchen table and when they played their board games; she didn’t want to be near him in the garden. “You stink,” she said to him, more than once, and all he could say was that any day now they’d both have to get out the old washtub and have a bath. Or take a swim in the beaver pond when the water warmed up one of these days. She did not know how to swim; her mother had never allowed her to go swimming, for fear she’d drown. But the beaver pond was the only thing she liked in this whole world where she was trapped. In the days ahead when she missed her daily routine of getting up and taking a shower with Mommy and getting dressed and going to school, and she wondered if her classmates were really missing her and if they were even sorry that they had ever criticized her and called her names like “snot” and “pest” and “meany,” she thought of at least one advantage of being a prisoner in this wilderness: in school they had been studying mammals and rodents and beavers and she had even seen a film about the busy beaver, which fascinated her, and here she was actually in the presence of real live beavers! Wouldn’t she have a lot to tell in school if she could get back and tell it? She had studied up on the beaver so much that she recognized the dam the moment she saw it, and she knew that beavers come out only at night and thus she hadn’t seen any, but she hoped she could go back to the beaver pond sometime at night with the flashlight or a lantern to watch the beavers and maybe even make friends with them. Of course the man would have to go with her.

“The least you could do,” the man whined, “since I’ve took the trouble to spade up all that there soil and plant the strawberries, is for you to help weed them and also pluck off the blossoms, because we can’t eat them this year but just get them ready to eat next year.”

But she would not work in the strawberry patch. She couldn’t conceive of doing something now that wouldn’t have any benefit until a year from now, when she was sure she would no longer be here. If she couldn’t find her way out of this place, or if someone didn’t come and rescue her, she would be dead a year from now, either from being eaten by bears or wolves while trying to escape, or else, if it came down to that, she would just decide to stop living and figure out some way to die.

“Help me mulch the sweet potaters?” he would whine. “Don’t you just love sweet potaters baked with marshmallers on top?”

“I hate sweet potatoes,” she would say. And then she would say, “I’ll help you plant the marshmallows, though.”

And he would look at her to see if she was kidding, and say, “We’ve got bags and bags of marshmallers.”

In the days ahead he worked every day in that garden, and not once but twice she took his razor from the place where he kept it and unfolded it and went off looking for that dog. The first time the dog woke up and saw her coming with the razor and jumped up and ran off. The second time the dog stayed asleep and she was just about to slash its throat when the man came up behind her and snapped, “What are you doing with my razor?”

“We don’t have any scissors. I need it to cut my paper dolls some clothes.”

“You don’t have any paper dolls,” he said.

“I need to cut some out of something.”

“And you’ll slice your finger off. Give me that.” And he took the razor and hid it in a place where she couldn’t find it. So she had to think about other ways of getting rid of the dog.

In the days ahead there was not much else to do. She had already spent so much time brooding and moping about her predicament that she had nothing else to think on the subject. There were no books to read, not even comic books. She had been addicted to comic books and being weaned from them so suddenly gave her real heartbreak. There was a stack of some kind of magazine called Police Gazette full of stories about murder and crime and evildoing, but she read one issue and lost interest. She was bored. There was no music to listen to or any way to play it, and all she could do was sing to herself. Worst of all, there was no television. If Sugrue Alan thought that he was going to deprive her of television for the rest of her life, he had another think coming to him.

She reflected that the only other thing she liked about this place, besides the beaver pond, was the fact that she didn’t have to worry about burglars. All her life, one of her biggest fears had been that somebody would break in and rob them. Her father, when he had still lived with them, had tucked her in at bedtime every night and reassured her about her fears that they would be poor or that he would leave her or that they would be robbed. He had left her, so she was right about that one fear. But way up here on this mountain they were so far away from everybody that no burglar would ever find them. For whatever comfort that was worth. Yet even though they were so far away, she knew that there were other people somewhere out there. At night when it was dark and still and she sat out on the porch and listened very carefully, above the sounds of the frogs (“peepers” the man called them), she could sometimes hear, far away, the sound of a truck shifting gears, or, sometimes, what seemed to be a gunshot. And sometimes the sound of airplanes far overhead. So there were people out there. Would she ever see them again?

As the days dragged by she tried to alleviate her boredom by making believe that she was in school and that Miss Moore was giving her a lesson which she had to learn. But such make-believe only got her to first recess, and there was nowhere to go, because the other girls and boys were out in the yard barefoot and she couldn’t stand being barefoot.

She missed her jump rope. She wondered if, among all the things he had got for her, there might be a jump rope somewhere. Was he saving it for her birthday in September? She went into the storeroom where the boxes were stacked to the ceiling and the sacks and packages were stacked on top of them, and she wondered what-all was waiting for her in there. She couldn’t open anything. Finally she came right out and asked him if he had a jump rope in there anywhere and he wasn’t sure what she meant. “For skipping, you know?” she said. He had lots of rope, and showed it to her, but most of it would have made a good lariat or lasso or noose but not a jump rope.

In the days ahead, with nothing better to do, she practiced her taekwondo moves, getting her feet and hands into their best maneuvers. The dog watched, and she knew that if she wanted to she could kick the dog up under the throat with a chagi that would snap its neck and kill it.

“What in tarnation are you up to?” he wanted to know.

“It’s martial arts,” she said. “I’m practicing, and when I get good enough, I’m going to protect myself against you.”

“I aint done nothing to ye,” he protested. “For one thing I’m just too blame tard. I’m too tard to lift a finger against ye.” And he went out to his blamed garden to get himself more tard. They ate out of cans at every meal because he was too blame tard to work in the kitchen. He kept promising that he’d kill a chicken and fry it and he kept promising to show her how to bake bread and cakes and everything, but he hadn’t yet.

Eventually, because she had absolutely nothing better to do, she approached him in the garden and said, “Okay, what do you want me to do?”

“When?” he said.

“Now,” she said. “Here.” And she spread her hands to indicate the garden. If she didn’t stand too close to him, and practiced holding her breath, she could stand him.

“It’s time to plant the beans, I reckon,” he said. “And if you don’t like green snaps, we could plant a few yellow snaps.”

She didn’t know what a snap was, but she followed his directions and together they planted two rows of beans, yellow for her and green for him. It wasn’t very hard. Then they planted shell beans and pinto beans and kidney beans.

And when they were all finished he said, “Let’s run over to the pond for a dip.” She didn’t know what a dip was, but she followed him when he fetched towels and a bar of Palmolive soap from the house and they hiked to the beaver pond. The dog followed them, but she didn’t mind too much. When they arrived at the pond, the man took off all his clothes and jumped in. She had to turn her head aside during the few seconds between his removing his underpants and his submersion in the water. She caught just a glimpse of this thing, the very first time she’d ever seen one.

“It’s just a mite chilly,” he said. “Come on in.”

“I can’t swim,” she said.

“You don’t have to swim. It’s shaller enough to wade in, over yonder.”

“No,” she said. She was not going to take off her clothes even if the afternoon was almost hot.

“Suit yourself,” he said. He gave himself a bath with the soap, which she was glad to see. No, not see, because she tried not to watch, but she was glad that he was getting himself clean for the first time since she’d known him. He looked funny, suntanned on his arms and face but still white on the other parts, including his fat belly. While he was exposing himself, she strolled down where the dam was and searched for any sign of the beavers, but she knew that they’d built what was called a “lodge,” and they were sleeping all day in the lodge unless the man’s jumping into the water had waked them up.

When he was finished and dried himself off and had his clothes back on, and didn’t stink so much, he said to her, “If you’d like to go over there where it’s shaller and give yourself a bath, I won’t watch.”

She really needed a bath. “Take your dog,” she said, and she waited until they had wandered off out of sight, and then she removed her jeans and shirt and, taking a look around to see if even the beavers were watching, she pulled off her panties and she stepped into the shallow water with the bar of soap. But it was cold! She quickly stepped out of the water, shivering. She took a deep breath and stuck one foot back in and got it wet enough that she could rub some of the soap on it. She liked the clean smell of the Palmolive. She reached her hand down and got a handful of water and rubbed it on her upper body, and soaped a bit. Bit by bit she got accustomed to the cold water and managed to reach the point where she could splash enough of it on herself to get the soap off. If her mother had been here she would have made Robin wash her hair, or have washed it for her, and Robin would have had to say, “But, Mommy…” which was something she said nearly every day of her life but had not had to say for a long time now, and this made her smile. She missed her mother so much but did not miss having to say “But, Mommy…” all the time. Then she toweled herself dry and dressed again. He came out of the woods with the dog and they went home.

“Looks to be some rain coming up maybe,” he observed. “We sure could use it.”

He declared that it was time they had a real supper and he wanted to show her how. He led her out into the yard. He picked up the axe in one hand and with the other hand he grabbed a passing chicken by the neck. The dog yelped. “Bitch, hush, I aint about to harm you,” he said, and swung the axe and chopped off the chicken’s head but it didn’t kill the chicken, who went on flopping headless around all over the yard, while Robin screamed and the dog whined and whimpered, and off in the distance it began to thunder. After a while the chicken stopped its headless dance and lay trembling, and the man said to her, “Quit your squealing and help me pluck it.” He showed her how to pull the feathers off the chicken, and then he took a butcher knife and cut the chicken up into pieces and showed her how to dredge it with flour and fry it properly. She felt really sick to her stomach.

He had to eat most of it himself. Or several pieces, and said he’d keep the leftovers in the springhouse. Then he toasted her with Hawaiian Punch and said, “Since it’s our first real honest-to-God supper together, don’t you think it’s time you told me your name?”

She didn’t want to tell him her name but she knew he’d pester it out of her eventually. “Wobbin,” she said.

“Robin, huh?” he said. “That’s a right perty name. Glad to know you, Robin.” And he offered his hand. She took it and gave it a little shake.

By bedtime the thunder was booming, and she could hear the rain falling on the roof and all around. It grew steadily harder. One of her teeth had been working itself loose for many days and she reached into her mouth and wobbled it and pulled it and finally got it out. She put it under her pillow on the pallet for the Tooth Fairy to find.

Then the lightning bolts started hitting all around, and the thunder sounded like it was coming in the front door, right into the house. It was terrible. She had never seen such lightning nor heard such thunder. Was this the end of the world? The whole house would disappear with her and him and everything. She was shaking uncontrollably. Between peals of thunder she could hear that damned dog whimpering horribly outside the front door, and finally she heard the man get up from his bed on the davenport and open the door for the dog. She didn’t want the dog in the house but almost felt sorry for the poor thing, having to endure such a thunderstorm as this. She felt sorry for herself. She even felt sorry for Sugrue Alan and wondered if he too was just a little bit scared. Anybody in their right mind would be terrified in a storm like this. But maybe he didn’t have a right mind.

The next horrendous flash of light and peal of thunder lifted her right up from the pallet as if it had hit her. It was unbearable. She ran from the bedroom into the living room, desperate to be comforted and hugged. He was there on the davenport waiting for her.

The next morning she knew only two things: one, that she had spent the rest of the night cuddled against him on the davenport, and two, that she had had a long uncomfortable dream about finding herself at school in her pajamas.

Chapter fifteen

Mr. Purvis was kind enough to set up an area in a corner of the warehouse room, screened behind the cereals and the condiments, where she could go for privacy when she felt an uncontrollable need to cry. Or she thought it was a kindness at first, until Liz, one of the other checkers, told her that Mr. Purvis simply didn’t want her using the employee’s lounge for her crying.

The attacks came on her suddenly, triggered by almost anything, such as a customer coming through the aisle with a little girl, and sometimes Karen couldn’t make it to the warehouse corner before she broke down. Sometimes the tears started streaming down her face while she was ringing up the items on the counter, and this disturbed the customers, although many of them recognized her because they’d seen her on television several times, and if they recognized her they’d say something sympathetic while she signaled for Liz to come and take over so she could run to the warehouse room.

The first uncontrolled fit of crying had of course occurred at the roller rink itself, that terrible place, that goddamned place which, one of these nights, she was going to set on fire and burn to the ground (although every day various people left bouquets of fresh flowers on that little balcony). The second fit had hit her not long afterward when she’d been required to find a good recent photograph of Robin for the officers, and she didn’t know whether she was crying simply at the sight of Robin’s face in the photo or out of embarrassment at the realization that she had so very few pictures of her daughter; neither Billy nor she had ever owned a camera.

And the third time the fit had wracked her with helpless sobs was when, at the police station, they had made her take a polygraph test. Her! Did they think she would do something to her own daughter?! The cop had tried to explain that it was “just by the book,” as he put it, part of routine procedure. They had to delay the test for a whole hour until she could get control of herself.

“If you ask me just one more question I’m going to start screaming,” she had said, several times that night and the next day, to several people, not just the cops but the television people and the reporters. But they had not stopped asking her. And she had stifled her screams. She had broken into tears again when they had asked her to describe what Robin had been wearing, and she was almost ashamed that Robin’s jacket was cheap and too small for her. She had really bawled when they had made her show them Robin’s room. They had “secured” the room and wouldn’t let her touch anything in it, although again she was embarrassed that her whole house was a mess and needed straightening at least. They had taken several items of Robin’s dirty clothes to be used for the bloodhounds to sniff. They had practically moved into her house and for several days she was a stranger in her own home.

The time she had cried the hardest was the worst, in the sense that it screwed up her first carefully planned television appearance. They had given her several hours to prepare her “message” and to rehearse it, but those hours hadn’t been sufficient to prepare her against the possibility that she would break down so completely in front of the television cameras.

“Whoever you are,” she had said into the camera, clutching the stuffed bear that Robin had called Paddington, “wherever you are, I know that you are listening, and I want to say just a few things to you. Robin Lee Kerr was my daughter, my only child. She is my daughter, my only child, and I say ‘is’ because I know that you are keeping her alive, that you have not done any harm to her. Not yet. I can imagine what you plan to do with her, and I can only believe with all of my heart that you are going to keep her alive. I know why you selected her, of all the girls her age in this world. Because she is so beautiful. Oh, she is also full of mischief and spunk and humor, as you are discovering every minute she’s in your company, but most of all she is so very, very beautiful….” At that point Karen had lost it. The cameras had had to avert their eyes and go to the announcer, who had tried to finish the message for her, begging him, whoever he was, wherever he was, to let Robin go.

Her doctor had given her sedatives for the first week only. After that, he said, the Lord would take care of it. Her doctor was also an elder in her church, and when she told him how much and how helplessly she was crying, he told her that her tears were necessary for her to come to terms with her grief.

She had thought she had cried so much that she simply had no tears left, and after a week off from work, the week when she was drugged with the sedatives and assaulted every day by contacts with strangers, she had needed to go back to work to pay the bills. But she had cried again when her fellow employees presented her with a check in the amount of the wages she had lost during her week off. They had taken up a collection for her.

And she had cried when she realized that if Robin were here, Robin would call her a “crybaby.” Karen couldn’t remember the last time that Robin herself had cried, although she had a fairly good guess: when Robin was about three, and they (including Billy) were at the supermarket (not the one where she eventually went to work), and Robin was crying about something she wanted to get, in the typical fashion that three-year-olds learn to cry for whatever they crave, and Billy, who wasn’t in good humor for having been dragged out to help with the grocery shopping, had snapped at Robin, “If you don’t stop that crying, I’ll give you something to really cry about!” Karen didn’t believe that those simple words were enough to have turned the trick, but for whatever reason Robin had never cried again.

“Are you crying now, Baby?” Karen asked of her missing child, having acquired the habit of talking aloud to Robin. “Is he doing something to you, and making you cry?” Karen waited for an answer with a real hope that somehow the words of Robin’s answer might come back to her, but they did not. And once again Karen would see Robin at a younger age, lying in bed asleep, or sucking her thumb, or both. “Have you started sucking your thumb again?” she asked. But there was no answer.

Robinsville still lay untouched on the table where she had left it. Karen took literally the instructions not to disturb anything, and Robinsville was still spread out with its crudely cut and labeled store and school and post office and its houses with the dozens of people young and old in their paper clothes that Robin had designed and cut out for them. Karen would pause to stare down at the village, and would think it was a ghost town now despite its paper citizens. The thought gave her something else to cry about.

But she also remembered that the whole idea of Robinsville had been prompted by a gift of reams of paper and pasteboard and even scissors from Leo, and Karen hated to think of Leo. She had not seen that bastard again since chewing him out at the roller rink. Her mother said that her husband had simply disappeared, which reawakened suspicion that Leo was either responsible for Robin’s abduction or was in cahoots with whoever had done it. Karen hated the thought that her mother had been married for a number of years to such a man…although she had often told herself that Leo was precisely what her mother deserved. Her mother offered to move in with Karen temporarily until Leo returned or was captured, but Karen didn’t want it, couldn’t stand the thought. For one thing, she was very resentful of her mother, because her mother had always had such a let-well-enough-alone attitude toward Robin’s upbringing, chiding Karen for being such a worrier. Just recently Karen had lost it with her mother and had yelled, “You told me not to worry and look where it got me!” It was very hard not to blame Louisa Spurlock for Robin’s misfortune; if she was not directly to blame, she was married to a louse who was conceivably at this very moment holding Robin captive somewhere.

And that “sketch” which Leo had provided for the police artist, which indeed reminded Karen somewhat of that jerk state cop Sergeant Alan, was obviously just a clever ruse that Leo had devised to divert suspicion from himself. State Police Lieutenant Samples, the specialist in child mistreatment, didn’t think that the sketch was valid, and therefore they didn’t have anything to go on.

The FBI agent assigned to the case, Henry Knight, out of the Little Rock office, seemed to Karen to be the only one who knew, as the expression had it, the distinction between his ass and a hole in the ground. He was efficient and knowledgeable and industrious, and in addition to all that he was kind and good-looking. Mr. Knight—or Hal as he insisted she call him—was the nicest, or the least unpleasant, of all the men she had had to deal with since it happened. She felt close enough to him to make her complaints about the other men to him. There had been a lot of rudeness and thoughtlessness and downright stupidity on the part of so many of the officers she’d had to deal with and answer a thousand questions for. Hal Knight understood her problems and her feelings so well that she wondered if perhaps he himself had lost a child. Finally she came right out and asked him, but he said he’d never had any children of his own.

It was Agent Knight who suggested to her that she keep a journal, and he even provided her with a spiral notebook. He told her the journal would not only be a good outlet for her feelings but it might also accidentally provide a key word or passage that might give a clue to something she’d previously forgotten. She was so touched at his thoughtfulness that she broke into tears, and he held her while she cried; it was the very first time that anyone held her while she cried. But it was also the last time, because she never cried again after that. Whenever she felt like crying, she would just whip out her journal and write something in it.

She leaned on Agent Knight and couldn’t have done without him. She couldn’t lean on her mother, or her doctor, or her minister. Billy came back to Harrison briefly at the request of the police, and spent the night at a motel, and she saw him for only a few minutes. They spoke but didn’t touch. She was surprised to see how grief-stricken he was, but she couldn’t lean on him. Somehow she got the feeling that he blamed her for Robin’s disappearance.

A couple of weeks after her first dismal performance on television, she was invited back to try again, and she willed herself not to cry, and took her precious journal with her just in case. Agent Knight went with her and helped her get ready for it. She confided to Agent Knight her fear of repeating the break-down she’d had the first time she’d gone before the TV cameras, and was surprised to learn that he had been watching that.

“Don’t dwell on your loss,” Hal advised her. “Don’t think about what a swell kid Robin is. Think about what a scumbag her abductor is. Get angry. Let it all out.”

It was good advice. Instead of trying a placating tone as she had in the first TV message, she delivered a tirade. She even imagined she was addressing Leo directly. “We’re going to find you,” she said into the camera. “We’re going to catch you, and if you have harmed a hair on that girl’s head we are going to make you pay for it. You had better be taking very good care of her, and doing all you can to make her happy, because she is going to tell us everything you did, and you are going to be severely punished for every little wrong thing you did to her. The only way you can possibly prevent the terrible reckoning that awaits you is to bring her back now! We have no pity for you, none whatsoever, but if you search your heart you might find just enough common decency to allow you to lessen your hideous crime by ensuring her safe return.” She paused, glowering fiercely at the camera for a long moment, and then she went on. “Now if you have her there with you and she is watching this, I want to say something to her too. Robin? Can you see me, Robin? Can you imagine how much I miss you? Not a moment goes by that I don’t ache to hear your laugh and see your bright eyes and smile. Paddington misses you too, and everybody in Robinsville is counting the seconds until you return. I know you are brave and clever and nothing can hurt you. If only you knew how many people are spending every minute hunting for you. We will find you. We will never stop trying to find you. I love you.”

Later, she asked Hal Knight, “Do you think she heard me?”

He nodded his head. “She heard you,” he said. “I know, as I’ve never known anything, that she is still alive.”

“But what if that creep has her somewhere where there’s no television?”

“That’s possible,” he admitted. “But still she heard you.”

Even with all the help she had from dear Agent Knight, and even though she had stopped crying, Karen felt helpless, and there was nothing she could say to her journal which would make her feel there was anything more she could do. What she needed was a book on the subject. Unfortunately Harrison didn’t have a good bookstore. She phoned the library and spoke to the librarian. “Would you happen to have any books with a title like What to Do If Your Child Is Missing?”

“Is this Karen Kerr?” the librarian asked, and said she would check the card catalog and phone her back. Sometime later she phoned back to say that she’d even contacted larger libraries in Fayetteville and Little Rock, but there simply wasn’t any such book. There were books on child victims of sexual offenses, and books on pedophilia, and books on abduction, but there were no manuals advising heartbroken mothers of missing kids on how to deal with their problems and their heartbreak.

The librarian said she was sorry, and then she said, “Have you considered trying a psychic? Don’t laugh. I know a woman over at Batavia who is truly incredible. It’s worth a shot.” And she gave Karen the name and phone number.

Karen asked Agent Knight what he thought of the idea of using a psychic. She expected him to laugh but he didn’t. And she hoped he understood: she didn’t need a psychic to deal with her psychological problems. She needed a psychic to help her locate Robin.

“It’s been known to pay off,” Hal said. “Let’s be sure the person won’t try to gouge you.” And he offered to drive her over to Batavia to interview the woman. The woman gave her directions over the phone and told her to bring something that had been special to Robin. Karen took Paddington.

“I certainly know who you are,” the woman said, when they arrived. “You’re becoming famous, and my heart goes out to you. Now y’all have a seat and I’ll tell you my terms.” The woman would require a down payment of “only” fifty dollars, but if the child was found as a result of any information given, the total fee was five hundred dollars. Karen was ready to leave, but Agent Knight said he’d gladly fork up the down payment out of his own pocket, and he did.

The woman proceeded to do her “reading.” She took Paddington and hugged the bear and sat with it on the sofa with her eyes closed, for a very long time. Karen and Hal waited and Karen resisted the urge to drum her fingers on the table, as Robin would have done. But she thought of Robin and kept Robin fixed in her thoughts while the woman was doing her “reading.”

The woman’s eyes suddenly snapped open and the woman smiled broadly. “She’s alive,” she said.

Karen’s heart ought to have leapt up but she remained emotionless. She waited and heard the rest of it: a man was keeping Robin in captivity, not tied up or anything but free to move about as she wished, although she couldn’t run away because the place where they were was so far off in the wilderness that the child could never find her way out of there.

“Which wilderness?” Hal wanted to know. “There’s wilderness all over the Ozarks.”

“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “I can’t pinpoint it. It’s remote but it’s bright. It’s a very bright place surrounded by deep forests. There’s an old farmhouse. There are chickens all about. There is a dog.”

“Can you tell what the man looks like?” Karen asked, wishing she’d brought a picture of Leo to show to the woman.

“He’s not a young man,” the woman said. “He’s coarse. He’s misguided. He’s not very bright.”

And that was all she could do for them. But she was so sincere in her belief that Robin was still alive that Karen’s own belief was reinforced. One of the thoughtless cops had told her that the chances of finding the girl alive this late were “practically nil;” he’d quoted to her some statistic that nine out of ten girls abducted for sexual purposes, if they are found at all, are usually dead.

So she had a glimmer of hope, and life returned to Karen. Her landlord appeared on the Saturday he usually collected the rent and told her that a certain FBI agent had persuaded him to let her live rent-free until Robin was found. The Harrison Rotary and Lion’s Clubs had taken up a donation to offer a reward for Robin’s return. In celebration, Hal invited her to have dinner with him. It was only Western Sizzlin’ but eating out is eating out, and it was her first date in nine years.

And then Leo returned. The cops spotted his pickup and pulled him over. On the seat beside him he had a large roll of U.S. Topographic Survey Maps in a scale of 1:24000 for all of Northwest Arkansas and Southwest Missouri. Questioning him, the police relayed his answers to Agent Knight, who told Karen. Leo was quoted as having said, “What if I was one of these here child molesters? Where would I take her? Why, sure as shootin I’d take her to an abandoned farmhouse at the end of a dead-end road.”

So all this time, with the help of those detailed topographic maps, Leo had been trying to locate each and every abandoned farmhouse in the Ozarks that was at a dead-end road. But his search, so far, had been a dead-end. He still had hundreds of other roads to explore, if only they would let him go.

Chapter sixteen

The first thing he did when he woke up, before he woke her, was to feel the davenport beneath them to see if she had peed on it. But she hadn’t. That was good news. It had been such a terrible storm he’d come mighty nigh to wetting the bed hisself.

The bad news was that he still hadn’t been able to get any lead in his pencil. Even now, with her still sound asleep against him, her face against his chest sweeter than ever, he couldn’t get it up. He was just as out of commission as he had been ever since he’d first taken her. He’d thought at first it could just be from the same kind of anxiousness that had made him into what Arlene had called a premature ejaculator. But this kind of anxiousness, if that’s what it truly was, was caused by something else. Did he really feel guilty or evil? No, he sure didn’t. Did he feel sorry for the poor girl? No, there wasn’t no reason whatsoever that he should feel any such thing, because he was doing everything in his power to create a new home and a new kind of life for her to make her happy and keep her happy forevermore.

Maybe it wasn’t any kind of anxiousness but just plain old overwork. It was true he had been working awfully hard lately, getting the garden ready and tidying up the place, and there was a good chance he just didn’t have any energy left over for thoughts of getting it on. Yeah, maybe that was it. The least little thing he did lately left him plumb tuckered out. Maybe he needed a rest before he’d be able to stand up stiff and salute again.

He’d hoped that when she took off all her clothes at the beaver pond he’d be able to feel his old dinger getting stiff just at the sight of her. And sure enough she was a sight to behold, much better in the flesh than any of the pictures in his Nudist Moppets book, and although he’d spied on her the entire time she was trying to give herself a bath, practically drooling at the loveliness of her little body, he hadn’t been able to feel even a twitch of stiffening down below.

The two roosters were doing not a duet but a duel of crowing, the Rhode Island Red trying to drown out the Barred Plymouth Rock. It woke her up. She smiled up at him! It was the first time he’d seen her smile since that first time he’d laid eyes on her in the parking lot of the Harrison supermarket. She had such a lovely smile. He couldn’t resist wrapping his arms around her and giving her a big hug, but even that failed to arouse his dead dood. She climbed off the davenport and said “I gotta go” and for a awful moment he thought she was fixing to try and run off again but he sat up and watched as she went out the door in the direction of the outhouse. Bitch followed her out, and he realized the dog had been in the house all night and he hoped she hadn’t gone wee-wee or worse anywhere.

He got up and put on his overalls and started breakfast. When Robin came back, he said, “Maybe things is gonna get better. You didn’t wet the bed last night.” She had to go see for herself, but came back from the bedroom with a big pout on her face.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“The Tooth Fairy didn’t come,” she said, biting her lip as if once again she was just on the verge of having a good cry. “I left one of my teeth under my pillow last night.”

“The pillow on your pallet?” he said. “Well heck, no wonder. That wasn’t your pillow last night. I was your pillow last night. What does this here Fairy generally leave you?”

“Fifty cents.”

“Well, if I was your pillow the Fairy must’ve left it under me.” And he went to the davenport and pretended to fish around with one hand while with the other hand he found two quarters in his pocket. “Sure enough, what did I tell ye? That old Tooth Fairy thought I was your pillow, which as a matter of fact I was.” And he gave her the two quarters. “I can’t imagine what you could spend those on, though.”

“I’d put them in my piggy bank,” she said. “At home I have a razorback piggy bank, and I probably have a whole lot of money in it. Maybe ten dollars.”

“You wouldn’t need a piggy bank around here,” he said. “One of these days I’ll tell you where there’s all the money you could ever dream of.”

“Really?”

“Really. I’ve got it stashed away in a good place. Hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

“You’re kidding. Where’d you get it? Did you rob a bank?”

He wondered if he ought to tell her. There was never going to be any chance for her to tell on him. He wanted her to know that as far as money was concerned he was her sugar daddy, even though there would never be any need whatsoever for money. So he went ahead and told her the whole story about the drug runner he’d stopped on the highway who had taken a few shots at him and been killed in return. He wasn’t bragging but he hoped it would increase the respect she had for him. He’d never told the story to anyone and it was good to be able to tell it to somebody.

When he was finished, all she said was, “If you spent so much money buying all that stuff you’ve got in there, why didn’t you get some scissors and some paper and some crayons?”

“Crayons?” he said. “Well now, I do believe we’ve got some of them.” And he went into the storeroom and fished around in the bags and sure enough there was a big yellow box of Crayolas. A real big box, with maybe over a hundred Crayolas in it, of every color you could imagine. She was real tickled to have it, but made that pout again and said, “If only I had some scissors.”

“Tell you what,” he said. “You help me out around the house this morning, and this afternoon I’ll take my pocketknife and get it real sharp and see if I can’t cut out for you anything you want to trace on a piece of brown paper.”

So they had them a deal. Since the rain had left it too wet to work in the garden, and it looked like it was a-coming up another rain anyhow, he put her to work sweeping the house and washing windows, although she had trouble reaching some of the cobwebs. “I’ve never seen a cob,” she said. “What do they look like?” While she worked in the house, he went out to the cooper’s shed and started to saw some pickets for building a picket fence to surround the garden, to keep the chickens out of it. And maybe the rabbits and any other critters that Bitch wasn’t smart enough to shoo away. He ought to have thought to bring along a good big roll of chicken-wire to make a garden fence, but that was one more thing he hadn’t even thought about, and besides he was going to have to learn how to make do. A picket fence, even if he didn’t have any paint to paint it nicely white, was a lot more sightly than chicken wire anyhow.

There was old tools in the cooper’s shed that he wanted to learn how to use to shape the pickets for that fence—adzes and froes and augers—but every time he went into that workshop he felt a kind of strange feeling like as if there was somebody else there, although there sure wasn’t. Once, in there, he had without even thinking about it said “Hello?” as if he expected somebody to answer.

He couldn’t do it. Not because of whatever or whoever was haunting the place, but because the effort of sawing just wore him completely out. He didn’t have the strength to take a spit. It was all he could manage just to drag hisself back to the house and plop down on the davenport, where he could only laze around and watch busy Robin redding up the house. For such a little thing she did a fair job, and then she even got some lunch for both of them, and after lunch, true to his word, he took his pocketknife and used one of the whetstones from the shop to get the point real sharp so he could cut into pieces of paper on which she traced the outlines of teeny-tiny clothes: dresses and hats and pants and coats and what-all. It wasn’t easy, and he felt dizzy with fatigue. It sure would have been a lot easier with a pair of scissors, but he rolled his tongue out and bore down and managed to cut up enough clothes for one paper doll.

“I wish you had something stiff,” she said, and his eyebrows lifted in search of her meaning. What she meant was that she needed pasteboard or something to make the actual paper doll with. He suggested they could empty a cardboard box in the storeroom and use the cardboard but she said cardboard was too thick. “I have an idea,” she said, and went out to the privy and came back with the almost-used-up roll of toilet paper. She unwrapped what little was left on it, and took the cylindrical tube or core and picked at it until she found the seam that kept it in its shape, and she unrolled it and flattened it out and showed him how it made a kind of diamond shape of thin pasteboard! Then she took her pencil and drew a paper doll within that diamond shape, head at one point, feet at the other, hands at the others. “Now, can you cut this out?” she asked, and he took his knife and bore down and managed to cut into the outlines of her drawing and liberate the paper doll from the toilet paper tube. How about that? Wasn’t she some kind of genius? And then she took the pencil and the Crayolas and gave the doll features and skin color and a pair of panties. “This is me,” she said. And she dressed it with some of the clothes that had already been cut out of a paper sack.

“Are you a-fixing to make me too?” he asked.

“You’re too big to be made out of a toilet paper tube,” she pointed out. “But I have another idea,” she said, and she went and got the board game called Dealer’s Choice and said, “I don’t like this game,” and she showed him how the bottom of the box was just the right size and shape and thickness for making the paper doll of him. He kind of liked Dealer’s Choice himself but if she didn’t he could learn to live without it. So he let her use the box the game had come in. She traced the outlines of a paper doll three times the size of the one she’d done of herself on the toilet paper tube.

“I reckon you’re right that we sure could use a pair of real scissors,” he remarked.

They were interrupted by some loud barking right outside the door, and Sog managed to get up and fetch his rifle, and decided to get his revolver too while he was at it. He told Robin to get behind the davenport and stay down. He looked out the window but didn’t see nobody. So he slowly opened the door, and there was old Bitch looking up at him with one of her grins on her face. And she barked again, at him, that silly kind of bark that sounded like “roffa”.

“What is it, Bitch?” he asked her, but she just said that roffa again. And then he noticed. At her feet, on the porch floor, was a pair of scissors! “Lord God Almighty!” he exclaimed. “Who brought them?” His first thought was that somebody had sneaked up onto the porch and left them there.

As if to demonstrate that she herself had put them there, Bitch gripped the scissors in her teeth, picking them up. She trotted past Sog into the house, and presented the scissors to Robin. Roffa, the dog said to Robin.

“Don’t that just beat all,” Sog exclaimed. “Didn’t I tell ye she was the smartest dog on earth? But where did she find a pair of scissors? Bitchie babe, where’d you get them scissors?”

Robin was just overjoyed with the gift, and even gave the dog a hug. Imagine that. Here she’d been bent on killing the dog and now she was hugging it.

Well, the scissors needed some work. They was somewhat rusty, but Sog summoned the energy to scrape and clean and file them good as new, and he oiled them, and then Robin was really in business. She went right to work, cutting paper dolls and paper doll clothes all over the place and you never saw anybody happier.

A good thing she had all that paper doll stuff to keep her busy, because it commenced raining again, raining pitchforks with tines on both ends, and there were howling winds. Sog had meant to get up on the roof while it wasn’t raining and try to patch that one leak, and now he couldn’t do it because it was raining too hard and also because he just didn’t feel like doing anything.

For days and days it rained off and on, more on than off, and sometimes so mighty on that he feared the whole place would wash away. Robin was happy with her paper dolls but he had nothing much to do except watch her and drink his Jack D and smoke too much and sometimes get up from the davenport and show Robin how to fix some supper. He tried to show her how to bake bread but it turned out wrong and they could only throw the bread to Bitch, who sort of liked it. Sometimes Robin went out in the rain with a slicker on (the Wal-Mart lady had recommended a yellow slicker) to do her chores: bringing in firewood and water and gathering eggs, either in the henhouse or sometimes just out in the grass somewheres. Sog taught her how to fix reasonable scrambled eggs for breakfast, although once she burned herself on the stove and he had to get out the first aid kit and put some ointment and a bandage on it.

When she was just giving all her attention to her paper dolls and not paying him any mind where he sat drinking and smoking on the davenport, sometimes he’d take out his sorry prick and fool around with it and study it and try to get it to solidify just a little bit. But he might as well have been playing with a dead man’s cock, and the thought of that—touching another man’s cock, even if the man was dead—gave him a bad case of fantods.

In time he realized that probably he would have to see a dick doctor, one of those specialists who could give you something for it or do something that would correct the plumbing. But that was out of the question, of course. The very thought of it set him to brooding about what would happen if either one of them, him or her, was ever to really need a doctor for something. Or even a dentist. In time she lost a couple more of her teeth, and he dutifully played the Tooth Fairy, but what if she ever got cavities and needed some drilling? He felt selfish and mean for wanting a dick doctor when she might need something even worse.

Hell, if any kind of doctor was needed it wasn’t a peter specialist anyhow but just a plain old ordinary sawbones who could look him over and find out what was generally bothering him, that he didn’t have no strength to speak of lately, and had dizzy spells besides and just generally felt like shit. He couldn’t even walk right any more; his left leg had started dragging behind him. He never in his life had such problems before. He’d never taken a single day of sick leave the whole twenty years he’d been with the state police. He’d always prided himself on being fit and hearty and he was contemptuous of people who allowed some silly little illness to hold them back.

Now he didn’t know what could be causing him all this distress. His feet were numb, he had a backache troubling him, and sometimes he couldn’t tell whether his arm was up or down and even when he looked to see if his arm was up or down he couldn’t make it out clearly because there would be two of them, one up and the other down, and both of them the same arm, the left one.

Even Robin noticed his discomfort, and asked him, “Are you feeling okay?”

He hated to admit it. “It don’t appear that I am,” he said. “But how come you to ask?”

“Your hands are shaking a lot,” she said.

It sure was a good thing that such a smart and brave little girl had the ability to take over the running of the household, which was the only hold that needed running, what with the constant rain.

The garden was begging something terrible for its weeds to be pulled but he couldn’t send her out to do it even if he could explain to her all the ways of knowing the difference between a useless weed and a useful plant.

After that night of the terrible storm when she’d come to sleep against him on the davenport, she decided that she liked that arrangement, or maybe since she couldn’t have that old Paddington bear to sleep with that she’d claimed she could never sleep without, she decided to sleep with him. But the davenport was too small for both of them, and they couldn’t really stretch out proper, so one night after she’d fallen asleep he took her to the featherbed, and lay down beside her, and that’s the arrangement they had for sleeping from then on, although he wasn’t good for nothing but sleeping.

He lost track of time. He’d decided from the beginning not to own a calendar, but even if he had one he’d have no inclination to get up and go take a look at it. And if he hadn’t thrown away his timepiece he wouldn’t bother to glance at it. He had a notion, but just a notion, of when May turned to June and June turned to July, et cetera. There were even some mornings when he felt like getting up, at least long enough to do something useful like go out and chop the head off a chicken. Not being able to work in the garden and not being able to put a fence around it had one advantage: the critters of the woods came out to nibble the garden stuff, and he could get up and fetch his firearms and show Robin how to use them, even the shotgun, which knocked her down the first few times she pulled the trigger. But in the course of time she managed to shoot a couple of rabbits who was pestering the garden, and he had just enough strength left to show her how to skin the critters and put ’em in a stew pot and cook ’em. Robin didn’t like beef jerky and she didn’t care for Vienna sausages or a lot of the other stuff they had in cans or jars, and she didn’t much like the idea of eating bunny rabbits, but it was that or starve. Robin was skinny and he wished she’d eat more but she just didn’t have an awful lot of appetite, or maybe it was just too much trouble for her to do all the fixing of all the meals.

He felt totally worthless and having lost his manfulness didn’t help, at all. Things got so bad that Sog Alan began to wonder if it was God’s punishment on him. Under ordinary circumstances he would never have given a thought to such a thing.

Chapter seventeen

Even the dumbest of dogs possesses the basic talent for minding, which, Yowrfrowr had once explained to her, most decidedly does not mean the ability to obey, but rather the faculty of knowing what is in one’s master’s mind. Not exactly mind-reading, Yowrfrowr had said, nor so-called telepathy, no, nothing so magical as that, but purely a sense of being in tune with the workings of the master’s thoughts, which is necessary, after all, as a substitute for verbal communication. So. Hreapha’s minding of her master quickly alerted her to the fact that he was sick as a dog, so to speak.

Searching for a reason for feeling like hell, you start with something you ate. And Hreapha didn’t have to look far to find that: he had killed and eaten that nice hen who had kept Hreapha from starvation by providing an egg, and who Hreapha had spared from the clutches of the hawk. For several days after that event, Hreapha had felt morose and angry. And out of sympathy for that hen she had lost her appetite so completely that she wondered if maybe she herself was coming down with something as a result of having eaten the hawk. But she got over that. It remained to be seen whether he would ever get over having eaten the nice chicken. She sort of hoped not. He deserved punishment for numerous wrongdoings, including, Hreapha was beginning to believe, the taking and keeping of a very young female person against her will. Hreapha was convinced that the person, whose name was Robin, had not been a stray at all, nor even a willing companion to the man, but had been stolen! Theft should always be punished, and possibly the man’s grave illness was what he had coming for snatching the girl.

Despite the general mood of gloom and doom that had befallen the place along with the impossible rainfall, Hreapha was at least cheered by the fact that the girl was no longer attempting to murder her. In fact, the girl had become caring and even affectionate, and had taken over the chore of making sure that Hreapha always had her dish filled with doggy nuggets once a day. And the girl always gave her a pat on the head and some kind words at mealtimes. This radical change in attitude was obviously the result of Hreapha’s having presented the girl with the pair of scissors.

It was a dirty deal that Hreapha had never received any credit for having rescued the chickens from the woods or for killing the hawk or her various other good deeds, but her first thanks had been for something she didn’t deserve credit for. It had not been she who had found the scissors. She had only brought them to the house and given them to the girl. She might never have known the location of the scissors (although she had looked all over the place, including the dangerous barn) if it had not been for the in-habit who inhabited the cooper’s shed.

Hreapha had been asleep and thought she was just having another of her vivid dreams when she distinctly heard the word scissors, and looking around but seeing nobody, heard further, Come go with me, old girl, and I’ll take ye to some scissors. It was rather difficult to “come go” with him, the in-habit, because she couldn’t see him nor smell him, and couldn’t tell which way he was coming or going, but he clucked his tongue occasionally to let her know where he was, and thus she followed him out to the cooper’s shed, and to a dark corner of it where beneath a workbench was a wooden box containing assorted old thingumajigs, whatchamacallits, and diddenfloppies, among the latter a pair of scissors. I reckon that’s what she’s a-hankerin for, the in-habit said, and sure enough, when Hreapha presented them to the girl she got a hug, a real hug. Thenceforward Hreapha could take a nap without fear of being slaughtered in her sleep.

In the weeks afterward, as everything went to the dogs, so to speak, Hreapha had to be careful whenever she was in the house not to walk upon or disturb the paper dolls, who were breeding like rabbits. The girl let Hreapha into the house whenever the frequent thunderstorms occurred, having discovered that Hreapha shared her intense dread of thunder, and the two fear-stricken females cowered and quaked together. Ordinarily the man would not have allowed Hreapha in the house so much, but he was too out of it to notice.

When it wasn’t raining too hard, Hreapha spent a lot of time guarding the chickens and the garden, and trying to keep the former out of the latter. She despaired of explaining to the chickens that the various succulent vegetables in the garden were intended for the exclusive use of the poor sick master and the mistress. How do you tell a chicken to leave be the vegetables that are intended to be served with chicken? It took Hreapha days and days of shouting her name at the hens and the two roosters whenever they attempted to wander into the garden until finally the fowl seemed to decide that it wasn’t worth the bother, listening to all that hreaphering in order to grab a bite of lettuce, and they kept out of the garden. Hreapha had more problems with the occasional deer who came down to nibble the veggies, and also the rabbits. But the poor sick master rose up from his davenport long enough to teach the girl how to shoot at and finally hit the rabbits. Your turn is next, Hreapha tried to tell the deer, but they just backed off and waited for her to leave the garden, which, eventually, went to the dogs, so to speak, what little was left of it that the weeds didn’t choke out. Hreapha had never been able to understand the difference between a cultivated vegetable and a so-called weed, many of which were just as edible and tasty as the vegetables. Thus, while Hreapha was very good at protecting the garden from mobile creatures, she could do nothing to protect it from vegetative creatures.

Despite the neglect and assault, the garden managed to produce, in time, some edible produce. Especially the melons: huge watermelons and cantaloupes that almost frightened Hreapha with their looming bulk, and which, once cooled in the springhouse, gave the man the only happiness he knew all summer.

Hreapha, who had never eaten any kind of melon herself, wondered if the melons could possibly be held to account for the latest development in the man’s list of distresses: his inability to do his business. With only one eye open, Hreapha could observe that each morning the man staggered, dragging a foot behind him, out to the outhouse, where he remained forever, and from whence came the sounds of his grunting and straining, which Hreapha easily recognized because she too, like all creatures, suffered from occasional difficulty in emptying her bowels. She knew of certain grasses that could be eaten for the condition, but there was simply no way she could prescribe these to him. His inability to poop contributed further to his melancholy and his unpleasantness. And the only way he could alleviate his mood was by stepping up his consumption of the moonward beverage, so that in time Hreapha’s minding could not determine whether he staggered from his drinking or staggered from his illness.

Eventually he began to fall down. Once he fell off the porch. Once he fell repeatedly trying to reach the beaver pond, and gave it up, returning to the house, where the girl drew many buckets of water from the well to fill a large tin tub for him to bathe in. Hreapha could not tell him, or her, that she had discovered the beaver pond no longer existed. The hideous rains had washed away the beaver’s dam, and they had not yet been able to rebuild it. In the middle of one night Hreapha had gone to see if there was anything she could do to help, short of felling or dragging timber, and found a bobcat menacing the beaver family. The bobcat had already killed one of the kits and was trying to catch another one when Hreapha arrived and did battle with the cat. She had never fought a bobcat before and hoped she would never have to do so again. They are bigger than Hreapha and they claw and scratch something awful. But Hreapha inflicted sufficient bites all over the cat’s anatomy to give the cat second thoughts about further disturbance of the beavers.

Mr. and Mrs. Beaver attempted by their body language and assorted unintelligible snorts and squeaks to tell Hreapha how grateful they were that she had spared the other four kits from the snatches of the bobcat. Hreapha wished there were some way she could communicate to them her desire to help in whatever way possible with the reconstruction of their dam and pond. In her teeth she took hold of a long hefty stick and dragged it to the dam site, and the beavers perceived that she wanted to help, and for the rest of the night she worked alongside them. When she got home in the morning she was all worn out, but so was the man, who had fallen on his way to the outhouse and was just lying there resting in the outhouse path. He didn’t seem to mind or even notice that Hreapha had to sleep all day, and that she returned after dark once again to the dam site.

The third night she set out for the dam site, Robin followed her with a flashlight. “Where are you going, B—?” she started to use the not-nice name the man had given her, but caught herself and said “Your name isn’t really Bitch, is it? Did you ever have another name?”

“Hreapha,” she said, matter-of-factly, not barking it.

“Oh?” the girl said, and then she did a wonderful thing: she tried to pronounce it. She didn’t quite get the aspirate correct or trill the r as much as it should have been, but she did a good job on the plosive ph and the whole thing sounded almost like the way Hreapha herself said it. “I’ll just call you Hreapha then, okay?” Robin said.

“Hreapha!” she said excitedly, and trotted on toward the beaver’s place with Robin right behind her.

“Where are we going, Hreapha?” the girl wanted to know.

“Hreapha,” was the only way she could pronounce “beaver dam.”

“Will you protect me if we meet a bear or wolf?”

“Hreapha,” was the only way she could tell Robin that she would protect her against any harm in this world but that they had nothing to fear from wolves, who didn’t exist hereabouts, and as for bear, they were pretty scarce or at least she had not yet seen one.

At last they came upon the construction site for the new dam, where Mr. and Mrs. Beaver were busy as beavers, working with the help of their four kits. Since the beaver didn’t have the impounded waters of a new pond ready yet, they had nowhere to hide when this human being showed up, and Hreapha could not explain to them that the girl had no intention of causing them any harm. So the family of beaver simply shrank back and trembled as Hreapha demonstrated to Robin how she had been grasping sticks and dragging them up to the dam site.

“What happened to the dam?” Robin asked. And then answered her own question. “Oh, did all that rain wash it away?”

“Hreapha,” Hreapha said. And dragged another limb to the dam site. Fortunately many of the limbs and sticks and logs which had made up the original dam had not been completely washed away but had lodged against boulders further downstream.

“You’re helping them build it back?” Robin said.

“Hreapha.”

“You really are a good dog,” Robin said.

Hreapha was pleased and proud. She was even more pleased and proud that Robin herself began to help, and was strong enough to drag larger limbs than little Hreapha could drag. Robin also observed how the beaver were picking up large rocks in their dexterous fingers to anchor the base of the sticks making up the dam, and Robin was able to do this work too. The kits were all four busy dredging up mud from the streambed above the dam and packing it against the sticks, so that step by step the water flowing down would distribute the mud among the sticks, chinking the dam and closing it up. The water began to rise, and as it rose the eight of them—two adult beaver, four baby beaver, a dog and a girl—added more sticks and mud to the top of the dam.

The dam was finished before morning! The new pond began to fill. “That was fun,” Robin said to the beavers. “When the pond is filled, I’ll come back, and you can teach me how to swim.” Then she said to Hreapha, “I’d better get home. He’s going to be mad I was out all night.”

But he didn’t even notice. Robin went into the house and came back out to report to Hreapha that he was sound asleep and snoring, even though the sun was well up in the sky. “Let’s have breakfast,” she said, and filled Hreapha’s dish with the Purina Chow, and got her own bowl of cereal and sat with Hreapha to eat it. There were a few peaches she had found ripened on the old trees up in the orchard, and Robin sliced one of these atop her cereal. “This is almost good,” she told Hreapha. “There’s no real milk, and it’s not my kind of cereal, but I can eat it. Are you okay with the doggy chow?”

“Hreapha,” she assured her.

After breakfast they had a long and chummy chat. Or rather Robin did all the talking, and Hreapha was content merely to listen and to interject occasionally a mild Hreapha or a milder whimper, and at a few points a growl to indicate she understood the serious import of what Robin was saying.

“I think he’s dying,” Robin said. “Don’t you?” Actually Hreapha’s minding of him had not yet dared reach that conclusion, and she dreaded contemplating it, but already was beginning to feel not that she was losing a master but gaining a mistress, and a good one. “He talks about sending me to find a doctor, but isn’t that silly? He says he’ll tell me how to find a road that leads down the mountain if I will promise to get help for him. Do you know how to find the road?” Hreapha wished that dogs had at least been given the ability to nod or shake their heads as humans do to signify yes or no. But if she could really communicate, she was sorry she’d have to inform Robin that as a result of the recent severe rainstorms the whole east side of Madewell Mountain had been eroded into deep gullies and ravines that obliterated any trace of the old trail. Hreapha had recently attempted to locate the remains of the pickup and had discovered that even its burnt carcass had been washed far down the mountainside. And that precarious narrow ledge along the bluff leading to it had had sections of it knocked out by boulders in mudslides. Hreapha had had to make an elaborate detour along a rock-face that would be impassable by a human being, especially a young girl. Getting down off the mountain in that northern direction was unthinkable. Hreapha had not yet explored the southern direction, but intended to do so in the near future, because she was beginning to miss Yowrfrowr.

If the two of them were really having a good girlie talk, she ought to be able to tell Robin about Yowrfrowr, and she greatly regretted that she could not. Robin told her about a boy named Jimmy Chaney that she had sort of had a crush on, and even asked, “Are there any boy doggies that you like?” But Hreapha could not tell her about cute and smart Yowrfrowr. Abruptly Robin asked, “Have you ever done it with another dog?” And when Hreapha could not vocalize her virginity, Robin said, “You know, fucked?” And then added, “I wonder what it’s like. You know, he has never done that to me. I thought he was going to. I thought that was the main reason he kidnapped me and brought me up here. I was expecting it. I was sort of getting myself ready for it.”

All of this talk about sexual matters did not embarrass Hreapha in the slightest, but rather gave her some strange and curious stirrings of desire. Her mother—and eventually in their long talks together Hreapha was to discover that among the many other things she and Robin had in common, for example, their fear of thunder and of spiders, not to mention their virginity, their mothers were somewhat alike, as Whuphvoff and Karen had both possessed a didactic nature—her mother had once given her a long explanation of the periodic condition she could eventually expect to experience, wherein her markings would begin to take on a faint olfactory signal easily detectable by the noses of any male dog within miles, informing them that she was in the mood for romance. Her mother had cautioned her not to permit such romance unless the marking’s scent clearly indicated that she was “ready.”

Hreapha’s markings had never yet borne this aroma. She wondered what she would feel the first time they did. What would she do? Would the scent carry all the way to Stay More, three miles away, where Yowrfrowr could pick it up? Such thoughts could not fail to titillate her.

“Don’t take this wrong,” Robin was saying, “but I wish I had a kitty cat.” Hreapha’s ears snapped into better hearing position. “I mean, you’re a really good dog, and I never had a dog before, and I’m awfully glad to have you as my dog. But I’ve really and truly always, always wanted a kitty cat.”

Chapter eighteen

Talking with Hreapha was so much more fun than talking with that stupid doll, who had been the only one she could talk to for so very long and who just sat there and had to play-like listen. Robin had wasted so many hours saying things to that doll, pouring out her heart to it, when all along she could have had Hreapha, who was so attentive and appreciative and smart. Robin was convinced that if by some magic Hreapha could really talk, the dog could tell her what she ought to do, the dog could even tell her how to find her way out of here if she wanted to, and above all the dog could tell her how she ought to feel toward Sugrue Alan. Should she feel sorry for him? Should she truly hate him? After all, he was all she had in this world. Unless and until she could be rescued. Or by some miracle find her way out of here. For the longest time Robin had been almost happy sleeping in the featherbed with him beside her; sometimes her head was so close to his chest that she could feel his breathing and hear his heart beat and he was a lot more alive than Paddington had ever been. And she hadn’t even needed to have a night light on, because she knew he was her protection. She hadn’t wet the bed again, not once. In the summertime when the weather warmed up and some nights were almost hot, she didn’t need her pajamas but she wore them anyway out of modesty and sweated inside of them. But when he became too ill to work in his garden, he no longer stank of his sweat although he stank of the whiskey that he kept on drinking, and he stank of his illness, whatever it was, and she had to scrounge over to the side of the bed to escape his stench. She hadn’t slept close to him for a long time now. She knew that he was probably never going to be able to do anything to her. He never would fuck her. He was so sick now.

But the weird thing was, some days he seemed to be okay. Not only well enough to fix his own breakfast for a change but also to go out and try to do something, if he could. He would go out and chop wood until he was all worn out again, and she would have to help him back to the house, and then she would go stack the wood up into a neat pile. Among all the things he’d bought for her were a pair of work gloves so she wouldn’t get splinters in her hands. They were getting lots and lots of stove wood. “I reckon it’ll get right airish and crimpy up here come fall,” he said. “And doggone dithery come winter. You’ll need more firewood than you’ll be able to cut yourself, tiny as you are.” His saying that somehow made it sound as if he didn’t think he’d be around in the winter, or if he was he wouldn’t be able to cut any more firewood.

He was also concerned that when the snows came the chickens wouldn’t be able to get out and scratch around in the yard hunting for bugs and worms to eat. There wouldn’t be any bugs and worms in the winter! He confessed he’d made a mistake not to have brought more than one thirty-pound bag of chicken feed, which was all gone now. Chickens will eat just about anything (and Hreapha had a hard time keeping them out of her chow, as well as out of the garden) and ever since Robin’s first experiments at baking bread, biscuits and cornbread had failed, the chickens had helped to eat the failures and they still ate all the leftovers, now that she had finally learned how to bake some decent bread. To make sure the chickens could have a food supply for the winter, Sugrue had planted extra corn—Robin had roasted or boiled corn-on-the-cob so many times she was almost tired of it—and they could dry the leftover ears and feed them to the chickens all winter.

Very early Robin had discovered that the chickens were flocking around behind and beneath the outhouse, and looking down into the hole she sat upon she was horrified to discover that they were eating doo-doo. For a while after that she could not eat either chicken or eggs, and she put their disgusting habit at the top of her mental list of all the things she couldn’t stand about living here. But in time she realized that it was just a fact of country life, and if you stopped to think about it, it wasn’t any worse than chickens eating worms.

She was glad to help store corn for the chickens to eat in the winter, and while she was helping Sugrue do it, he took a Mason jar and filled it with dried kernels of corn, and then took a handful and said to her, “I need to show you how to plant your corn next spring,” and took her out to the corn patch with his hoe and showed her how to hoe up a furrow and plant it with the corn kernels. “Think you can remember all that?” he said to her afterward, and again she thought it sounded as if he didn’t expect to be around in the spring.

One morning they were all just sitting on the porch when Hreapha jumped up and started barking, and they saw a hog raiding the corn patch! “Wooee,” said Sugrue, “if that aint a razorback!” And for a sick man he was pretty quick and nimble in fetching his rifle and shooting the hog. “I ort to’ve let you shoot him,” he said to her, “but if you’d’ve missed, we wouldn’t’ve had no secont chance.” Robin doubted she could have hit it, although Sugrue had made her practice with targets again and again and she was very good with the rifle, although the shotgun was still too much for her.

It was a big hog, and Sugrue’s only shot had hit it right square in the side of the head. “This is sure enough a wild razorback. Aint seen one of these since I was a kid,” Sugrue said. “Be damned if we aint got us a right smart of meat.” She helped him drag the hog, which must’ve weighed more than him and her put together, to the cooper’s shed, where they rigged up a pulley to hoist the carcass to a beam. And Sugrue insisted she watch closely, every step of the way, as he cut into the hog’s neck (“Smack in the goozle,” he explained) to make the hog’s blood run out. “The moon aint right, probably,” he observed. “You ort to kill your hog on the full moon.”

They heated the big iron kettle of water that they used for clothes washing (the hardest of all Robin’s many chores), and when it was boiling they poured it over the carcass and Sugrue dusted wood ashes all over it. “Got to get all that hair off,” he explained. Robin used a dull knife to scrape and scrape on the hide to remove the hair, while Sugrue kept pouring on more scalding water and wood ashes. It was messy and it took them hours and hours just to get the hide scraped clean. They didn’t even stop for lunch, which was a good thing, because when Sugrue started gutting the hog and made her pull the intestines out into a washtub she started to puke but didn’t have anything in her stomach to throw up.

He identified all the parts of the hog’s insides for her—the lungs, heart, kidneys, liver, stomach, and so on. He showed her how to separate the trimmings of fat to be made into lard and the trimmings of lean meat to be made into sausage. She thought about becoming a vegetarian, which she knew a lot of people were (her friend Beverly was), but she didn’t like vegetables. She liked bacon and hated Spam and as they worked Sugrue kept telling her all the good things that could be made from this hog—spareribs and hams and pork chops. All afternoon they butchered the hog, and Sugrue was ready to drop. “I reckon we’ll just have to wait till tomorrow to cure it,” he said. “Bitch will have to guard it all night.”

He went into the house and grabbed one of his bottles that said Jack Daniels Black Label Sour Mash Whiskey on it and he went to bed. And the next day he didn’t feel like doing any curing, whatever that meant. She wondered if the hog had had some terrible disease that it had to be cured of. “That good meat is sure to spoil,” he complained. “But I just don’t have the stren’th to lift a finger.” In the afternoon, he said, “Hon, do ye reckon you could fetch one of them bags of coarse salt from the side room?” It was a big bag but she fetched it. “Now,” he said, “If you’ll just listen careful, I’ll try to tell you what to do. And then next year if you’re lucky enough to kill another razorback, you’ll know how to do it all by yourself.”

He couldn’t even go with her to the cooper’s shed to supervise what she was doing. Hreapha kept her company but only for a while before falling asleep; she’d been awake all night guarding the meat (from what or from whom? Robin wondered). Robin spread the hunks of meat out on the shed’s workbenches and started to cover them with the coarse salt. Mix in molasses and pepper, a voice said to her, and she turned, thinking Sugrue had finally come to help, although it was a much younger voice than Sugrue’s. And Sugrue was not there. She wondered if she was imagining things, or maybe Sugrue was communicating with her through his mind. She went to the bedroom where he was sprawled out with his bottle, still conscious. “Did you tell me to mix some molasses and pepper with the salt?” she asked him.

“Why, no, I never,” he said. “But come to think on it, that’s what Grandpa Alan always done. We’ve got plenty of ‘lasses out to the kitchen.”

So she mixed the coarse salt with molasses and pepper and started smearing it on the meat. Red pepper and black pepper, the voice said. She wondered if she was suffering from overwork, but she went back to the kitchen and got the red pepper to add to the black pepper. It took her all the rest of the afternoon to finish covering all the hunks of meat with all of the salt mixture. She wondered if any other seven-year-old girl in history had ever cured a hog all by herself. Thinking of this, she realized that she was almost eight. She wondered if it might even be September already. She would be eight years old on September the twelfth. That’s still pretty young for curing a hog by yourself.

“Now what?” she said to Hreapha, as if the dog could tell her what now. “How long do I leave the salt stuff on there?”

Pends on the weather, the voice said. Reckon six or seven weeks ort to do her.

“Hreapha, did you say that?” Robin asked, delighted with the possibility that perhaps there was some way the dog could talk to her after all.

“Hreapha,” the dog said, which seemed to be negative.

She was tired and sweaty and dirty and had salt and molasses all over her. She went to ask Sugrue if he had any idea whether this might be September yet, but he was passed out. Or dead. She didn’t care. She opened a can of beans for her supper (it had pork in it, which made her impatient for the new meat to finish curing), and then, when it got dark, she lit a lantern and headed for the beaver pond. Hreapha happily followed. Robin decided Hreapha wouldn’t have to guard the meat, once it had been salted so much.

The pond had filled with water. Their beaver friends were enjoying a supper (or breakfast?) of alder bark. “Hello,” Robin said, but they did not run; they remembered her and knew she had helped them rebuild their dam. She took off all her clothes, but felt no shame at all to be naked in front of the beaver or Hreapha, who were all naked anyway. “Can you teach me how to swim?” she asked, and walked out into the pond.

The beaver taught her how to swim. Maybe even if she wasn’t the first nearly-eight year old girl in history to cure a hog, she was the first to receive swimming lessons from beavers, who are experts at it. She didn’t possess their large webbed feet to paddle with, but she could imitate the strokes of their arms and front feet. It wasn’t hard at all. And although the kerosene lantern helped her see what she was doing, she felt she could do it with her eyes shut. She was dizzy with pleasure and pride; not even her first spin at the roller rink had given her such a sense of escaping from humdrum reality. Hreapha jumped into the water too, and all of them swam and swam and splashed and flipped and bobbed. The beaver seemed to be trying to get her to dive underwater to reach their lodge, but she wasn’t ready for that yet.

Suddenly a light appeared, not from the kerosene lantern. It was the light of a flashlight, and Robin’s first thought was that some human being had finally found her and was coming to rescue her. Her excitement at that thought was mixed with a kind of sadness: if she were rescued and taken away from here she could never swim with these beaver again. Also she was a little concerned because she was naked, and didn’t want them to see her.

But it wasn’t a rescuer. It was Sugrue. The flashlight played over the figures in the water, and she could hear his voice behind it. “Just what in tarnation do you think you’re a-doing?” he hollered, and she knew he was not only angry but drunk. Then she heard a rifle shot. He was firing at the beaver! Hreapha barked at him, and he fired at her too, but didn’t hit her.

“Stop it!” she yelled at him.

“Get your little hide out of there!” he ordered her. She climbed out of the water, and he played the light over her naked body. “Bitch!” he yelled. “Bitch, you’re supposed to be a guard dog, goddammit, and you’ve let a fox get into the chicken house! Come on out of that water.” Hreapha climbed up onto the shore, and he immediately kicked her as hard as he could, knocking her back into the water with a big splash. “Stupid dog! I’ll learn ye to mind me.” Hreapha moaned and whimpered.

“You’re a mean man, Sugrue Alan,” Robin said to him. “I thought you might be nice, but you’re just plain old nasty mean.” He slapped her. It really hurt, too, and she felt her eyes welling up with water but she was determined not to let him, or anybody, ever make her cry. “I hate your guts,” she said.

“Just what do you mean anyhow, coming over here in the middle of the night and burning up all that kerosene? You won’t have none of it left to get you through next year.” His voice was really mad.

“I won’t be here next year!” she yelled at him.

He grabbed her and started spanking her bare bottom. He spanked her so hard it made her jump around. He spanked her so hard she was going to be not just red all over her bottom but black and blue too. For the longest time she held back her tears but then she couldn’t hold them any longer and she yelped and began crying. She really cried. It was the first time she had cried since she was three years old, and she was hurt more by the loss of that record than by the sting of his spanking. He had done so many bad things, starting with his kidnapping of her, and she had never cried. But now she bawled her heart out.

“Get your clothes on and let’s get out of here,” he said finally, his voice not quite as angry, as if he’d got it out of his system by battering her.

She decided that as soon as they got back to the house and he put that rifle back where he kept it, she would snatch it up and kill him with it. He made a mistake when he taught her how to use the guns. He would pay for that mistake, and pay for his cruelty toward her and Hreapha.

But she abandoned her plan to kill him. For three reasons: one, she would never be able to escape from this place if he were dead; two, he was dying anyway, and she understood even that this terrible nasty mood he was in was because he knew he was dying; and three, his terrible nasty mood was completely gone the next morning and he told her how very sorry he was that he had slapped her and spanked her. He told her that he was completely ashamed of himself and would do anything to make it up to her.

“I wanted to be your husband,” he said to her. “That was my plan. But it aint never gon work out that way. So if I caint be your husband, leastways I can be your daddy. And help ye to get ready for all you’ve got to know and do to get through this life.”

She needed a minute to think about that. And then she said, “I don’t want you to die, Daddy.”

Chapter nineteen

Hell, he’d been madder at himself than he’d been at her or the damn dog. For the longest time he’d felt pretty sorry for himself, that this peculiar affliction was ravaging his body, but that self-pity had lately turned into self-loathing. It wasn’t simply that his body had let him down, completely, but that he still had possession of his brain, and his brain was letting him down worse than his body was. If he had the sense to come in out of the rain, he ought to be able to figure out some way to save himself, to get help, or get to somebody who could help, and save the girl into the bargain.

On one of the rare days (and why did his sickness come and go, come and go, like that?) when he was feeling well enough to put on his pants and shoes, he sneaked off from Robin and found the trail that led to where he used to park the pickup. He had done such a good job of covering up the trail, and the stretch of thunderstorms had also contributed, that he could hardly find it himself, but he found it, and, dragging one leg behind him like the mummy in those old mummy movies he’d loved as a kid, he traced the trail to where the bluff began and the path narrowed to just a ledge clinging to the side of the bluff. He took only one step out onto the ledge before feeling such vertigo he was lucky to back away from it without falling to his death. But he could see that farther along, the ledge was totally knocked out by boulders fallen in a mudslide. So that ledge, which he had traversed hundreds of times in stocking up the place, was no longer an option. He considered trying to climb down the bluff and going beneath it to reach the ravines that led to the gullies that led to the place where he’d burned the truck. But he realized that he was simply in no condition for such climbing and hiking.

On another good day he had the strength to try to braid Robin’s hair, at her request. She said her mother often braided her hair, and she tried to show him how, and he tried his best, but couldn’t really do it, and it made him mad. He offered to give her a haircut but she said she was never going to cut her hair.

On another good day he decided it was time to teach her how to line bees and find a hive of honey. He took his axe and crosscut saw, as well as his rifle, and she carried the four empty buckets, in one of them a bait of a corncob smeared with some of what little honey they had left. He’d only got one jar of honey from the store because he anticipated being able to find his own. Since they both had to give up such things as ice cream (he loved the stuff as much as she did, and missed it mightily), it would be good to have other ways of keeping the sweet tooth happy.

Dragging his leg behind him like the monster in those old Frankenstein movies, he led her and the dog for almost half a mile out into the deepest woods, where they set up that bait of honeyed corncob on a piece of bark in a glade. And then, as he explained to her, it was sort of like fishing: you just had to sit and wait. Wait for a bee to show up and discover the honey and then for the bee to head back for the hive to tell the other bees about it.

While they sat, and Bitch took a snooze, they got to talking about some things that was a-bothering them. He was in the habit of complaining, at least once a day, that his affliction must be God’s punishment on him. And now when he said it again, she wanted to know what specifically was God a-punishing him for. Besides, of course, stealing a innocent little girl. As if that wasn’t enough. Well, he thought back (he was having terrible problems with his memory these days) and told her near about every bad thing he’d ever done in his life that he might be paying the price for. Going all the way back to his schooldays, when he was the worst hell-raiser Stay More school had ever seen, and Miss Jerram had her hands full trying to deal with all his cussedness and wickedness. There was one time he used a baseball bat to break the arm of a kid he didn’t like. Another time he actually branded his initial “A” with a red-hot nail onto the chest of a kid he “owned.” The worst thing he’d done was to get even with some poor kids by killing their mule. And Miss Jerram when she found out about it made him dig a grave for the mule and give a speech at the mule’s funeral. It had been humiliating.

“Miss Jerram,” he related to Robin, “she. Wudn’t. Bogzh. Furrup. Thog. Ervers. Since. Hard.” He stopped because Robin was looking at him peculiar.

“What did you say?” Robin asked.

He suddenly realized that in addition to all his other misfortunes he was losing the power of speech. His tongue and his vocal chords seemed to be turning into rawhide. He grabbed his jaw and gave it a shake, but that didn’t help much. “Ahrg. Riggin. Ahrg. Cain. Tawg,” he managed to say.

“No wonder,” she said. “That’s a horrible story. What did you kill the mule with?”

“Stig,” Sog said.

“You stuck the mule? What with?”

“Stig,” he said, and pantomimed the piece of timber that he had bashed over the mule’s skull.

“That’s horrible.”

“Ahrg. Cain. Tawg,” he complained and pointed to his frozen jaw.

“Then just hush up,” she said, and sat there seeming like she was just a-thinking about what a bad boy he had been. But then she said, “Now I’ll tell you about all the bad things I did. That I’m being punished for.” And she started in to telling him all this stuff that she had done. She had once prayed that a certain girl would die, a girl who was very popular in school and the only one smarter than her. The girl hadn’t died, but she’d come down with scarlet fever and missed most of her classes. Another girl who had annoyed Robin got herself pushed so hard while she was swinging in the swings that she shot right out of her swing-seat and broke her arm, and Robin denied to the teachers that she had done it, although she later bragged about it to the other girls.

“Keeb. Yur. High. On. Thatur. Kobb,” he told her, but he had to sign-language his meaning by pointing first to his eye and then to the honeyed cob that was their bait.

Robin went on telling all the times she’d misbehaved or done something wrong, picking on other kids and being an all-around scamp and rascal. To hear her tell it, she’d been the holy terror of the school, just as Sog had been the holy terror of his, and he couldn’t help wondering sort of wishful-like what it would have been like if they’d been in school together, if Robin had been in the second grade with him at Stay More schoolhouse and they could have conspired to make life miserable for old Miss Jerram. He wanted to tell her this, but realized he had lost the power of speech. He hoped that maybe the power would come back again, just as he had good days as well as bad days with this disease, whatever it was. He had promised Robin that some day he would tell her all about Stay More, all the interesting people who had lived there and the very few who still did, and for him to do all that telling he’d have to be able to talk good again. She’d already asked him the names of the families who had lived in Stay More so she could give these names to the families of paper dolls that she’d been cutting out and dressing up for a town she had decided to call Stay More instead of Robinsville, which was the name she’d already given a town back home.

If he couldn’t talk plain any more, they were really sunk, because he was counting on being able to tell her stories about Stay More as a substitute for the fact they couldn’t never again watch the TV or ever go to the movies or nothing.

“Hreapha!” said Bitch, and Sog looked around to see what the dog was barking at. But there wasn’t nothing nowheres. “Bidge,” he said. “Was gog yur?”

“Look,” Robin said. “She’s spotted a bee!”

And sure enough, the darn dog had pointed a bee alighting on the honeyed cob. The three of them watched as the bee took its fill of the honey and then flew away. Sog tried to tell her that now all they had to do was wait a bit more and that bee would fly back to its bee tree to tell the other bees of its discovery and before long there would be a bunch of them going back and forth from the bait to the bee tree and all they’d have to do is try and follow them. “Urs ussuns waig orwell,” Sog tried to explain, but all he could do was lay his hand on Robin’s arm as a sign of staying more. They waited.

By and by, that good old bee-dog said “Hreapha” once again, and here come a line of bees making for the cob. They lit, filled up on the honey, flew off and up, circling around and then headed the way they’d come, and Sog got to his feet and motioned for Robin to get up too. But old Bitch was ahead of them and she took off after the bees, so they just had to follow her. Sog wished he still lived in Stay More so he could spread the word about this incredible dog who could line bees.

Sure enough, Bitch led them to this middling-size white oak tree with a bulge and a crack halfway up, and the bees swarming in and out of that crack. “Shud far!” Sog exclaimed.

The main problem with not being able to talk was that he now had to explain a crucial thing about bees to Robin but couldn’t do it. Bees will only sting you if you’re afraid of ’em. If you don’t fight ’em or swat at ’em or nothing, but just act calm and still, they won’t sting you. It was going to be hard to get this across to Robin but he tried his best with pantomime and going through all the motions of trying to get her to keep real still. He was able to say “Saw,” which is what you say to a cow to keep her calm.

Bitch was sniffing around the trunk of the bee tree, and when she commenced barking again he figured it was just because she knew this was the right tree, but he took a look and there were some bear tracks around the base of the trunk! Bear! He knew how bears sure did crave honey, and he found claw marks on the trunk which seemed to indicate the bear had tried to climb the tree to get at the honey. Sog asked himself whether he ought to tell Robin that a bear had been here. No sense in scaring her, right now, but he had warned her that time she’d tried to run away that the bears or wolves would get her if she were out in the woods by herself. He knew there weren’t any wolves in Newton County, maybe a few coyotes, but not any big bad wolves. But he’d seen black bears himself. Yes, I’ll tell her, he said, and pointed at the bear tracks and said, “Mawr.” He tried again, “Parr.” But he couldn’t say the name right. He motioned for her to stand a good distance back while he cut down the bee tree.

He hadn’t hit the trunk more than a few licks with his axe when he felt the first sting. It sure don’t do you a lot of good to know that you keep still to keep from being stung if you have to swing an axe. “Gahrdommid,” he swore, and backed off and waited a while.

By the time he got the tree cut down, he’d been stung maybe a dozen times, but he knew from past experience that after a while the sting doesn’t sting as much; the more you get stung the less you feel it. He’d heard stories about bee stings being good for arthritis, rheumatism and all kinds of other problems in the joints, and he figured maybe his foot might even stop dragging like the mummy’s or Frankenstein’s.

They got four buckets full to the brim with honey, but poor Robin herself got stung a few times in the process, and she didn’t like it one bit. He gathered up the leaves of three separate plants—he didn’t know which plants they were but according to the ages-old remedy it didn’t matter which three so long as there was exactly three—and crushed the leaves together and applied them to her bee stings and to his, and the relief was almost instantaneous, but still she was pissed off. He wished he could speak and be philosophical. If he could be philosophical he could tell her that everything in this life worth getting requires being stung a few times. Thinking about this on the way home, he realized the main drawback of losing the power of speech wasn’t that he wouldn’t be able to tell her all those Stay More stories but that he wouldn’t be able to tell her his philosophical thoughts about how the world was just no damn good, life was a joke, the world was full of meanness and wrongdoing and corruption and selfishness and evil and backstabbing and shoddy merchandise and wickedness and bum raps and disorderly conduct and weakness and malpractice and greed and moral turpitude and what not. It had been his plan to learn her to appreciate the isolation of this wilderness that protected her from all that badness and transgression. But how could he do it if he couldn’t talk? Thinking of his bee stings and hers and the tried and true folk remedy he’d applied to the stings, he also thought of all the things he had to learn her about the old ways, the uses of plants, the phases of the moon, the reading of signs. What kind of teacher can’t even talk?

On the way home he spotted the tracks of a wild turkey! “Darg eek,” he exclaimed, and pantomimed the swagger of a turkey tom and flapped his arms to represent its wings, but he couldn’t get across to her that somewhere out here in these woods their Thanksgiving dinner was a-running around loose.

When he got home after toting all that honey plus his axe and crosscut and rifle, even with her help, he was plumb dead on his feet and could only crawl into bed with Dr. Jack D’s remedy. There he remained for several more days, thinking philosophical thoughts not only about all the stuff that was wrong with the world but how life itself was just one big joke that wasn’t even funny, and the biggest joke was that if you ever got to finding anything good about life you’d soon enough discover that the only thing that mattered about life is that it comes to an end, by and by. There was this good old funeral hymn everbody used to sing, that Miss Jerram had got them to sing at that mule’s funeral, which said that farther along we’ll know all about it, farther along we’ll understand why, but Sog wasn’t too sure he’d ever be able to know all about it or understand nothing.

He didn’t even have any notion what time of year it was. What was left of the garden was still producing some fine maters, as well as all the melons they could eat, and although some of the nights had got right crimpy the days was still warm enough to indicate that summer wasn’t quite done by a long shot. But he figured that it must be at least well into September, and the next morning he woke up feeling tolerable he decided it was time for Robin’s birthday.

He put on his overalls for the first time since he’d been a-beeing, and went out to the kitchen and stirred hisself around and set into making a birthday cake for Robin. He hadn’t forgot how, and they had quite a few boxes of cake mix that all you have to do is follow the directions.

“What are you doing?” Robin asked him.

“Awr, og us ursings ur sprose,” he tried to get around telling her what he was up to, and she left him alone.

While the cake was in the oven, he went into the storeroom and fished in some of the bags and brought out the pretty packages of birthday gift wrap that he’d stocked up on, and some ribbons and Scotch tape. Then he picked out from the hoard assorted little toys and games, as well as this one real nice dress that he’d bought her at the Wal-Mart, and a couple of pretty sweaters. That was more than he’d intended to give her at any one of her birthdays, but he might not even be around for the next one. He wrapped everything up nice and pretty. He sent Robin out to dig up taters, both Irish and sweet taters. And while the oven was still hot he put in a cut of ham off that razorback they’d slaughtered. The meat hadn’t been smoked yet, but that wasn’t necessary for just a cut of ham.

He served her a fine dinner and then afterward he brought out the cake, with candles lit on top and all. “Hubby bart deg tyoo,” he tried to sing but gave it up and just set the cake on the table.

“Oh!” Robin said. “Oh!” she said again. “Is it my birthday?”

“Yur aid,” he said. “Hubby bart deg.”

And then he brought out all the wrapped presents and she had such a lot of fun opening them one by one. Too bad that dress was too small, and he realized that when he’d got all her clothes he hadn’t even thought that she’d ever outgrow them. He reckoned that he had probably hoped she’d stay seven years old for the rest of her life. But now that she was eight, did he no longer desire her? That was a dumb question, since he didn’t have no desire to speak of nohow.

“Oh!” she said, taking the wraps off a game. “A Ouija Board! I always wanted a Ouija Board!”

It was just a plain old game board with all this stuff written on it: all the letters of the alphabet and all the numbers, plus “Yes.” “No.” “Good Bye.” There was a three-legged gizmo that was the only game piece, and Robin explained how you use it. Trouble was, you’re supposed to rest your fingertips gently on that three-legged doodad, but his hands was so shaky he couldn’t do it without jiggling the darn thing. And what it was supposed to do was answer any questions you might have, and he couldn’t ask any questions without the power of speech. So they just had to make do with Robin’s questions. They started off with easy questions, like “Is this September 12?” and the pointer thing crept its way over to the “Yes.” So it really was her birthday, after all! If you could believe that pointer. What is the dog’s real name? they asked the Ouija board, and it moved bit by bit to the letter H, the letter R, the letter E, the letter A, the letter P, the letter H again, and the letter A again. “Roffa,” said Robin, which was what Bitch always said.

By and by, Robin asked the Ouija Board, “Will I ever see my mommy again?”

The board said, “Yes.”

When she asked the Board, “Is Sugrue going to get well?” he wanted to stop her, but his curiosity got the better of him.

“No,” said the damned board.

Chapter twenty

Her ambitious project for some time had been to procure a kitten as a birthday present for Robin. She herself had had only one birthday so far, the previous winter. Since it is the lot of most animals not even to know, let alone to observe, their birthdays, she had not expected that hers would be special. She had observed it simply by digging up her favorite bone, declaring I am one, and wishing herself a happy birthday. Of course she had realized the ambiguity of her words: not simply that she was one year old but that she was one fine dog, she was number one, one of the best, one of those, one to reckon with. She had been happily surprised later when Yowrfrowr had shown up in her yard, saying A pity I have no gifts for you but I do want to give you a birthday lick. And he had given her a birthday lick and then had tried to become more romantic than that, but the man had come out of the house and run him off.

Now with the approach of September she had wanted desperately to see Yowrfrowr again, and had given much consideration to exploring the environs south of the farmstead in search of any remaining trace of the old trail that Adam Madewell had used to reach Stay More when he went to school there. The in-habit had told her he could describe the route and which landmarks to watch for, but he couldn’t take her or go with her, because it would lead beyond his haunt, that is, beyond the area of places that he was allowed to frequent. He also advised that she shouldn’t attempt to hike the trail, which was a long and possibly treacherous journey that had broken some of his bones the last time he’d tried to use it, when he was ten. His warning didn’t scare her sufficiently, because she had powerful motives: simply to enjoy canine companionship again, to tell Yowrfrowr of this particular situation she was in and Robin was in and the man was in, get his opinions thereof, and even, if nature so dictated, permit Yowrfrowr to assuage this peculiar nervousness she had been experiencing lately and the itching in her afterplace. But her principal motive, overriding the others, was this: she wanted to see if she couldn’t take possession of one of those kittens that overpopulated the yard of Yowrfrowr’s house. Hreapha had never bothered to count, but there were always dozens of felines on the premises, often openly and flagrantly engaged in procreation, and consequently no one would even notice if Hreapha removed one of the kittens, seizing the nape of its neck gently in her mouth as she had observed mother cats doing, and, carrying it thus, transporting it all the way back up to Madewell Mountain, and giving it to Robin, who wanted a kitten so badly. Could she do it? It was a challenge, and one that consumed many of Hreapha’s waking thoughts.

But as Robin’s birthday neared, Hreapha became frantic with the realization that such a journey would take at least one overnight and possibly two or three, and there was simply no way she could explain to the man, let alone to Robin the potential beneficiary, her disappearance.

As luck would have it, on one of Hreapha’s frequent visits to the beaver pond to visit with her friends there and make sure they were all right, she encountered once again that audacious bobcat who had previously killed one of the beaver kits and had apparently not been sufficiently deterred by the whipping Hreapha had given it. Hreapha wasn’t in the mood for further fighting; her body still ached and hurt from the time the man had kicked her into the beaver pond; but she resented the bobcat for not having learned its lesson in the first fight. So she attacked it again, and not only drove it away from the beaver pond but chased it for some distance through the woods. It was apparently trying to reach the safety of its den or lair when it stepped upon, or was attacked by, a copperhead snake. Copperheads are just as venomous as rattlesnakes, if not more so, and Hreapha had long learned to give them both a wide berth. The bitten bobcat staggered on toward its den, which was actually a nest of leaves in a hollow log, but just managed to reach the opening to the log when the venom took full effect and the bobcat crumpled and, calling out a sound that was like a dying calf’s, expired. Hreapha nudged it with her nose to make sure it was absolutely lifeless.

The dying-calf sound came again, and Hreapha thought possibly the bobcat was still alive, but when she looked into the hollow log, there was a bobkitten, a lone bobkitten, saying woo again and again. Hreapha’s first thought was to wonder if Robin would object to a kitten who said woo instead of meow. The bobkitten, oblivious or indifferent to Hreapha’s presence, came out of the hollow log and attempted to nurse from its dead mother. Hreapha was touched. Poor kitty, she said. Where’s your brothers and sisters? It occurred to her that a feline as large as a bobcat might not have a litter of more than one or two.

Hreapha waited until the poor kitty had discovered that it wasn’t going to be able to get any milk from the dead mother, and then she gently chomped the nape of the kitten’s neck, lifted it, and began the trek back home. The kitten remained motionless, as if paralyzed by the clasp of its neck in Hreapha’s jaws. But when eventually Hreapha reached home and set the kitten down in order to announce her return and her gift, the kitten attempted to run away, and Hreapha had to chase and catch it and seize its neck again. She mounted the porch and scratched at the door. Because of the bobkitty in her mouth, she couldn’t call out “Hreapha!” meaning Happy Birthday, but she could scratch the door and whimper, and finally Robin opened the door.

And you never saw such an astonished expression on anybody’s face! “What have you caught, Hreapha?” she said. “Is it alive?”

To demonstrate its possession of life, Hreapha gently set it down, and it immediately hollered WOO! WOO! WOO! and ran under the davenport.

“GURFLAGE!” yelled the man. “Laud faint bub cut! Wul sought my hide!”

Robin was full of questions which, alas, Hreapha could not answer, the chief one being “What is it?” but also “Where did you get it?” “How old is it?” “Is it a boy or a girl?” She got down on her knees and peered under the davenport and studied it closely. And began to answer her own questions: “It’s some kind of kitty. Hreapha must have found it somewhere. It’s just a baby. And I think it’s a boy. Come on out, kitty. Here kitty kitty.”

“BUB CUT!” yelled the man. “Glodge plairn fugadaze!”

“Can I keep him?” Robin asked.

“Wul hail far hit’sa wile beast,” the man said.

Robin had succeeded in fishing the critter out from under the davenport and was cradling it in her arms, where it began to purr.

“Hreapha,” said Hreapha, that is, Happy Birthday.

“Thank you so much,” Robin said. “It’s the best birthday present I ever had.”

Having determined, despite the man’s atrocious mispronunciation, that it was a bobcat kitten, Robin decided to name him “Robert.” She fetched one of her dollbaby’s bottles, which had a real nipple on it. She filled it with Pet Milk, and her new pet had its first meal in Robin’s arms.

“Floszh,” commented the man. Then he slowly and painfully rose to his feet and, taking one of his bottles, went off to bed, or, since the feather mattress was being aired in the yard from an accumulation of his markings upon it, his pallet on the floor.

“Thank you for the Ouija Board and everything,” she called to him, but he did not respond. He proceeded to guzzle the bottle.

Robert the kitten continued guzzling his bottle, and at length fell asleep. Robin set him down on a corner of the davenport. “I’ll show you my other presents,” Robin said to Hreapha. And she showed her the dress and the sweaters and the toys, including the Ouija Board, which she set up on the floor, suggesting, “Let’s see if you can play. Can you put one of your paws on this?” And she took one of Hreapha’s forefeet and set it upon a kind of miniature table with three legs. “Now I will ask a question, and put my fingertips here beside your paw, and this planchette will start moving until it finds the answer. Okay? I’ve already asked it how to spell your name and it spelled it out, H-R-E-A-P-H-A. So I know that’s your real name, and you’ll never be ‘Bitch’ again. Let’s ask it: How many years will Hreapha live?”

Hreapha felt the planchette, as it was called, moving beneath her paw and she was prompted to bark. But she watched with fascination as the planchette moved to the numeral 1 and then to the numeral 9.

“Wow!” Robin said. “Nineteen years is a long life for a dog. Okay? How many years will I live?”

The planchette moved to the 8 and just stayed there.

“Oh-oh!” Robin commented. “This is scaring me. Does this mean that I’m going to die before my ninth birthday?” But the planchette was not absolutely motionless. It was moving but never departing from the 8, just circling it. Hreapha wished she could explain to Robin that that might mean it was doing the same numeral twice, that is, not 8 but 88. Robin would live to be eighty-eight years old.

“Let’s ask it something else,” Robin suggested, but she was clearly disturbed at the thought she might not live beyond this, her eighth year. “Would you like to find out who you will marry? Of course dogs don’t have weddings, but would you like to know who your mate will be?”

Hreapha was not able to declare that she already knew, so she silently participated with her paw as the planchette spelled out the letters Y-O-W-R-F-R-O-W-R. Robin attempted to pronounce it: “Yowrfrowr! That’s a cute name for a dog! Do you know any dogs named ‘Yowrfrowr’?”

Hreapha moved the planchette to “Yes.”

“Hey!” Robin exclaimed. “You can talk! You can answer yes or no questions. Are you and Yowrfrowr really, really good friends?”

“Yes.”

“Does he live somewhere around here?”

Hreapha moved the planchette to “No.” Of course it was relative: “around here” could possibly mean Stay More, miles and miles away.

“Do you like Sugrue?”

That was easy. “No.”

“He’s not going to live much longer, is he? I was playing the Ouija Board with him when you came back with Robert, and we asked it if he was going to get well, and it said No.”

The planchette was still resting on the “No,” and Hreapha tapped it with her paw.

“Could we ask the Ouija Board how much longer he’s going to live?” she suggested.

Hreapha was not comfortable learning so much about the future, but she consented, and they jointly “rode” the planchette as it moved to the 1 and circled it, meaning 11, then to the two and the three. 1,2,3. Maybe the planchette was just proving it knew the basic numbers. Did it mean that he was going to live for 123 days? No, it had circled the one, doubling it, so that would be 1123. That many days?

It was Robin who figured it out. “I think it is just trying to tell us the month and the day. Eleven twenty-three. The eleventh month is November. Sugrue will die on the twenty-third of November.”

“Hreapha,” Hreapha commented, meaning I can hardly wait.

But Robin said, “I don’t want him to die. If he dies, we are going to be in trouble.”

“Hreapha,” Hreapha said, meaning, That remains to be seen.

“Okay, let’s ask it who I am going to marry,” Robin suggested. And she put her fingertips on the planchette along with Hreapha’s paw. The planchette moved quickly to the letter A but stalled there and would go no further. They waited and waited, and then the planchette moved its way to the word that spelled “Goodbye.”

“Well, goodbye yourself,” Robin said to the Ouija Board, and put it back in its box.

In the weeks ahead, Robert grew so rapidly that both Hreapha and Robin had their hands full with his education and training. There is a natural antipathy between felines and canines and Robert did not like Hreapha, avoiding her and sometimes even hissing at her. But they were bedmates, the two of them sleeping every night with Robin on the aired-out feather mattress, while the man continued to sleep on the pallet on the floor, which he frequently marked, requiring its daily airing out.

The nights were beginning to grow cold, so Hreapha appreciated that she was able to get under the covers with Robin, even if she had to share the covers with a creature who was so thoroughly nocturnal he couldn’t sleep at night, and did most of his sleeping in the daytime. But Robin took him to bed with her every night anyway, and fell asleep herself with one arm around Robert and the other around Hreapha, whereupon, as soon as she was asleep, Robert would begin pestering Hreapha, hissing in her ear and nibbling on her flews, and trying to get Hreapha to fool around. By day, when Robin was playing with Robert (she seemed to have forgotten her paper dolls and her paper doll town), it was fun to watch the kitty rough-housing and running around, but at night the kitten was a nuisance. Hreapha endeavored to teach the kitten her own language, but the kitten wasn’t interested and would not respond to any instruction or commands that Hreapha tried to give him.

One instruction that was imperative, and to which Hreapha devoted considerable time, with some help from Robin, was letting Robert understand in no uncertain terms that he was not to chew upon any of the baby chicks. Even though there was a great surplus of them, since both roosters had been busy fertilizing the hens, and the hens had sat upon and hatched countless eggs, and there were chicks of various ages all over the place. Robert loved to chase them, which was permissible, and to catch and play with them, which was all right up to a point, but Hreapha knew that if he ever killed one he would become hopelessly feral and bloodthirsty, and she did her best to prevent that from happening. Robert loved water, and his favorite swimming place was Hreapha’s water dish, which made the water taste off.

One night, the last night of that autumn when it wasn’t too cold to swim, and the moon was full so that a kerosene lantern wouldn’t be needed, Robin got out the Ouija Board just long enough to ask Hreapha a yes-or-no question. “Should we take him to the beaver pond?” After some deliberation, realizing that Robert might grow up to get along with the beaver if he was introduced to them at an early age, Hreapha moved the planchette to “Yes” and they escorted Robert to the beaver pond. Since neither Robin nor Hreapha could communicate with the beaver in their language, they had a bit of a problem persuading the beaver that this kitten, who was their natural enemy, only wanted to use the pond for bathing purposes. But after a while they accepted him, or at least tolerated his frisky plunge into their pool. Both Hreapha and Robin joined him, although Robin shrieked with the coldness of the water. They didn’t have to worry about the man coming and finding them.

The man spent nearly all of his nights, and most of his days, in a state of constant drunkenness, getting up from the pallet or the davenport only to grab his crutches—he had fashioned a pair of crutches out of saplings—and hobble off to the outhouse, the only exercise he got, which was futile, because he was rarely able to leave anything behind at the outhouse. He seemed to have forgotten that Hreapha existed, never speaking to her or trying in his garbled speech to give her a word, kind or unkind, and she realized eventually that he probably couldn’t even see her; in addition to his other afflictions, he was going blind, or, if not blind, his vision was blurry and doubled: Robin told Hreapha that he had begun to think that there were two Robins, twins, or close look-alike sisters.

I have lived not because of you but despite you, Hreapha once said to him, but of course he couldn’t hear her. She could not understand why she still felt any sense of duty or fidelity or any need to provide protection for him. It was probably just inbred.

But it was strong enough that she was torn with guilt when, eventually, she realized that she could no longer ignore the intensity of the new bodily feelings that overwhelmed her and left her markings with a musky new aroma. She was going to have to abandon him again, at a time when he might really have need of her. She would be leaving Robin too, and Robert, and all the poultry who depended upon her protection, but they did not disturb her as much as her forsaking him did. She went out to the cooper’s shed and had a long chat with the in-habit, making sure that she understood his directions on how to find that trail that led to Stay More and how to stay on the trail if the trail no longer existed. Once again he warned her that she’d probably kill herself trying the trail, but he understood her desperation.

She wished there were some way she could explain her journey to Robin. Although she was smart enough to use the Ouija Board’s “Yes” and “No,” she was not smart enough to spell out words, to formulate language on the Ouija Board that would say, Robin girl, I am going to have to go away for two or three days. You know about Yowrfrowr? Well, he has something that I have to have.

There was nothing at all she could do. She had trouble enough explaining to her own in-habit that she was going to have to go away for a while. She cursed her body, she cursed her afterplace, she cursed her aromatic pee, but she went on peeing it, and then, one morning bright and early, all she could do was say to Robin, “Hreapha!” meaning, Goodbye for now, my dearest friend, I hope to see you again in a couple of days, three at the most.

And then to start trotting southward. Robin and Robert both tried to follow her, and she could only turn and yell, “HREAPHA!” meaning, I’m not going to the beaver pond. I’m going to Stay More.

And then to run so fast that they could not keep up with her.

Part Three

Without

Chapter twenty-one

They let him go, and he sure went. The first thing he done, which was the reason he’d come back to Harrison in the first place (you can bet your life it wasn’t to see that crabby old grass widow he was married to) was to take his pickup to the used car lot and trade it in on a four-wheel drive. It was a trade-down, naturally, and he wound up with a piece of junk that reminded him of that bald-tired four-by-four his opponent had been a-driving, only his tires had good treads on them. So he could get to places that he hadn’t been able to reach with two-wheel drive. Many a time he’d been required to either turn back, on some hairpin climb in Searcy County or Newton County, or else strike out on foot for the rest of the way, and usually only to discover after a long hike that the supposed abandoned house had fallen in completely or was still just a-setting there empty except for rats and mice.

You’d be surprised how many empty houses there is at the end of the road all over the Ozarks. It kind of made Leo sad, at the thought that families had once lived there, and children had played, and people had worked hard to squeeze a living out of their rocky acres, only to have it come to nothing. Leo wondered what had become of them. He knew most of ’em had probably gone to California, like everbody else. Or else they’d moved into one of the big towns like Springdale or Fayetteville or Harrison, and enjoyed the comforts of city living. It was a real shame they’d never been able to find a buyer for their house, and Leo found a few houses that was really in pretty fair shape, and he even imagined himself taking possession of one of them. In fact, Leo entertained himself as he roamed the highways and byways (he didn’t much care for music or gospel preachers on the pickup’s radio) by having daydreams of moving into one of those abandoned farmsteads.

Of course his ideal location wouldn’t be up here on one of these godforsaken mountaintops but down along the river somewhere, and he’d found plenty of abandoned houses where the old road stopped at the river. For most of his life, until he’d more or less quit it in order to give all his time to the search for Robin, Leo had earned his living as a guide on the Buffalo River, taking rich sportsmen from Little Rock or as far away as St. Louis, KC and Chicago, out in johnboats to float the Buffalo and fish for linesides and goggle-eyes. He knew ever inch of that river and couldn’t nobody direct the sportsmen to the best fishing spots better than he could. His customers always gave him a nice tip over and beyond the fee. Leo was constantly hoping that he’d find Robin safely living in some cabin at a dead-end along the river. If she was, and according to his daydreams after he’d shot and killed or taken prisoner that guy who’d stolen her, Mr. Bald Tires, why, he intended to return Robin straight to her mother, and then collect the reward and get his pitcher in the papers. And then he supposed he could just spend the rest of Robin’s growing-up years giving her presents and being a nice grandpappy to her and admiring her.

The abandoned houses of the Ozarks was spread out all over northwest Arkansas and southwest Missouri, and Leo had already found quite a few of them in Missouri and intended to find quite a few more now that he had a four-by-four pickup. He was keeping track and whenever he found one of the places he had one of these here yeller high-lighters that he smeared around the little white empty square on the map that meant the dwelling was no longer dwelt-in (if it was black, it meant that it was occupied, but Leo had discovered a number of black ones that was empty too, so his maps was mostly out of date). There was just about the same number of empty houses up on the ridges and mountaintops as there was down along the river or off in some flat plateau somewheres.

It was the ones up high that made him need the four-by-four, and sure enough, as soon as he got the truck and headed south from Harrison (he could never forget that was the direction Mr. Bald Tires had headed), he found himself climbing a rough trail that led up a mountain near Gum Springs, south of Jasper in Newton County, a trail he couldn’t possibly have climbed in his old pickup, the way it turned every whichaway and was full of washouts and mud holes and his pickup had a real work-out getting there. And when he got to the end of the road and stopped at the house, he saw at once the house wasn’t really abandoned. There was chickens and pigs all about, and a garden patch. A man with a shotgun came out of the house, somebody Leo hadn’t never seen before, and the man just pointed the gun at him and said, “Well?”

“Looks like a dead end, don’t it?” Leo said.

“It’s the end but it aint dead,” the man said.

“You live here all by yourself?” Leo asked.

“Just me and the old woman,” the man said.

“How old is the woman?” Leo wanted to know but that question was answered directly when the woman herself came out. She was old, all right.

“What does he want?” the woman asked her man.

“He wants to know if he can back up and turn around and get the hell out of here,” the man said to her, and then he said to Leo, “Yes, I believe you can.”

That was the second time he’d found people still living in a supposed abandoned house. The other time there’d been three women living together who’d pointed their rifle at him and driven him off. He figured most people who’d want to live at the end of the road wouldn’t care for company.

But the third time he found people still on the premises of a deserted house, he wasn’t turned away. It was in rough hill country over in Madison County, way up on the highest peak for miles around, and after climbing in low-lock for a mile over some terrible boulders, he came out into a field, and there was a young lady with her titties hanging out, why, she didn’t have hardly nothing on but a too-tight pair of cut-off blue jeans, and a string of beads around her neck. He didn’t know whether to wave or just pretend he never seen her. “Howdy,” he managed to say as he drove up beside her. Her hair come pretty near to her waist. “Does this here road go anywheres?” he asked, conversation-like, without staring at her bosoms.

“You don’t look like a narc,” she said. “Boss. The house is right down there, Daddy.”

He drove on, and the next thing he saw was another girl who didn’t have nothing on. Not a stitch except some beads around her neck and a big floppy hat on her head. He decided not to speak to her. A little beyond her, he come to the house, which might’ve been abandoned not too long ago but now looked like people were sure enough living in it, and out in the yard of the house was a whole bunch of young folks, most of ’em naked as jaybirds, in mixed company besides, boys as well as girls.

When he stopped the pickup, one young feller with his pecker hanging halfway to his knees came over to him and said, “You’re not the landowner, are you?”

“Who, me?” Leo asked. “Naw, I don’t own this land.” He could smell the smoke of mary jane in the air.

“Too much, man. Were you looking for someone?”

“Yeah, just a little girl.”

“Your daughter? What does she look like?”

“Just my step-granddaughter, and she’s seven going on eight, long blonde hair.”

The young feller laughed. “Freaking, man. Nobody that young around here, man.”

One of the stark naked girls came up beside the young man and wrapped her arm around him and said to Leo, “Daddy, I thought for a minute you were my father. But you’re not. Cool.” She was looking him over so much that he didn’t think she’d mind him staring at her titties. And her bush. “What’s your thing?” she asked.

“Thing?” he said. The only thing he knew about was what he’d once told Robin was his mousy, and it was a-starting to stir in a way he hadn’t known for quite a spell.

“Are you just some farmer?” she asked.

“Naw, I’m sort of a fisherman,” he said, if she was talking about job occupation.

“Solid,” she said. “But there’s not any fish around here.” She giggled.

The young feller said, “Turn off your motor, man, and blow some good shit with us.”

Leo wasn’t sure just what that invitation involved, but he turned off the motor and got out of the pickup and soon he was in the midst of all those young people and somebody handed him a rolled joint of mary jane. He used to use the stuff regularly in the Navy, but lately the only times he did was when one of his sportsmen customers was lighting up along the Buffalo and passed the joint to Leo just to be polite, and he didn’t smoke too much because he had to steer the johnboat.

But he smoked a lot that day. He smoked so much of it that he stopped feeling self-conscious on account of he was the only one with his clothes on and also the only one over thirty years of age. The smoking made him forget eventually that he wasn’t under thirty, but nearly twice that, and before long he had also stopped being the only one who still had clothes on.

They invited him to crash, and he hoped they weren’t talking about having him start up the truck and ram it into a tree or nothing. Some girl told him he was a gas, and he wondered if he had accidentally broke wind. Several people urged him to hang loose, and he was a little nervous about what they might be planning to do with him. “You’re making the scene, Daddy,” another girl said to him, and he wondered what he was supposed to do. They fed him some dish of rice and vegetables that was okay, nothing special, with home brew to wash it down. And after supper some of them got out their guitars and played rock and roll music, and he was invited to dance with some of the naked girls. Later one of the gals, a little on the hefty side, rubbed up against him and said, “You’re mellow, man. Want to be my old man tonight and ball me?” He didn’t like being reminded of his age, but whatever she had in mind he was ready for. Her name was Misti Dawn, and she showed him some real fancy fucking which must’ve been the fruit of lots of experience.

He stayed three or four days there with those young folks. He hated to leave, and they didn’t want him to leave, but he had to remind himself that he had a mission, and he’d been neglecting it to enjoy himself. By the time he left he had even learnt what some of their language meant, “spaced” and “trip” and “way out” and “downer” and “happening” and all such as that. He had had plenty of mary jane as well as home brew and even something called acid which made him see things and scared him for a few hours. He was afraid if he stayed any longer he wouldn’t want to leave. So he left.

But they traded him his ordinary clothes for some striped blue jeans with the first bell-bottoms he’d had since the Navy, and a fancy embroidered shirt, and they put what little hair he had in back into a pony tail with a ribbon around it, and that’s what he was looking like the next time Louisa seen him.

“Where on earth have you been, and what on earth have you been doing?” she wanted to know.

“Outa sight,” he said. And he stayed just long enough to see if the square world was still going round. The only development in the law’s handling of Robin’s case was that a couple who’d been in the parking lot of the roller rink that night, maybe fucking in the back seat of their car, had seen a suspicious man and had described him so well that a new police composite sketch had been made, replacing the one that Leo had done and not looking anything like that feller. The new suspect was actually identified as a known child molester recently released from Cummins prison, and there was a APB on him, with the state police and FBI concentrating on known places he had lived. That there FBI man who’d been so chummy with Robin’s mother was spending all his free time with her, and the last thing Louisa said to Leo before he took off again was, “You might just get an FBI agent for your new son-in-law, so you’ll have to watch your step, you old reprobate.”

Leo looked over his maps and decided to see if he couldn’t reach those places that he’d had to turn back from when his truck was just a two-wheel drive. One of them was up a mountain beyond the town of Snowball in Searcy County. The old Jeep trail climbed for a good two miles beyond the place where it left a good dirt road, and when Leo came in sight of the house he had a hunch or something that made him stop the truck and proceed on foot with the revolver tucked into the waistband of his bell-bottom blue jeans, with his embroidered shirt covering up the handle.

That way, he was able to catch ’em by surprise, and sure enough there was a old boy living there with a young girl, only she wasn’t Robin, and she wasn’t seven or eight but maybe thirteen. “How’d you find us?” the feller asked, and Leo knew that they was fugitives, and they was living here with a garden patch and a flock of chickens, and a spare room loaded up with food and supplies.

“I’ve just been looking everywhere for you,” Leo said, which was practically the truth.

“Are you her father?” the man asked.

“Naw, I’m just her uncle, aint that right, sweetheart?” he said to the girl, and she nodded her head, playing along with his game.

“Trina, tell him I aint done nothing to you,” the man requested of the girl.

“You know that’s not true, Wayne,” she said.

She held Leo’s gun on Wayne while Leo tied Wayne up real good with some rope and put him in the back end of the pickup, and the girl rode up front with him. He figured he’d just take ’em both to the county seat at Marshall and hand ’em over to the sheriff. Making conversation, he asked, “How long has he been a-keeping you?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I lost track. Maybe five or six years.” She smiled real big, and said, “I’m so glad you found me. I thought nobody ever would. You’re my hero. Could I give you a blow job?”

Leo slammed on the brakes and felt his old mousy unbending just at the thought. “That’s real kind of ye,” he said to her, driving on. “But I reckon I’d better take a raincheck on it.”

As it turned out, when he’d delivered them to the sheriff at Marshall, the girl had been kidnapped five years previously, and the search for her had eventually been abandoned. Her kidnapper, Wayne Curtis, had a long rap sheet of child molesting and sex offenses.

Leo got his pitcher in the papers, with a story about how he’d actually been working on the famous Robin Kerr case when he accidentally stumbled upon the other one. But the reward offer had expired, so he didn’t get nothing out of it except that raincheck, which he never got a chance to cash in.

The good deed gave him a right smart of pride and courage, though, and when he resumed his search for Robin he was filled with pep and renewed determination. As September rolled around, he was all set to give another try to a trail in Newton County that had turned him back in July. The country sure was pretty, what with the trees commencing to turn color, and all that red and orange warmed him up since the weather was getting cold and he had to wear his winter jacket. According to his map, there was this impassable Jeep trail that wandered all around the north end of a place called Madewell Mountain. He’d been able to climb less than a mile of it in his two-wheel-drive pickup before hitting a stretch that he couldn’t negotiate. There was at least another mile or so of it to go to reach the white square that meant a uninhabited dwelling.

That was his destination now, and the hunch he’d played in finding that Trina girl was now hunching him over the steering wheel with shivers running up his hunched back. Something told him this was the big day.

But the damn trail just played out completely, far short of the goal. After getting stuck in one hole so rough and deep he had to get out and jack up the rear end and put rocks under the tires to go on a little ways more, he got into a gully that was really terrible and he couldn’t go backward or forward, and spent two hours trying to jack the pickup up and get it out of there, without any luck. Since he couldn’t go back the way he came, he figured he might as well just walk on, until he reached that house.

The trouble was, there just wasn’t no trace whatsoever left of the trail. And the bluffs was steep and risky and the woods was deep and spooky, and it was beginning to get dark. He had a flashlight, and his revolver, and that was all he had to find his way to wherever he was trying to go.

Chapter twenty-two

She was so heartsick she couldn’t eat. So she simply stopped eating. She didn’t even bother to build a fire in the kitchen stove each morning, because Sugrue wasn’t eating anything anyway. She built a fire in the living room stove just to keep warm. She made sure that Robert was fed, giving him his bottle with Pet Milk three times a day, and then tried gradually to wean him from his bottle by getting him interested in some of the canned goods: there were potted meats like deviled ham that he would eat. But there was nothing that she would eat. Not as long as Hreapha was gone.

She wondered if perhaps Hreapha had been eaten by a bear. Although the Ouija Board had once declared that Hreapha would live to be nineteen, which was really old, old age for a dog, there was a possibility that the Ouija Board was mistaken, just as a lot of things that require belief and faith are false: for instance, Robin had a hunch that there was no such thing as the Tooth Fairy, or, if there was, the Tooth Fairy had ignored the last two teeth she had left under her pillow. She had a third tooth almost ready to leave there, but had decided not to, out of fear it would prove beyond doubt that there is no such thing as a Tooth Fairy. And if the Ouija Board was wrong about Hreapha living to be nineteen, then it was also wrong that Sugrue was going to die. Some mornings he was able to get up and go out, hobbling on his homemade crutches, and although he couldn’t do any work, and wasn’t any good at talking, he was at least sobered up enough to listen to her.

When she told him she feared that a bear had eaten Hreapha, he simply said something that sounded like “Pigeon eat.” More than once he said those words whenever she brought up the subject of Hreapha’s disappearance. Was he trying to say that a pigeon had eaten Hreapha? Or perhaps that Hreapha had eaten a diseased pigeon which had caused her to get sick and die?

Although she accepted the possibility that the Ouija Board was wrong and that the Tooth Fairy did not exist, she refused to cease believing in spirits or whatever was unseen but clearly felt or known. She knew that there was some kind of invisible spirit who lived in the cooper’s shed or spent most of its time there, and she had heard its voice clearly, that time she’d cured the pork. She was going to hear it again while doing the only work she would do during her time of sorrow over Hreapha: the smoking of the pork. One of the garbled things that Sugrue had said, whenever he said “Pigeon eat,” was “Mokawg,” and when several repetitions of mokawg failed to make any sense to her, he got his crutches and summoned her to follow him to the cooper’s shed, where, on the dirt floor of the shed, he piled up an assortment of wood chips from the chopping stump and some of the accumulation of corncobs that they’d saved from their own corn on the cob and the chicken’s winter supply of shelled corn. He built a fire and soon the interior of the shed was filled with smoke. He poked holes through the chunks of the razorback she had cured, and ran white oak splits through the holes and hung the meat from the joists of the cooper’s shed.

He held up two fingers and then three fingers, “Toodaze. Freedaze,” he said, and hobbled on back to the house, leaving her to figure out that she was expected to keep the fire going by adding more of the wood chips and more of the corncobs. But was she supposed to stay awake and watch it for two or three days?

Dadblast it, this aint a smokehouse, you idjits, said that voice she’d heard when she was curing the pork. And then the voice began coughing. She thought that was funny, that an invisible spirit which had no body and no lungs and no throat to cough with, would be coughing at the smoke. It made her cough too, but she had lungs and throat.

“Are you really coughing?” she asked. “Or just faking it?”

I’m jist a-making out like it, he said. Paw would skin ye like a hog if he knew you was smoking up his workshop thisaway.

“He started the fire, not me,” she said and pointed toward the house where Sugrue had gone. She wondered if the spirit could see her point.

He is a miserable cuss, aint he? Bad enough when he could talk plain, much worser since he caint.

“How old are you?” she suddenly wanted to know.

Me? I reckon I must be about three, four years older’n you, gal.

“Is your name Adam?” she bravely asked.

How’d ye know?

“Sugrue told me how this place had belonged to the Madewells, and they had a boy named Adam. Do you just live out here in this shed all the time?”

Why, no, I wouldn’t rightly call it such as that. But you’uns has stuffed my room with all them boxes and bags and such that a body couldn’t turn around in there.

“The storeroom was your bedroom?” she asked.

Not was but is.

“I can’t see you, you know,” she pointed out. “And I think maybe I’m just imagining you. Maybe I’m just going crazy because Hreapha is lost.”

Aw shoot, that dog aint lost. She’s just gone down to Stay More for a visit with her friends.

“Really? Whenever I talk about Hreapha, Sugrue always says ‘Pigeon eat.’”

Her invisible friend Adam laughed. It was a boyish laugh that was more than just the kind of giggle that Jimmy Chaney made when he laughed. Don’t he have a lot of trouble talking, though? I reckon what he was trying to say was ‘Bitch in heat.’ He was just trying to tell you that she’s having her time of estrus.

“What does that mean?”

There was silence, and then he said, Darn, you’re a-makin me blush. It aint fitten to talk about, but you know what she-dogs and he-dogs do when they get together?

She thought about that for a while, and then she smiled and said, “Oh. So maybe she’s just gone to Stay More to see her favorite he-dog, Yowrfrowr.”

That’s the one, he said. I had to tell her how to get there, because it’s a long ways over the roughest country you ever seen, and I aint even so sure she could’ve made it.

“I feel a lot better, knowing she hasn’t been eaten by a bear.”

Aint nothing ever going to eat that dog.

“I’m sorry we’re smoking up your father’s workshop, but I don’t know what else to do.”

Our smokehouse aint standing no more. It was right over yonder. She could not see the way he was pointing, if he was pointing. So I don’t reckon it will do no harm to Paw’s shop if you just go on and smoke your hog in here. But you caint stay awake all night tending the fire, so I’ll help ye with it.

“Thanks so much,” she said. And that night she put more chips and corncobs on the fire and watched to be sure it would keep burning, and then she bundled up in her thickest jacket and with a blanket and pillow made herself comfortable outside the cooper’s shed but close enough to keep an eye on it. And she eventually drifted off to sleep, with Robert joining her under the blanket. Sometime late in the night or early morning she was awakened—maybe Robert did it—she was awakened by something and saw that the fire was dying out, and got up to add more chips and cobs to it.

She smoked the meat for nearly three days, until it was good and dark reddish-brown. Every time the fire was getting too low while she slept, she would be awakened again, but her new friend never spoke, although she occasionally called to him, saying “Hello?” This bothered her, and she wondered if he was tired of talking to her. Or if she had said anything to bother him. Eventually she decided that he wasn’t really there, that she had just imagined him, that she had been talking aloud to herself.

When the smoking of the meat was all finished, and she had hung it up to keep in the storeroom, she returned to her neglected paper dolls. It was hard to play with her paper dolls when Robert was in the house, because he’d mess up her paper town of Stay More, which she had laid out so carefully and populated with dozens of paper dolls named Ingledew and Swain and Whitter and Duckworth and Coe and Dinsmore and Chism and so on. Now she wanted to put into the Stay More schoolhouse a paper doll named Adam Madewell, and she tried to imagine what he looked like. If he was three or four years older than she, he’d be twelve years old and in the fifth or sixth grade.

Late one cold afternoon Robin was standing on the porch of the house, admiring the pretty colors in the distant trees and in the yard, where a giant maple had turned bright red, when suddenly she heard, far out across the way, the name of her dog announcing her return home. Robin’s heart nearly exploded with joy. And then she saw the dog, limping slowly across the field. Robin ran out to meet her.

“Hreapha!” Robin shouted gleefully.

“Hreapha,” said the dog, and while there was happiness in the way she said it, there was also a kind of pain too, as if something was wrong with her.

Robin reached Hreapha long before Hreapha could reach her. And Robin knelt to hug the dog, but did so gently, astonished to see how hurt the poor dog was. “Oh, Hreapha,” she cried, “what has happened to you?” And found herself astonished that she expected an answer, as if her friend could tell her the story of her adventure.

Hreapha could not even say her name. She could only whimper.

“Let’s get you some food and water,” Robin said, and tried to pick her up to carry her to the house, but Hreapha struggled and whined and had to be put down. So Robin walked slowly as Hreapha limped onward to the house, where Robert was so thrilled to see her that he forgot he hated dogs and jumped on her back and began licking her. Robin drew a bucket of water from the well and rinsed Hreapha’s big plastic water dish, which Robert had been using as a wading pool, and then held Robert back while she filled it so Hreapha could have a drink.

For several days Hreapha did not feel like doing anything. Robin made a pallet for her with an old blanket on the floor beside the living room stove, which she kept running day and night. She had a practiced swing with the axe, and was very good now at splitting firewood. Day by day the weather grew colder; there were even dustings of snow. On one of her trips to the woodpile, Robin stopped in at the workshop/smokehouse and said, “Hello? Adam? Would you like to come in the house and keep warm?” She waited a long time for an answer, but it never came, and made her realize that Adam was just a figment of her imagination, whose voice had come to her only when she was in desperate need of help.

She didn’t need any help now. She kept everything going. She had always been strong-willed but now she had to be stronger than ever. Her appetite had returned with Hreapha’s return and she did a good job in the kitchen, although Sugrue didn’t much care for anything she tried to fix for him. She wondered if there was something in whiskey that was nourishing and a good substitute for food. She learned all on her own how to make a good ham omelet, with onions that had been dried from the garden, and it was so tasty she had it several times a week. She always ate too fast, much too fast, but simply assumed that was because her appetite was good. She appreciated that there was no one to remind her to wash her hands before supper, although she wished her mother was still around to nag her about it, and she thought of her mother when she usually washed her hands anyway. She wished her mother could be there to praise her for being clean and to sample her cooking. After enjoying a scrumptious ham omelet, she followed it up with one of her desserts: using the box of mix according to instructions, she made perfect fudge brownies. A month earlier Sugrue had shown her the location of a grove of pawpaw trees and they had brought home a couple of sacks full of them to ripen, and there were still a few that were ripening, and she had learned almost to like them as a kind of inferior banana. No, she didn’t need any help. She looked at herself in the mirror one morning and decided, “I don’t look like myself.” What she meant was that whatever self she had been thinking of herself as having was no longer there. Maybe her mother wouldn’t recognize her. Whatever remained of her human self she now projected into her paper dolls, so that she became each of the citizens of her little town of Stay More and fabricated their lives for them, and did a passably good job of having them speak to each other. Hreapha and Robert always seemed to enjoy listening when she was talking in the voices of the citizens of Stay More as they lived through their lives. She wished her mother could listen to her talk about Stay More. Almost as much as missing her mother, she missed comic books, even more than she missed movies and television, and she took it for granted that she might never again see a comic book, so she would have to make up replacements for them.

The only drawback to her fabulous world of paper Stay More was that she had to do it all alone, even if Hreapha and Robert watched and listened. She really did not like playing alone. In fact she hated it. One day when Hreapha was feeling much better, Robin got out the Ouija Board again and got Hreapha to put her paw on the planchette and they asked a lot of easy, random questions, such as “Is there a Tooth Fairy?” (“NO.”) And “Will Santa Claus be able to find his way to us out here in the woods?” (“NO.”) And “What month is this?” (“N-O-V-E-M-B-E-R.”) And “What day of the week is this?” (“T-H-U-R-S-D-A-Y.”)

And then some questions like, “Did Hreapha find Yowrfrowr down in Stay More?” (“YES.”) “Did they have a happy time together?” (“YES.”) “Did Hreapha have a hard time reaching Stay More?” (“YES.”) “Did Hreapha have a hard time coming home from Stay More?” (“YES.”) “What happened?” (“C-O-Y-O-T-E-S.”)

“My gosh,” Robin said not to the Ouija Board but to Hreapha. “Were you attacked by coyotes?”

Hreapha moved the planchette to YES.

“You poor thing,” Robin said, and thought about it and wished that Hreapha could give her details. “I guess you’re lucky they didn’t eat you.” Robin had searched Hreapha’s hide thoroughly, hunting for ticks (the best thing about the coming of cold weather was that the ticks and chiggers went into hibernation) and also for any wounds: she had found a few deep scratches and had used ointment from the first aid kit on the worst ones.

Robert didn’t like being excluded from their Ouija Board game, so Robin decided to see if she could teach them how to play Hide and Seek. Hreapha caught on very quickly, although Robert was too impatient to wait while he was “it” to give the other two time to hide. There was no way to explain it to him, so they just had to play along with his finding one of them before they became hidden. Still, it was fun, and Hreapha apparently seemed to enjoy it a lot, it was the first fun she’d had in a long time.

While looking for a place to hide, Robin found a book or booklet about three times as thick as a comic book, called Nudist Moppets. Somebody had sure been looking at it a lot; it was all smudged and the pages were bent and crumpled and coming apart. It was nothing but pictures, hundreds of pictures of boys and girls without any clothes on. When the game of Hide and Seek was over, Robin curled up on the davenport to study the book. She didn’t have much time before dark. She had made a decision never to light any of the kerosene lamps except in emergencies. The days were growing shorter and it was getting dark earlier, and she and Hreapha simply went to bed when it got dark, and even Robert was learning how to ignore his nocturnal habits and join them in bed.

Now she had just a little while to study all the pictures before darkness fell, and even without words it was a form of entertainment such as she had been missing for a long time. She had not held a book or booklet in her hands for ages. Most of the kids in the pictures were near her age, some of them older, some younger, and she could identify with them and even envy their freedom to sport and play and mix with each other without any modesty. Some of the boys had weenies that were not just hanging down but sticking out! Robin turned the page and found a picture in which one of the girls had her fingers wrapped around a boy’s hard weenie. She tried to imagine what it would feel like to hold a weenie in your hand, especially if it was not limp like a hotdog weenie but hard and stiff.

Then she turned the page and got a real shock. The same girl who had been holding the boy’s weenie had put it in her mouth! None of her friends had ever said anything about such a thing as that or what it was called or whether any of them had ever done it, probably because they didn’t even know about it. Robin wondered how much the girl and boy were really enjoying it or whether they were just doing it because some man with the camera was making them do it so he could take their picture. Their faces both looked as if they were in heaven, and Robin wondered if it felt better for the boy or better for the girl.

Then it was too dark to keep looking at the book. She put it back where she found it, and she told Hreapha and Robert it was time for bed. She put more wood in the woodstove and turned the dampers so the wood would burn very slowly all night. It was going to be the coldest night so far, and Robin was glad to have her dog and kitty help her warm the cold sheets of the bed.

While she tried to drift off into slumberland, she found herself doing something that she had not done for years, although according to her mother she’d done it all the time when she was small: sucking her thumb.

Chapter twenty-three

Boy howdy but wasn’t it a pure marvel how some mornings you could wake up without any sign or trace whatsoever of any bodily ailment? It was almost as if his fairy godmother—if she still cared for him at all—had passed her wand over him and taken away all his afflictions. Not only that, but the Lady had left him with the first genuine hard-on he’d had in recent memory. Not only that, but he hadn’t bepissed the pallet during his sleep. Not only that but he had no urge to reach immediately for the bottle of Jack D. Not only that but he practically leaped up from the floor and did a little jig just to show that he could use his legs just fine. He felt wonderful…although previous experience had learned him to tone down his joy because it wouldn’t last more’n a few days at the most, if that. Probably this was his last great bout of feeling fine before the final return of the disease which would wipe him out.

But as long as he was feeling so fine, he might as well make the most of it. He gave his pecker a pump or two just to make sure it wasn’t a-fooling him, and then he headed for the bed, to enjoy at last the fruit of all these labors. The girl was surrounded by her pets, old Bitch and that darned bobkitten, all three of ’em sound asleep. “Good morning!” he said loudly and cheerily, to demonstrate that even his power of talking had returned. All three of them woke up at once and all three of them stared at his revivified pecker. Bitch said “HREAPHA!” The bobkitten said “WOOO!” Robin said “That’s a big weenie you’ve got.”

“Hey Sugar,” he said, “let’s shoo these animals out of here so we can have us a little fun.” And he gave Bitch a swat on her tail to make her jump out of the bed. Then he picked up the bobkitten to toss him off too, but the damn critter bit him! “Shit on a stick!” he hollered and flung the cat away. Then Bitch chomped him around the ankle; she didn’t sink her teeth into his flesh but she held on and he couldn’t shake her loose. “Damn it, Bitch, leggo!” he hollered, and tried to pull her loose from his ankle. Here come the bobkitten again, a-clawing its way up his back! “Git him off me!” he ordered Robin, who climbed out of bed and detached her bobkitten from his back.

By the time that he had got loose from the animals, Sog was dismayed to see that his erection had flopped. And Robin was laughing. He was mighty pleased to hear her laughing such a sweet laugh for the first time, but he felt she was amused by his drooping piece.

“What’s so damn funny?” he said.

“They were protecting me,” she said proudly. “You were getting ready to fuck me, and they knew it, and wanted to protect me!”

“You’ll need all the protection you can get after I’m gone.”

“You can talk right again,” she observed. “You must be feeling well enough to go someplace.”

“I aint going nowheres,” he said. “But I’m not long for this earth.”

“What does that mean?”

“This morning I’m feeling hunky-dory, but it’s just a sign. It’s a sign that my days is numbered. It’s Mother Nature’s way of tellin me that the worst is yet to come, and we’d better get ready for it.”

He put on his overalls and marched out to the kitchen and fixed them a big breakfast of pancakes and bacon, having to slice up a bacon slab. “How come you aint been carving up the bacon slabs?” he asked Robin.

“You know I can’t cut meat very well,” she said.

“Time you learned!” he thundered, and before the morning was over he had learned her how to carve meat. He also learned her how to tie her shoes. Then he took her out to the chopping block and said, “You’re pretty good with the axe, aint you? Well, just play like this here stick is the neck of a chicken and see if you caint cut it in two.” She was real handy with the axe and could cut sticks just fine, but when he told her to grab a chicken and do the real thing, she had problems. She had trouble chasing down a chicken to catch. “Don’t chase ’em,” he advised. “Just sort of sidle up to a flock of ’em and reach down slow and grab one.” It took three attempts before she could hold on to one and bring it to the chopping block. “Now,” he said, “just hold its head down and pretend its neck is one of them sticks you just split.”

“I can’t,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I just can’t do it.”

“You’ve got to,” he said. “You’ll never be able to cook fried chicken or roast chicken or chicken n’ dumplings if you can’t kill the damn chicken in the first place.”

It took him a long time to persuade her to give it a try, and she botched the first attempt so he had to finish it himself to put the hen out of her misery. Then he insisted she try again with another hen, and he didn’t care if they had to slaughter every damn chicken on the place until she got the hang of it. But she managed to kill the chicken the second time, although she still screeched and squealed while the headless body was flopping around in the yard.

He helped her with the work of plucking the feathers and scalding the birds and showed her the best ways to carve up the chickens. They had two fine big fat hens which would furnish them with plenty of good eating for a while. He was getting tired of pork himself.

While dressing the poultry, he realized that he had never bothered to dig up his sweet potato patch, so right after lunch he took Robin out there and showed her how to dig the yams. She wore her boots and her cute pair of denim overalls, but the tater-fork was just too much for her; she just lacked the body weight to force it into the soil. “Next year you’ll be bigger and heavier and maybe you can work the fork into the earth. Also it helps if you do it after a rain when the earth is softened up.” He went ahead and did the spading himself and let her dig the big sweet potatoes out of the ground, more than a bushel of them, enough to get her through the winter and spring. He took one of the mature yams and explained how she should save it for next year’s crop, and how to poke nails in the side of it to suspend it in a jar of water until it rooted its slips. “Can you remember how to do that come next spring?” he asked.

“I think so,” she said.

As long as he was feeling so healthy and strong, he decided it would be a good thing to fell a few more trees so Robin could have a supply of logs to chop for firewood. In another year she might be big enough to force a tater-fork into the earth but she wouldn’t be big enough to cut down a tree by herself. He took her along that afternoon to watch him so she could see how it was done, if she ever got big enough to do it. With his crosscut he felled half a dozen oaks and maples not too big to drag back to the house, and she helped him drag them. It was a crisp autumn day, most of the color gone from the woods but the sky bright blue and the air not too cold. They found the tracks of bear, wild turkey, deer, possum, coon, porcupine and etsettery, and he learned her how to identify the tracks and even how to tell the difference between those of a buck deer and those of a doe. They also found some pecan trees, one of them a big one that had shed considerable amounts of its nuts that were just waiting to be gathered, and later on they could fill nearly a whole toesack with them. While he worked that day he told her helpful and philosophical things she ought to remember, that he’d been thinking about while he couldn’t talk. Such as, everything in this life worth getting requires being stung a few times. But just as you can ease the sting of a bee by applying the crushed leaves of any three plants, you can always find something in nature to ease the aches and pains of life. Howsomever, there aint no cure for cancer, the common cold and whatever the fuck has been a-bugging me for the past several months. You have to take the bitter with the sweet. You can’t get something for nothing. But be careful what you wish for because you’re liable to get it and not want it. We have all been sentenced to a life sentence in the prison of life, and there aint no parole.

But he realized that she wouldn’t remember all that stuff. So that evening before it got dark he took the last paper sacks which she hadn’t already cut up into paper dolls and he borrowed her scissors and cut up some rectangles like sheets of writing paper and he told her to write down these things so she could remember them: Time once gone caint never be got back again. Pawpaws make fair catfish bait. Life is like a dead-end road: it don’t go nowhere and when it gets there it aint worth the trip. For a bad cough, just gather you a bunch of pine needles and bile ’em down with some molasses. People aint no damn good, and like medicine have to be took in small doses. Don’t never drop your broom so it falls flat on the floor, and if you do drop it don’t never step over it; if you do it means you won’t be able to keep house worth beans. Disappointment comes in all shapes and colors; the least ugly is called pleasure. Laugh before it’s light, you’ll cry before it’s night. If you sing before breakfast, you’ll be crying before suppertime. If you hear the firewood a-singing and a-popping and a-cracking, it’s a sure sign that snow’s about to fall.

He went on and on, until Robin protested, “We’re using up all the paper. There won’t be any left for my paper dolls.”

“Okay, I’ll hush,” he said. “I need just one last piece of paper, and I’ll tell you what for. I’ve been feeling pretty good today, and like I say it’s probably Mother Nature’s way of telling me that the worst is yet to come. And when it comes, I may not be able to speak at all or even grunt. So I have to write my last words to you on this last scrap of paper, and here they are.” He took the pencil from her and block-printed the letters: SHOOT ME. He showed them to her. “The time might come when I’ll have to show this to you because I caint talk at all, and you’ll have to do it. You can use the shotgun or the rifle or the handgun or whatever you want, but you’re gonna have to put me out of my misery.”

“I won’t ever do that!” she yelled at him. “Don’t you ever tell me to do that!”

He sympathized with her feelings and decided not to keep insisting on it right now. But soon he would have to force her someway to agree to it. He had thought about this a lot. Why couldn’t he just do the job hisself? Because, most likely, when the time came, he’d be too feeble and blind and shaky to handle any sort of firearm. Thinking about this so much, he had recollected that he had shot and killed that hermit named Dan Montross, not knowing at the time that he was the grandfather of the little girl he’d kidnapped and not knowing that his motive for kidnapping her was pure: to raise the child away from the evils of the world. It would be right and proper, Sog had decided, that he hisself be kilt by the same means that he had kilt Dan Montross. It would also be right and proper as well as practical for Robin to do away with the man who had illegally snatched her away from the world.

There was so much to do, and so little time left. He had to take Robin up behind the house to the old orchard, help her pick a bushel or two of poor apples, which would at least do for drying and making cider and vinegar, and give her some hints on how to manage the orchard in the future, pruning it and grafting and such. She might even get some peaches and pears too if she took care of the orchard. Then he had to hurry. There was really just two more important things to do. He had to show Robin how to kill a deer and persuade her to do it, so she could have some venison. The meadow across from the house was often populated by a family of deer, and Bitch liked to get out there and mingle with them.

Late one afternoon he took the .293 rifle and Robin and they went to the meadow and he showed her how to stand and how to hold the gun, and they didn’t have to wait too long before a young buck came out into the clearing, and he whispered, “Okay, aim for his chest.”

“No,” Robin said. “He’s too beautiful to shoot.”

By the time he was finished arguing with her, the buck had picked up their voices and run away. “Am I too beautiful to shoot?” he demanded. “Naw I aint, and you’d better believe that there are reasons for shooting something whether you like it or not.”

The wonder dog, Bitch, one morning presented him with some junk she’d probably found in the cooper’s shed in the same place she’d found the scissors. It consisted of an old rough corncob on a stick, a rosewood striker, and a quarter-sawn striker block. Sog recognized at once that the contraption was a frictionwood turkey caller. “Good dog!” he said, and reflected that Bitch would take better care of Robin than he hisself could ever do. “We’re in business.”

He persuaded Robin that turkey gobblers weren’t beautiful at all. They was, in fact, ugly, especially their red wattle. He got Robin to practice with the caller, showing her how to make it cluck and yelp and purr and even make the quaver of young hens. And then he took the shotgun and led Robin off to the woods (she had to make Hreapha and the bobkitten stay behind) and sure enough before the day was done she had learnt how to call a gobbler and then shoot the sonofabitch.

“Hon, ask your Ouija Board if it’s Thanksgiving yet,” he requested, and she got out the board and they put their fingertips on the thing and it told them that Thanksgiving would be day after tomorrow. He helped her plan the menu for Thanksgiving: they would have roast wild turkey stuffed with apples and cornbread, mashed potatoes and gravy, and for himself (if he felt like eating; his appetite seemed to be going away again) a mess of greens: turnip, mustard, etsettery. His eyesight was starting to go again too. His goddamn eyeballs seemed to be vibrating inside his head. He had considerable difficulty seeing well enough to crack and shell the pecans, but he got enough of ’em done so they could have roasted pecans as a side dish with the turkey, and also a pecan pie for dessert. He had to get out his crutches again to help him move around in the kitchen.

He was proud of Robin, that she could do all those things, like roast a turkey. He tried to tell her so, but his voice was starting to disappear on him again. Too bad, because he still had so much to say to her. While he could still talk at all, he told her as best he could that he would tell her the location of a huge amount of money if she could agree to shoot him when the time came. Still she wouldn’t agree. He was starting to lose his temper. He was truly pissed that she couldn’t do this one simple little favor for him. He went ahead and showed her where the money-chest, the Sentry box, was buried under the front porch, but he decided to hold on to the key and offer it as a bribe when the time came that he needed to be shot.

He didn’t know what time it was, or what day it was and even where he was at. She asked him, “Can Hreapha and Robert come to Thanksgiving too?” and that reminded him that it must be Thanksgiving. All his brains seemed to be turning into mush.

In one hand he clutched a quart bottle of good old Mr. Daniels from Tennessee (where his forebears came from too). Maybe this was the last bottle he’d be able to drink, though there was enough more in the storeroom to pickle Robin until her middle age if she ever developed a taste for the stuff. He laughed. Or tried to. In the other hand he held the key to the Sentry and the scrap of paper that said for her to shoot him. Those three things was all he needed in the world.

“Dinner’s ready,” she came and said to him, and helped him make his way to the table and sit down. There was a goddamn dog sitting in one of the chairs, and a fucking baby bobcat sitting in another one, and they both had little napkins tied around their necks. Or maybe he was just imagining it, because he couldn’t see worth shit nohow. Robin was talking to him but he couldn’t tell what she was saying.

The dog and the kitty was staring at him. He tried to pick up his fork to start in to eating, but his hand shook so he couldn’t manage it. He wasn’t hungry anyhow. All he wanted was some more of this here bottle in his hand, which he could leastways hold steady to raise to his mouth.

“We ought to say grace,” he heard her say. He tried to remember who Grace was.

Nobody said her, so Robin came around and commenced feeding him, forking his food into his mouth until his mouth was filled and he tried and tried to chew and swallow, just to help out. But he couldn’t, so he had to just spit it out, and it splattered all over the table.

It was time to go. Hell, it was long past time to go. He held up the sign that asked her to shoot him, and waved it back and forth in front of her face, and offered her the key, but she just shook her head and kept on a-shaking it.

He realized he needed to piss, and not only that, he needed to shit. He grabbed his crutches and hobbled for the door, falling down before he reached it. She did her best to help him up. “You’d better sit down, Sugrue,” she told him.

“Gotta go,” he managed to say, which was his next-to-last words. He struggled on out to the outhouse, and she went with him. He got her into the outhouse and dropped his overalls and said to her the only thing that would make any sense besides “Shoot me.” He grabbed the back of her head and said, “Sug my dig.” And there really wasn’t much that he remembered of this life after that.

Chapter twenty-four

Your own in-habit is always waiting for you whenever you meet up with it again, especially after a long absence. When she had come back from her long, terrible journey, her in-habit, which was now firmly and forever entrenched on these premises, had been happier to see her than even Robin had been.

But she had discovered a strange and important thing about others’ in-habits. For whatever reason, someone else’s in-habit will appear to you—no, “appear” is the wrong word—will make itself known to you only when you are in great need of it. That was certainly true of the boy in-habit who had helped her find the scissors and the turkey caller and had given her such detailed but ultimately useless instructions on how to find her way to Stay More. He was a wonderful in-habit and she felt as if she were his dog as much as she was Robin’s and certainly much more than she was the man’s. And yet when she returned from her long rough journey, he had not been around to greet her. She had “looked” for him around the cooper’s shed, and had hreaphered for him a few times, but he seemed to have disappeared. Oh, of course, he was already and always disappeared, but his presence seemed to have evaporated. She had wanted to tell him that many parts of the trail he had used to get to Stay More simply no longer existed. She had also, since he seemed to be able to hear her as well as a fellow dog could, wanted to tell him that she was pregnant. It was an important announcement that she couldn’t communicate to Robin or Robert or her friends the deer or her friends the beaver or her friends the chickens. She wanted someone to know, although she herself was not at all certain who the father was, dear sweet Yowrfrowr or one of the pack of coyotes who had raped her on her way home.

The trail to Stay More still existed in many places: she had watched for landmarks that the in-habit had told her to look for: a red bluff, a lone tall pine, a craggy gap through boulders, a steep slope of slate scree, a dark forest of hickory trees, a limestone ledge with a spectacular waterfall spilling over it and dropping fifty or more feet, a treacherous vertical path that she should skirt because she didn’t have hands for holding to the limbs beside it, the dark luxuriant holler or glen surrounding the run-off of the waterfall, and then, nearing Stay More, abandoned logging trails, abandoned pastures, abandoned orchards, abandoned farms.

The last mile had been fairly easy, and even fun, although Hreapha realized that the entire route she had taken was simply not one that Robin could ever take, in order to escape her captivity, if that was her wish. Hreapha even doubted that Adam Madewell, if the boy were actually “around” today, could manage the journey that he had taken so often to reach the Stay More school. And she herself was nervous and disinclined to make the return journey when the time came. It would be mostly uphill going back.

She had grown increasingly hungry, having been on the hike for two days and a night. The first day and night out, although she had sometimes detected actual remnants of the path once worn by the in-habit’s feet when he was a boy going to and from school, was confusing and difficult, and she had spent most of the cold night curled up in a cavern, not because she was tired yet or couldn’t see well in the dark, but because she had heard the coyotes, who were mostly nocturnal, and she did not wish to encounter them. She had tried her best to refrain from peeing, because she did not want to attract the coyotes with her advertisement or give them a trail to follow. Even so, on the second day out, one of them had picked up her scent and begun stalking her. She had become so increasingly desperate for mating that she was tempted to allow the coyote to catch her, but thoughts of dear Yowrfrowr made her seek to escape the coyote. In running as fast as she could to escape him, she had slipped on the slate scree and tumbled down a steep slope and landed in a briar patch that scratched her up badly, even bringing blood. But she had escaped the coyote, and after getting her wind back she ran onward, finding herself lost in the hickory forest, with only a vague sense of direction and no visual or olfactory clues. She tried to tune in to her old Stay More in-habit but it had long gone to the Madewell Mountain house, where its presence was sending her such strong signals that she was tempted to turn around and go home, even if she had to mate up with a coyote along the way. She had nothing against coyotes; their breeding was just as good as, if not better than, her own. In fact, most of these local coyotes were descendants of the long-extinct red wolf, a magnificent dog. But she didn’t like the idea of quick mating with strangers, and after all, coyotes did not speak her language, or rather they spoke a form of it that was not at all intelligible to her.

So she had gone on and managed to find her way out of the hickory forest. She had searched for but could not find the log which the in-habit had told her served as a footbridge over a little stream, so she had attempted simply to swim across in the frigid water, but she had been caught up in the current and thus discovered the fabulous waterfall by going over it! She had howled as she had fallen fifty feet to the pool beneath, had gone deeply underwater and struck herself on the bottom, losing consciousness. It was a wonder she hadn’t drowned. But when she had come to, she had found herself on the bank downstream in the glen of the waterfall, bruised and thoroughly wet and cold, but still alive.

The rest of the journey had been fairly easy, although she was so sore she could hardly walk. And when, finally, she reached the dogtrot log cabin where Yowrfrowr lived with a thousand cats and a beautiful old lady, she could only weakly announce her name to him and then collapse at his feet.

I’ll be jigswiggered! Yowrfrowr exclaimed. Will wonders never cease? I had given you up for permanently missing. Are you all right? And he licked her face.

I’ve just made a trip, she said, such as you should hope you never have to make.

For what reason? he said.

Why, to see you, silly, she said.

Oh, dear me, he said. I’m frightfully flattered.

Yes, dear you, she agreed. But she didn’t feel like doing any more talking until she’d had some rest and possibly something to eat and drink. Yowrfrowr obligingly exhumed one of his favorite bones for her, and led her to the springhouse, where she slaked her thirst. She rested a while and then told him about some of her adventures on the hike down from the mountains, and told him also of her experiences at the old Madewell homestead, where her new mistress was a charming young girl named Robin, whom the man had kidnapped.

Good heavens, Yowrfrowr commented. You’ve been living with a felon.

She told him all the good things about the place, even including the nice in-habit who lived in the cooper’s shed, as well as the beavers and their dam, and the recently acquired bobcat kitten. She wanted to make life up there sound as exciting as possible, on the chance she could persuade Yowrfrowr to go home with her. She told him that the man was very ill and would probably not last much longer.

But doesn’t the girl want to escape and go home? Yowrfrowr wondered.

Probably, Hreapha admitted, but even if there was a way she could get out of there, and there isn’t, she’s having the time of her life and is starting to think of the place as her home. I have to get back to her as soon as I can, but I just had to see you. I have been dying to see you.

May I guess why? Yowrfrowr inquired, and that was all that either of them had to say for the rest of the day and night. They found privacy at a distance from the cabin, and there they went through the ritual of positionings, almost like a dance. She displayed her swollen afterplace to him, with her tail held to one side, then stood motionless while he rose up and clasped her around her flanks, inserted himself and began thrusting. Her mother, in describing the act she could eventually expect, had warned her in advance to expect to find herself tied or locked at the afterplace with her mate after he had deposited his discharge in her. Her mother had told her that the climax of mating was called ‘getting off,’ but you don’t get off at all. You remain hooked together for a long time. And indeed, fifteen or twenty minutes passed before they could separate, whereupon they just lay snuggly cuddled and resting for a long time, talking about Stay More gossip and all the things that had happened on Madewell Mountain, until, after going to the springhouse for another long drink of water, they repeated the whole process.

Hreapha spent the night, and, in fact, another night after that one…or maybe two. She was not bothering to keep count, but it seemed they made love at least half a dozen times, until finally she had no desire remaining. But she had no desire to leave, either. Yowrfrowr gladly agreed to accompany her on a kind of sentimental journey to her old home, which she found completely abandoned and uncared for. No trace of her in-habit remained there, but she could not help reflecting that her poor master, if he had stayed there, might not now be in death’s embrace. Conceivably, Hreapha could have lived out her life in this old place, happy with occasional visits to her beloved Yowrfrowr, without ever knowing of the heaven of Madewell Mountain. She began to talk to Yowrfrowr in earnest about the possibility that he might be able to join her permanently at the Madewell homestead. She stopped just short of actually begging him to go with her.

You make it sound so wonderful, he allowed. I am greatly tempted. But you must understand how devoted I am to my mistress, and how crushed and desolate she would be if I left her, even with all those uncompanionable pussycats she has.

I’ll miss you for the rest of my life, she whined.

Godspeed and take care, he said.

And after she’d left him, she reflected that he might have gone with her if she were still in heat and if he had not exhausted himself servicing her. He also might have gone with her if she had asked for his protection against the coyotes. She hadn’t even mentioned to him that there was a pack of coyotes roaming Ledbetter Mountain, which was the sister mountain to Madewell.

When she stopped to pee, she was relieved to note that her marking no longer bore the sexual advertisement. That was some small comfort in the hideous hike, mostly uphill, that lay ahead of her.

She had no idea how long it took her to get back home; certainly more than the two days and one night the downhill journey had consumed. It should have been easier because she had the guidance of her own scent on the trail as well as of her in-habit at the Madewell place, and if it hadn’t been for the damned coyotes she would probably have got home without much more difficulty than she had had leaving it. She heard them before she smelled them, late on the second afternoon out. And then she saw them. There were five males, smaller than German shepherds, long legged, dark furred, pointy eared. They were good-looking, even handsome. They lacked Yowrfrowr’s jovial bearing and shaggy casualness, especially his jaunty flopping ears, and certainly, when they began attempting to communicate their wishes to her, they lacked his elegance of speech.

Her first instinct was to run, but, tired as she was already from her uphill hike, she doubted that she would get very far out of their reach. So she stood motionless, cringing and snarling. Leave me alone, she said. I’ve already been bred.

They gave no sign of having understood her. Expressing their one-track minds in their guttural language, they began circling her, moving ever closer. Keeping her afterplace covered firmly with her tail, she breathed deeply, filling her lungs, deciding that she would not give in without a fight. But the wiser course would be at least to make an attempt to run away from them. When the alpha male raised a paw to begin mounting her, she bolted and ran harder than she had ever run, not uphill on the original path, but downhill, off into the woods. If only she could reach the waterfall again, she would gladly go plunging over the fall and into the pool, anything to get away from these lechers.

But they stopped her before she could reach the waterfall. The beta male and the gamma male jumped her and held her while the alpha male got himself into position to copulate. She struggled and bit viciously wherever she could find a piece of coyote to bite upon. But the alpha male poked and poked and got off without becoming locked, and then the beta and gamma males each got on and got off inside her. She had no strength to resist further when the delta and epsilon males each took their turn.

Eventually they just left her lying there on the ground. Their claws as well as their teeth had drawn blood on several parts of her body. It seemed that in their throaty voices they had debated with one another whether or not to kill and eat her, a fate from which she was saved when they caught wind of a passing deer and took off after it.

She was not able to move for another night—or perhaps two—laying in a thick pile of autumn leaves which offered only a little protection against the below-freezing temperature. Then when she finally could attempt to get to her feet, she could scarcely move. An entire day was consumed in covering less than half a mile of the trail. She found sufficient water to drink but nothing to eat. She saw an abundance of rodents and other small animals but lacked the strength to chase and catch one.

Thus she was truly starving and very cold when she finally reached the beaver pond, the first sign of home territory. Her beaver friends were solicitous about her welfare but she couldn’t communicate her mishaps to them. She rested a while with them and then finished the journey home, exulting “HREAPHA!” when she came in sight of the house.

She was so very thrilled to be home again. She never wanted to leave. For days and days she was content simply to rest, keeping warm by the stove, sleeping for hours on end, enjoying Robin’s company and even Robert’s, and eating her fill of doggy nuggets. Apparently the homestead had survived intact without her during her absence, and even the chickens had not needed her supervision.

The man was obviously on his last legs, although he had a brief, mysterious spell of apparent freedom from his afflictions, beginning with an obvious intention to put his miraculously restored manthing to use, an intention which required intercession from both Hreapha and Robert. The moment of her seizing one of his ankles in her teeth to prevent him from assaulting Robin was the moment when she understood that her longstanding fidelity to him was at an end. But Hreapha was glad to get outdoors again when the man began giving Robin her final instructions. Hreapha watched sympathetically but fearfully as he taught Robin how to behead a chicken, and then as he tried to teach her how to dig sweet potatoes. Hreapha couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to eat a sweet potato, but when it came to digging up things she was as good as a spade or fork and she demonstrated this ability to Robin by digging up some of the tubers for her. She also accompanied them to the old orchard, but being unable to climb trees there wasn’t any help she could offer there. She kept her distance during their deer hunt, which she hated, and was terribly proud of Robin for refusing to shoot the young buck.

She had not had any “contact” with the in-habit since her return from Stay More, but as she was walking by the cooper’s shed on her daily check-up on the henhouse, she heard a distinct Psst! requiring her attention. And there he was again, wherever he was. She could only hear his voice, They’s a right fine turkey caller my paw made out of rosewood and frictionwood which makes the most wondrous noises just like them wild turkey gobblers and hens, if you’d care to take it to those folks so’s they could get ’em a turkey for their Thanksgiving. Then he led her to the box in the cooper’s shed which contained the pieces of wood and the corncob striker. Thanks so much, Hreapha said, and delivered this gift to the man, and heard herself called “good dog” by him for the first time in her life. She was sorry that Robin made her stay behind when she went off to use the turkey caller and shoot her turkey.

Hreapha had never eaten turkey before, but the smell of it when it was cooking in the old stove was certainly interesting, even savory. Hreapha understood how she was supposed to participate in this special occasion called Thanksgiving. She had no conception of any deity toward whom thanks should be directed, but she certainly was ready to thank Robin for working so hard in the kitchen to prepare this marvelous dinner, and she had no objection whatsoever when Robin wanted to tie a little napkin around her neck so she could climb up into a chair and sit at the table with the human beings…and with Robert, similarly attired.

The man was obviously in such bad shape he couldn’t even feed himself, and when Robin tried to feed him he vomited the food all over the table. Hreapha’s heart ached for the way he had ruined Robin’s Thanksgiving. And then he began to shove that piece of paper in her face.

Hreapha was a very smart dog but of course she was not able to read the letters that humans use to communicate on paper. She knew the basic words of the Ouija Board such as YES, NO, and GOODBYE, but she could not decipher letters as such, and thus she did not know what was printed on the piece of paper which the man insisted on waving back and forth in front of Robin’s face. It was something he was trying to say to her, something that he was trying to get her to do. Hreapha found herself breathing hard and feeling distinctly uneasy when the man got up from the table, fell down, was helped up again by Robin, and hobbled on his crutches in the direction of the outhouse. Robin followed, and so did Hreapha.

With the door to the outhouse not closed, and the afternoon light still strong enough to illuminate the scene, Hreapha could only watch with great curiosity and no little fear as the man dropped his overalls, took out his manthing, and forced Robin to put it into her mouth. Although in itself this did not strike Hreapha as exceptional (she had licked Yowrfrowr’s genitals, and he hers), it was obvious that Robin hated it. She beat against him with her fists until he had to let her go, and then he collapsed upon the seat of the outhouse. Sobbing, with tears running down her cheeks, Robin brushed past Hreapha and rushed to the house, and Hreapha started to follow, but Robin came back at once, carrying in her hands the instrument she had used to kill the turkey. It had two barrels. Robin pointed the instrument at the man and the instrument fired twice, knocking Robin backward to the ground. Hreapha rushed up to her, but could only lick her face as Robin lay there for a long time crying her heart out.

Hreapha walked slowly to the outhouse and studied the man, who was sitting there with many holes in his body, through which blood poured. He may have been a bad man, a very bad man, but now he was not a man of any kind any longer. He was a corpse. Some part of Hreapha felt the loss of her master, but the ultimate measure of her smartness was that she understood that the man was now better off. And so were they all.

Chapter twenty-five

Readers who have been holding their breath in expectation that Sugrue Alan would cause some great harm to Robin Kerr—or vice versa—can now let out a long sigh. The bastard was terminated, and regardless of whatever mixed feelings were being felt by Robin, by that darling cur Hreapha, and by the devoted reader, I personally was glad, glad, glad, and I was making plans already to move from the barrel factory to the house, not that I preferred the house to the shed (shelter as such had no meaning for me) but I had deliberately stayed away from the house as long as Sog Alan was the occupant of it. And now the only house he occupied was the outhouse, which he would continue to occupy for years, actual years for heaven’s sake, although it would be only his skeleton residing there. Of course his body was too big for poor Robin to move, and I was powerless to give her a hand—I didn’t have a hand to give—and while she doubtless eventually (because of the smell, for one thing) thought of trying to pull the deceased off his throne and drag him to a burying spot, she realized that was simply beyond her strength. So she had to leave him there. She never used that outhouse again herself for the purpose of micturition or defecation, although there was, after all, an unoccupied hole, if she had been able to ignore the macabre. She simply squatted in the yard, as Hreapha did, as Robert did, confident that her privacy was not being invaded, oblivious to the simple fact that I could watch her, if I chose, because while I might not have possessed any of the handicaps of selfhood such as appetite, sleepiness, sensitivity to hot or cold, or the need to micturate or defecate, I did possess a certain sentience which gave me sight and hearing and speech. More about this later, but for now I was thoroughly aware of what was going on, and I did not avert my gaze when the little girl needed to go out, nor when the turkey vultures—or buzzards as we called them—soaring high overhead with their keen eyesight detected the carrion occupying the outhouse and made short work of removing the meat from the bones, so that in a matter of weeks there was not even an odor remaining.

This is not to say that Sugrue Alan, although his flesh became birdfeed, did not have any sort of funeral. One of my earliest memories of the jerk was when I was in the second grade at Stay More—no, not exactly I but rather my person, the person who went to California at the age of twelve and left me, whatever sentient form I had, to take his place as enchanted habitant of these premises (I like Hreapha’s use of that term, in-habit, but it suggests that there might also be an out-habit), anyway, my person, while still living here and trekking eight miles each schoolday over that terrible terrain poor Hreapha had recently essayed, had been required by Miss Jerram, the teacher, to accompany all the rest of the pupils on a march up into Butter-churn Holler, to conduct a funeral for a mule named Old Jarhead, the work animal of a poor family of kids named Dingletoon, a mule senselessly beaten to death by a pack of punks led by Sog Alan. Miss Jerram forced the gang to dig a grave and bury the mule, and instructed various pupils, including Old Jarhead’s owners as well as her murderers, to speak solemn requiems for the departed. Even Sog himself, miscreant and bully, was required to speak, and began, “I never done nothing in my life that I was sorry for,” but paused and added, “until now.” And spoke a sincere apology, which moved my person, seven-year-old Adam Madewell, to giggle, this causing him to be beaten up later by Sog and his cronies.

What my person—and I too, now—remembered most about that mule’s funeral was the singing, at Miss Jerram’s request, of a funeral hymn, a traditional dirge known to everyone at Stay More, which consisted of several verses and a chorus at the end of each:

Farther along we’ll know all about it,

Farther along we’ll understand why;

Cheer up, my brother, live in the sunshine,

We’ll understand it all by and by.

The death of Sugrue Alan needed some sort of closure, a funeral or a service of some sort—no one in those days in that part of the world would have understood or appreciated the so-called “memorial service” held nowadays with its gaiety and laughter and jokes and digs amounting almost to a roasting rather than a commemoration of the departed—a ceremony of some sort to solemnize and ritualize the fact of Sugrue’s death. Even I, at the age the “in-habit” was at the time of Sugrue’s death (and still was, forever)—twelve—understood enough of human nature, without even the faintest notion of what psychology meant, to realize that the only way for poor Robin to climb out of her deep distress and grief would be to speak and sing some manner of last offices.

She was having a terrible time, and more than ever needed her mother and missed her terribly. Neither Hreapha nor Robert could console her; indeed, the very fact that they were animals seemed to highlight her awareness of being the only living human being on the mountain. It was almost as if she were the only person in the world. She certainly was the only person in the world of Madewell Mountain, and the only other person who had occupied that world had died at her hand. She was wracked with the ambivalence of having killed him as an act of mercy at his own request, but having been forced into that killing by his nastiness to her in his last moments. His attempt to make her “go down” on him did not in itself offend her—it wasn’t pleasant but it wasn’t unbearable—so much as his rudeness and desperation in insisting upon it. Was she able to understand that he had made the attempt not because he actually desired it, but because in his reduced condition it was the only thing his poor mind could conceive of which might compel her to do his bidding and shoot him? Probably not, but she knew that he had ceased, in his last moments, being the Sugrue that she had known.

How did I know these were her thoughts? Well, my goodness, certainly you’ve fathomed that I possessed the ability not only to inhabit the premises but also to inhabit the consciousness of each of its inhabitants. How else could I reveal their thoughts and feelings to the most important, albeit temporary, inhabitant of this place, namely, you, the reader? Is it too much of a stretch for you to believe that I am the real narrator of this book you are inhabiting? Do you need proof? Okay then, I’ll tell you what happened to Leo Spurlock, who you might have been expecting to show up at any moment, brandishing his revolver and ready to kill Sog Alan himself. Leo, you may or may not be happy to learn, got hopelessly lost on the north face of Madewell Mountain, spent a couple of frigid, scary nights in the woods, and like many lost people, moved unconsciously in a circle that brought him back eventually to his stranded vehicle, where a man driving an expensive type of SUV was trying to get around him. He chatted with the man and assured him there was no way he could get on up the mountain, and finally persuaded the man to turn around and head back down the mountain, and even to give Leo a ride. The man was going to Harrison anyhow, where Leo was able to hire a tow truck to rescue his pickup from its miring on the hopeless trail, but he did not attempt any further progress up that vanishing trail. He was still searching other roads and other trails with his topographic survey maps, and still having adventures, albeit none as exciting as his encounter with those hippies and his rescue of that abducted girl. There. Enough of Leo. How would I know all that unless I’m performing for you some of the same services that I was performing for Robin?

But I had not yet made myself known to her again. She was in great need of me, and, like Hreapha, had come to the conclusion that I only showed up—maybe turned up is the better term—when I was greatly needed. I recalled fondly how she’d been searching for me previously, even inviting me into the house to keep warm, bless her heart, not understanding that I didn’t need to keep warm, and not understanding either why I chose at that particular moment to remain withdrawn from her consciousness. I wasn’t happy that she’d considered me only a figment of her imagination. It is so easy to believe that there isn’t any such thing as us—call us in-habits as Hreapha does for want of a better term—or that we are only the products of a desperate imagination, an overheated need or yearning. We certainly don’t come when we are called, or respond to any attempt to locate us or communicate with us, because we are, after all, intensely idiolectal: nothing could be more private and personal than a part of oneself that one perforce must leave behind when one leaves a place. I was just the residue, as it were, of Adam Madewell, but I possessed something he no longer did: habitation at this homestead.

The simple fact was that I didn’t know what I could do for Robin, and I felt helpless. My joy at the removal of the bad guy was dampened by my awareness of her sorrow for having killed him. What could I say to her? Gal, you done the right thing? No, because for her to believe that, she’d have to accept it on her own, not because she heard it from a disembodied peer.

Several days after Sog’s mercy-killing, if it may be called that, when the buzzards (and crows too) were busy at their feast, and I had moved from the shed to the house, Robin abruptly stopped crying and began to sing. The rest of us—Hreapha, Robert, myself—were surprised. She had rarely sung when Sog was alive, perhaps out of self-consciousness about her voice, which was, in fact, a very sweet soprano. What she sang was not important, probably a contemporary popular song—it was something about Hi de ho, hi de hi, gonna get me a piece of the sky—what was important was the sense that the singing was allowing her to vent her emotions, and that the time had come for closure.

When she finished, I remarked, That’s right perty. I reckon we can start in now to saying our goodbyes to the departed.

Robin laughed and looked around as if she might be able to see me. “You’re back,” she said. “You only come when I need you real bad.”

I don’t reckon I come, one way or t’other. To come, you’ve got to’ve been able to’ve went, and I aint went. I’m just here. I just am.

“Well, I need you, that’s for sure,” she said.

You needed me real bad yesterday and the day before, I observed, but I didn’t have no notion what I could do for ye.

“What do you mean, say our goodbyes to the departed? Do you think we should go out there to the outhouse and talk to him?”

I laughed. Naw, I don’t reckon the buzzards and the crows would let us git close to ’im. But it’d make ye feel a heap better iffen ye could hold some kind of ceremony. Not no funeral, because you aint a-fixing to bury him, but jist speak and sing something solemn, ye know?

“Like read something from the Bible?” she said. “The trouble is, I don’t have a Bible.”

Let me see if I caint find ye one, I said. Or if you’ll jist listen careful, I’ll tell ye where one’s hid.

By voice alone, since I couldn’t point, I directed her to a little door in the ceiling of the kitchen and she was strong enough to raise the wooden ladder to the wall and with her flashlight climb up and push open the door. There was an attic space up there with mostly worthless dusty junk that Adam’s parents had cast off, but in one dark corner, wedged between two ceiling joists and covered with boards, was one of Adam’s mother’s old castoff dresses wrapped around two books, the only books on the premises, which Adam’s mother, blinded by trachoma and no longer able to read and not allowed to read in any case because Adam’s father, Gabe Madewell, prohibited the possession of books for reasons we will later discover, had directed Adam to hide there.

One of the two books was a not-very-large but complete Holy Bible. The other was titled Farmer’s and Housekeeper’s Cyclopædia, subtitled A Complete Ready Reference Library for Farmers, Gardeners, Fruit Growers, Stockmen and Housekeepers, Containing a Large Fund of Useful Information, Facts, Hints and Suggestions, in the various Departments of Agriculture, Horticulture, Live Stock Raising, Poultry Keeping, Bee Keeping, Dairy Farming, Fertilizers, Rural Architecture, Farm Implements, Household Management, Domestic Affairs, Cookery, Ladies’ Fancy Work, Floriculture, Medical Matters, Etc., Etc. with two hundred and forty-nine illustrations. It was published in 1888 and belonged originally to Adam’s grandmother, Laura Madewell.

“You really are Adam Madewell, aren’t you?” she said. “Or you wouldn’t have known where these books were hidden.”

Iffen it makes ye feel some better, I’m all that’s left hereabouts of Adam, but he aint really here, so I caint say as how I’m him.

Starved for anything to read (the only reading matter in the house was a stack of back issues of Police Gazette which Sog had read and re-read and which Robin had found boring), Robin sat herself down upon the davenport with these two books and proceeded to forget about me. I didn’t mind. I was happy to see that she had something to take her away from her miseries, and I enjoyed looking over her shoulder, as it were, as she skimmed through both books. The pictures in the latter book, mostly simple black and white wood engravings, were fascinating. And while Robin might never need to construct a spile or post driver or a hay elevating apparatus, she could certainly use such things as the instructions on grafting apple trees and making a simple smoke house out of a barrel, not to mention the many recipes.

While she pored over the two books, she wasn’t unmindful of her primary objective: to find something suitable to read at the services. The problem with the Bible was that in search of inspirational or devotional readings she kept getting sidetracked into the stories or narratives which arrested her curiosity—Elisha and the bears, Joseph and his brethren, Moses and the princess, the plagues and The Passover, Queen Athaliah, and so forth. She was going to have a lot of fun on cold winter days reading the stories in the Bible.

“Well, I guess I’m ready,” she finally announced, addressing Hreapha as much as she was me. But then she addressed me, “Adam, do you know any hymns we could sing?”

So I sang for her, in my own pleasant country countertenor, “Farther Along.” I sang each of the verses, starting with this one:

Tempted and tried we’re oft made to wonder,

Why it should be thus all the day long;

While there are others living about us,

Never molested though in the wrong.

Followed by the chorus, with its promise that someday we might be able to make sense out of all this. Several of the six verses implied that we would have to meet Jesus first, when he came in glory and took us to meet our loved ones gone on before us, but the important thing was not so much inhabiting “that bright mansion” where we will meet Him but rather that we will learn answers to all our questions: why the wicked prosper, why the wrong are not molested, why we must leave home, why we must endure toils while others live in comfort, and so forth and so on. It is ultimately a hopeful and a reassuring hymn, and, as it turned out, Robin did learn the chorus if not all the verses, and thus was able to conduct a kind of memorial service for Sog, with three in her audience: Hreapha, Robert and myself.

She had, after all, come to think of Sog as her father, and she preached a little sermon to the three of us in which she declared that Sugrue Alan was not all bad, that he had some good qualities, like for instance he tried to teach her stuff, why just recently he’d taught her finally how to tie her shoes and cut her meat, and we ought to feel sorry for him because of how sick he’d been for several months now, and how feeble he had become, and she was sure that even if she could not forgive him for kidnapping her and taking her away from her home and her mother probably God would not hold it against him and he was probably going to heaven instead of hell. Amen.

“Okay, let’s sing,” she said to me. And I sang “Farther Along,” she joining in for the chorus, hampered not by keeping the key but by the variation of our pronunciation, hers the plain and simple accents of a Harrison schoolgirl, mine those of a backwoods country boy. Poor Robert was a bit spooked because he couldn’t tell where my voice was coming from.

When the hymn was over, she asked me, “Could you tell me a good part of the Bible to read out loud?”

Who, me? I said innocently. And then I added, I’m mighty sorry to have to tell ye, but I never got a chance to look at that book.

So she flipped aimlessly through the thick book, searching for something appropriate, but found nothing, just meaningless lists of names she couldn’t pronounce. Finally she decided that it might be just as well to read something from the other book, the 1888 Cyclopædia, so she let it fall open at random, and read aloud:

Bee stings.—Take a pinch in the fingers of common salt, put on the place stung and dissolve with water, rub with the finger. If not relieved in one minute wet the place with aqua ammonia. Care should be taken not to get the ammonia in the eye. I have used this remedy for several years and it has never failed with me.

“This just goes to show,” she declared, ceremoniously, “that he wasn’t always right but sometimes wrong, because his idea was to mix up the crushed leaves of any three plants and put them on the sting.”

Well heck, that’s what I’d do, myself, if I ever got stung, I declared. But the best thing is to try to keep from getting stung.

“Besides I don’t think we have any ammonia,” she said. Then she said, “I can’t think of anything else to say. So I guess this service is over.”

But one final gesture remained. When the buzzards and crows and rodents and maggots had left nothing but a skeleton sitting in the outhouse, a skeleton who would have looked scary except for the big grin on its face, Robin took a bottle of Sog’s favorite beverage, Jack Daniels Black Label, and, first tasting it herself but spitting it out, placed the bottle in the grip of one of the skeleton’s bony hands.

Chapter twenty-six

What she really wanted to ask the ghost of Adam Madewell was if he knew whether Sugrue had a ghost too, and if so, was the ghost going to be around like Adam? But she was afraid of the answer she might get. What if Adam said that Sugrue was already busy at work haunting the place? If that were true, Robin surely would have to leave, which scared her even more, although she had given it a lot of thought and had an emergency plan ready: she would wrap enough food for several days in a dishtowel, and take a flashlight with fresh batteries and the .293 rifle with several bullets, and getting Robert to ride on Hreapha’s back, she would just take off: heading south in the direction Hreapha had made her trip and hoping to come eventually to a path or trail or road of some sort. She’d have to wear her thickest coat, and maybe try to keep her hands in the pockets. There was already snow on the ground.

Why hadn’t Sugrue thought to buy her some mittens or gloves? He had filled that storeroom—Adam’s bedroom—with enough food and supplies and presents for her to last for a long, long time: he must have been planning to keep her for years. But he had neglected to get so many things that she would need, and hadn’t even thought of Kool-Aid and scissors and paper and books, and he hadn’t seemed to realize that she would outgrow all the clothes he’d bought for her.

Thinking of Christmas coming, she decided to go ahead and open everything he’d bought, searching for gloves or mittens, and while this would spoil the surprise of opening things he’d intended to give her for Christmas or Valentine’s or Easter or her next birthday or whenever, the whole idea of surprise and whatever fun is in the surprise means that there has to be another person involved, and there wasn’t any other person any more. Even with Hreapha and Robert in the bed with her each night, she had moments of panic at the thought that she was all alone now. Anyhow, being all alone allowed her to go ahead and open all the boxes and all the bags, and see all the stuff that Sugrue had intended to give her for presents eventually. “Thank you, thank you,” she kept saying to him again and again, as she opened the packages, which even included a box of ribbon candy intended for Christmas. Having learned to believe no longer in the Tooth Fairy, she was now prepared to accept this answer to her burning question, How could Santa Claus possibly find her this far off in the wilderness? She saw plenty of evidence that Sugrue had intended to be Santa, just as he had once been the Tooth Fairy. He had really got her some nice things, and she was sorry that he’d never be around to see her play with them or put them on…unless his ghost was here, and she surely had no awareness of his ghost being around, except for that ghastly skeleton in the outhouse.

Why didn’t she just get rid of the skeleton, which wasn’t too heavy for her to drag off its perch? It certainly wasn’t because she was afraid to touch it, because after all she’d made sure that those finger-bones had wrapped around the neck of that whiskey bottle. And the skeleton as such didn’t scare her. She remembered last Halloween when some of the kids dressed themselves in skeleton costumes, which she had thought were the least frightful of all possible costumes. What is scary about a collection of bones? No, maybe there were only two reasons she had decided to leave the skeleton there. One was that the outhouse had been Sugrue’s favorite place, where he had spent an awful lot of time. Dozens of times when she’d needed to go, she had opened the outhouse door to find him sitting there reading a Police Gazette and she could only say “Oops” and shut the door and wait for him to come out. But the other reason, the main reason, was that she liked the idea of leaving the skeleton there as a reminder that this man, Sugrue Alan, who had brought this world into existence, had kidnapped her away from her mother and friends and taken her to live in this place, was now no longer alive. She wanted to be able to glance in the direction of the outhouse at any time and see that reminder sitting there with that stupid grin and that stupid bottle of stupid whiskey in his hand.

Whenever Adam wasn’t around—that is, whenever she couldn’t detect that he was present, which quite often he was not—she just had to talk to Hreapha or Robert, or to herself. “I need to grow up fast,” she said one day, to any ears that cared to hear it. Her own ears did: she was painfully aware of how little and helpless and innocent she was, and she wanted to become an adult as soon as she could. But the more she thought about it, and wondered how long it would take for her to become an adult, the more she understood that actually what she really, really wanted, more than anything else in the world, was just to stay the age she was right now forevermore. Just not ever change, just always be little and fragile and simple.

She knew she spent too much time thinking. And too much thinking wasn’t good for her. She tried to avoid it by spending as much time as she could with her two precious books, the old Cyclopædia filled with all kinds of handy hints on how to live and manage a homestead, and the Bible filled with all kinds of interesting stories.

Much of the Cyclopædia was either over her head (“Farm Fences,” “Making Our Own Fertilizers,” “Caponizing,”) or useless (“The Best Known Recipe for Corning Beef,” “To Banish Crows From a Field,” “How to Judge a Horse”) but there were pages and pages of things she ought to know (“How to Keep Sweet Potatoes,” “Winter Egg Production,” “To Stop Bleeding,” “Washing Made Easy,” “Burns and Scalds”), and there were hundreds of recipes to be tried out, and she proceeded each day to try a new one: hominy fritters and potato cakes for breakfast, chicken patties and potato salad for lunch. There was something called “Sauce Robert,” easy, with onions, which she couldn’t resist making and trying out on her kitty, who liked it if it was poured over protein like chicken or ham. There were desserts galore she tried. There were sixty different recipes for pudding, but she had the ingredients for less than half of them, which was more than she could eat. Her favorite was called “Kiss Pudding,” using mostly egg yolks (which was spelled “yelks” throughout the book). There was a simple recipe “To Cook a Rabbit,” so with Hreapha’s help she went out and shot a rabbit and cooked it according to the directions and it was delicious, although not that much different from chicken. One dish that was different somewhat from chicken was the pigeon pie. She used the .22 rifle to kill a few pigeons (remembering of course Sugrue’s “Pigeon eat”). The recipe called for lining the bottom of the dish with a veal cutlet or rump steak, which she did not have, so she substituted ham, and it was just fine. She always shared her dishes with Hreapha and Robert, who greatly appreciated them.

She also took her mind off of thinking too much by playing with her paper dolls in her paper town of Stay More. The problem was that her paper dolls talked to her. Oh, of course it was probably just her own voice, but the paper dolls, those old country people of Stay More named Ingledew and Swain and Whitter and Duckworth and Coe and Dinsmore and Chism and so on, seemed to be talking to her in voices that weren’t her own, that she couldn’t even imitate, because they were country voices, like Adam’s. They told her stories that she couldn’t possibly have made up by herself, stories about floods and droughts and periods of darkness and periods of light, and an Unforgettable Picnic and the organization of a Masonic lodge—surely she couldn’t have been making all of this up in play. But she distinctly heard their voices.

“Hreapha, can’t you hear them too?” she asked, but her adorable dog just cocked her head to one side as if she were trying to listen, without acknowledging the voices.

For the longest time she had persuaded herself that the voice of the ghost Adam Madewell was just something she was imagining, although she couldn’t imagine how she would have been able to know the particular way he talked and some of the words he used. But how could she explain his finding those two books for her? Did she just have a hunch to see what was beyond that little door in the ceiling of the kitchen and go up there with her flashlight and find those two books? Well, it wasn’t impossible, but she was pretty well convinced that there really was a ghost named Adam who sometimes talked to her. And what about that business of singing the “Farther Along” hymn? She had heard Sugrue make some references to it, but he’d never sung it, so how did she learn the words and tune, unless she learned them from Adam?

She loved that song, and every day she sang it; she even sang it in bed at night when she was trying to go to sleep. She understood that “Farther Along” was a funeral hymn and ought to be reserved for funerals, but day by day the people in her paper town of Stay More began to die, of natural causes or illnesses or whatever people died of, including murder, and while she didn’t actually try to bury the paper dolls she had a little memorial service for those who died and sang “Farther Along.”

And when she got to that lovely verse which said, “When we see Jesus coming in glory, When He comes from his home in the sky; Then we will meet Him in that bright mansion, We’ll understand it all by and by,” she always began to wonder if this old house in which she lived might possibly be That Bright Mansion. She had never seen a mansion; Harrison had some fancy houses but not any mansions, which she knew were supposed to be very large and very imposing, neither of which this old house was. Still, she began to think that perhaps when Jesus came to meet her in this house, the house would be transformed into a mansion, just as pumpkins could be transformed into coaches in “Cinderella.”

Robin was ready for Jesus. She took the Bible and, avoiding all those stories about unpronounceable names like Zelophehad, Ahinoam, Zedekiah, and Athaliah, began at the beginning of the New Testament and read the four gospels. It took her a week to read each one, but by then according to the Ouija Board it was Christmas, appropriately, because she could celebrate the first Christmas in her life in which the meaning of the day had real significance as the birthday of the nice interesting kind man named Jesus, who was called the Christ.

She had got out the Ouija Board again and with Hreapha’s help determined that Christmas this year was only three days away. She took the axe and cut down a little cedar tree behind the house, and figured out a way to make it stand up in the living room, “planting” it in one of the wooden bails from the cooper’s shed. “Adam, do you mind if I borrow this?” she asked, but got no answer. She decorated her Christmas tree with stars that she cut out of toilet paper tubes (although she never used the outhouse any more, she still used toilet paper) and colored with her crayons, which were in danger of being used up. Searching through the storeroom for the possibility that Sugrue might have bought more than one big box of crayons, she came upon a paper sack she’d overlooked before. In it were a half dozen ears of dried up yellow corn, and there was a note, hand-lettered on a piece of brown paper, which said, “THESE HERE IS POPCORN, FOR YOU TO POP ON THE STOVE AND EAT OR MAYBE MAKE YOU SOME STRINGS FOR YOUR CHRISTMAS TREE. SORRY THERE’S NOT NO ORANGES TO PUT IN YOUR STOCKING BUT I GOT YOU SOME RIBBON CANDY SOMEWHERE AROUND IN HERE. MERRY CHRISTMAS AND LOVE, SUGRUE.” Before she shelled the kernels from the ears and attempted to pop them, she had to spend just a little time crying. Then when her tears were dry, she put some of the popcorn in a pot and popped it, and spent the rest of the day stringing it on coarse cotton thread (although Sugrue had never thought to have bought some scissors, he’d stocked a supply of other sewing things, like needles and thread). Thus her Christmas tree was garlanded with white fluffy strings of popcorn. It was the prettiest Christmas tree she’d ever had. She had a bit of trouble keeping Robert from climbing the tree, but she scolded him about it, and he left it alone, although when he thought she wasn’t looking he took a swat or two at one of the dangling stars.

The next day she took the shotgun and the turkey caller and went off with Hreapha (she had to shut Robert in the house to keep him from going too, commanding him to stay off the Christmas tree) to find a turkey for Christmas dinner, although she’d eaten so many leftovers from Thanksgiving that she was really tired of turkey and didn’t care whether she found one or not. The Cyclopædia had a great recipe for roast partridge and another recipe for a bread sauce for partridges, but she had no idea what a partridge was, apart from the “Twelve Days of Christmas” song. There was a pear tree up in the old orchard (which hadn’t borne any fruit this year), and she looked there first for the partridge. “Hreapha, do you know what a partridge looks like?” she asked. Poor Hreapha looked very sorrowful not to be able to help, but Robin assumed that one bird was the same as the next to her.

The snow in the woods was deep in places, and they couldn’t go very far. Robin didn’t even bother with the turkey caller. She decided just to serve ham for Christmas and turned around and headed back toward the house. Suddenly a large bird of some kind flew up out of the leaves and landed on the limb of an oak, and she loaded the shotgun with one shell and aimed it and fired, and the bird was hit. She didn’t know if it was a partridge or maybe a prairie chicken or grouse or quail or what.

But she plucked all the feathers off and washed it and stuffed it and prepared to cook it according to the Cyclopædia’s recipe for partridge. Christmas morning they woke early because of the brightness: it had snowed during the night and the sunlight was reflecting off the snow and brightening up everything (“In that bright mansion,” she sang.) Still entertaining a shred of hope that Santa might somehow have found her house, she ran to the Christmas tree, but could only stand there pretending, “Oh look! A bicycle!” She realized there really wasn’t any place she could ride a bicycle in this weedy wilderness. “Oh look! Skis!” she exclaimed and sat down to try them on. Hreapha and Robert observed her oddly. “Merry Christmas, Hreapha!” she said. “Here’s a sweater I knitted for you!” and she pretended to put the play-like sweater on Hreapha. She noticed that Hreapha’s belly was really swollen. “Merry Christmas, Robert!” she said. “Here’s a toy mouse I got for you to chase!” and she wound up the make-believe toy mouse and set it free, but Robert wouldn’t chase it. She was sorry that animals couldn’t make-believe. She had gift-wrapped just a few of the presents that Sugrue had intended to give her, which were real, not make-believe, and she slowly opened them and thanked him for each one.

She could not help wondering what she might actually have received at Christmas from her mother (and maybe even her father too). She wondered how much her mother missed her, and thought that possibly her mother had even gone ahead and wrapped gifts for her even though she wasn’t there. But she was proud of herself for putting together such a good Christmas without any help from her mother.

She’d left three of Sugrue’s long socks (which she’d laundered) tacked to the wall beside the stove, and filled them with ribbon candy and popcorn balls made with sugar syrup. Hreapha’s stocking also had in it some of the Purina dog chow (which was running low), and Robert’s stocking had a can of tuna-fish, and the animals were really able to appreciate the edible contents of their stockings, except the ribbon candy, which they wouldn’t eat.

Robin put the partridge (if that’s what it was) in the oven to bake. The sun was so bright they went out to play in the snow for a while, and Robin decided to see if they could go as far as the beaver pond, to wish a merry Christmas to their beaver friends. She had to carry Robert because the snow was too deep for him, but it wasn’t too deep for Hreapha, who managed to sort of leap in and out of it. They reached the pond to find it covered with ice, but there was an opening through the ice near the beaver’s lodge, and when Robin called “Merry Christmas!” a few times the family of beaver came up through that hole in the ice and even attempted to walk on the ice, which was too slippery for them. But Hreapha barked her “Hreapha!” and Robert mewed his “WOO! WOO!” and they were all one big happy family for a little while until Robin began to get very cold, and they just barely made it back to the house before freezing to death.

She had to warm up and dry off at the stove for a long time before she could resume preparing the Christmas dinner. When it was ready, just as she had done at Thanksgiving, she sat Hreapha and Robert at the table and tied little napkins around their necks. She said a kind of grace, “Dear Jesus, I have got to know you pretty well by reading about you, and I do believe you’re here with us on your birthday, aren’t you? Thank you for being here, Jesus, and thank you for all this food and for keeping us warm and safe. If there was anything I could ask for, it would be that you would let Adam be here too. Happy birthday, Jesus, and Merry Christmas. Amen.”

She waited just a few moments, and then called, “Adam? Adam! Don’t you want to eat Christmas dinner with us?” There was no answer. She said, “Well, I’m being silly, because ghosts don’t eat anything. Do they?”

And his voice replied! I aint no ghost, you dizzy gal. Ghosts is dead people, I aint never been dead, though I’d felt close to it sometimes.

“Merry Christmas, Adam!” she said.

Merry Christmas to you, Miss Robin. You’ve sure been doing it up proud the way my maw would’ve done, with them popcorn balls and all.

“I’m sorry you can’t eat with us, but I’ll set a plate out for you anyhow.”

Thank ye kindly. Howsomever, that aint no partridge. It’s jist a big fat bobwhite. I’ll bet it tastes real good anyhow.

They had a nice fine dinner and everybody was happy and after dinner there was just one more thing Robin wanted to do for Christmas. She took a shovel and found the spot under the porch where Sugrue had said he’d buried the money box. She started digging it up. Hreapha stepped in and helped and was a faster digger than Robin, although her swollen belly hampered her and tired her out. They dug up the box and took it into the house, and Robin used the key which Sugrue had given her to try to bribe her into shooting him.

Just for the fun of it, and with nothing better to do for a couple of hours, she counted all the money, which was mostly in hundred dollar bills, four thousand and twenty of them. She might not ever be able to spend any of it. But it sure was nice to have that much, almost half a million.

“Thank you, Sugrue,” she said. “Merry Christmas.”

Chapter twenty-seven

Too bad the dinner was so meager. Robert got one drumstick and she got the other one, and Robin ate most of the rest. It hadn’t been a very large bird to begin with. She had eaten all of the doggy nuggets that had been in her Christmas stocking, understanding full well that the supply of that particular kind of food was running out, and that the time would come when Robin might no longer be able to feed her.

But remembering the huge bird they’d had at Thanksgiving, she had looked forward to a similar feast for Christmas, and was disappointed and restless and famished. She wasn’t simply eating for two now. She was eating for perhaps four or five or even six. For several days now, her appetite had been doubled, at least. There was no way she could tell Robin to please put twice as much Purina chow in her bowl. She could only whine and linger expectantly over the bowl, but Robin didn’t get the hint.

There were times when she seriously considered eating Robert. It would not only furnish her with much-needed calories and proteins and all that but it would also rid the premises of a nuisance. The bigger Robert had grown, the friskier he had become, and he was constantly in motion, practically bouncing off the walls, and it got on her nerves, especially when she was trying to rest. She didn’t care whether or not Robert or Robin understood that she was pregnant, but she had to get them to understand that she needed more rest and peace and quiet than usual. She liked to curl up beside the stove and sleep for hours, but Robert had other ideas: he wanted to play, he wanted to chew on her, he wanted to chase her tail (alas, he had none of his own to chase), he wanted to climb up to the back of the davenport, pretending it was a tree limb and he a mountain lion, and then leap upon his prey, her, and knock the wind out of her. She honestly could not understand the reason for the affection she felt for him, which kept her from eating him. Or maybe it was simply that she understood he wouldn’t be very tasty.

Fortunately, but embarrassingly, ever since the man had ceased existing and thus had ceased eating many eggs, there was a great surplus of eggs, more than Robin could ever possibly use and more than the hens themselves wanted to sit upon and hatch, and thus, in the interests of self-preservation and to keep her stomach from growling at her (often she had awakened from sleep at full alert, thinking another dog was in the room), she had gone to the henhouse and sucked an egg or two. She was now regrettably a dyed-in-the-wool chronic egg-sucking dog, but she was almost tired of eggs. You really couldn’t sink your teeth into their contents, so while they might be nourishing they weren’t much fun to eat.

Shortly after Christmas the weather turned so terribly cold that none of them wanted to go outside, and the poor poultry were in danger of freezing. On one of the warmer days before Christmas, Robin had gone out to the woodpile and laboriously brought in all the wood she could carry and stacked it right in the living room. Then when the weather got so cold, she closed the kitchen door, letting the kitchen stove go cold, and did what little cooking she had to do on the living room stove. Eventually she had to close off the other two rooms, putting the feather mattress on the living room floor, so they lived entirely in that one room, going out only when they had to do their business, and making their business as speedy as possible. Although Robert had been what Robin called “housebroken” for some time now, meaning he didn’t want to get scolded for doing his business in the house, there were a few days that winter when it was so hideously freezing outside that he stubbornly refused to go out for his business and did it under the davenport. Robin not only screamed at him but rubbed his nose in it, and Hreapha said “HREAPHA!” meaning, “Just say the word, and I’ll gladly eat him.”

One day, when Robin opened the door to the storeroom to get some food, Hreapha dashed into the room and with her nose nudged one of the empty cardboard boxes toward the door.

Robin got the hint. “You want a box, Hreapha?” she asked, and picked up the empty box and set it in the living room. Hreapha nudged it closer to the stove, but not too close. Then she leaped up and pulled a pair of the man’s trousers from a peg on the wall, and deposited them in the box. Then she likewise pulled the man’s overalls off their wall-peg and put them in the box.

“Golly gee, Hreapha,” Robin said. “Are you trying to pack up his things to send away or just get them out of sight? Maybe that’s a good idea. I’m tired of seeing them.”

Hreapha also got some of the man’s underthings and stockings into the box, and then, when she had the “nest” thoroughly padded, she climbed into the box and curled up into a comfortable position, cushioned by the man’s clothing. She hoped Robin would understand that she had built herself a nest.

And possibly Robin did. “Oh,” she said, looking down at Hreapha. “Is this where you’re going to have your babies?”

“Hreapha,” said Hreapha.

But when the time came, she found that she couldn’t remain in the box. Staying curled up in the box made her think too much and worry too much. She fully understood that what she was about to do was natural and part of her job. She did not worry a lot about whether she would be a good mother or not. But she couldn’t help worrying about how all those babies were going to get out of her, and whether it would hurt her a lot. She got up. She sat down. She got up. She sat down. She couldn’t decide which was better.

She paced the room. There wasn’t really enough room to pace properly, but she had to pace and she walked constantly from wall to wall. “You don’t want to go out, do you?” Robin asked, and held the door open for just a moment, but the wintry blast that blew into the room made her quickly close it.

What Hreapha really wanted to do was dig, yes. She wanted to get out into the snow and dig and dig and dig down into the earth. She didn’t know why. Was she expecting the babies to be stillborn and wanted to have holes to bury them in? It scared her. She paced, and couldn’t stop.

She began to shiver, but not because she was cold. Maybe she was shivering from dread. Maybe the living things inside her were doing the shivering and it was making her shiver too. She decided that what she really needed was some grass to eat, but all the grass was covered with snow.

She began to pant, as if she’d already been running for miles, but all the pacing she had been doing, wall to wall, had not tired her that much. She was not panting because of her pacing. But she kept on pacing, and shivering, and panting.

And then she stopped suddenly and helplessly threw up.

“Oh no!” Robin said. Robin put her hand on the back of Hreapha’s neck, and that helped, but Hreapha went on heaving.

Leave her be, said the in-habit. They allus do that, they allus puke right before birthing, just so’s they’ll have a empty stomach during the work. She’ll be okay.

Hreapha was so happy to know that the in-habit was going to be in attendance at the event that her fears left her for a while, long enough for her to climb into her box-nest and lie down. And then she felt the urge to strain, thinking at first that she needed to do her business, but then she was amused by that thought. It is my business, she said to herself, but not the business of pooping. The business of birthing. She liked the word the in-habit had used. Birthing.

Might be a good idee to build up the fire a bit, the in-habit told Robin. Also have a towel or two handy.

So Hreapha strained. And she strained. And she grunted and growled and strained. She really had a reason to be panting now, and between straining she did a lot of panting. Robin brought her a dish of water but she didn’t want it. Not yet.

You jist might be a bit too young to watch, the in-habit said to Robin. Why don’t ye go sit on the davenport and I’ll keep ye posted.

“I want to watch,” Robin said. Hreapha didn’t want her to watch, and now even Robert had propped his paws on the edge of the box and was trying to peer into it. Hreapha didn’t want anybody, not even the in-habit, watching. She snarled. “HREAPHA!” she said; go away.

But then she didn’t care any more. She took a deep breath, bore down, grunted and kept it up for as long as she could.

Here she comes, said the in-habit, and sure enough she glanced at her flank and there was a pup, covered with slime and a double membrane which, she knew, she had to remove. She licked the membrane and seized it in her teeth and peeled it off her pup. The pup was a female and looked, Hreapha was pleased to note, more like Yowrfrowr than like herself. She was going to have a shaggy coat someday.

“He’s beautiful!” Robin said.

She, said the in-habit. It’s a she-puppy. But jist hold your horses, they’ll be more of ’em.

To make room for another one, Hreapha had to tidy things up a bit: she ate the membrane, the placenta and the afterbirth, not that she was hungry at all at the moment and they certainly weren’t especially tasty but they were edible.

And then she had to bear down and strain again for a long time before another one appeared. This one was male. She was getting tired, and wished it were all over, but there were hours and hours yet to go. The third pup seemed to be the hardest of all in terms of the time and effort before she could get it out. It was another female, who seemed to look more like herself than Yowrfrowr. Hreapha was too tired to eat the placenta and decided to wait and do it along with the next one. The fourth pup came fairly easy, another male, but Hreapha was exhausted and had to rest for a long time before she could even try to strain again to see if there might be a fifth one. She was so tired that she actually drifted off to sleep, aware that the four puppies were already nuzzling up to her teats and starting to nurse. That was the only pleasure she’d had for many hours and maybe that was what put her to sleep.

She woke because the fifth puppy wanted out. She didn’t know how long she’d been asleep but perhaps it was long enough to give her the strength to strain again. She strained. Minutes passed. Did hours pass? It was dark outside. Night had come. She kept on straining. She strained so hard it made her dizzy. She felt herself drifting off again, not into sleep but into something dark and black and deep, but she fought her way back from there. She kept ahold of this world long enough to sigh and push out one more puppy. But she had no strength at all to lick the membrane from it. Even with the double membrane covering it she could see that this puppy, a male, did not look like his brothers and sisters. And also that he seemed to be stillborn. All the puppies had their eyes tightly shut but this one’s eyes were not only closed but lifeless.

She heard the in-habit’s urgent voice, Wrap it in a towel! Wrap it and rub it! Rub it hard!

That was all she could remember. When she came back into this world again, it was broad daylight; not only had the night gone but the morning too. She felt very sick, and needed to relieve herself, not to do any business but just to make much water. She tried to get up but there were five puppies clinging to her. There was blood all over the man’s clothes lining her nest.

“She’s awake!” Robin said. “She’s alive and awake.”

Them pups has started in to nursing again, the in-habit’s voice said, so ye ort to know they couldn’t git no milk from a dead momma.

“I think she needs to go,” Robin said.

Go? Said the in-habit. Aw, ye mean to take a leak?

Robin pulled the puppies away from her, then helped Hreapha lift herself out of the box.

“I won’t open the door for you,” Robin said. “It must be below zero out there, and you’d freeze to death. Just use that corner.” She pointed to a corner of the room behind the woodpile. There were wood chips there, so Hreapha wasn’t too abashed to make her lengthy markings on them. But then she saw that some green stuff was oozing out of her afterplace, and then she had black diarrhea, and the sight of all that mess caused her to faint.

When she came to, it was night again. She was in her nest, which Robin had cleaned up, and Robin had also cleaned her afterplace. Her five puppies were not nursing, but just sleeping deeply, snuggled up in a pile with one another. It was very clear that the fifth one did not have Yowrfrowr as its father. But she loved it all the same, and gave its face a lick.

“She’s awake!” Robin said. “But she’s burning up.” Robin’s very cold hand was resting on her neck.

They’re allus kinder hot for a few days afterwards, the in-habit said. I reckon she’ll be okay. But she’s had a bad time

“You know so much,” Robin said. “Did you have a dog when you lived here?”

The in-habit laughed. Yep, they was allus dogs on the place. But they was jist one of them, Hector, was my own mutt.

“Hector’s an odd name for a dog.”

Old Heck used to want to go to school with me, but the trail was just too steep for him. So he’d just sit the livelong day waiting for me to come home after school.

The in-habit and Robin went on talking, and Hreapha drifted off to sleep again and even had dreams in which she led the whole pack of her five grown-up offspring as they chased a raccoon through the woods.

Hreapha woke to find the puppies nursing again, and she sighed and just lay there enjoying it, although she still felt very sick.

Finally she really had to go out. She was not going to do her business beside the woodpile and mess up the floor again. She scratched at the door and whined, and Robin said, “Are you sure you want to go out?”

“Hreapha,” she said, and Robin opened the door and let her out. The first thing she did was dig down into the snow until she found grass, and got a mouthful of grass and chewed it and swallowed it. Then she did her business, and climbed the porch and scratched at the door. While she was waiting for Robin to open it, she glanced at the outhouse, where the white skeleton, the same whiteness as the snow, was just sitting there watching her. “Hreapha!” she said to him.

Days and days passed before the puppies finally opened their eyes and looked at her. Until then they were just helpless lumps who could barely move, and couldn’t do their business for themselves but had to have their mother lick their afterplaces to clean them. Hreapha didn’t mind. It was her job.

They couldn’t even try to walk until two weeks or so had passed. And it was about that time that they made their first attempts at barking, so that Hreapha was able to determine what each of them wanted to be named. The firstborn male was named simply Hrolf. His sister, who had actually preceded him in birthing, was named Hroberta, possibly in honor of her godfather, the bobcat. The second male was named Hrothgar. And the second female was named Hruschka. But the third male, the fifthborn, did not make the same sounds as his siblings, possibly because his father was a coyote. So Hreapha had to accept that his name was Yipyip. Not only in name but in every other respect, he would stand apart from the others.

Robin was thrilled with the puppies, and was constantly picking them up and holding them (one at a time of course) and laughed to watch their clumsy attempts to walk and fight with each other. Robert sulked for a few days because of all the attention being paid to the pups, but eventually he discovered that they liked him and he attempted to join them in their play. He was especially fond of the one named Hroberta, and with Hreapha’s permission he took naps with her. The pups slept practically all the time when they weren’t nursing. But then, when they could walk, they discovered Hreapha’s food dish and began chomping away at her doggy nuggets.

“Oh oh,” Robin declared one morning as she poured some doggy nuggets out of the bag into Hreapha’s bowl, where six hungry mouths were waiting for it. “That’s all there is. There’s not any more Purina Dog Chow. It’s all gone.”

Hreapha considered teaching her offspring how to suck eggs. But even the chickens were not laying many eggs in this horribly cold weather, when all the bugs and worms and other staples of their diet had gone into hibernation. There were only just enough for Robin.

Robin opened a jar of pickled pig’s feet and put some of it in Hreapha’s food dish. From previous experience Hreapha disdained it, but to her surprise she discovered her pups loved the stuff…after she took the trouble to pick the little bones out.

And when Robin opened a can of beef stew, Hreapha discovered that it would suit her just fine.

By the time the puppies no longer had to suckle milk out of Hreapha but could eat whatever Robin could furnish from cans or jars, the first signs of Spring were in the air.

Chapter twenty-eight

The imaginative reader, meaning you, has for some time now been caught up in the idyllic aspects of Robin’s situation. Even before Sog was dispensed with, you had an awareness of the sheer lively entertainment that Robin was experiencing, almost to the point of making her forget the world she had been stolen from.

Thus it is my unpleasant duty to reveal aspects of her existence which were less than ideal. Sog’s death was decidedly a mixed blessing; it left her figuratively without insulation against life with its unkind vicissitudes, just as the house itself literally had no insulation against the winter cold (in those days the so-called “wind-chill factor” had not yet been discovered, but the howling winds on Madewell Mountain often dropped the temperature well below zero). Despite my own antipathy toward Sog, I was willing to concede that preferably he should have been allowed to continue living for several more months or even a year if need be (for the record, his affliction was a malignant form of degenerative multiple sclerosis which would have been treatable with medical attention). Living a bit longer would have permitted him to fully prepare Robin for the life she was going to have to live without him. As it was, a day would not go by that she did not discover things she needed to ask him, or things she wanted him to do for her, or tasks that required his help.

If Sog had managed to hang on a while longer, he would certainly have chewed her out for her mismanagement of the household. He hadn’t been at all fastidious himself, but he still would have jumped all over her. She quit sweeping the house, and not because of that superstition he’d given her, “Don’t never drop your broom so it falls flat on the floor, and if you do drop it don’t never step over it.” Sog had often been required to nag her into washing the dishes; now that he was gone, she quit washing dishes entirely, except when she had to have one, and then she just wiped it with a dirty rag. She quit washing practically everything, including herself, her clothing and her bedding, using as an excuse the fact that it was too cold to go out to the well. One morning, when she just had to have some drinking water, she found the well bucket frozen tight to the ice beneath it, and couldn’t pry it loose. She made do with snow melted in a pan on the stove. The stove periodically required having its ashes removed, and although she had a scuttle and a little shovel for that purpose she was negligent in using them, and the stove became inefficient to the point where all the inhabitants (except me) were unnecessarily cold.

She had no regard for the larder. She had no concept of budgeting the food supply, and thus had already run out of several things that she couldn’t do without, least of all the Purina Dog Chow. She was going to run out of flour in a few more months, and then she’d really be in a pickle. And speaking of pickles, having happily discovered that Hreapha’s pups loved Sog’s pickled pig’s feet, she gave no thought to rationing the stuff. And speaking of Hreapha’s pups, although their thoughtful mother did her best to housebreak them, Robin did nothing to clean up the mess that they sometimes made, with the result that the living room in which all eight creatures were living and from which they were all loath to sally out into the subzero weather was a veritable pigsty, or (since the only evidence of actual pigs were their feet) a crummy dump, uninhabitable by anyone except an in-habit: fortunately, although I could see and hear I chose not to smell. At the age of twelve I was not especially neat and tidy myself; in fact, I couldn’t care less about orderliness, but even I was moved to remark to Robin one cloudy day, This place aint fitten for dogs! If Adam’s mother had been there, blind though she was, she would have fainted. If Robin’s mother had been there…well, of course, if Robin’s mother had been there she would have immediately whisked her daughter out of the place.

Which reminds me that it has been a good while since we last saw or heard anything from Karen Kerr. Mention was made that she’d been spending a lot of time with the FBI agent, who, Leo’s wife Louisa had remarked, might become Leo’s new son-in-law. If it’s of any interest, as a matter of fact the FBI agent, Hal Knight, did propose to Karen Kerr at Christmas, but she, while confessing her love for him, said that it would not be “seemly” to get married while she was still in mourning for Robin. I’m sure we’ll hear more about her farther along.

As Hreapha was the first to detect, the signs of Spring were in the air, and it would soon be time for the whole pack of them to get outdoors, open the windows and doors and air out the house, and for Robin, even if I had to get on her case, to do a bit of cleaning.

In fact she was prompted to do so not by my giving her a talking to, but by the appearance in the yard of the first daffodils. Adam’s mother had once obtained, after a visit to her sister in Parthenon, a peck of bulbs for tulips and daffodils, and had planted them (“naturalizing” is the modern gardener’s term) randomly around the yard, where many of them had received unwitting fertilizer from the toilet habits of Hreapha, Robert, and Robin, as well as all the pups (not to mention the dozens of free-ranging chickens). Now, twenty-one years after Sarah Madewell had gone to California, leaving behind the bright flowers that she had been able to enjoy only through touch and smell (and Adam would never forget the sight of his mother down on her knees gently fondling the daffodils each early March), the bulbs not only continued to bloom but had greatly multiplied. Their coming up seemed to be, for Robin, a sign of renewal and hope. She gathered several to put into a vase for the kitchen table, and the sight of those bright clean yellow flowers in all that squalor tempted her to do something she hadn’t done for months: give the house a thorough sweeping and dusting. That done, she was even inspired to go out to the henhouse and do an awful chore she’d neglected all winter, shoveling the chicken manure into the wheelbarrow and carting it out to fertilize the vegetable garden soil, as she had been advised by the Cyclopædia.

That done, she was even inspired to go into the barrel factory and straighten things up. Hold your horses! I exclaimed. There aint no call to be moving things around in here.

“Hi, Adam,” she said. “I thought you’d moved into the house and didn’t stay out here any more.”

How confess to her that I was her stalker? I generally keep an eye on whatever’s going on around here, I declared. Don’t matter whether it’s the house or this shed or wherever.

“It’s so messy out here,” she said, sweeping her arms around her.

But look what ye done, I pointed out, although I was unable to point. You’ve put the bung flogger and the chime hoop maul on the same bench. That aint where they belong.

“There’s so much junk all over,” she said.

Aint a bit of junk. Ever one of them tools—stave froe, jointer, swift, stoup plane, horse, chince, backing knife, croze and flagging iron has got a use, and if you was to lose ary one of ’em, you’d be on the spot.

“But what do I need them for?” she asked. “I won’t ever make a barrel.”

Naw, but you might could make a firkin.

“You’re bad, Adam! Did you say ‘fucking’?”

I blushed, as much as invisible cheeks can redden. Aint you the feisty’un, though? What I said was firkin, which is what’s called a small cask for keeping butter.

“Where would I get any butter?” she wanted to know.

She had me there. I laughed at my own slip. And then offered, Wal, ye never can tell, some old cow might come wanderin lost into the pasture some day.

“That would be nice,” she said. “Would you be able to teach me how to milk it and then how to use the churn to make butter?”

Why, shore. If you’ll look at the corner over your left shoulder you’ll see a right nice butter churn.

“Sugrue told me what it was.”

That was the last thing I made afore we left. I mean the last thing that Adam made afore his folks up and took off for California. Can you turn it upside down and look at the bottom?

She did so, and there were the initials “AM” that Adam had burned into the wood with the branding tool.

“You made this?” she asked.

Adam Madewell made it well, I said with a giggle. Recall I aint Adam, jist his leavings. What ole Hreapha calls a “in-habit.”

She was smiling. “So this ‘AM’ is not just your initials, but it means you are.”

I didn’t yet follow her. At twelve I was slow in realizing that she had recognized and was referring to the first person singular present indicative of be. As in the Cartesian axiom. Am = sum. In all his years of living with those initials—and he was still very much living with them—it had never occurred to Adam that the initials were an assertion of his existence, his being. When Adam’s twelve-year-old in-habit finally got the concept through his thick skull, his admiration for Robin was greater than ever: he fell in love with her, although what he had been feeling for her already amounted to slavish devotion.

That shore is real clever, I granted.

“So can you teach me how to make a fuckin?” she asked.

If you can learn to say the word proper.

“Firkin! Firkin! Firkin!” she said, and giggled.

My daddy never believed that I could make that ’ere churn, I related. Matter a fact, I aint made it just yet. I’m not but twelve and Adam made that churn when he was twelve just before he left me behind, so you could even play like the churn aint been made yet. Not “am” but “aint.” Wal, little lady, I’ll tell ye: you’d want to make your firkin out of cedar, not out of white oak the way all these barrels has been made. I made my churn out of cedar. Cedar don’t shrink when it dries. But you’ve got to cut the cedar in the fall, not the spring when the sap’s a-rising. Come to think on it, there’s a stack of cedar staves out to the barn that I already split with the stave froe.

“Sugrue told me not to go near that barn,” she said. “It could come crashing down on top of me.”

Naw, it won’t. Grampaw built that barn to last forever. Braxton Madewell had made the barn as well as he made anything, and the barn might still be standing years after I no longer inhabit the place.

“I could just tiptoe in there and grab them,” she offered. “How many would I need for a firkin?”

A dozen ought to do it, I said.

Robin brought an armful of cedar staves from the barn. They had been seasoning for two decades and were thoroughly dry. “Now what?” she asked.

I sniffed one of the staves. All the cedar smell is gone, so it won’t give your butter a cedar taste.

“What butter?” she asked, and laughed. “I can use it for a water bucket instead of a firkin. What do I do next?”

Them is churn staves. You’ll have to saw ’em down to firkin size, if you can. That’s the stave saw hanging on the wall yonder. She looked around but couldn’t seem to find it. It was a damned nuisance for me not to be able to point. See all them things a-hanging yonder by the window? Naw, to your right. That’s it. The third one over is the stave saw. Now prop a stave here on this horse and see iffen ye can cut it in half.

It was slow work. Robin simply didn’t have the muscle for sawing, but she persisted, and managed after a long while to cut the stave in half. I might have become bored or restless during the long passage of time required for her to do all the cutting, but for the simple fact that just as I was free from appetites and susceptibility to the physical world, I was also free from the passage of time, its speed or dragging. But Robin’s pets, seven in number now, grew tired of observing her and went off to play elsewhere. Or, more likely, they went off into the woods to rustle up their supper.

The shaving horse was just a little easier, not much. She had to sit on the horse, and draw the two-handled bucket shave toward her again and again along the edges of the stave, to shape it. She began intoning aloud a little work-chant: “Shave the stave. Shave the stave. Shave the stave.” Why hadn’t I ever thought of that? Or rather Adam, when he worked? Because he lacked her imagination, and her sense of words. I joined my voice to hers: Shave the stave. Shave the stave. Shave the stave. She had to stop to laugh more often than she had to stop to rest.

But then, as I pointed out, it was necessary to sharpen the bucket shave. Blades has got to be kept keen, I told her. Sog had already shown her how to use the treadle whetstone, although she was always catching and bumping her knees in it and had hobbled for a week the first time she’d tried to use it. That had been for sharpening the kitchen knives and the hog butchering knives and occasionally her scissors. Now she had to learn how to keep the cooper’s knives and shaves razor-sharp.

Paw allus tole me, “Ever a tool falls off the bench, don’t never try to grab it. It’ll slice your fingers off.” It was something Robin would have to learn and remember because one always instinctively tries to keep something from falling. If a cooper’s tool falls, you must let it fall.

I couldn’t show Robin my right hand—I didn’t have one—and I couldn’t show her Adam’s right hand, which was missing the index finger, from an accident in which he forgot that warning, grabbed for the backing knife as it fell, and not only sliced off the finger but hurled the knife against his leg, causing a deep gash that left him unable to walk at all for months and to walk only poorly thereafter. Only once again was he able to try to make the long hike to Stay More, and that, as we’ll see, ended in an accident which kept him at home thereafter, which his father considered a blessing, for two reasons: one, his father despised education and books, and two, Adam was able, once he could walk again, to spend all his time helping his father in the cooperage.

Nor could I show Robin Adam’s left thumb, which was severely callused from the hammering and driving of the hoops onto barrels. His hands in general were covered with hard skin, although not nearly as bad as his father’s, which were grotesquely callused all over.

I did not want Robin to get any calluses, let alone cuts. But she was determined to make her firkin. The days were still short, and it grew dark before she had completed the task of dressing the staves, and I half hoped that her enthusiasm for the job might drift away overnight if she got interested in something else. But she returned to the cooperage early the next morning, and it was my painful duty to point out to her that while she had successfully shaped the staves she had not yet jointed them, that is, tapered their sides so they would fit together in a circle. It was hard to explain to a girl so young that backing a stave, which she had done, must be followed up by jointing the stave, with the upturned plane called a jointer. And first she had to sharpen the blade of the plane. By the time she had successfully reassembled the plane with the sharpened blade and was ready to use the long-jointer, I had to explain the gauge to her: a two-pronged wooden thingamajig which determines the angle of each stave to make them fit snuggly into an exact diameter of, in this case, ten inches.

This here’s the most important job of all, I said, meaning to encourage her, but it seemed to dispirit her.

She did a fair job of angling the edges of four or five staves, but then her eyes moistened and tears began running down her cheeks and into her work. She returned the jointing plane to the bench and said, “Adam, I don’t think I’m big enough to do this. Would you mind if I waited until I got bigger?”

Her words touched me. If in-habits could weep, I would’ve. Something in her words seemed to suggest a kind of resignation: she truly understood that she would have to go on living here until she grew older and bigger. Or even until she died.

But the twelve-year-old in-habit was somewhat scornful that she could not finish a job that she’d started. I pouted, You was the one who wanted a firkin. I realized the sexual suggestiveness of those words. I rephrased it, You was the one who wanted to be learnt how to make you a little cask. But heck, I won’t hold it again ye.

“Thank you, Adam,” she said, and went on back to the house, where she took advantage of her pets being out of doors to spread out her paper doll town of Stay More on the newly swept floor. But she took one paper doll house and three of the paper dolls and put them not on the floor but on the topmost part of the davenport. “This is the Madewells and their house, way up here on a mountaintop,” she said, in case I was listening. “Someday soon you’ll have to tell me all about them.”

Any old time, I said.

Chapter twenty-nine

Stay More was a relief to her, it helped her get away from herself and her plight and her most recent failure. Maybe she never could build a firkin, but she could always build Stay More, not just the town itself but all the people in it. She lost herself in their lives. It was hard to feel lonely when there were all these Ingledews and Swains and Dinsmores and all of them let her make them and follow their feelings and their doings. So easily she took on their voices. So easily they softened her solitude.

She had the town (and the Madewells up on their davenport-mountain) arranged so neatly that for many days she would not let the animals come back into the house, for fear they would mess up her paper dolls in their paper houses. It was getting warm enough now that even though the nights went below freezing Hreapha’s pups and Robert could snuggle up with Hreapha somewhere out in the yard or maybe the cooper’s shed and keep warm until the sun rose.

And that good old sun started rising earlier and earlier and hotter and hotter. One morning Robin realized it was just too nice outside to stay indoors with her paper dolls, so she put on her light jacket and went out. The lovely daffodils had drooped and shriveled and would soon be finished with their flowering. Robin decided she might have to plant some flowers, if she wanted any more other than wildflowers. She went out to the garden spot and kicked out around the leaves that covered it. She was uncertain about that garden. On one hand her attempts to spade it up and plant it and all might require more muscle than she’d had to use in her failure to make the firkin, and she didn’t need another failure so soon after that one. But on the other hand, she really did love corn on the cob and muskmelons and even the vegetables that weren’t green, such as yellow squash and potatoes and onions and, yes, those big juicy tomatoes that Sugrue had grown which were so much tastier than the bland tomatoes her mother used to bring home from work.

While she was kicking around through the leaves, she uncovered some spinach and turnips that had survived the winter. She was amazed that they were still alive and growing, even though she wouldn’t eat spinach and positively hated turnips. But later that same day, while she was poring over “The Garden” parts of her 1888 Cyclopædia, she came across the following, in a section on starting tender seeds such as tomatoes, squashes, and melons: “It is desirable in transplanting not to check the growth by disturbing the roots. A good way to avoid this is to scrape out turnips, fill them with good soil and plant in two or three seeds, setting them in a warm, light place, and keeping them moist. When the weather is suitable, place these out in the garden at the proper depth. The turnip will decay and the plant will thrive unchecked if properly cared for.” It sounded like a lot of fun, so Robin took the shovel and went back out to the garden and dug up all the turnips, just a dozen or so, and took them to the house and scooped out their insides. The pulp was earthy and piquant and she was almost tempted to cook it and see if she could stand to eat it.

Where had Sugrue told her he was keeping the seeds? She searched through the storeroom (Adam’s room once, and now again) looking for the little box that contained the packets of seeds, but couldn’t find it. “Adam?” she called out. “Can you help me find the seeds?” There was no answer. She should have known better. She had learned that Adam would never “come” when called. In fact, she had learned that it was almost a guarantee he’d stay in hiding if she tried to find him or reach him or call him. It was frustrating. And it also made her think again that Adam was simply somebody she’d made up in her own head, the same way she made up all those paper people of Stay More. But how could she have even started on that firkin without his help? How could she have helped Hreapha give birth without his help? No, she knew that this place really was inhabited by Adam’s—what was that word he had used?—his leavings, his inhabit. She knew she didn’t have the imagination to come up with that name, in-habit, just as she didn’t have the imagination to come up with firkin or even the name of Adam’s dog, Hector. “Adam?” she said, louder. “Don’t you want me to have a garden? Can’t you help me find the seeds?” But there was no answer. She went on searching. The Madewell house had no closets or cabinets the way other houses do, so there weren’t any places like that to search in.

She practically turned the storeroom upside down, moving all the boxes and bags and sacks. But the box wasn’t there. The only place she hadn’t looked was inside the Sentry money-box, and she opened the lid just to see if all her money was still there. And there amidst the money was the box of seeds! She certainly hadn’t put it there. Or she certainly didn’t remember putting it there. Had Sugrue’s ghost possibly put the seeds in the money-box? The thought made her flesh crawl. But she had enough trouble with in-habits, she didn’t want any trouble from ghosts. She knew that it wasn’t impossible that she herself had absent-mindedly put the seeds in the money box, because she was often confused and distracted with all her responsibilities that cluttered up the world worse than all the actual clutter that was everywhere.

Anyway, she now had the seeds. She sat and slowly sorted them, setting aside any that she either wouldn’t plant or wouldn’t plant until she was old enough to develop a taste for that particular plant: green beans and peas and spinach and lettuce and cabbage and cucumber and beets and turnips and okra. To the other side she placed the packets for sweet corn, popcorn, tomatoes, squash, cantaloupe, wax beans, onions, carrots, and radishes. She couldn’t find the seeds for the potatoes, but then she remembered the instructions Sugrue had given her for sprouting a sweet potato to make “slips,” and how to cut up the Irish potatoes so that each had an “eye” that could be planted. She also added to the “using” pile the seed packets for some flowers: nasturtiums and marigolds and zinnias and petunias and sweet peas and morning glories and cosmos. The Cyclopædia didn’t say anything about planting and raising flowers; it had a whole chapter on “Floriculture,” but that was mostly on how to decorate with flowers after you’ve grown them.

There was one thick envelope in the seed box that simply said “wheat” on it. She couldn’t remember that Sugrue had planted any wheat. She could remember a film she’d watched in school about gristmills and how they ground up wheat to make it into flour. She hadn’t been thinking of flour as something that was grown but she suddenly realized that the big cloth sack of flour on the storeroom floor was the last one; they’d had several to start out with. When that sack was used up, she wouldn’t have any more flour. She wouldn’t be able to do any more baking.

“ADAM!” she called out. “Please help me. I’m frantic. Where did you get your flour? Did you grow wheat?” But again there was no answer. She decided to look up wheat in her Cyclopædia, but all it told her was how to harvest it and stack it into shocks. It didn’t say anything about how you could make your own flour.

She took the scooped-out turnips and filled them with dirt and planted in each of them seeds of tomato, cantaloupe, and squash, as the book had said. She set them on the south window sills and forgot about them, until one day Robert knocked them all off, and she had to replant them and tell Robert that he was no longer allowed in the house.

It was lonelier for her at night, not sleeping with her kitty (who wasn’t a kitty any more but a large cat), or her dog, and she started pining for Paddington again. And some nights she had to cry herself to sleep.

Thinking of Paddington, she wondered how long it had been since she had seen him last. So one afternoon, after she was tired of trying to spade up the garden (the Cyclopædia talked about plowing your garden with a cultivator pulled by a horse, ha ha), she took a break and put her Ouija Board on the floor of the porch and called Hreapha to play with her. Hreapha was such a devoted mother that Robin didn’t see very much of her these days unless she made an effort to look her up, and often Hreapha took her pups out into the woods to run around and play and even hunt little animals to eat. Both Robert and Hreapha had learned to catch squirrels and rabbits and chew them up, which was a good thing, because Robin had nothing in the house to feed them with.

The first thing they asked the Ouija Board was how to spell the names of the five puppies. Although Robin had been able, from the sounds of their barking, to guess roughly what Hreapha’s babies were named, it was good to find out how their names were actually spelled, and Robin was interested to note that they all started with “Hr” like their mother’s name, except for the odd one, the one who didn’t look at all like the others, and whose name wasn’t spelled at all like theirs, Yipyip. While Hreapha herself seemed partial to the firstborn, Hrolf, and Robert liked to play with the one named Hroberta, Robin had from the beginning felt more affection for Yipyip, possibly because he was so different from the others, and Robin herself, as long as she’d had other children to compare herself with, had prized the differences in herself, how she was distinctly her own person and would not like anything simply because other kids liked it, and how she was often at odds with everyone else. Yipyip preferred to go his own way. And of course he spoke his own language.

“Now,” Robin said to Hreapha, “what I want to ask the Ouija Board is how long I’ve been here at this house. Have I been here a whole year yet?” She tried to explain to Hreapha—and to the Ouija Board—that she wanted to do something to observe the occasion (she vaguely recalled the word “anniversary” but wasn’t certain about it), not that she wanted to celebrate, because she didn’t intend to celebrate a year of being taken away from her home and mother. “Whenever it’s a full year that I’ve been here, a whole twelve months, the earth has gone all the way around the sun. Does that mean anything to you?” She looked into Hreapha’s eyes and caught a glimmer of understanding. Then Hreapha put her paw on the planchette and moved it to the “YES.”

The Ouija Board told them that the anniversary would occur in six days. “So we ought to do something on that day, six days from now, to, not to celebrate but just to keep the day. Don’t you think that would be a good day to escape, to try to find the way out of here?”

Hreapha’s paw moved the planchette to “NO.”

“No? Why not? Do you like it here so much?”

Hreapha’s paw tapped the planchette as it was parked upon the “NO.”

“Are you afraid to try to get out of here with your pups and Robert and me?”

Hreapha moved the planchette to “YES.”

Robin pondered. At length she said, “Well, we can’t stay here forever, can we?”

Hreapha tapped the planchette at “yes.”

“That’s not fair!” Robin said, realizing her voice was whining. “I can’t go on living my whole life here and never seeing anybody ever again. I mean anybody human.” When Hreapha made no response to that other than continuing to stare at Robin with her soulful eyes, Robin at length said, “Okay, I guess we’ll keep the day of the first year by doing something special like planting the garden.”

And that is what she did. She spent the six days until that day working until she was exhausted, spading up as much of Sugrue’s garden space as she could possibly spade up. She wore her boots and stood up on the back of the tines of the spade and jumped up and down on them to force them into the soil. The third day it rained, so on the fourth day she discovered she could force the spade into the soil without jumping on it. By the sixth day, the awful anniversary of her captivity, she had enough of the soil turned over so that she could rake it and plant in it all the seeds that she had selected from the seed box. Unfortunately she did not know that some seeds must not be planted until after last frost, and these seeds did not take or the tender seedlings were killed when the last frost came a couple of weeks later. Worse than that, she had no idea how deep to plant seeds, and planted most of them too deep, although the potatoes she planted too shallow.

Robin was going to have to learn gardening by trial and error, and she was going to have to remember from one year to the next what mistakes she had made. She thought of her first year’s garden as a worse failure than her attempt to put a firkin together, but that wasn’t strictly true. She would, in time, reap what she had sown. The stomach is the best teacher. The harvesting in less than a month of the first radishes that she had planted were such a joy that she made a lunch of nothing but radishes, and was motivated to do something Sugrue had never been able to persuade her to do: keep the weeds out of the garden.

Her little garden plot covered less than a third of the space Sugrue had originally cleared for a garden, so she broadcast the wheat seeds over the other two thirds, and in time took an interest in watching the wheat come up and grow, and was informed by her Cyclopædia exactly when the wheat would be ready for harvest.

As the spring passed into summer and the hot sun bore down, Robin discovered that she really didn’t need any clothes. So she stopped wearing them. They were getting too small for her anyway, and she remembered that stupid Sugrue had never realized that she would outgrow all the new clothes he’d bought for her. She had already decided never to cut her hair again, and it was down to her shoulder blades behind and to her nipples in front, and when the breeze came, as it often did, it blew her hair all around her face and shoulders, and she loved the feel of the breeze as well as the smell of it. She discovered that the breeze in her hair felt better if she washed her hair and made it fluffy, and this alone gave her the motivation to keep her hair washed.

She recalled with amusement, as if watching a movie about somebody else, the Robin Kerr who could not stand to go barefoot even when all the other kids were doing it at recess. Now when she ran around without a stitch on, that included the stitches of her shoes. Sometimes she stepped on something sharp that caused her to yell, and a few times she stepped on something sharp that pierced the sole of her foot so that she had to run to the house and get out the first aid kit and apply antiseptic ointment and maybe a Band-aid. But her feet learned to love the feel of the cool moist earth.

When work was done, she played. She went back to the practice of taekwondo, and perfected it, with her kicks and thrusts and jabs. “Come out, Adam!” she hollered, “and I’ll give you a chagi in the nuts!” She knew that he was probably watching her. Probably he was even all excited to see a naked girl jumping around like that doing her taekwondo. In the evenings before dark when she was tired of reading the Bible stories or the Cyclopædia, she would get out the third book, the only other book in the house, the Nudist Moppets, and have some fun looking again at the displays and antics, and she understood full well that if men (including twelve-year-old in-habits) got so much fun out of looking at such pictures, then Adam was probably getting more than an eyeful.

One day when he made no response whatever to her inviting him to come out and get his nuts kicked, she hollered, “Come out, Adam, and I’ll give you a kiss!”

And sure enough, that brought him out. Here I am, his unmistakable young voice said, but I reckon I don’t need no kiss.

“You’ve been ignoring me for months!” she complained. “Where have you been, anyway? Gone fishing?”

You ort to know I caint be living with ye, much as I’d keer to.

“But can’t you answer simple questions? I wanted to know about wheat and flour and needed you to answer me. Did your folks grow wheat? Where did you get your flour?”

Down to Latha’s store, where everbody else got it.

“You mean the general store in Stay More? But how did you carry it home? An eighty-pound bag of flour would be awfully hard to carry on that terrible trail.”

I took a mule the long way around, on the trail that you came in on, what Grampaw called the North Way. It took a while, but I generally had to get a bunch of other things that Maw needed from the store. And I generally wanted to say howdy to Roseleen.

“Who was Roseleen?”

He was slow in answering, as if he didn’t want to tell her. I aint tole ye about her yet, but I reckon I will one of these days.

“But you bought all your flour at the store. You didn’t grow any wheat?”

Grampaw used to grow it out in yon meader, but it’d have to be took to town to the mill, so it was easier jist to buy the flour. Mill’s been shut down for many a year.

“Well, I can’t go to Latha’s store, and I’m nearly out of flour. I’ve got just enough to make maybe one more loaf of bread.”

I notice you’ve planted a little bit of wheat. Adam laughed, as if that were funny.

“So what can I do? Do you know how to turn wheat into flour?”

I reckon it could be done, if you put your mind to it.

“Thank you, Adam,” she said, but before he could go away again, she added, “I’m sorry I said that about giving you a kiss. You don’t even have any lips, do you?”

Chapter thirty

Ma, are all people as little as Mistress? Hrolf was full of such questions, but she didn’t mind answering them. She was glad to see that Hrolf was not going to merely accept the world as it was without wanting to understand it. The other pups—and they weren’t exactly pups any more; in dog age they were already as old as Robin—rarely asked her any questions other than, When can we eat, Ma? She considered the possibility that the answers she gave Hrolf to all of his questions were passed along to his brothers and sisters, for Hrolf was the natural leader of the pack, as he had been the firstborn male.

She had explained to all of them, as soon as they were able to understand her, that Robin was their Mistress, the boss, the lady of the house, and they must not only refrain from biting her, chewing her garments or playing tug of war with them, disturbing her paper dolls and stealing her food, but also they should always obey her and worship her and be faithful to her unto death. Later, when Hreapha had begun to regale them with anecdotes and narratives, she told them stories about the man, the man who had set up this house and kidnapped Mistress long ago and then had died. Hrolf was full of questions about the man and even wanted her to describe the “vehicle” that the man had supposedly owned as a means of transportation. Will I ever be able to ride in a pickup? he wanted to know. I doubt it, she answered, but there are things to do that are a lot more fun than that.

Like what? He wanted to know.

Chasing coons, she said. She explained that while he and his sisters and brothers weren’t really coon hounds—or any other kind of raccoon dog, for that matter, they probably had instincts for chasing coons and foxes and squirrels, not for man’s benefit but for their own.

What’s a instinct? Hrolf wanted to know. Hrothgar’s end stinks but mine don’t.

Hreapha chuckled. You can’t smell an instinct. It’s something you’re born with, something you don’t have to learn, something that tells you what to do, makes you do what you do without even thinking about it.

Hrolf thought about that for a while, and then he asked, Is Adam an instinct?

No, he’s an in-habit. You can’t smell him either. And you sure can’t see him, but you can hear him, can’t you?

I sure can, Hrolf said. He talks to me a lot.

Does he? asked Hreapha. What does he talk about?

He tells me what a good dog I am. And that time when the thunderstorm came and scared the piss out of all the rest of you he told me not to be afraid because it was just noise and it wouldn’t do me no harm.

You’re his favorite dog, she said. You’re mine too but don’t tell any of them I said that. Thunder doesn’t scare you, and even snakes don’t scare you, but you’d better listen to me, boy, snakes can kill you if you mess with the wrong kind. Thunder can’t hurt you but snakes can bite you to death.

I just don’t like them thinking they own the place.

They don’t own it, but you don’t either.

Hreapha’s biggest problem in the education of her offspring was trying to teach them that all of this vast wilderness in which they lived was not theirs to defend. There were even limits to how far they should mark up the immediate neighborhood—Adam’s haunt—to establish their territory, and they had to know those limits, and if other creatures encroached upon their territory they had to be willing to share. Hreapha herself didn’t like the encroachment, and she still remembered that incident of the hawk who had tried to attack the chickens (a story she had told more than once to her pups, at their request), but she did her best to instill in her brood a knowledge of the difference between harmful and benevolent creatures, while assuring them that even the most harmful creature doesn’t consider itself harmful, that a rattlesnake is just doing its job with its instinctive behavior and theoretically has just as much right to be here as we do. Still, it is good to know the difference between a rattlesnake and a king snake, the latter not only unafraid of the former and immune to its poison but also not poisonous itself. In fact, Hreapha was seriously considering giving Robin a baby king snake for her next birthday, which was coming up soon. It would make an excellent pet.

The present she’d given Robin for her previous birthday was getting rather stale. Robert spent less and less of his time around the house these days. Possibly, Hreapha realized, he was out searching the forest for a female. Or he was certainly searching the forest for food, since Robin was not able to feed him anything any more. They had made clear to him that he was not ever even to think about eating one of the chickens, and he had certainly become so friendly with the beaver family on his many visits to the beaver pond with Robin and the others that he would never consider recognizing his mother’s instinctive appetite for beaver. Robert was sometimes gone for weeks. He’d always come back, with no stories to tell or any sign of having been in a fight or an adventure of any kind. The young dogs were always glad to see him, despite their instinctive aversion for felines. And Robin always picked him up and held him and listened to him purr, and Robert still loved her, but he wasn’t truly a pet any more and it was time Robin had a new one.

The young dogs were quickly growing almost as large as Robert was, and he was practically full grown. Hreapha realized that soon she would have to honor her promise to take them hunting for something larger than the squirrels and rabbits they were constantly catching for supper in the nearby forest. Hrothgar especially needed some excitement. Early in life he had developed a compulsion to chase his tail and even to inflict bites upon it, and she needed to provide some exercise for the lad.

All of them had a regular chore which gave them a certain amount of useful activity; Hreapha called it the garbage detail. Trash and empty tin cans regularly accumulated in the house, and Robin, who wasn’t a very neat housekeeper, usually just tossed them out the door. Hreapha taught her brood how to dig holes at a distance from the house and bury the garbage and then cover it up.

I don’t get it, Hrolf had complained, the first time his mother introduced him to this accomplishment. What good does it do me, since I don’t even get to eat anything from the cans any more?

Hrolfie, we must always do anything and everything we can to make life easier for Mistress.

Why can’t she bury her own garbage? I’ve seen her using a shovel.

Listen, boy, and don’t ever forget: she is Mistress and we must honor her and worship her and sacrifice for her and please her.

Whether he passed that message along to his siblings or not, there weren’t any more complaints about their chores.

Hreapha did have a bit of a problem teaching them something that basically ran against their instincts: that they must never harm deer, especially not fawns. She taught them that fawns have no scent, and because the coloring of their coats looks like the leaves and stuff in which they sit, they often cannot be seen. Their mothers deliberately leave them all alone out in the open, because the mothers don’t want their own scent to draw any predators. So if Hreapha’s young dogs should happen upon a fawn, they should treat it like a copperhead or rattlesnake and stay away from it.

That’s not fair! Hrolf protested. They really look good to eat! My instincts tell me to eat them!

Listen, the reason you are not merely a dumb dog but an intelligent canine is that you can use your head and convince yourself that fawns are too innocent and beautiful to be eaten, regardless of what your instincts are telling you.

Hreapha considered capturing an orphaned fawn and presenting it to Robin as a ninth birthday pet, but she decided to wait until Robin’s tenth, or even, if a king snake were presented for the tenth, the eleventh. By the age of eleven Robin would fully appreciate the young deer and would know how to provide a home for it without completely domesticating it…just as Robert’s long residence in the company of a human had not, apparently, taken away his wildness.

So it was decided, eventually, practically on the eve of the birthday (again determined with help from the Ouija Board), that Robin’s ninth birthday present would be a baby raccoon. The woods of Madewell Mountain were not exactly teeming with raccoons—a coon needs at least two hundred acres to itself—but they were out there, and Hreapha had entertained her pups endlessly by speaking of the out there and all it contained. She would never tell them of the many trips she had taken with the man to the large towns far away, because she didn’t want them to feel deprived of something they might never experience in their lives. And she hadn’t yet told them about the tiny village of Stay More. Only Hrolf had been curious about the identity of his father, and Hreapha was surprised that he had even learned the concept of “father” without yet knowing anything about reproduction. She had answered his questions by describing what a beautiful beast Yowrfrowr was, and not simply beautiful, but intelligent beyond all comprehension.

Where does he live? Hrolf wanted to know. Why can’t I go visit him?

Someday you can, she told him. But it’s a long ways off, and nearly impossible to get to.

Often, at night, if they listened carefully, they could hear the distant calling of the coyotes, a sound which always excited Yipyip, who would prance around speaking his name whenever he heard it. Hreapha had explained to them that a coyote is an attractive but uncouth dog and that a pack of them prowled the forests out there. Hreapha hoped that the coyotes would never come around here, and she hoped it would be a long time before her young dogs would have to fight them. Just as her own mother had done for her, Hreapha had taught her pups all the skills of fighting, and they sparred with each other constantly and sometimes with her. Hrolf wasn’t the best fighter. In a tussle between Hrolf and Yipyip, the latter was usually top dog. So Hreapha knew that if the time ever came when her dogs had to fight the coyotes, the coyotes would probably win.

Raccoons are vicious fighters, and the first time Hreapha took the dogs coon hunting they not only failed to kill any of the quarry they encountered, but they themselves, Hreapha included, came away scratched and bloody. And the coons had an unfair advantage in that they could climb trees. Hrolf once remarked, If God had allowed dogs to climb trees, we would be the lords of the earth.

Where did you hear about God? Hreapha wondered.

Mistress talks about Him, Hrolf said. He’s the one who made me and you and everything.

But the second time they went coon hunting, knowing what to expect and even practicing in advance, they tracked a coon until it came to a clearing, without a tree in easy reach, and all six of them pounced upon it at once, killed it quickly, and ate as much of it as they could separate from its fur. They decided that coon is much more palatable than possum or squirrel. The latter, after all, is just a rodent, while the raccoon is cousin to the bear. Speaking of bears, they had occasionally come across some bear scat, and learned the scent, and they knew that there was a family of black bear somewhere out there, but Hreapha knew they would have to wait a long time before they were big enough, strong enough, and smart enough, not to say brave enough, to go bear-hunting.

The raccoon was enough for now, and kept their bellies full for days. On their way home from the feast, Hrolf picked up another raccoon scent, or thought he did, and while none of them had any appetite remaining, out of curiosity he traced the scent to a hollow tree, explored it, and came running back to report, Ma, there’s some baby coons in that tree!

There were three of them. They were very young, their eyes not yet open, and Hreapha, understanding that their mother had just been killed and eaten by ravenous dogs, knew that the babes still had to be suckled for weeks before they could manage on their own. They were orphans. Their father was probably still in the vicinity, perhaps watching at this very moment, and while raccoon fathers help in the rearing of their young they would only eat any young who lost their mothers. Hreapha had not intended to give Robin three birthday presents, but she couldn’t very well choose which one to take and leave the other two. So she instructed Hroberta and Hruschka to gently lift two of them by the nape of the neck, and she took the third herself, and thus they carried the three baby raccoons quite a distance back to the homestead.

“Hreapha!” Hreapha said to Robin, that is, “Happy Birthday!” And each of the other dogs wished her a Happy birthday too. “Hrolf!” “Hroberta!” “Hrothgar!” “Hruschka!” “Yipyip!” It was quite a chorus.

“Good heavens, what are they?” Robin wanted to know, which reminded Hreapha of Robin’s first response to the sight of Robert. Baby raccoons appear more like the mature coon—just a smaller version—than baby pups resemble dogs. Their distinctive facial markings are already clearly in place. Hreapha realized that perhaps Robin had never seen a raccoon before and had no idea what they were. It didn’t matter. Creatures don’t have to have names to be appreciated.

Robin attempted to nurse the raccoon kits with the same doll baby bottle she’d used on baby Robert. “I’ve only got a couple of cans of Pet Milk left,” she said.

Adam’s voice became present: It aint a good idee to hold ’em like that, he told her. Upside down they might choke on the milk. Hold ’em right side up, on their bellies.

“What are they, Adam?” she asked him.

Baby coons, he said. I used to have one. Raised it till it was full growed, but it was so full of mischief my dad took it away off into the woods and let it go. Or maybe he kilt it.

Whether because the Pet Milk was used up, or because it wasn’t right for the kits in the first place (raccoons can’t drink cow’s milk, Adam told her), two of the kits perished before a week was out. Hreapha instructed her pups to bury them. The third one struggled on, opening its eyes and managing to crawl around and even to grasp one of Robin’s fingers. But it was sickly for a long time, until Robin could get it to take some mashed up apples (Robin had done a good job of getting the orchard to produce this year, with just a little help from her book and from Adam). Maybe the sugar in the apples was all the kit needed, and it began to perk up. Robin gradually added to its diet some Osage oranges, or “horse apples” as Adam called them: the huge fruit of the bois d’arc. And before long, it (or she, for it was clearly a female) was well, and eating anything they could find for it.

Robin named the baby raccoon Ralgrub, explaining to Hreapha (who in turn explained it to her brood) that it was “burglar” spelled backward. The facial markings, she said, resembled a mask worn by burglars, who are people that sneak into buildings to steal things. As she grew up, Ralgrub would often do that; sneak into the house and steal things.

Ma, when it’s my birthday will you give me a baby animal? Hrolf wanted to know. Something I can eat?

Don’t you ever think of anything except your stomach? she chided him, but instantly realized that wasn’t kind. Of all her young, Hrolf was the most interested in things beside his stomach. Tell you what, she added, if you’re a good boy and behave yourself, on your birthday I’ll take you to visit your father.

Really? he said. Really truly promise cross your heart?

She had let it slip out, and couldn’t take it back. The slipping out was probably an indication of how much she herself wanted to see Yowrfrowr again. She had hoped that he might want to see her—and his offspring—and might somehow be able to leave home long enough to search for her. Whatever markings she had left along the trail were long evaporated; she had told him the general location of the Madewell place, and if he wanted to, he could find it. But he was devoted to his mistress and wouldn’t leave her.

Hrolf, we’ll just have to see. Your father lives in a place called Stay More. It isn’t too awfully far from here, but it’s almost impossible to reach. You once said, If God had allowed dogs to climb trees, we would be the lords of the earth. No, we wouldn’t. God would have had to allow you to take wing and fly. The only real way you could get to Stay More easily would be to fly there. If we could fly, I’d take you there tomorrow. But we have to go on foot, and Mistress herself couldn’t possibly do it. Ask Adam to tell you about that trail. Or to tell you what it was like when he could use it to get to school. If he tried to use it today, he’d be out of luck.

Part Four

Within

Chapter thirty-one

I was out of luck the last time I tried to use that trail when I was a kid. I had used it so often through the third grade of school that I could have used it blindfolded, which is what my morning use of it had amounted to, anyhow, since I’d always had to set out from home well before sunup in order to make the journey before time o’books, which was eight o’clock. I made that journey so many times in the dark that I might as well have closed my eyes. I’ll never forget the very first time I made it, the only time I wasn’t alone. Grampaw took me. I was six years old, and it was August during the war years, and I had heard Grampaw and Paw arguing the day before over whether I was to be allowed to go or not. Paw had quit going to the school before he’d finished the third grade and had not been promoted to the fourth, not because he wasn’t smart and not because he was a troublemaker, but simply because he could not—or would not—learn how to read. He had no use for it, he always said. There was no earthly reason why a feller had to know how to look at a bunch of squiggly marks and tell what words they stood for. Words, if used at all, was meant to be spoken, not figured out of some squiggly marks. He was not going to let me start school either, despite my mother’s tears, she who’d never been known to shed any. But Grampaw, who lived in a shed (long gone now) behind his cooperage, and was still very much in charge of the homeplace he’d built as well as the cooperage, told my father, “For you to keep that boy out of school because you failed at it yourself would be like me keeping you away from coopering because I was fourteen before I could hammer and drive a barrel myself.”

And it was Grampaw who came into the house before the others were awake and shook me and told me to get dressed. He had a coal-oil lantern, and I followed single-file along after him, barefoot because I had no shoes, as he led me on the narrow trail which I hadn’t even known existed. He told me he’d blazed that trail himself when he’d anticipated going for the doctor to assist Grandma in her labor for the birth of my father. The job had taken him three weeks with axe and shovel and he was prouder of it than he had been years earlier making the road up the north side of his mountain that had allowed him to get his team and wagon in and out, up the steep winding road and back again. He’d had to practically carve the cliffside into a ledge wide enough for the wagon wheels (a ledge eventually fallen away and constricted into the narrow path that Sog Alan had been required to use). Every week he—and during my growing-up years, my father in his stead—drove a wagonload of finished barrels, lashed together to keep them from falling off the wagon, across that precarious ledge and down that crooked road and onward for many miles to Harrison, where he sold them, making just enough money to buy whatever was needed to live on until the next shipment of barrels could be made and loaded and hauled. He told me that making that original road—he’d called it the North Way—had been much easier than making the trail we were now using, the South Way, which, although it was not wide enough for a wagon and team and scarcely even wide enough for a person as big as Grampaw, had taken not just an awful lot of physical effort but considerable trial-and-error surveying of the best possible—in some places the only possible—route. He told me he’d jokingly said to Grandma, “Laurie, I reckon it’ll be a real tribulation for you to birth that baby but most of the labor was mine.” There was one spot on the trail so steep that he related how he’d had to tie a rope around the doctor’s waist to haul him up—although now you could hold on to the branches of shrubs and trees on either side to raise and lower yourself. In such places, I had to keep my hands free by gripping in my teeth the bail of the dinner pail my mother had filled for me: hard-boiled eggs, a big tomato, a roasting ear, some cornbread and a bit of meat, probably possum.

“I hope ye’ve been taking heed of where you’re at,” Grampaw said, when the trail finally emerged onto one of the Stay More roads, “because you’ll have to handle that trail all by yourself on the way home. Leastways you won’t be needing no lantern that time of day.” And then he delivered me to the schoolhouse, an awesome building because of its length and the windows of its one room and the belfry on the roof and most of all because it was painted white—I’d never seen a white building before. Grampaw said he hoped I’d have a good time and learn a few things, and then he left me.

The truth was, I had been following in his footsteps most of the trail without paying much attention to any landmarks or turnings in the trail. And that first day of school was such an ordeal that it left me all shook up—Miss Jerram was easy enough and did her best to make the first day of the first grade tolerable, but being thrust into the company of so many other kids after an isolated early childhood took more social skill than I could muster, and I was left feeling like what some of the kids called me: a “furriner.” Because I wasn’t from Stay More or from the immediate environs, and nobody had ever seen me before or heard of me, I was a furriner. And thus an outcast from the beginning. I was determined never to go to that school again…if only I could find my way home.

Trying to negotiate that treacherous trail without Grampaw was a fittingly sad conclusion for a sad day. I lost my way more than once. Climbing up steep places that had been relatively easy climbing down seemed to take forever. At one point, in the exertion to reach the top of a steep climb, my teeth lost their grip on the bail of the empty dinner pail, and it fell and clattered down to the rocks below, and I had to climb carefully down and retrieve it. In all modesty, what I was required to do at the age of six makes Robin’s ordeal at the age of seven pale by comparison. Hreapha, having made the trip herself (although she couldn’t have climbed in the places that required hand-holds), understood how precocious I was. She also understood why I was never able to allow my dog Hector to accompany me on that trail. And she understood why her own promise to Hrolf to take him to visit his father was so fraught with peril.

It was past suppertime when I finally reached home. “Dear Lord in heaven, I’d done given ye up for gone!” my mother said, hugging me to her.

“I was jist fixin to go out huntin fer ye,” Grampaw said.

“How was school?” Paw asked. It was a rhetorical question, nearly mocking, but I didn’t know that. I told them I would just as soon stay home.

“Didn’t ye learn nothing?” Grampaw asked.

“I learnt that most folks live in houses that aint on mountaintops and where you can see other folks’ houses,” I said. And then I wanted to know, because I had never been told, “How come we live up here in a place like this, anyhow?”

“What I’ve always wondered,” my mother remarked. “What I’d sure care to know.”

“Hesh, woman,” my father said.

“Boy,” Grampaw said to me, “this here’s the highest house in all the country. And it’s smack dab in the midst of all the fine white oak you’d ever need to make your barrels. And if you caint see no neighbors from here, so what? I never gave a hoot for no neighbors.”

But he woke me again before dawn the following morning and handed me the dinner pail my mother had filled the night before, and then he remarked, “There’s a full moon still up. Just as well, cause you don’t need to carry a lantern with you.”

I tried to protest, but he said, “Shhh! You’ll wake your folks.”

So by moonlight I made my way back over that awful trail. At least this time I paid more attention to the turnings it took and the landmarks whose silhouettes loomed in the moonbeams, so that I could find my way home. And during morning recess, Miss Jerram took me aside and asked me where I lived and how I’d managed to get from there to the school, and she also complimented me on learning the ABCs quicker than the other first-graders.

I told Grampaw he didn’t have to wake me to get me up for the journey to school. I could wake my own self. And when winter came, Miss Jerram gave me a pair of shoes that fit. “I just found ’em somewheres,” she said. They made a big difference when the trail was covered with snow. I knew how to read before springtime came. Paw was real glad when school let out for the summer, because he had plans for me to help him in the shop, sweeping up shavings, tending the forge, arranging the tools and, eventually, sharpening them on the treadle whetstone.

I loved working in the cooperage with Paw and Grampaw (whose days, I didn’t yet realize, were numbered). They didn’t talk much, but I overheard enough to understand a few things: they were the only full coopers in all the country. The woods were filled with men who cut down white oak trees, sawed them up into stave bolts and hauled them down to the Parthenon Stave & Heading Company, where they were fashioned into staves, not for making into barrels there on the spot, but instead just being bundled and hauled out to the places in Harrison and Pettigrew where they were shipped by rail to big cooperages elsewhere. Paw and Grampaw had many disagreements and sometimes loud arguments, but one thing they were agreed on was their refusal to sell the stave bolts alone, even though, in the years after the war, they could have got as much as a dollar apiece for white oak stave bolts.

“Start to finish,” was Grampaw’s motto, passed along to my father, and eventually to me. In fact, much of the white oak timber they were harvesting had been planted by Grampaw when he was a young man, so a finished white oak bourbon barrel, carefully charred on the inside, made well by Braxton Madewell & Son (& Grandson) was indeed a product created from start to finish. (But to be completely finished, I once observed to Grampaw, we ought to distill the bourbon meant to fill it. He was not amused by the remark.) Ironically, in the last year of his life, he could not work completely from start to finish; there was no market for his finished barrels, and his middleman had gone out of business, with the result that he could only try to sell the staves themselves, not the finished barrels. He was driving a wagonload of staves to Parthenon, too many of them for the wagon to bear, when the wagon slipped off the bluff near our house. He never recovered from his injuries.

By the second grade, two important things had happened in my life. One was that my skill at lettering had reached the point where I made a bold suggestion that my father and grandfather debated for only a little while before accepting: using an iron rod heated to red hot in the forge, I could brand the barrels with the word MADEWELL. My father might have been illiterate but he could read his own name and he took pride in seeing each of the barrels branded on its head with those letters, a job that required little of my time, usually on weekends when I wasn’t in school. I loved the smell of the oak burning as the hot iron sank into it. My clothes were impregnated with it.

Which is what led to the other important thing. My seatmate in school—as in all the country schools of that time the pupils sat two by two at desks made of wood and ornate cast iron with folding seats and lifting tops—was a shy little girl named Roseleen Coe. I wish I could say she was just as cute as Robin at that age (the age Robin was kidnapped) but in fact Roseleen was just moderately attractive: not homely by any means, but a long way from possessing Robin’s beauty. And she was terribly shy; Miss Jerram had to wring the least word out of her, and she never, ever spoke to me, her seatmate. I think Miss Jerram had assigned us to the same desk because we were not inclined to speaking, and we were both poor, both unkempt, both dressed shabbily, both shoeless (except in winter, and that second winter I gave Roseleen the shoes Miss Jerram had given me the previous winter, because I’d outgrown them and they would fit Roseleen, although I learned she had only a comparatively short way to walk in the snow to reach home).

The first words Roseleen ever spoke to me were to ask, “Do you live in a smokehouse?”

When I’d overcome my astonishment that she’d actually spoken to me, I said, “Why, no, matter of fact I don’t. How come ye to ask that?”

“One time our house burnt down and we had to live in the smokehouse till we got another’n built,” she related. “And you smell like we did.”

“Oh,” I said. “I’ve been branding barrels and the oakwood smokes when it burns and the smoke gets all over me.”

“Adam and Roseleen,” Miss Jerram said. “What are you two a-jawing about?”

“Nothing,” I said, and we hushed up.

But after school Roseleen caught up with me and said, “I’ll walk with ye a ways.” I didn’t mind. After being silent so long toward each other, we rushed to say everything in the short time we were together, until I reached the place where my rugged trail left the main road. Her main question was why I was branding barrels, and I had to explain the work that my paw and grampaw did and how I helped by burning our name into the barrelheads. How many brothers and sisters did I have? None. How many did she have? Scads. How far away was my house? Miles and miles. How far away was hers? Just down the road yonder. Was she any kin to Gerald Coe, the Stay More boy who’d died a hero at Iwo Jima? Yes, he was her own cousin. Where did I get my funny name? I said that I’d been told that in the olden days it was either Maidewell or Madwell, but somewhere along in there they didn’t know how to spell. Did I know I was the best speller in the second grade? Or the third too as far as that goes? That I could “spell down” practically anybody? Why, no, I never knew that. It’s true. You can. And I think you are just swell. I like you a whole lot too.

“Come go home with me and eat supper and stay all night with me,” she said.

Having never heard such an invitation before I did not realize that it was just polite and perfunctory, a commonplace way of saying goodbye that isn’t meant to be taken literally. I didn’t know how to reply. I didn’t know that I was expected to return the invitation at once by saying, “I don’t reckon I can tonight, but why don’t you come go home with me and eat supper and stay all night with me?” which would allow her to counter it by saying “Not this time, I reckon, but I’ll be looking for ye.”

All I could think to say was, “Really?”

That caught her by surprise. She had to think about it for a while before saying, “Well, yeah, if you really want to.”

“I’d really like to,” I said. “But my folks are looking for me, I reckon.”

“So I’ll see ye tomorrow at school,” she said. And she kissed me on the cheek, and walked away.

In the third grade she kissed me on the mouth.

The summer before the fourth grade I had a bad accident in the shop when I grabbed for a backing knife that fell off the bench, and I cut off my first finger and I gashed my leg something terrible. My mother wanted to see if they couldn’t get a doctor to come, or at least take me to see one, but my father said I could just take off from work for a while and see if it didn’t get better. I never could walk too well on my left leg after that.

And I was out of luck the last time I tried to use that trail, which was the morning of the first day of the fourth grade. I had missed Roseleen all summer, and I had no idea if she even knew anything about my accident. Surely she must have wondered why I didn’t ever come into Stay More again to shop at Latha’s Store. Surely she was just as eager as I was to see how far we could go. Surely she had delightful memories of how far we’d already gone.

My father and mother both didn’t want me to attempt to go back to the school with my very bad leg and the fact that Grampaw was practically bedridden with rheumatism and Paw needed my help more than ever in the shop.

But I couldn’t put off seeing Roseleen any longer, and besides Miss Jerram had promised us that the fourth grade would be really special, when we’d really take up the study of geography (and it was going to be her last year, before a soldier she’d met during the war took her away from Stay More). So I begged my mother to fill my dinner pail for me, and I got up before dawn and dressed. I was no longer wearing overalls; but a shirt and trousers, and I felt grown up. But I had covered less than a mile of the trail, hobbling with my bad leg and practically having to drag it behind me as Sog Alan would be required to drag his leg so often toward the end, before I began to have serious doubts about my ability to complete the journey. Only my vision of Roseleen kept me going. And that vision was not enough to sustain me when, attempting the most hazardous and vertical drop of the trail, I lost my grip on the branch I was clinging to—or perhaps the branch broke under my weight (I was a real big boy now) and I plummeted to the rocks below. It was some kind of miracle I didn’t break every bone in my body. I broke only four of them, in my wrist, arm, ankle, and skull. The cracking of the skull gave me a concussion that left me unconscious for hours, and when I came to I could scarcely move. I drifted in and out of consciousness for the rest of the day, sometimes having dreams of Roseleen, even very sexual dreams of Roseleen, and managing only, at one point, to crawl far enough to reach my dinner pail and eat its contents. That was probably around suppertime. When I did not return home for supper, or at any time during the night, my folks figured that something must have happened to me, and the next day my father went out upon that trail himself, the first time he’d ever used the trail his father had blazed to allow a doctor to come for his birth, and he found me and carried me on his shoulder the rest of the way into Stay More, where Doc Swain set my broken bones.

I was never able to go to school in Stay More again. I never saw Roseleen again…until…but that will have to wait.

Chapter thirty-two

It was the longest stretch she’d ever listened to the in-habit and it left her convinced he really was there, not just a voice in her own head. It was very timely too, because more and more lately she had been bothered by the inescapable idea that she was just inventing the whole world inside her mind, that nothing actually existed except her mind. Even before all of this began, when she still lived happily at home with her mother, she had noticed the strange developments that whenever she thought about something, or was hoping for something, that that something came to pass, it occurred, it appeared as if by magic, the magic that was in her head, as if she had just made it happen. This left her feeling powerful and it made her wonder if she had the ability to perceive things that other people could not. But it also, now, left her doubtful of the existence of other people, or even if other people had ever existed at all except in her creation, the way she created the paper inhabitants of Stay More. The last living human being she had seen, a year ago, was Sugrue, and she had done away with him. Although Adam was here, she could not see him nor touch him nor kiss him, and it was so easy to think that he was only the most remarkable product of her lively mind.

One of her favorite lines in the Bible, in the very second chapter, was “And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.”

It was so easy, when she was feeling lonely, as God must have felt, to think that she might really be God herself, and that she had created Adam out of the dust and told him to name everything. Sometimes she tested the idea: “Adam, what’s the name of that little tree over there?”

Why, that’s a sassafras, I reckon. It aint good for much. Slack cooperage, maybe, but we don’t make slack barrels, just tight ones. Course, you could make tea out of the small roots.

“Adam, what name have you given to that big bird pecking on that tree trunk over there?”

I call it a woodhen, but I’ve heared Grampaw call it Lord God Peckerwood on account of it’s so big. It’s actual named a pileated woodpecker, I don’t know why. Maybe because of that red crest.

“Adam, what did you decide to name this big spotty spider?”

That there is jist a orange garden spider, but don’t she make a perty nest? I had one I named Mirandy and she made a web that was ten foot acrost, and I’ve watched her catch grasshoppers in it. Look at them there cocoons, big as hickernuts! They won’t hatch till after Christmas but the babies will stay in the cocoon till May or June.

And She saw everything that She had made, and, behold, it was very good.

When she turned nine years old her new motto was, “Let’s be real.” Having for some time now decided that Adam simply could not be pure imagination, although her imagination never ceased to amaze her, she was not surprised that two important things happened because of him. The first was that he helped her make flour, something she couldn’t possibly have figured out how to do on her own. And something she desperately needed. She had run out of flour a long time back. It had been ages since she’d been able to make any bread or biscuits or cakes or pies. She could still make cornbread with the cornmeal (which was also about to run out), but that was it. She had broadcast the wheat seeds Sugrue had left, and harvested enough of the wheat, stacked into shocks as the Cyclopædia directed her, to result in almost two bushels of wheat, after she’d followed Adam’s instructions for making a primitive winnowing fork (out of sassafras) to throw the threshed grain into the air and separate the wheat from the chaff. (Here her other book, the Bible, was more helpful than the Cyclopædia.)

Adam told her that down the trail toward Stay More, very near a large waterfall, in a glade or glen into which he had fallen during his last attempt to reach the Stay More school, were several caverns once inhabited by Bluff-dweller Indians. He had explored those caverns and had found an Indian mortar and pestle which he had brought home and shown to his folks, but his father had said “We aint got no use for such as that,” and Adam had put them away in the barn somewhere. Robin searched the barn and found them in one of the stalls.

Pounding the wheat by hand with the Indian mortar and pestle was a lot of work, taking hours and hours, and then Adam said it would have to be sieved, and he helped her fashion a sieve from a tin can with nail holes punched in the bottom, which was slow but it worked. In the box of kitchen gadgets Sugrue had brought from home was one of those old tin hand-crank flour sifters, and when she got through using that she discovered that she had enough flour to make at least one loaf of bread, and maybe a pie.

But when she got up one morning to light a fire in the kitchen stove so she could bake that loaf of bread, she discovered that she was out of matches. There had been several boxes of Diamond “Strike Anywhere” Kitchen Matches, but she had used one or two whenever she wanted to light a fire or a lantern or even a candle, and now she was all out! And winter was coming on and it was cold in the house!

“ADAM!” she yelled. “How can I start a fire?”

This time, thank heavens, he came when he was called. Put on your coat, silly, he said. He could say that, not ever feeling cold or hot himself.

“I have to light a fire in the stove!” she said. “And I’m all out of matches!”

I don’t have ary a match, he said.

“You don’t have ary a anything!” she mocked his language. She had once asked him what “ary” meant, and he said he figured it was just a way of saying the old-time “ever a” or “e’er a”.

“How did you make a new fire when you ran out?” she asked.

We didn’t never run out. It’s terrible bad luck to let a fire go out, and it never happened to us.

“But didn’t you ever make a fire without matches? The way the Boy Scouts do or whatever? Rub a couple or sticks together or something?”

What’s Boy Scouts? he wanted to know. Naw, but one time I lit the forge in the shop with a kind of bow drill like the Indians made. Let’s see if that there bow drill aint still anywheres about.

But it wasn’t. They searched through all the stuff in the shop and even with her coat on she was getting very cold. Many days later she remembered that Sugrue had possessed a pocket lighter that he lit his cigarettes with, and she went to the outhouse and searched in the remains of his disintegrating trousers on the floor, managing to say “ew” not more than a couple of times, and found the Zippo lighter. But that was many days later, and now she was cold and eager to get the oven ready for some bread.

Listen careful, Adam said, and I’ll try and tell ye how to fashion a bow drill. It aint near as hard as making a firkin.

It took some whittling of an Osage orange branch, the type of tree that left those big inedible (except by Ralgrub, who loved them) horse apples all over the ground, the tree that got its name from the fact the Osages who’d lived and hunted hereabouts (years after the Bluff-dwellers had died out) made their bows and arrows out of it. She made the bow drill’s bow out of that, and also the spindle. The bearing block she made from an oak barrel stave which she drilled with the bung-borer, an augur Adam said was used to make the bungholes in barrels.

The idea was fairly simple, and all she needed now was something for a little bundle of tinder. Adam said the fluff of cattail was the best thing, but that not being within hiking distance, she substituted the fluff of a milkweed pod (It’s called butterfly weed, Adam explained, and it’s good for all kinds of things). The idea was to wrap the bow’s string around the spindle and saw back and forth to set the spindle spinning in the hole of the bearing block until it charred and then the hearth board began to smoke as the char dust ignited into a coal, and the red coal was dumped onto the milkweed down of the tinder bundle, which you blew upon until it burst into flames.

Although the idea was fairly simple, it took Robin most of the day to make it work. By the time she got the tinder bundle burning and carried it into the house and put it in the kindling in the stove, it was too late to make the bread that day, but at least if she kept the fire burning and never let it go out completely for the rest of the winter, she’d have no problems. She was proud of herself for making fire. She understood how the very first people who lived must have felt when they learned how to make fire. But she understood she’d never have been able to do it without Adam.

She left the woodstove in the living room burning all night. It was a cold night, but she did not let the animals into the house. There were too many of them, and while Ralgrub was still young and practically helpless it wouldn’t be fair to let her spend the night in the house if none of the others could, and it wouldn’t be smart to let all those dogs into the house. “You understand, don’t you, Hreapha?” Robin said, and Hreapha was content to spend the night in her usual spot, a hole she’d dug in the earthen floor of the barrel shop, out of the wind. As for Robert, he never came around at night any more anyway. Wherever he spent the night, he was all worn out the next day, and spent the whole day sleeping on the porch.

Robin slept alone now, and usually it didn’t bother her too much, but occasionally she felt lonely. She’d not forgotten Paddington, and ached to have him with her. Sometimes, even, she recalled how nice it had been to go to sleep lying snuggled with Sugrue. One evening she spoke aloud, “Adam, would you like to sleep with me?” But, as so often was the case, she got no answer. It didn’t matter. Even if he had answered, and said he’d be glad to sleep with her, she wouldn’t know he was there. She wouldn’t be able to feel him. She’d just have to pretend that they were snuggling up and keeping each other warm…but no, his body wouldn’t be warm because he didn’t have any body.

Sometimes he occupied her dreams. She had never seen him by day nor even made any attempt to imagine what he looked like, but he was clearly visible in her dreams, a tall boy of twelve in overalls with an unruly shock of brown hair and a very nice face. She could almost touch him. In fact, she did touch him in her dreams. It seems she kissed him, and hugged him. He was very bashful, and blushed a lot. When she wasn’t dreaming about Adam, usually her dreams went bad, and involved being lost in the woods and pursued by animals that wanted to eat her, or fires or tornadoes. Her ninth year included a lot of nightmares, from which she sometimes woke up screaming or crying for her mommy. She also knew that when she read the horror stories in the Bible—the beheading of John the Baptist, Absalom accidentally hanging himself, Moab making lime out of the king’s skeleton (did she need any lime for anything?), the murder of the daughter of Jephthah, and David killing Goliath not once but twice—these stories would give her nightmares, and she tried to stop reading whenever she came to one of those parts of the Bible. The few times she had really nice dreams, often involving Adam, were mostly just before waking in the mornings, so that she had trouble waking up and wanted to go back to sleep and return to the dream.

Often in her ninth year she repeated her invitation, “Adam, would you like to sleep with me?”

Finally when warm weather had returned she got a reply. Gal, I don’t never sleep.

“Oh,” she said, and thought about that. “There’s no bed in your bedroom,” she observed. But he didn’t seem to spend any time in that room anyhow. She couldn’t imagine how anybody, not even an in-habit, could stay awake constantly all the time. “Don’t you ever get bored?” she asked.

What’s bored? Bored is when you caint find something to keep you curious. So long as there’s anything going on in the world, I’ll never be bored.

“But what’s going on in the world? Nothing ever happens around here.”

She heard his scoffing laughter. You just aint looking for it. Or you caint see it. Or caint hear it. Or caint taste it or smell it or feel it. Why, there aint a moment goes by that something wondrous don’t occur.

“Like what?”

Like a orange garden spider building her web. Or like the wind a-slewing through the cedars. Or the sound of them dogs afar off a-hrolfing and a-hrothgaring as they chase their game. Or the lightning bugs all over the meader at dusky dark. Or the fine smell of oak wood fresh cut. Or the sweet breeze that puffs from your nose when you’re a-sleeping.

“So you watch me when I’m sleeping?” she wanted to know. Her breath caught and she felt uneasy.

Iffen I don’t have nothing better to watch. Which aint too often.

“And you watch me when I go to the bathroom?” She didn’t mean bathroom, because there wasn’t one, and she didn’t mean when she was taking a bath, although she did mean that too, except that she didn’t take a bath very often.

He did not answer, which she took to mean that he did. But somehow her sense of modesty, what little was left of it, wasn’t offended. Being watched by an invisible in-habit isn’t nearly as embarrassing as being watched by someone who has real eyes. And since she rarely wore any clothes any more when it was warm, and had outgrown all her clothes anyhow, her going naked made her less and less self-conscious about it. In fact she felt more self-conscious when she had to dress against cold: when it was cold she had to try to squeeze into an outgrown coat or else wear something of Sugrue’s that was too big for her. She had thought about taking the scissors and the needle-and-thread and cutting down some his garments to make them fit her, but she wisely realized it would be better to just wait until she grew into them, and meanwhile she went without clothing in warm weather and made do with whatever would fit or wrap around her in cold weather. None of her shoes fit any more, and all of Sugrue’s were much too big for her, but she wore them if she had to walk in the snow. Otherwise she went barefoot all the time.

Chapter thirty-three

As she had planned, Hreapha gave Robin a snake for her tenth birthday. It wasn’t easy. She wasn’t at all certain that Robin would even appreciate the gift, because a snake, even a baby snake, is not in the least cuddly and cute. But she discussed the matter with the in-habit, and while he was amused at the idea of giving someone a snake for a birthday present, he knew there might be obstacles to overcome in the way of fomenting a bond between Robin and her newest pet. King snakes, he said, were known to live to a ripe old age, sometimes twenty years or more, and would Robin want to keep a slithery reptile on the premises for that long a time?

But come to think on it, he allowed, maybe it’s high time she learnt that pets don’t have to be furry and cuddlesome.

Hreapha offered to present the snake to Robin as a birthday present from them all, including the in-habit, who was not physically able to present Robin with birthday gifts, and had not yet done so.

By the way, Hreapha asked him, when is your own birthday? It’s not right for us to honor Robin each year and ignore your birthday.

I aint got ary, he said. Ole Adam has one, which is right before Christmas, but I’m jist his remainder, don’t ye know? I don’t never get no older, so I don’t have birthdays.

Do you mean you’ll be twelve all your life? Hreapha asked him.

The in-habit chuckled. All my “life” aint exactly the way to put it. But I’ll never change a whit.

That August, without leaving his haunt, that is, within barking distance of the house, the in-habit helped Hreapha find a rotting stump where a mother king snake (Ort to be called a queen snake, I reckon) had laid a clutch of nearly a dozen eggs in a pile of loose damp stuff. The oblong eggshells were white like chicken eggs, but not brittle; they were tough and leathery.

How do you know the eggs are king snakes’ and not rattlesnakes’ or copperheads’? Hreapha asked.

Them pizen snakes don’t lay no eggs. They just have live babies the same way you do.

Hreapha told all her offspring about the plan for Mistress’ birthday, and asked them to take turns watching the snake eggs to see when they hatched.

Shoot far, exclaimed Hrolf. What if the mother snake comes around to keep a watch on her eggs?

The in-habit explained that snake mothers don’t ever pay any attention to their eggs once they’re laid, nor do the baby snakes ever get any attention from their parents. Pore things is all on their own. He also explained how the baby snake has a tiny but sharp “egg tooth” on the tip of its snout which it uses to slit the eggshell so it can escape.

Of the dogs, only Hruschka would have nothing to do with the eggs, for she had a morbid fear of snakes that she would never overcome. Hreapha herself was on watch when the first hatchling emerged, so tiny, hardly bigger than a worm, and totally helpless. How do they nurse? Hreapha wanted to know.

They sure don’t drink milk, not that I know of. By and by they’ll be able to catch little critters and eat ’em, but for now your best bet is to see if you caint find some baby mice to feed ’em. Or little lizards. Or tree frogs.

Hreapha instructed her dogs to help in rounding up sufficient lizards, frogs and baby mice to feed the newly hatched snakes. They left the snakes alone with their food overnight, because snakes don’t like to be disturbed while they’re feeding.

Hreapha then had to decide which one of the several hatchlings to capture and present to Robin. Do we want a male snake or a female snake? she asked the in-habit. And how can I tell them apart?

Iffen I had fingers and thumbs I could tell ye, he said. And you don’t have fingers nor thumbs neither. Ralgrub has got ’em, and I could try to explain to her how to sex a snake, but maybe you’d better just take your chances on getting a female.

Why a female?

Hreapha could hear the in-habit hemming and hawing. Being the smartest of the animals hereabouts did not endow her with the ability to understand right away what would eventually occur to her: that a snake, being symbolically phallic, would be even more suggestive as a male. Especially to a ten-year-old girl who was just a year or two short of puberty, and who spent all the hot summer in a state of nakedness like all the other creatures on the place (except possibly the in-habit, and Hreapha decided that invisible clothing didn’t count anyhow). Robin was as totally lacking in self-consciousness about her nakedness as she was about her singing. She had a lovely voice, and she sang all the time, although more often than not she did not sing any actual words of a song, but just pure tones in some kind of melodic chant. Her voice must have carried to the far reaches of the haunt. Except for Hrolf, who seemed to appreciate it, and of course Hrolf’s mother, the other dogs found Robin’s singing objectionable, and usually ran off into the woods to get away from it.

If Hreapha had given full thought to the sexual allusions of snakes, she’d have gone ahead with her plan to give Robin a fawn for her birthday. But she’d already gone to the trouble to prepare a cage of sorts for the new pet: there was a discarded two-gallon glass jar in the trash that the garbage detail would have buried, but Hreapha rescued it, and rolled it with her nose out to one of the stalls in the barn, where she managed, with help from Hrolf, to get it into a vertical position. Now that the bunch of baby snakes had been more than adequately fed as a result of all the dogs’ round-up of tiny rodents and reptiles and amphibians, to the extent that they were beginning to crawl away from their nest, Hreapha selected the prettiest hatchling, to the extent that snakes can be pretty, and, hoping it was female, transported it gently in her jaws to its new home in the glass jar in the barn. For the next few weeks the dogs regularly dropped assorted baby mice, lizards, and frogs into the jar, until Robin turned ten.

Ma! hollered Hrolf one morning. That snake has done turned itself inside out!

The in-habit was summoned to inspect the damage, which wasn’t damage after all but simply, according to the in-habit, a shedding of the skin, and the snake would shed its skin once again before Robin’s birthday. The in-habit explained to them all that it was the only way the snake could grow. It had to shed its skin to get larger. And they were feeding it so much that it was getting large fast. It looked already like a miniature version of the six-footer it would become; it had the same markings: black with white and yellow crossbands that forked on the sides and ran into each other. It was indeed a pretty creature.

The day arrived for Robin’s birthday, and the in-habit persuaded her to use one of the last boxes of cake mix to make herself a birthday cake. Hreapha overheard their conversation.

“That would be selfish,” Robin said. “Making a birthday cake for yourself.”

How’s that any more selfish than anything else you do for yourself that you have to do because there’s nobody to do it for you?

All the inhabitants, including the in-habit, were invited to the birthday party, and each was given a piece of the cake. Ralgrub and Robert especially enjoyed the cake, and the dogs, although they didn’t have sweet teeth, dutifully ate a piece each.

Robin cut one more piece and held it up to the air. “This is your piece, Adam, but I’ll just have to eat it for you.” And she ate Adam’s piece.

Mmmm, moaned the in-habit, that was sure scrumdiddlyumptious. And now if you’ll kindly foller your dogs out to the barn, they’ve got a real present for you.

“Oh, really?” said Robin. She heeded the invitation and followed them out to the barn.

“Hreapha! Hreapha!” exclaimed Hreapha, that is, Happy Birthday! And just look what we’ve got for you!

“Eeek!” exclaimed Robin. “It’s a snake!” And she backed away from the glass jar.

Hit’s a shore-enough king snake, said the in-habit. The masterest snake there is. Won’t do you no harm, but it’ll slay any pizen snakes that try to come around. Some folks call it a chain snake on account of them markings that look like links in a chain.

“What kind of birthday present is a snake?” Robin demanded. “I can’t pet it.”

Pet it all you like, said the in-habit. Go ahead, stick your hand in the jar and take aholt of it real gentle-like. I guarantee she won’t bite you.

“She?” said Robin. “Is it a girl snake?” Robin slowly and cautiously put her hand into the jar and took hold of the snake and lifted it out of the jar and cradled it in her arms the same way she would cradle any other infant. The snake squirmed and wiggled to get loose from her grasp, but it soon settled down.

I can tell ye how to find out, the in-habit said, and he instructed her in a procedure called “popping” whereby she turned the snake over to locate its afterplace and then pressed or “popped” in a certain place to see if it had the snake’s equivalent of a penis. It didn’t. So I reckon it’s a female, sure enough, the in-habit said.

“Then how can you call it a ‘king’ snake?” Robin wanted to know.

You got me there, he said. I never heared tell of no queen snake, though, but it appears that’s what you’ve got.

So Robin decided to name her snake The Queen of Sheba, explaining there was a woman of that name in her book called the Bible who had brought rich treasures to King Solomon.

They all called the snake Sheba for short, and everybody lived happily ever after.

No, that wasn’t true, Hreapha realized. Sheba was going to live for many, many years, and in no time Robin had made friends with her, so much so that after Sheba’s eighth shedding of her skin they could release her from the glass jar and she wouldn’t try to run away and they didn’t have to feed her any more. She kept the whole haunt free of mice and rats, even to the extent of depriving Robert of part of his food supply, so that he had to roam farther and farther into the woods for his supper, although on at least two occasions he saved Sheba’s life, once by killing an owl that attempted to prey upon her, and the other time by killing an opposum also bent upon making a meal of Sheba. Sheba had a number of natural predators, including skunks and coyotes. She established her throne in the stall of the barn where she’d grown up, and she could usually be found there, where Robin often visited her and enjoyed picking her up and holding her and even wrapping her around her neck or waist. King snakes—and in this case a queen snake—are constrictors, and they capture and kill their prey, including the poisonous snakes, by wrapping themselves around the prey and squeezing it to death. Sheba’s squeezes on Robin were gentle and sensuous.

Hreapha understood that sex was the most important part of every creature, that all creatures lived in order to mate, and thus mating had been intended to be a main source of pleasure. She herself never again came into heat—something had gone wrong during her first and only experience at birthing, and whatever internal triggers or switches consume and devote the body to procreation were no longer operative in her—but she still enjoyed observing the manifold manifestations of love in all other creatures, including her own offspring. Recently Hreapha had witnessed an act that she had been suspecting for some time: Robert was not merely a constant companion and mentor to his protégé Hroberta but had also become her lover. Hreapha didn’t mind; she thought it was cute. And it couldn’t result in Hroberta’s pregnancy and overpopulation of the premises. But when Hroberta’s sister Hruschka also went into heat, she simply disappeared. Hreapha could only assume that Hruschka, who was the quietest and shyest of her offspring, was neither willing to discuss her feelings with her mother nor willing to have one of her brothers or Robert put her passion to rest, so she wandered off in search of succor elsewhere in the world. Hreapha wondered if she might have managed to reach Stay More and even unknowingly mated with her father, Yowrfrowr. Or, more likely, she had encountered the pack of coyotes who roamed these hills. Or perhaps she had headed north and found other dogs somewhere. They were all sad to lose her, and they hoped that she might come home after she had been bred, but she never did.

Her three brothers began to pester their mother to allow them to attempt to find Stay More, not just to search for Hruschka but also to meet their father. Hreapha had promised to take Hrolf on his first birthday to see Yowrfrowr, but the birthday had come and gone and Hreapha had never been able to overcome her fear that the journey was no longer possible…although it wasn’t inconceivable that Hruschka had somehow accomplished it. But now she had another motive for making the attempt, in addition to all her other motives, not least of which was her desire to see dear Yowrfrowr again.

So, in the early springtime, not long after the dogs’ second birthday and thus, she told them, worth considering as a belated birthday present, she took them to see if they could find Stay More. Hroberta wanted to go too, but Robert dissuaded her. Of course Hreapha explained her destination and itinerary to the in-habit, who in turn explained it to Robin.

“Don’t go, Hreapha!” Robin said to her. “I’ll worry about you. It’s dangerous. Have you forgotten the last time you tried it?”

“Hreapha,” she said, that is, No, I certainly haven’t forgotten, but that time I was all alone and this time I have my three big boys to help me.

Leave her to give it a try, the in-habit urged Robin. They can allus turn back if the going’s too rough. Then in parting he said to Hreapha, You’ll just have to find some way to skirt around that there drop-off in the trail where it goes straight down near the waterfall.

Which indeed proved to be their downfall, in both senses of the word.

But before they even reached it, they encountered another obstacle: the coyotes. There weren’t five of them, or not the same five who had raped Hreapha, but only four. The four of them circled Hreapha and her three boys, and the eight dogs went through the formalities of sniffing each other’s afterplaces. She did not recognize, or could not recall the specific scent, of any of them. They were especially curious about the scent of Yipyip, and he was equally curious about them.

He looked at her. Ma, am I any kin to these guys?

She did not say, as she was tempted to, One of them might be your father. Instead she said, They’re coyotes, and you’ve probably got some coyote in you.

In their guttural language the coyotes began conversing among themselves, perhaps debating whether to attack. Yipyip listened with great interest, and almost seemed to understand them, which Hreapha couldn’t do.

Ma, Hrolf said to her, would you mind if I took a bite out of one of these bastards?

Not until they bite first, she said. Her boys were full grown and had their father’s muscular build, and she knew they could hold their own in a fight with these bastards. As her own mother had done for her, she had taught all her offspring the full array of martial skills: each of them was an excellent fighter, although none of them had had a full chance to put their skills to the test. They hadn’t yet encountered a bear.

One of the coyotes, possibly the alpha male who had inherited the position from the leader of the previous pack Hreapha had encountered, spoke at length to Yipyip, who listened with excitement and then turned to her and said, Ma, they’re inviting me to go hunting a bear with them. Can I?

What could she say? He was too old even to be asking her permission. It’s your decision, she said. Don’t stay too long. Then she addressed the alpha male, You’d better take good care of him, and let him come home when he’s ready.

But she wasn’t at all certain the alpha male knew her language. She could only watch as the pack loped off into the woods with her Yipyip in their midst.

Hreapha resumed the journey and they came at last to the head of the waterfall, the place where she had attempted to swim across the little creek and had been caught up in the water and swept over the falls. She had told this story several times to her offspring. I recognize it, Ma! Hrothgar exclaimed, and before she could stop him he leapt into the water and attempted to paddle his way across it, and was seized by it and carried over the falls, and, as his mother had done, plummeted fifty feet down to the pool beneath, where he disappeared underwater. Hreapha and Hrolf crept warily to the edge of the precipice and peered over, waiting to see Hrothgar emerge from the water, but he did not. “Hreapha!” she wailed down to him.

“Hrolf!” howled his brother.

They waited a long time but Hrothgar did not come to the surface. They searched all along the cliff for some way to get down to the pool. They found the remains of the trail, in the place where it was nearly vertical, the place where Adam had fallen on his last attempt to reach the Stay More school, a place that was nearly impossible for humans and completely impossible for dogs.

There was no way that Hruschka could have gone down there. She must have gone northward, or, as Hreapha herself had done the first time she’d tried to reach Stay More, taken the road that ran along the east side of Madewell Mountain.

Hreapha and her one remaining boy returned sadly homeward, their heads held low and their tails drooping. They waited a long time, months and months, to see if either Hruschka or Yipyip might come home, but they did not. Nor, of course, did Hrothgar.

Chapter thirty-four

My heart went out to Hreapha. It went out to all the survivors but especially to her, the mother, who had lost three of her progeny and was disconsolate for a long time. Eventually I got them all together—Hreapha, Hrolf, Hroberta, Robert, and Robin, as well as Ralgrub, Sheba, and Dewey, the fawn that Robin got for her eleventh birthday—and told them something that I had been keeping to myself: how Grandma Laura Madewell had lost three of the children she’d had after my father, Gabriel, was born. I did not wish to malign either Laura or Hreapha with the comparison, but they had much in common, especially that their mates were so much alike: Braxton Madewell wasn’t as well-spoken as Yowrfrowr but he was very like him, even in his shaggy, droop-eared appearance. I told my audience about the romance of Braxton and Laura, pointing out how similar it was to that of Yowrfrowr and Hreapha, with one important exception: that the latter two were not permitted to live together. There were some marvelous parallels, even including the fact that Laura had hiked a long way from her home, in a place called Boxley, in order to be with Braxton and try to persuade him to move to Boxley, and just as Yowrfrowr was too devoted to his mistress to leave her, Braxton was too devoted to his, the oak-forested mountain. Gabriel was their first born male, as Hrolf was Hreapha’s…but I would save for another day spelling out the many similarities between Gabe and Hrolf. Laura would have two other boys, and two girls. One of the girls ran away from home—like Hruschka? Eventually there was only one remaining, Gabe, my father—like Hrolf?

In the earlier part of my childhood I knew Grandma Laura well. She was a small woman, as Hreapha was small, and her white hair was the color of Hreapha’s. What I remembered most about Grandma—and this held my audience, who began to drool—were the buttermilk biscuits she made, light as feathers, which practically dissolved just as you sank your teeth into them. Robin wanted to know if she’d got the recipe out of that 1888 Housekeeper’s Cyclopædia, which she’d brought from Boxley to Madewell Mountain as part of her small dowry or trousseau or whatever. No, the secret of those biscuits was something she’d learned from her mother, a Villines, and which she passed on to her daughter-in-law Sarah, my mother, but which my mother could never make as nicely as Grandma Laura could.

In-habits, who retain all their senses, including taste, but possess no need to eat nor any hunger, can only endow with rich memory such an experience as biting into Laura Madewell’s biscuits. Even if Robin discovered, as she was busily investigating recipes all on her own, a way to make perfect biscuits, and assuming her rather crude home-milled flour would permit her, her biscuits could never do for me what Grandma’s did, what Proust’s madeleines did for him.

But remembrance of biscuits past was distracting me from my main point, the tragedy of Laura’s loss of her children, which corresponded to Hreapha’s loss of hers. I would not go into the details of how each of them lost their lives, although the stories had been told me by Grandma herself: the important thing is not that one of your children dies in a waterfall and another one runs away from home but that some vicissitude robs you forever of the pleasure of their company. Farther along we’ll know all about it.

That little narrative and sermon were for the benefit of the whole company (including you), and were delivered in the elegiac accents of a twelve-year-old country boy who had been left behind by that actual part of himself who against his will had been removed from these beloved premises. I was only a simulacrum, no, an eidolon in the classical Greek sense, a presence, and my presence was needed more these days not by Robin but by Hreapha, and I spent countless hours (what is a mere hour to an in-habit?) in the latter’s company, not merely consoling her for her loss but honoring the promise that farther along we’ll know all about it.

I hate it here, Hreapha said to me one day when she was feeling despondent. I wish I were anywhere else.

Is that a fact, now? I rejoined. How can ye be certain that anywheres else would be any better?

I can’t, she said. But it just wouldn’t be here. Here is so dismal.

I reckon I may of felt that way sometimes. Or Adam did, I mean. Until it was time to leave. Until they was a-fixing to take him away. And then he got right mastered by the thought of leaving.

I told Hreapha the story of Adam’s last day on Madewell Mountain, of Gabe loading the wagon with just the bare essentials of their possessions, just what the wagon would hold in addition to the three of them—or the two of them, because at the moment of departure Adam kissed his mother and said, “You’uns have a good time in Californy. I aint a-going.” And ran away into the woods. No, not ran, because with that game leg of his he couldn’t even walk very fast, but it was fast enough to get away from his father, who had been busy loading the wagon, and by the time Sarah told Gabe that their son had gone off into the woods, he was too far behind to catch him. Still, Gabe plunged into the woods in pursuit, yelling over and over again, “AD! AD! AD!”

Adam knew he was being stupid. He didn’t manage to get so far off into the woods that he couldn’t hear in the distance that voice, “AD! ADAM MADEWELL, YOU BETTER JUST STOP AND GIVE A THOUGHT TO WHAT YOU’RE A-DOING!”

But Adam was so determined not to leave Madewell Mountain that he spent the whole night in the woods, cold and hungry. He discovered the unburied corpse of his dog, Hector, whom his father had shot days earlier. (This part of my story moved Hreapha out of her megrims.) Early in the morning he went back to the house to make certain that his parents had in fact departed. He searched the kitchen for something to eat, but his mother had left nothing behind. Days earlier, his father had taken the remaining livestock—the cow, the pigs, the goats, the chickens and geese—to his brother-in-law in Parthenon. Gabe Madewell had planned after reaching Harrison to sell the wagon and the mules for whatever he could get and pay a family in Harrison who were planning to drive a truck to California and would have room for the Madewells. Adam assumed they were already on their way to that Promised Land. Up until the day of the departure he had almost persuaded himself that the only good reason for going to California was that he might find Roseleen there; he had heard that the year before her parents had joined the endless migration of Arkansawyers (or “Arkies” as they were called) to California. But on the day of the departure he had had to choose between Madewell Mountain and California, and he knew that the latter, for all its fabled splendors, was simply no match for the former.

Now, even if he was only twelve (which, after all, Robin herself wouldn’t reach for another year), he planned to live here by himself, fend for himself, make do, subsist, exactly as Robin was doing so many years later. His father had taken the firearms, but Adam had a slingshot he’d left in the cooper’s shed, and he also had some fishing tackle and he could make a spear or two, and catch enough game to cook on the nice old kitchen stove that had been left behind. He didn’t even have the advantages that Robin had, not just of firearms but of a stock of edibles (albeit hers were practically gone now) salted away by Sog Alan, so Adam had to start from scratch in fending for himself. It was a daunting prospect.

But right away he killed a squirrel with his slingshot and fried it on the kitchen stove, having just a little difficulty with the recipe because all the previous times he had killed squirrels with his slingshot his mother had done the cooking. He overcooked the squirrel but it was still edible, and something for his stomach.

“Better piss on that fire, and put it out,” said Gabe Madewell, and Adam wheeled around to see his father standing there. His father was holding his rifle loosely in one hand. Adam was instantly scared, wondering, What’s the rifle for?

“I figured you’uns had done gone,” he said.

“You didn’t figure your maw would let me go off without ye, did ye? Why, I didn’t hardly make it to the foot of the mountain afore she commenced a-bawlin at the top of her lungs.”

“So you’ve made up your mind to stay?” Adam said hopefully.

“Naw, not a chance. The wagon’s still at the foot of the mountain, where we had to camp out last night. I’ve hoofed it back up here to get ye. Now unbutton yore britches and piss on that fire and let’s go.”

Adam would not piss on the fire. “I aint leavin, Paw,” he declared.

“Well, we aint goin nowheres without ye. Yore maw won’t allow it.”

“Then bring the wagon on back up here.”

“Boy, you aint yet learnt why we caint do that? When your grampaw died, this place died with him. This place aint fit for nothing. I caint run the cooperage without your grampaw, and you aint much help, and besides there just aint much of a market no more for homemade barrels, nor even stave bolts. I’ve told ye all that, time and time again.”

“Come and look, Paw,” Adam requested and led his father out to the cooper’s shed where, in one corner, Adam had hidden the cedar churn he’d recently made. “Look at that, Paw,” he said. “I can make anything, and if you’ll just give me time I can make a barrel ever bit as good as you can.”

Gabe Madewell laughed, but he fondled the churn and admired it and allowed as how it was pretty good made. “But nobody uses churns no more,” he observed. “You can buy your butter at the store real easy.” He tossed the churn aside, and Adam heard it crack as it fell. “It’ll be another two or three years afore you’re big enough to make a barrel, and no telling but what there won’t be no market at all for homemade barrels.” He took the boy’s upper arm in a tight grip, the muscular vise-like grip of a cooper, and led him out of the cooperage. “I never should’ve dragged your maw up here in the first place, but your grampaw needed me, and now he don’t because he’s dead. And now it’s time to make your maw happy and get the hell out of here.”

Adam broke free from his grip. “God damn it, Paw, I’m not leavin. You caint make me.”

His father just studied him for awhile. When he spoke again the coldness of his voice sent shivers through the boy. “Ad, you know I had to put ole Heck away because we couldn’t take him with us. Now I could just as easy put you away too, if we caint take you with us.” He raised the rifle and pointed it at his son.

Adam was shocked as well as scared but he managed to put a little courage into his words, “How you figure to explain that to Maw?”

“I’d just have to tell her I couldn’t find you nowheres. I’d just have to say we’d have to get on. Them folks in Harrison that’s a-taking us to Californy won’t wait for us. We’ve done already put ’em a day behind. Now take your pick, Ad: get yourself down the mountain with me, or there’ll be only your ghost to stay here.”

Adam turned and gazed at the homestead. Would his ghost really be able to stay here? He had spent a number of idle moments pondering the matter of death, especially when his grandfather had died, and he had considered whether or not it is possible to survive death in some way. Is there some part of yourself that can go on after you’re gone?

He knew it was possible that his father didn’t really mean it, that he had no intention of killing him but was just tricking him into leaving by that threat.

“Give me a minute, Paw,” he requested, and walked away from his father, back to the cooper’s shed. He reached down to the earthen floor of the shed and clawed up a handful of dirt and put it into his britches pocket, to take to California. From his other pocket he took his handkerchief and held it to his lips. “Adam Madewell,” he whispered, “be always here. Be always here. Never leave, Adam. Stay more forever.” He spread the handkerchief over the toppled cedar churn, and then he straightened up as his eyes began to fill with tears, and he limped out of the cooper’s shed and rejoined his father, and they walked together as fast as his limp would allow down the mountain to where his mother and the wagon were waiting.

The wagon has halfway to Harrison before he realized that he had never pissed on the fire. He smiled at the thought. Maybe the house would burn down. But maybe the fire would just die out.

“So you left yourself here on purpose?” Robin said. It wasn’t a question so much as a statement of fact. And it was as good a way as any of stating the truth, namely, that Adam Madewell had created me, had made me and bade me become his proxy, to inhabit these beloved premises after he was gone. I looked at Robin, aware that she was almost seeing me, aware that she had been listening to the story along with her dear dog.

“You,” she said, “never did go to California.”

Nope, I never did, nor will I ever.

“Does Adam know you’re here? Do you somehow talk to him?”

Naw, I caint reach him. Nor vicey versy.

“You don’t know what he’s doing in California? Or even if he’s still alive?”

I reckon he must still be alive and kicking, or else I wouldn’t be, myself. But I’m sorry to say I aint got the least notion what-all he’s up to.

The lad in his awkward way had stated an accurate but perplexing fact: I, Adam Madewell, already forty years old, was indeed living and working in Rutherford, California, having endured some experiences about which we’ll at least have a synopsis farther along, but I had no awareness at all that the little ritual I’d performed upon leaving Madewell Mountain had actually had the magic effect I’d intended, of creating not a second self but an ersatz self, free from time and appetite, forever keeping the home fires burning (literally, in view of his showing Robin how to make a fire). It would have been so nice if somehow I could have contacted him from time to time to ask how things were going. Or if he could have followed my progress through life, my fortunes, literally, in California. But we were as two brothers who went their separate ways and never corresponded. I suppose that is simply an inescapable condition of all in-habits everywhere.

How then, you’re wondering, can I, the mature, learned, and even, I hope, occasionally entertaining adult Adam, switch places, or at least first-person pronouns, so readily and glibly with that backwoods hobbledehoy or his lively understandable spirit? Because, as I’ve hinted before, this story, at least for now, is all in the past tense, of which I am master. This does not mean that I could omnisciently witness everything that was happening on Madewell Mountain at the time of the story, but that from this retrospective of the present, now, I can reconstruct all of it for your benefit at least as adroitly as Robin had been reconstructing with her paper dolls the entire history of Stay More.

Alas, she had outgrown the paper dolls. Or lost interest in them. Or found other things to play with. She had not destroyed them, and when I asked her, How come you aint played with them little paper people for some time now? she shrugged and said she had run out of paper.

Which was true. Robin was running out of everything…except determination and resourcefulness, which, with my help, would get her through. She ran out of sugar. She ran out of toothpaste. Sog Alan had stocked up several dozen tubes, but Robin despite a general laxity in her personal grooming liked to brush her teeth at least once a day (which was a good thing because she was not going to get any care at all from a dentist), and the toothpaste was all gone. She vaguely remembered something she’d learned in school about using baking soda as a substitute for toothpaste, and there were enough boxes of baking soda to last her until she was able to devise or invent some other dentifrice (at fourteen, having taking an interest in geology after Hreapha gave her a chunk of crystal quartz for her fourteenth birthday, she would discover a small deposit of chalk on a cliff side, and discover that chalk makes a splendid dentifrice).

But you can live without toothpaste. It’s hard to live without soap, and now that was all gone too. Nothing to bathe with, nothing to wash the dishes with, nothing to clean your clothes with (although she rarely wore clothes, it was nice to keep the bedsheets and pillow-cases laundered). The Cyclopædia had a recipe for hard soap with three ingredients, sal-soda, unslacked lime, and rainwater, only one of which she possessed (although she knew from the Bible that lime could be made from a skeleton), and although I had watched Grandma Laura and my mother making lye soap I had only the vaguest idea of the process or the ingredients, and thus was of no help to Robin. Often I, the in-habit, could only say I was sorry I couldn’t help, or didn’t know what to advise her.

Robin’s body was getting dirty. It was also changing, as I couldn’t help noticing and admiring. She was already as tall as I was, and I in my innocence began to wonder if she would eventually outgrow me entirely. I already knew that she would soon become as old as I was, and thereafter she’d get progressively older than I. As her childish body had grown, it had softened and rounded, especially in the hips as her pelvic area broadened, her waist was more accented and narrow, her arms were rounder—her body was taking on the classical feminine vase shape. She was no longer a child, at all. Most delightfully her nipples were beginning to project, and the area around them was swelling into a conelike projection on her otherwise flat chest, although, curious to young Adam’s ogling in-habit, one breast seemed to be developing more rapidly than the other one.

Having the advantage of invisibility, the in-habit could indulge his desire by gazing upon her ripening body to his heart’s content, and even to his part’s content.

Chapter thirty-five

There was only one mirror in the house, a half-length wall mirror with its edges fading and rotted-looking, but she loved to stand in front of it, even if she badly needed to wash off some of her dirt (if she could only figure out how to make soap), and examine what was happening to her body, how she was not just growing up but filling out. When she went to the mirror, she liked to allow Sheba to wrap herself around her neck and upper body (she’d measured with the yardstick, and Sheba was nearly six feet long now), which Sheba herself seemed to think was her favorite place in all the world, wrapping around her and gently squeezing. Her blonde hair was a mess. It came down to her waist and she hadn’t been able to shampoo it since the soap ran out a long time back. Studying herself and Sheba in the mirror, although she loved her nakedness, she wished that maybe sometime she could dress up in a really nice fancy dress, but all the dresses Sugrue had bought her were ridiculously small now.

She caught sight of her fawn Dewey watching her. She often let him into the house, and even let him sleep with her, along with Ralgrub, the three of them all snuggled up. Dewey was cute beyond belief, with those big innocent eyes and big ears and his head too big for his little body. But now, as she studied his reflection in the mirror behind her, he seemed to look too fuzzy, and she knew he wasn’t that fuzzy. His speckled coat was smoother than that. She thought at first there was something wrong with the old mirror, but then she backed away from the mirror as far as she could back, and studied her own reflection with Sheba wrapped around her. She looked fuzzy too, or blurry, and maybe it wasn’t the mirror’s fault. She moved to the window and looked out at the yard and the trees all around and the garden and in the distance the blue mountains rolling off to infinity, and all of it was kind of hazy.

“My eyes are going bad!” she yelled. “Adam, god damn it, I’ll have to start wearing glasses!”

I caint imagine you in spectacles. Where do you plan to find ary?

To use one of his favorite expressions, he had her there. Her chances of getting glasses were more remote than her chances of finding some soap or some sugar. She was learning to substitute other sweeteners for sugar; the previous spring, when the sap was rising in the trees, Adam had shown her how to take the bung augur and drill a hole in the trunk of a maple tree and catch the sap in a bucket and boil it down into a kind of dark but very sweet maple syrup. And then of course each autumn she took Hreapha and the other dogs out to “line” bees, as Sugrue had shown her, and find honey, and although she usually got stung (and had to treat the stings with three kinds of crushed leaves), she had more honey than she could eat, and also plenty of beeswax, which she liked to chew; it was almost as good as having some chewing gum.

Most recently, while she and Hreapha were at a bee tree, she saw again the footprint which Sugrue had taught her to identify, a track so much like a human’s footprint: a bear’s. She still hadn’t seen a bear, and she wasn’t completely convinced this was not the footprint of a human. She was only a little frightened, because no wild animal could ever scare her any more, not since she’d made friends with Sheba. “Hreapha,” she said, “I think I’d like to have a bear cub for my twelfth birthday.”

“Hreapha,” her sweet dog said.

And one day she was sitting on the davenport chewing some beeswax, feeling restless and itchy, unable, as she often was, to sit still on the davenport. As she often did, she began squirming around, bouncing, and twisting and wriggling and throwing a leg over the arm, and swinging her feet, and cocking her head this way and that and then making faces to herself, and laughing, all signs that her mind was busy at work. She suddenly realized that the texture of beeswax was such that it might make the base of soap, if only she had the other ingredients, whatever they were. Her Cyclopædia had mentioned beef tallow, which of course she didn’t have and could never get, unless some old beef came wandering into the yard; she also didn’t have the Cyclopædia’s other ingredients such as gum camphor, borax, bergamot and sal soda. But Adam had mentioned his grandmother using lye to make soap.

“What’s lye, Adam?” she asked the air. He didn’t answer, as usual. She let the matter drop for a little while, and went on flouncing her body around on the davenport, giving full thought to the practicality of making soap, if she could figure it out. After a while, she said, “Tell me what lye is, god damn it.” That had become her favorite swear-expression lately; she had memories of how Grampaw had said it and how Sugrue had said it, and although she read her Bible regularly and knew that you aren’t supposed to take the Lord’s name in vain, she didn’t think there was anything vain about it, and she was always careful that “god” was not capitalized.

Keep your shirt on, gal. Naw, I don’t mean your shirt, ’cause you aint wearin ary, but don’t get your back up. Gentle down. You been a-squirmin and a-fidgetin around on that davenport like a bunch of blister beetles was a-chompin on ye.

“Tell me how to make lye, gol dang it.”

Lie? You mean like a whopper or just a windy?

“The kind of lye that was used to make soap, silly.”

Never heared tell of no silly soap.

She sighed. “Adam, you are impossible. I have got to have some soap. You said your grandmother made soap with lye. Did she have to buy it at the store?”

Naw, they just made it out of wood ashes.

“Wood ashes? We’ve got gobs of those.”

You’d have to make you a ash hopper. Let me see if I caint remember what it looked like.

He could remember. And he told her how to make it, at least a crude makeshift funnel sort of thing out of slats of wood—old staves, but not the staves she was saving to finish that firkin whenever she got around to it. He said that as best as he could remember, they’d lined the hopper with paper to filter the water through the ashes, and of course there wasn’t a scrap of paper left in the house that she hadn’t made into dolls. She thought of using pages torn out of those issues of Police Gazette that Sugrue had kept and which she never cared to read. That did okay to line the hopper, and then she filled it with all the ashes she could get from the kitchen stove and the living room stove. She poured water on top, and behold, lye dripped into the bucket (the same bucket she’d used for collecting maple sap), and she realized her firkin, when she got around to finishing it, would do a better job.

“Now I need to know, what’s ‘tallow’?”

Taller? Why, I reckon taller’s just the hard fat that comes from beef.

“Seen any beef lately? Can you get tallow from chicken fat?”

I misdoubt it. Say, maybe you could get it from hogs.

“Seen any hogs lately? Which reminds me, it’s been a long time since I had any meat from that pork I smoked a few years back. We had the last of the ham last Christmas.”

But Sugrue had taught her to save all her bacon grease, which he said was the best thing for frying chicken in, and she had several jars of it. She decided to see if you couldn’t get tallow out of bacon grease.

She built a fire under the big iron kettle that was used for washing clothes (which she hadn’t used since she ran out of soap), and put some water into it and brought it to a boil. All her friends were gathered around, watching her as if she were preparing something special to eat: there was Dewey, and Ralgrub, and Sheba, and Hreapha, and Hrolf, and Hroberta, and Robert, and of course Adam too was somewhere around. Making a ceremony out of it, she dumped in the bacon grease, the lye, and several big chunks of beeswax, and took a wooden stick and began to stir. She stirred and she stirred, feeling like a witch stirring a cauldron and wondering if she ought to add magic ingredients or at least something that would perfume it and take away the greasy smell. At least she had plenty of energy for stirring, the kind of energy that had gone to waste bouncing around on the davenport. But after an hour of stirring, the whole mess just looked like dark gravy and didn’t smell anything at all like soap.

One more failure in her education. But at least she was learning something. She reflected that if she were in Harrison she’d be in the sixth grade, about to graduate from Woodland Heights Elementary, but she wouldn’t have learned a fraction of all that she’d learned up here at Madewell Mountain Elementary. She went to bed not brooding about her failure but wondering just what she’d learned from the experience.

The next morning she went out to dump the contents out of the kettle, reflecting that she’d probably not need the pot for washing anyway, if she didn’t have soap. But she discovered she did have soap! Overnight the dark gravy had hardened. She took a knife and cut into it and brought forth a cube of honest-to-god soap! It wasn’t nearly as hard as store soap. But it was soap. Soap!

She cut all the hardened soap into rectangles and squares, and stacked them up in the house, and then scraped out all the remainder in the kettle to be used for flakes of dishwashing and clothes-washing soap. Then she filled the kettle with water, built up a fire to boil the water, dumped in all her filthy towels and sheets and rags and the few items of clothing she wore from time to time, and began to sing as she worked:

Here we go ’round the mulberry bush,

The mulberry bush, the mulberry bush.

Here we go ’round the mulberry bush,

So early in the morning.

This is the way we wash our clothes

Wash our clothes, wash our clothes.

This is the way we wash our clothes,

So early Monday morning.

Come to think of it, maybe it was Monday. It might as well be. One nice thing about not having a calendar is that one day was just as important as another, or as unimportant as you wanted it to be.

She finished the job of washing all the clothes, and hung them out on the clothesline to dry in the sunshine. It felt so good to have everything fresh and clean…except herself, which was next. In the kitchen she filled the galvanized tub with hot water from the stove, enough for her hair as well as her body, and she climbed in, discovering she couldn’t really stretch out the way she had been able to in earlier years, and got her body and hair thoroughly wet and rubbed her homemade soap all over herself. It didn’t smell very much like bacon grease; maybe that was what the lye was supposed to do: bleach out the greasy smell.

She was so happy to be getting clean and so delighted by the feeling of the bar of homemade soap running over her body that she became not just overjoyed but intensely excited, so much so that she had to slide the bar of soap down to her groin and move it around there for quite a while. The sensation of the wet slathery bar of soap, her own handiwork, rubbing against her poody lifted her higher and higher in her feelings. She gasped. She knew that Adam was probably watching her, but he had been watching her for so long that she felt not the least bit self-conscious; on the contrary, the idea of his watching made all of this even more exciting.

“The soap works,” she said to him, wherever he was. “Oh, the soap works!”

She felt tingly as well as soapy all over, and the tingle spread from her hair to her toes and changed from being just a tingle to a ripple, and then a tremor, almost as if an electric current was starting to pass through her body. She jiggled the bar of soap against herself so rapidly that she was sloshing water out of the tub. She’d never felt anything like this before. She felt a sense of certainty that something she couldn’t avoid was about to happen, a sense of expectation and anticipation that was all the more thrilling because it also scared her just a little. But it didn’t stop her. She was all out of breath and the sweat of her body was mingling with the water of the bath. She searched for a word to name what she was feeling, but all she could come up with was reach. She was reaching for something, and the reach was about to happen.

And then it happened! It was as if she’d been turned inside out or, like Sheba, shed her skin, or like Adam taken leave of his whole body: she shivered and shook uncontrollably, not reaching anymore but getting there, and there was the most awesome and intense feeling she’d ever had. It went on and on for nearly a minute and left her exhausted but happier than she’d ever been. She could only lie perfectly still in the water, marveling at what had happened. She felt so good and so peaceful that she might have easily fallen asleep and drowned herself, but the bathwater was beginning to grow cold, and she climbed out. Realizing all her towels were hanging on the line, she shook the water from herself like a dog and then went outside to dry herself in the sunshine. She resumed her song, with her own words:

That was the way we washed ourselves,

And that was the way we reached ourselves,

That was the way we reached ourselves

So early in the morning.

“Adam, sweet honey, is there a mulberry bush anywhere around here?” she asked.

As was often the case, there wasn’t any immediate answer. But couldn’t she hear his breathing? Or rather his panting? He seemed to be breathing real hard. What was he doing? Had he been running around his haunt? Did he really run? What did he do for exercise? Finally, with his voice still out of breath, he said, They’s only one mulberry I know of, but it aint a bush. It’s a full-growed tree yonder on the east edge of the meader.

“Why are you panting so, Adam?” she asked. “What are you doing?” But there was no answer.

For most of the summer thereafter, Robin took a bath nearly every day. Imagine that. Usually when the weather was warm she bathed by swimming in the beaver pond, but she had learned long ago that the beaver didn’t like for her to use soap in their pond, so she didn’t use the beaver pond very much any more, except to visit it to say hello to her friends.

Toward the end of that summer, not long before she was going to have her twelfth birthday, there was a drought. She didn’t know that word, although she’d encountered it several times in the Bible, but she knew that it was getting harder and harder to draw the water from the well for her frequent baths. And then the well dried up entirely! Adam instructed her on how to roll one of the shed’s barrels up to the corner of the house where it could be connected to the downspout to make a rain barrel. But it didn’t rain. Not for the longest time. The spring at the springhouse dried up too, which not only removed that source of water but made the springhouse useless for cooling leftovers or keeping anything cool. It was very hot, as well as very dry. The animals didn’t suffer too much; they could always get a drink from the beaver pond, which was too far for the chickens to hike, so she had to haul water in buckets from the beaver pond to keep the chickens from dying. Robin wouldn’t drink the pond water herself without boiling it first, but that at least gave her drinking water.

Baths were out of the question, and she missed them terribly. For a little while she tried simply to soap her poody, but without water to wash the soap off it wouldn’t work, and she couldn’t reach at all again. In frustration she tried to make herself reach without the help of the soap, and was shocked to see that her fingers became covered with blood!

She had probably done something terribly wrong. She couldn’t ask Adam to explain it to her. He probably didn’t know, anyhow.

The bleeding went on and on slowly day by day. She wiped it up with rags. She needed water to clean herself, but had none. The beaver pond was beginning to dry up, and what would she do if there was no water at all anywhere? And no rain came? How would she live? How would any of them live? The beaver too would die.

“Adam!” she cried. “I think I’m dying. Please help me!”

I’m here, he said. I reckon I’m allus here.

She frankly confessed to him what she had done to herself, although she knew he had probably witnessed it anyway. She was really and truly sorry that she had done it. She should have known better. She should have realized that anything which felt so good must be wrong. She had done a terribly wrong thing, and now she was bleeding, and the bleeding wouldn’t stop, and she needed to see a doctor, but there was no way she could do that. Was there nothing Adam could do that would help? Or tell her how to stop the bleeding? Or something? Anything? Adam? Adam?

You’ve got me all afeared now. I caint imagine what could be wrong with ye.

Chapter thirty-six

His mother told him that, yes, there was a possibility that Mistress was dying, but that did not excuse him from his responsibility to assist in, and perhaps even direct, the task of locating and taking possession of a bear cub for Mistress’ twelfth birthday. It was an awesome obligation which had given him much thought, search, practice and discussion with his lieutenants, only one of whom, Ralgrub, had anything to contribute, because she claimed that she was cousin to the bears and understood their habits and their ways…not to mention that she was the only one of them other than Robert who could climb trees.

What if they went to all the trouble to capture a bear cub and bring it home and even put a red ribbon around its neck as a birthday present, and then Mistress died of whatever was ailing her and causing all that blood? What would they do with the bear cub then? Just set it free, and say, Sorry, pal, but we don’t need you after all? Well, of course they could eat it, but Hrolf didn’t have much appetite these days, what with having to eat the chickens as they died. The drought was killing off the chickens, although Mistress each day brought a bucket of water from the beaver pond just to give the chickens some water, but that wasn’t enough to keep them from dying, and his mother had decreed that it was now permissible to eat a chicken if it was clearly dead, and Hrolf would be just as happy if he never saw another chicken again, he’d eaten so many of them.

Hrolf realized that the only way to get out of the responsibility of bringing home a bear cub would be for Mistress to die before her twelfth birthday. He hated to see that happening, but she was bleeding, and it wouldn’t stop.

It was a long hike to the beaver pond for a sip of stagnant slime. And then the beaver pond went completely dry. The beaver disappeared, without a word to anyone. Nobody knew whether the beaver had simply died or had gone elsewhere in search of water. Hrolf’s campaign to teach the beaver how to communicate in dog language had not been successful. The beaver were too ignorant, or too stubborn, or perhaps even too proud, to attempt to master the easy rudiments of dogtalk. And thus they had not said anything to anybody before departing. Hrolf considered it one of his failures. He had been proud and triumphant in his campaign to teach dog language to all the other creatures of their acquaintance, except of course Sheba, who had her own mysterious language that was unfathomable. But Ralgrub spoke a passable tongue, and Robert from a very early age had been quick to pick up on the language, although he never had learned to bark and still said “WOO! WOO!” as his primary exclamation. Hrolf had taken it upon himself to stress to everyone the superiority, nay, the nobility, of canine communication, and his efforts to dogize the other creatures, at least in dogese, were rewarding. They were all noble.

Thus, when he gathered them around him, in the presence (the omnipresence) of the in-habit, Adam, he knew that they could all (except Sheba) understand him when he declared, Friends, we’re going to have to go on an expedition. Our main objective is to find water, somewhere, anywhere. But our secondary purpose is to honor Mother’s request to find a bear cub for Mistress’ forthcoming birthday. I’ll take with me only the following: Mother if she wants to go, Hroberta and Robert and Ralgrub. And Adam.

You’uns know I caint leave the haunt, Adam declared.

Sorry, I forgot Sir, Hrolf said. He’d never called the boy “Sir” before, but he felt it was needed in this context.

Why can’t I go too? Dewey asked in his still fumbling form of dogtalk. Dewey wasn’t a mere fawn any more, but a young buck. He was growing up, and before long he’d start sprouting antlers.

Well, I suppose you could, Hrolf allowed.

I can find water as good as any of the rest of you can, Dewey boasted. And I bet I could find a bear even better.

All right, Hrolf said. Let’s go. Adam, Sir, would you explain to Mistress where we went, and that we may be gone more than a day or two. Don’t mention the bear cub.

The expedition set out, the six of them romping abreast across the meadow but changing to single file as they reached the dry beaver pond and the old path that was known as the South Way. I’m real proud of you for doing this, son, Hrolf’s mother said to him.

Ma, we’d all die of thirst if we didn’t.

But they were perishing of thirst by the time they’d gone a mile or so through the forest. They hoped that the creek which fed the waterfall would slake their dehydration, but they discovered it was bone dry, as was the waterfall itself. Peering over the precipice, Hrolf could see a dog’s skeleton in the dry bed of what had been the pool at the base of the waterfall. He realized that must be poor Hrothgar. He nudged his mother aside to keep her from peering over the precipice.

I can’t go another step without a drink, Hroberta declared.

They all sat around panting and moaning in the torture of extreme thirst. And before the sun set on that day of the expedition, Hrolf said apologetically, I’m sorry I brought you’uns out here. But we can’t go back. There’s nothing to drink anywhere.

Woo, Robert said, there’s got to be some way to get off this fucking mountain and find a creek.

Ralgrub said, Whatever creek you found might be dry too.

As night fell, several of them chewed on grass to get just a little moisture.

The next morning, it was Dewey who found the spring. It wasn’t much of a spring, and hard to reach, a trickle seeping out from beneath a rock on the cliff side, but it was genuine water. Each of them had to wait their turn (Hrolf insisted that his mother go first) to dip their tongue into the seep and lap a bit, and then wait a minute for more water to seep out for the next creature. Hrolf was sad to realize that even if he got Mistress to bring her bucket to this place, it would take hours or days for the bucket to fill.

But they’d each had enough water to sustain them through another day of searching. As they traversed the forests of Madewell Mountain, and Ledbetter Mountain too, everywhere they saw the effects of the drought: the carcasses of birds, animals, and reptiles who had perished. They came across the bodies of whole families of mice, squirrel, rabbit, possum, porcupine, skunk and coon. Some of the creatures were sprawled out full length on the ground as if they had used the last of their strength to try to reach water somewhere.

It was Robert who found the bears. There was a cave mouth mostly concealed by leaves and brush, and he burrowed through the camouflage, went into the interior of the earth, and came back in a little while, saying, Come and look! There used to be a little stream of water in there, but it’s dried up now. There’s a dead bear sow lying beside it, with one of her dead cubs. The other cub looks like he’s still alive.

They all went into the cave to investigate. It was much cooler in there, which was a relief, but the cave’s stream of water was nothing but drying mud. There was a stink from the bodies of the dead sow and the cub. The other cub was unable to move, and his eyes were closed, but he was still breathing. He was scrawny and pitiful and his black fur was matted and grungy.

Ma, I’m doubtful that he would be much of a birthday present, Hrolf observed.

We’ll have to take care of him one way or the other, as long as he’s still alive, she said. First we have to figure out how to get him home.

They tried nudging the cub into a walking or crawling posture, but the cub could not keep himself righted. If they could get him out of here at all, the first thing they’d have to do would be get him to that little trickle of a spring and get him to drink as much water as he could.

Hrolf’s mother took charge. Dewey, she said, would you mind lying down on top of the bear sow and rolling around?

For heaven’s sake, why? Dewey wanted to know.

So you’ll get her scent on your own body. So the cub won’t be so afraid of you.

With a look of disgust, Dewey lay atop the dead sow and squirmed around, getting her scent onto his own hide.

Now, Hrolf’s mother said, let’s see if we can’t get the cub up onto Dewey’s back. Lie down, Dewey, and when we’ve got the cub on your back, stand up, but don’t bump the cub on the ceiling of the cave.

They all cooperated in tugging and pushing the cub into position along Dewey’s spine, with the cub’s paws on either flank.

When Dewey stood up, he yelped, Yeoww! He’s sinking his claws into me!

Good, Hrolf’s mother said. He’s trying to hold on. Let’s get out of here.

Hrolf and Hroberta walked on either side of Dewey to make sure the cub wouldn’t topple off, and thus they made their way slowly back to the cliff side where the tiny trickle of springwater had been found. There, Dewey knelt and they gentled the cub off of Dewey’s back and led him to the spring. But he would not drink.

Maybe he was still nursing, Hrolf observed. Maybe he hasn’t learned how to drink.

No, Hrolf’s mother said, he’s too old to be nursing. He’s probably weaned. Let’s hope so. Our next step, if we can get him to drink, is to find something for him to eat.

Hrolf’s mother crept to the spring and lapped up a mouthful of water and put her mouth to the cub’s mouth and spewed or sprayed the water into the cub’s mouth. The cub shook his head in rejection of the dog-smelling water. But Hrolf’s mother kept at it, and finally got the cub to swallow some water. Then she put her paw on the cub’s head and forced his head down to the spring’s trickle, and the cub got the idea and began to lap at the water.

When the cub had drunk all the water he could hold, they each slowly took a drink, and then they got the cub up onto Dewey’s back again and headed out in the direction of home.

Ralgrub, Hrolf’s mother said, what would your cousin like to eat, do you think?

Mast, Ralgrub said.

Come again?

Mast. Acorns and nuts.

Eww! said the dogs.

Okay, gang, let’s round up some mast.

The drought had cut back the trees’ production of fruit, and few of the nuts had yet fallen this early in the fall, but both Ralgrub and Robert were able to climb some trees and knock down a few acorns and nuts. The hickory nuts were hard to crack, but the pecans cracked easily enough in a dog’s powerful jaws, and Hrolf’s mother directed them to masticate enough nut meat to make a mess that might appeal to the cub despite its scent of canine saliva. As it had at the spring, several attempts were required before they could get the cub to eat the masticated nutmeats. And in the process all of them grew powerfully hungry themselves. Ralgrub could eat some of the mast herself, but for the others there was only the carrion of drought-slain animals, which, if they could find a freshly deceased bird or rodent, sufficed. Lucky Dewey could survive on twigs and brush and what little grass had survived the drought.

The food and drink restored the cub’s spirits to the point where he could put up resistance to being abducted. He began to growl in his whiney little voice, and more than once attempted to escape from Dewey’s back, but the vigilant expedition crew kept him in place. Before they reached home they had to stop again to gather mast, masticate it (Hrolf wondered if mast got its name from being masticated), and feed the cub, although no further water was found for any of them. After the second time they fed the cub, instead of resuming his perch on Dewey’s back for the continued journey home, he snarled and climbed a tree. The dogs impulsively barked at him, their instincts being to bark at anything which is treed, and that didn’t help. Ralgrub and Robert had to go up after him, and perhaps Ralgrub knew enough of bear language to assure the cub that they were all his friends and had no intention of eating him, and besides, didn’t he want the comfort of Dewey’s back, which smelled like his mother? Somehow Ralgrub and Robert got him to come back down out of the tree and resume his perch on Dewey.

As they neared home, Hrolf conferred with his lieutenants about how they would keep the cub until it was time to present it to Mistress on her birthday. They didn’t know just when her birthday was, and the exact date didn’t matter, but they did have to decide on a day, and maybe they should wait a few days to give the cub time to fatten up and regain some of his health and strength. While Ralgrub had the manual dexterity to tie a red ribbon around the cub’s neck when it came time to make the presentation, she could not tie a rope around the cub’s neck to restrain him until the birthday. They needed some place to keep him until the presentation.

Hrolf’s mother suggested using the abandoned beaver lodge, a brilliant idea. They coaxed the cub into it, left him with a small but adequate supply of mast, and closed the opening to the lodge with sticks and brush. Ralgrub attempted to have a chat with the cub before they left it, to tell the cub they’d soon be back and would soon be delivering the cub as an offering to a goddess, a beautiful human girl whose twelfth birthday would be greatly enhanced by the cub’s presence. Whether the cub understood any of Ralgrub’s words was doubtful, but he promptly curled himself up and fell asleep in his new temporary home.

The beaver lodge was just outside the haunt of the in-habit, and as soon as they stepped across the line on their way home, the in-habit met them, or at least his voice did. Well, howdy, did you’uns find any water anywheres?

No, but we found a bear cub, Hrolf told him. We’re keeping him in the beaver lodge.

Won’t be ary bit of use, lessen you find some water.

They all sighed. Hrolf was tempted to say to the in-habit, You’re lucky you don’t have to drink anyhow. But that would be catty, and he was a noble dog. Instead he asked, How’s Mistress?

She aint a-bleedin no more, the in-habit said. She’s just fine, aside from being real thirsty, but she’s been missin you’uns something terrible.

They all went home to kiss and lick and be hugged by Mistress. Although she said she was just fine, she was obviously suffering from lack of water. So were they all. There was a nearly tangible or smellable pall in the air, a sense of impending doom. Hrolf decided that if they were all going to perish from the drought, as all those creatures in the forest had perished, he would be noble to the end, and with his last breath he would be guarding the bodies of his mother, Mistress, and the others. Or, come to think of it, probably Dewey and Sheba would be the last ones alive. Sheba didn’t seem to need any water, or at least she could go for a long time without drinking, and Dewey seemed to be able to get the moisture he needed out of bushes and leaves. Hrolf didn’t like the idea of being survived by others, and he would try his best to stay alive. The bear cub was an inspiration to him. If the cub had somehow survived after his mother and his sister died, Hrolf could do likewise.

Knowing that bears are mostly nocturnal, Hrolf went back at night to the beaver lodge to sit outside the closed opening and try to teach his noble language to the cub, so he could tell the cub of the kinship he felt for it as well as the encouragement he’d received from the cub’s example in surviving the passing of his family. But the only dogtalk the cub was interested in learning were swear words, coarse exclamations that sounded like he was trying to say Shoot far! and Up yours! and Your mother! Hrolf shook his head and decided, This is one cantankerous bear.

Hrolf’s mother decided which day would be Mistress’ birthday, possibly in consultation with Mistress herself and that device they used which was called a Ouija Board. Nothing else was planned for the birthday. The supply of flour Robin had ground from her wheat was insufficient for making a birthday cake. Ralgrub went into the storeroom while Mistress wasn’t looking and filched a red ribbon. Ralgrub had already told the cub how handsome he would look with a red ribbon tied around his neck, and all the other promises and expectations that she and Hrolf had bombarded the cub with appeared to be the reasons the cub was willing to leave the beaver lodge readily and walk the distance to the homestead with his canine and feline escorts. Adam joined them when they stopped so that Ralgrub with her dexterous fingers could attempt to tie the red ribbon around the cub’s neck. That sure is a mighty fine bar, Adam complimented Hrolf. Let’s just hope he aint too rambunctious.

Hrolf could see Mistress waiting for them. She was standing on the porch of her house, with Sheba wrapped around her neck and bare chest. She was shading her eyes from the sun and squinting but the squinting wasn’t because of the sun; it was because her eyes were going bad. As they approached across the meadow and into the yard of the house, they were finally close enough for her to recognize them, although she couldn’t recognize the beribboned bear cub they had in tow. Her squinting eyes finally lit up in recognition of the new animal, but then her face darkened, as if a cloud had passed over it. Indeed, Hrolf looked up at the sky and saw the clouds, and then he heard the rumble, and then the boom. Hrolf was the only one of them all, except possibly the in-habit, who was not frightened by the sound of the thunder. The rain began before they reached the porch, so they ran joyfully the last of the way. Shoot far! Hrolf yelled. Water! They all reached the porch, and the cub was very reluctant to climb the porch steps into human company, but the downpour began and prompted him into the porch’s shelter.

Happy birthday, gal! the in-habit spoke for them all, although they were each trying in noble dog language to say the same thing. “Hrolf! Hrolf! Hrolf!” he shouted blissfully, joining his voice to the chorus all around them. He didn’t know which made him happier, the downpour ending the drought, or his accomplishment of his mother’s decree to obtain for Mistress a bear cub for her birthday.

Mistress was beside herself with joy. She held her arms up to the heavens to feel the rain and she splashed it onto her face as it fell and happily drank it. Then she dropped to her knees and attempted to hug the cub, who would have none of it, who said Piss off! and shied away from her.

“Oh, Paddington!” she cried.

Chapter thirty-seven

I had distinctly mixed feelings about that bear cub. While I agreed with the others that the acquisition of a twelfth birthday present for Robin was almost as wonderful as the coming of the rain (which went on and on until the well filled and the spring ran and the beaver pond brought its builders home), I had many reservations about bringing such an obstreperous beast into the menagerie. During the time Adam had lived there, that is, the same number of years Robin had now been alive, he had never seen a bear. I had seen their plantigrade tracks here and there, but I could only imagine, from stories my grandfather told me about them, what they looked like. I had heard plenty of these, such as the tale about the bear hunter who always shot his bear just enough to irritate and not cripple it and then ran for home with the mad bear hot on his heels and waited until they’d reached the cabin before shooting the bear dead; that way, he didn’t have to worry about lugging home a five-hundred pound carcass. I had plenty of respect for and fear of the largest of all local wild creatures, but I had never encountered one. Now the beast that Robin unwisely chose to call by the same name she’d called her little stuffed animal (and she’d told me all about that Paddington) was very young and very cute (“adorable” was her word for his deceptively mild and cuddly appearance) and bore no resemblance to the fearsome hulking monster I’d imagined, but would in time come to lose his cuteness, and become a thoroughly ferocious, virile and lumbering fellow. I was, quite frankly, jealous of what he would become.

In my present maturity I’ve learned a few things apart from the appearance and behavior of adult bears: the name Paddington was cribbed from a mythical (and adorable) bear in the stories of Michael Bond, who gave the animal that name because he happened to live near Paddington Railway Station in London. And, unlike the other creatures in Robin’s menagerie, this Paddington should not have been made into a pet, because wild bears, being solitary creatures who don’t do mutual grooming of one another, don’t understand the idea of petting. Thus, for a long time Paddington resisted Robin’s efforts to take him to bed with her. She did not know that his assorted screeches and snarls were obscene and hostile in dogtalk, but she was hurt that he refused to snuggle up with her in bed or even on the davenport. And I, at twelve, was at a loss to explain anything to her or to help her.

She, at twelve, had already outgrown me. That in itself was unsettling enough, although of course she didn’t know it, being unable to see that the top of my head came only to her hairline, and I wasn’t going to tell her that she was taller than I. She seemed to be leaving me behind in her growth, not just physically but intellectually and emotionally.

The in-habit, meaning me, was certainly capable of crying, laughing, coughing, sneezing, and, to use that quaint participle created out of the verb, coming (although I preferred Robin’s reaching). This might be the proper place to confess that Adam Madewell as he turned thirteen and then fourteen out there in Rutherford, California may have sometimes remembered the self that he willed himself to leave behind on Madewell Mountain, and in such moments of remembrance or at least in his dreams wondered if the in-habit was having a good time jacking off, as he’d learned to call it in California.

What frustrated me more than the inability to actually have sex with Robin was the inability to do anything physical for her. She needed someone to cut down some trees for her: each winter she had to get her firewood by dragging in limbs of deadwood, usually the result of the ice storms that came nearly every winter. She needed someone to help her spade the garden, although year by year as she grew older and stronger she was able to spade more and more of it by herself. There was so much work to be done around the place, chores that Adam had regularly performed when he lived there but which his puny in-habit could not handle. If I’d been able to lift a finger to help, the first thing I would have done, years earlier, would have been to give Sog Alan’s skeleton a burial, but it was still there now, sitting and grinning in the outhouse, although Robin was old enough and strong enough to dig a hole to bury it if she chose. She had the decency, if that is the word, to put one of Sog’s hats on the skeleton’s head, so he wasn’t completely nude, although the result reminded me of Donatello’s David, that is, it simply called attention to the rest of the skeleton’s nakedness. Sometimes she went and spoke to it, and of course I eavesdropped, as I pricked up my ears at her every word and gawked at her every act. “I hope you’re satisfied,” was something she often said to it, the skeleton. Just the other morning she said to it, “I think that sometime around now I’m supposed to start eighth grade at Harrison Junior High, but I can’t, because you wanted a little girl to fuck, although you never did, or never could.”

But back to that bear. Another mistake people make when they attempt to “tame” a bear is to feed it. Feeding wild bears simply turns them into greedy, lazy parasites. Robin didn’t have an awful lot around the house that the cub would eat, but she apparently reasoned that since she’d seen bear tracks around the trees where’d she got her honey, bears must be fond of honey, so she spooned up a dollop for Paddington and sure enough he was crazy about the stuff, so much so that before she could stop him he had swiped the honey bucket from her and was dipping his cute little nose into it. And before she could stop him he’d eaten it all. And before she could stop him she learned that she couldn’t stop Paddington from doing whatever he damn well pleased. And he seemed to get angry with her for not being able to furnish a perpetual supply of honey.

He would never look her in the eye, even when she tried to make him do so. He might look overhead or sideways or down or behind him, but he would never look her in the eye. It was easy to believe that Paddington might simply be shy, but I don’t think this was the case. I think he had some peculiar notion that as long as he didn’t look at you, you weren’t there, or you couldn’t see him. And therefore he was safe from you. It wasn’t simply Robin he refused to look at. He wouldn’t make eye contact with any of the other inhabitants of the place, even including, for heaven’s sake, the in-habit, me. Did he know I had eyes? Could he see my eyes? It always bugged him if I ever tried to look him square in the eye. Maybe, I decided, he was afraid that making eye contact would allow us to “read” the mischief that was brewing in his mind. I’ve heard that many rapists can’t make eye contact with their victims.

Almost a month had gone by since the episode of Robin’s bleeding, and during that month, although she felt itchings and longings, she did not again attempt to touch herself down there, out of fear. But the time came when she simply had to try it again. With soap and plenty of water. And wouldn’t you know it? She started bleeding again, without even reaching. Wouldn’t she ever learn? She got out the supply of rags (Sog’s ripped up shirts) she’d laundered from the previous experience with bleeding. We all assumed that whatever wound she’d suffered had not healed completely. So she was having a relapse. Again, I didn’t know what to do. Adam out there in California would turn fifteen years old before he learned that fertile females bleed each and every month, year around, and it is a non-threatening condition called menstruation. He learned quite a few of the slangy synonyms as well, one of which, “on the rag,” referred literally to Robin’s method of dealing with the problem. But Adam In-habit, age twelve, had never heard or imagined that such an affliction would curse all womankind periodically from puberty to menopause, and in his isolation on Madewell Mountain he had been ignorant of all the quaint Ozark superstitions, such as that a menstruating woman must never take a bath and must always bury rather than burn the contaminated rags. Robin went on bathing during her periods, now that there was a plentiful supply of water, and with that water she washed and rinsed her bloody rags, month after month until sometime in her fifteenth year it finally dawned on her that her recurrent bleeding was not caused by her fondling of herself but rather had something to do with being ready for reproduction. She would even attempt to explain it to me, three years her junior by that point and still as ignorant as ever.

Which raises an interesting question. If in-habits never change and never grow old, but always remain the age they were when they were installed with their real self’s departure, are they capable of learning anything? Wouldn’t the acquisition of knowledge imply a change? Oh, as we’ll see, I learned as much from Robin as she ever learned from me; we grew in wisdom together, but she would eventually outgrow me in every way. I would always be essentially a boy; she would become a woman. It was fun to watch. I had been able for years before her coming to take pleasure in the mere act of observing the development of an acorn into an oak sapling and thence into a sturdy tree. Robin’s maturity came faster and more spectacularly.

Was she happy? I like to think so. She did not often dwell upon the world she’d left behind in Harrison, or have intolerably painful yearnings for her mother (Karen Kerr had married Hal Knight and reluctantly moved to Little Rock to live with him, despite her fear that Robin might any day return to her old home and find Karen gone from it. Karen and Hal Knight became the parents of a little boy, Robin’s half-brother, Richard Knight, but Karen’s new motherhood, while it eased some of the pain of her loss, did not stop Karen from remaining always active in an organization, called The Robin Kerr League, devoted to the prevention of child molestation and the recovery of kidnapping victims). Of course Robin no longer pined for Paddington the First, now that she had a breathing, snorting Paddington the Second to entertain her. She missed being able to go roller skating and bicycle riding and having a sparring partner for taekwondo, although eventually she’d teach Paddington how to stand up and take it. Sometimes when she had nothing better to do (which was rare) she would fantasize about, and make mental lists of, all the things she would spend her money on if she had an opportunity to spend that nearly half a million dollars. She’d get herself a fabulous wardrobe out of the kind of women’s catalogues her mother used to receive in the mail. She would buy huge quantities of all the foods she hadn’t had for years: spaghetti, ice cream, pizza, hot dogs, milk shakes, Kool-Aid, Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola, Dr. Pepper, Seven-Up. She would of course have to have herself fitted for eyeglasses, but she would buy the most attractive and expensive kind, maybe seven pairs so she could wear a different one each day of the week. But all of these expenditures would only make a tiny dent in her fortune. She needed to buy something that really cost a whole lot. What?

One afternoon when she was trying to teach taekwondo to Paddington (he always fell on his butt when he tried to kick a chagi), she heard a rumble up in the air, and thought for a while it was only thunder, but as it grew and changed in tone to a rhythmic drone, she looked up and saw a helicopter.

She knew what it was although she could not remember what it was called; she had seen photographs of them during the Vietnamese war. Forgetting that she was stark naked, or having been so long out of the habit of clothing herself that it didn’t even occur to her, she started waving her hands overhead to attract the attention of the pilot. Was this her rescue? Did she really want to be rescued? Even if the helicopter landed in the yard and offered to take her back to the world, would she be willing to leave all her friends? Of course not. But maybe she could tell the helicopter people to let the world know that she was okay.

The pilot and one other man in the helicopter finally caught sight of her and waved back at her. The other man put two of his fingers in his mouth and made a shrill wolf whistle which she could barely hear over the sound of the helicopter’s rotors. Then he made a circle of one thumb and forefinger and took the index finger of his other hand and poked it through the circle and thrust it in and out. The pilot blew her a kiss. Then the helicopter drifted on away and never came back.

I have tried to imagine, or to learn, what might have been going through the heads of those guys. Supposedly during those years there was a hunt for marijuana growers in the Ozarks that involved using one or more helicopters for surveillance. Is that what those two men were doing, hunting for patches of pot? Then what did they think, finding a homestead on a mountaintop at which no marijuana was growing but at which there was plenty of evidence of habitation, including a lovely young nubile nude, waist-length blonde hair barely concealing her breasts, with a rapidly-growing black bear cub in her company? Maybe those guys were smoking pot themselves. Why didn’t they land? I suppose we shall never know.

But that helicopter gave Robin a bright idea for how she would spend her money, if she could. She would buy one of those aircraft and hire a pilot to fly her over Harrison and all the rest of wherever she wanted to go. She would take Paddington with her, to see what he could see. She sang:

The bear flew over the mountain

To see what he could see.

It was an entertaining fantasy to which she often returned whenever she played “How I’ll Spend My Money.”

Around Thanksgiving, Paddington, having fattened himself up on mast and forbs, decided that the best den for his hibernation would be Robin’s bed. Actually black bears don’t truly hibernate, at least not that far south, but they go into a kind of dormancy that amounts to the same thing, except that they can be easily awakened. Robin didn’t try to wake him. She just snuggled up through those cold winter nights, and put herself to sleep each night imagining what she’d have to do to get ready for school in the morning.

Had she been at Harrison Junior High in the eighth grade, she would have had to submit two practice letters for the Language Arts class, one addressed to her Congressman, the other to her best friend; for Social Studies class she would have had to submit a report on the native Americans who inhabited the Ozarks; for Science class she would have had to be prepared for a test in the winter positions of the constellations; and she would have skipped Algebra class because her homework wasn’t done and she needed to practice several a cappella lieder for the concert choir. Of course she would not have been able to do any of these things because she had missed so many years of school leading up to them.

Likewise, I could easily identify with whatever yearning for school had befallen poor Robin. In Rutherford, California, there was a public elementary school just a few blocks from the little house in which Adam lived, but he had not attended school since the fourth grade in Stay More and now he should have been in junior high but was several grades behind, and his father’s stubborn resistance to the whole idea of education continued in the face of the fact that Adam’s hike to school there would have been immeasurably easier than his hike to the Stay More school, and he could have ridden a bright yellow school bus to St. Helena. California law prohibited him from holding down a job at the age of twelve, so his father’s idea of having Adam beside him at work as a journeyman cooper was a vain dream. The Madewells had, upon arrival in California, been detained and interviewed by a state agency responsible for resettlement of migrants, principally Okies and Arkies. (Eventually, having fallen in love with cinema and having made a hobby of watching it, Adam saw a movie called “The Grapes of Wrath,” greatly identifying with Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, and he was inspired to read the novel on which the movie was based, and while he didn’t think that Steinbeck had a very good ear for the speech of Ozarkers, he was inspired by the novel to read many other novels.) Because Gabe Madewell was not just a farmer but a highly skilled cooper, he was not sent to the fields to be a picker but found a job in the barrel works of a Rutherford winery called Inglenook. Back home in Stay More, the dominant family (for whom Robin had cut many a paper doll) was named Ingledew, and Gabe Madewell always believed that perhaps the Inglenooks were Ingledews from Stay More who had gone to California and couldn’t spell their name, as he could scarcely spell his own and had to have somebody fill out his application forms for him. Actually the name, which was famous as a label of wine, was bestowed in the 19th Century by a Finnish fur trader named Gustave Neibaum, who had bought a “Nook Farm” on which to grow grapes and called the winery after an “inglenook,” a nook or cranny beside a fireplace.

In the years the Madewells settled in Rutherford, wine-making in California had fallen on hard times, and the Inglenook vintage itself was inferior to the great wines that Gustav Neibaum had produced, equaling the best of Europe (and in fact winning awards at the Paris Exposition of 1889 at which the Eiffel Tower was dedicated) and continuing until the 1930s to win awards as the best American wine.

When Gabe Madewell went to work as a cooper for Inglenook, there were only two other men in the cooperage, and they used redwood staves to make the wine barrels. French wines have always been racked in oaken barrels. Gabe Madewell had been accustomed to making 50-gallon whiskey barrels of oak; he had just a little trouble learning to make the standard 59-gallon French Bordeaux barrel out of redwood. In time, he would persuade his superiors to switch to oak, which would eventually become the standard. In later years, Adam liked to think that his father was the “inventor” of the American oak wine barrel, which lends its distinctive flavors to even a jug of the cheapest grocery store wine. Whether or not Gabe Madewell actually deserved the credit, the aromas or flavors of wine, such as coconut, caramel, vanilla, fresh toast, dill, nuts and butter, or spices like clove and cinnamon are not inherent in the grape but come from the oak barrel. Adam was destined to become the foremost expert in these aromas.

If Adam couldn’t work beside his father making barrels (at least not until he turned sixteen), what could he do with himself? Rutherford was just a village, not much larger than Jasper, Newton County’s tiny seat, but it didn’t even have Jasper’s supermarkets or movie theater or newspaper. For major shopping, people in Rutherford had to go into the city of Napa, fifteen miles away, and Gabe Madewell would not be able to buy a car and learn to drive it until he’d been there for a few years. Meanwhile, Adam, hobbled by his bad leg, led his blind mother to one of the two grocery stores in Rutherford and helped her shop, a wonderful thing she’d never done back home.

The two things he remembered most about his first year in Rutherford: attempting to describe to his sightless mother the items on the shelves and in the cases of the grocery store (she had not dreamt you could buy meat in a store), and, one Saturday, limping four miles (the same distance he’d hiked to the Stay More school but over far more hospitable terrain) to the town of St. Helena, where there was a movie theater. Adam had never seen a movie before, and it would be several years before his father would buy a television.

The experience of that movie (although he cannot remember its title or cast or plot) made him almost glad he no longer dwelt on Madewell Mountain.

Chapter thirty-eight

She had grown at last into Sugrue’s clothes. Not that they really fit, but with the pants cuffs rolled up and the shoulder straps taken in as far as they would go, a pair of Sugrue’s denim overalls would hang from her body, at least during cold weather, which was the only time she ever wore clothes, together with one of Sugrue’s thick sweaters, which made her wish she had something knitted of her own. The winter of her twelfth year was very cold, in fact the coldest of all the winters she had been there, and she really envied Paddington his ability to sleep through most of it, at the same time that she was grateful for the warmth of his body and the softness of his fur under the covers on the worst winter nights. The howling winds outside left long icicles hanging from the eaves of the house, and tree limbs snapped all over the forest, and she was moved to permit all her friends to move into the house temporarily, even Sheba, who, Robin had learned, actually did hibernate every winter. For that matter, so did Ralgrub; on the awfullest day of winter Robin put on Sugrue’s thickest jacket, and his boots that were much too large for her, and trudged out through the snow to the barn to lift Sheba out of the pile of leaves in which she was coiled into winter sleep, and reinstalled her on a pile of leaves in the corner of the living room. Then she went back out in the snow for a considerable distance to the hollow tree where Ralgrub had settled into hibernation. The raccoon woke up when Robin tried to lift her out of the tree’s interior.

“Sweetheart,” Robin said, “it’s absolutely freezing, and it’s going well below zero tonight and you won’t survive. Wouldn’t you like to come in the house?”

Ralgrub moaned and squirmed and chittered but allowed Robin to carry her into the house, where she was given a new den among the debris in the storeroom, Adam’s room, which was the coldest room in the house, but much warmer than outdoors, and of course Adam didn’t care what the temperature was.

Better than growing into Sugrue’s clothes was growing into Adam’s age, and Robin didn’t have to feel younger or inferior to him any more. He might know an awful lot that she didn’t know about how to live in the country and how to take care of a homestead, not to mention how to make a churn and firkin (and she was determined during her twelfth year to finish that firkin), but now he wasn’t any older than she, and he certainly wasn’t that much smarter than she, and she bet she knew a lot of things he didn’t know. Maybe his ignorance of sex was just the result of growing up among people who considered anything sexual as unmentionable or forbidden. He’d told her that Hereabouts, it aint fitten to say ‘bull.’ You have to call ’em ‘topcow’ or ‘brute’ or ‘cow-critter.’

“By the way,” she’d said, “when is that cow you mentioned going to come wandering into the pasture, so I can make some butter in your churn?”

Haw, he’d laughed. Why don’t ye jist ask Hreapha to get ye a cow for yore thirteenth birthday? That’d be sure to do the trick.

“For my thirteenth birthday,” she’d declared, “I want an elephant.”

What’s an elerphant? he’d asked.

“Huh?” she’d said, but sure enough he had no idea what an elephant was. For that matter she’d never seen a live one herself, but she’d seen pictures of them, and she certainly knew what they were and what they looked like. Poor Adam really had a lot to learn.

And the thought of that gave her a worry (she was to discover throughout her twelfth year that she spent entirely too much time worrying, about all kinds of things): if Adam stayed twelve forever and she kept getting older and older, wouldn’t she become—what was that word? condescending—wouldn’t she look down upon him? How long could they remain friends before she started thinking of him as just a kid? She certainly wasn’t a kid any more. Not only could she wear Sugrue’s clothes, but her hips and thighs were fully developed, almost like a grown woman’s. Although she was spreading out down there, her face, neck and shoulders were slimming, losing the last vestiges of baby fat. Her breasts kept growing and the nipples were darkening, and she was only mildly disturbed by the hair that was sprouting in her armpits and around her poody. She remembered that her mother had had hair in those places, although she could hardly remember what her mother had looked like, or her teachers, and she really wanted to see other women so she could confirm or disprove her suspicion that she was turning into a very beautiful woman. Her fingernails were dirty and needed trimming badly (although she chewed off the ends of her thumb-nails, possibly a bad habit), and she sometimes was tempted to cut her long, long hair but had taken a vow never to do it.

What she really wanted was a brassiere. Although she thoroughly enjoyed the freedom to run around naked in warm weather (and even in the winter when the living room stove was hot), she liked the idea of having a bra, something that she and her girlfriends in the second grade could only distantly aspire to. She considered that she might look kind of funny, running around in a bra and nothing else (she had no similar cravings for a pair of panties), and since it was highly unlikely that a bra would come wandering into the pasture like a cow, she ought to put the thought out of her mind, which was too crowded with other thoughts anyhow, although most of her thoughts were just as useless or senseless as having a bra. For instance, she gave too much thought to the fantasy of going to college eventually, which was completely stupid in view of the fact that she’d never be able to finish high school. She wasn’t exactly sure what “college” was, but Miss Moore had told the class what to expect when they finished twelve grades. Robin liked to have fantasies (which were harmless enough even though they wasted brain energy) about using a chunk of her money, if she ever got out of here, to go off to some nice college somewhere, maybe even—what was the name of that best one which Miss Moore used to talk about? yes, Harbard—going to Harbard and wearing smart college clothes and learning all kinds of fabulous stuff, especially about her chosen subject, wildflowers. She adored imagining college. It would be so different from elementary school. Everything she learned would be worth learning.

In her twelfth year she began to have an intense hunger for knowledge. She wanted to get ready for college, somehow. If she’d been home in Harrison she would have gone to the public library and read each and every book in it until she’d read them all. She had nothing to read except the Bible (which she’d already read all the way through twice and was now on the third reading) and the Cyclopædia (which she could cite or recite from memory, even the parts on rural architecture, live stock management, the dairy, and Ladies’ Fancy Work). When February came and Paddington woke up and smacked his lips and grunted what sounded like a bunch of cusswords, she took him out to watch the daffodils blooming. He promptly ate a few. She led him off into the woods in search of nuts and acorns. There weren’t many; other animals had already got most of them. She saw some pig tracks, and realized that sometime soon she was going to have to try to find, and kill, and butcher, and smoke, another hog; it had been so long since she’d had bacon she couldn’t even remember what it tasted like.

Often that spring she took Paddington out and away from the house, telling the other animals to stay behind because she was teaching Paddington the things his mother would have taught him, how to recognize what was edible and what wasn’t. Their hikes deep into the woods in search of food for Paddington also turned into nature walks for Robin; the beginning of her realization that books weren’t the only source of knowledge. Paddington would never leave her side, except to chase and swat at a butterfly, or to wander off while she was down on her knees looking at some liverwort or tiny wildflower. Often he would look at her quizzically and snort a noise that sounded like he was asking her a question, “Ma, what’s that there little critter with those stripes down his back?” Robin realized that whether he thought of her as his mother or not he was expecting her to teach him the ways of the world or the ways of the wild, and she couldn’t explain to him that she herself was just as woods-ignorant as he was when it came to naming things. If he or she wanted the name of something they’d have to ask Adam, but she knew that there was an area called the “haunt” that limited the space Adam could traverse (she almost thought to call it “reach”) and she had already taken Paddington beyond the haunt.

The main difficulty she had with Paddington was that often she found a wildflower or plant of some kind that she wanted to study, but he wanted only to eat it. Once, in a crevice on the side of a gorge, she found a really marvelous little flower that looked like an elf’s penis standing under a hood to protect it from the rain. Beetles were crawling into it, and gnats were being caught by it and swallowed inside the chamber in which the elf’s penis was standing. The idea of a plant that could eat bugs really captivated her attention, but then Paddington came along and ate the flower before she could stop him. “Hey, that had bugs in it!” she protested. Whether it was the bugs or something else—maybe the plant was trying to teach him a lesson not to eat any more of them—he immediately got a stinging pain in his mouth and all the water he could drink wouldn’t make the sting go away. He was miserable for a long time. “Did you learn anything?” she asked him.

Whenever they went on a nature walk after that, she searched and searched for another one of the flowers, which she had come to think of as “elfsdick,” but it was a long time before she found another one, and she watched to see if Paddington would recognize it without any word from her, and sure enough when he saw it he made a big show of leaving it alone. She carefully dug it up (it had a big root like turnip) and took it home to show it to Adam and ask him if he knew if elfsdick would be a good name for it. He laughed and said, Sure, but we allus called ’em jack-in-the-pulpit.

She became fascinated with all the wildflowers and even had visions of sitting in a classroom at Harbard listening to a very smart man giving lectures about wildflowers. In her restless search for more and more varieties that she had not found before, she took Paddington deeper and deeper into the woods, in every direction from the house, but she always made sure to remember things that they passed, a big rock here, and a lone pine tree there, so that she could find her way home. But on one of their nature walks, Paddington flushed some kind of large rodent, maybe a woodchuck, and began chasing it, over hill and over dale, with Robin following as fast as she could. By the time Paddington had chased it into its den or burrow, she had neglected to observe any landmarks along the way, and when she tried to get her bearings after persuading Paddington that he’d have to give up the critter for lost, she herself was lost. She realized she didn’t know where they were, or which way to turn. She had a very poor sense of direction.

“Paddington, do you have any idea how to go back the way we came?” she asked. “Do you know which way we should even turn?” But his reply, a kind of growling which sounded sort of like the way Sugrue used to snore, was not much help. “Well god damn it,” she said, and began walking just to see if he might make any attempt to correct her direction. He did not, but just followed along. She tried to run away from him, but he snorted sounds that were clearly the bear equivalent of “holy shit” and “smoley hokes,” and caught up with her and knocked her down. One of his claws raked her back and drew blood. “Now look what you’ve done!” she said, showing him the blood. She wiped at it and slapped him with the wiping hand. “Bad bear!” she said. He whimpered and hung his head.

She walked on, not even able to see very well the direction she was going, because of her poor eyesight. She began to feel panicky, having no idea which way to go. The afternoon came and passed and it began to get dark. Although the day had been very warm, as darkness fell it grew cold, and her bare body was chilled. She kept on going, although the woods seemed to get deeper and darker. She never found any sign of an old trail or path, although she wondered if maybe she walked long enough and far enough she might come eventually to some path that might lead to a road, or even to somebody’s house, and she might finally find a way to get home, home meaning her old home in Harrison. But the thought of that gave her a bad scare. She couldn’t take Paddington with her. She couldn’t take any of her animals. She had a flash image of a possible scene where she tried to introduce Sheba to her mother, and her mother screamed.

No, she didn’t want to find her way home, not to that home. She wanted to find her way home to her home.

Paddington caught a chipmunk and ate it for his supper. She had nothing for hers, and she was getting very cold as well as hungry. But she kept on walking, hoping that she might find something familiar, or any of the landmarks she passed earlier. She did not. And then it was full dark. She was afraid of stepping over a bluff, and her fear of falling made her stop. She was so tired. She lay down and pulled Paddington to her and they snuggled up. His fur kept her from freezing. “I guess we’ll just have to try to sleep,” she said to him. But he didn’t seem to be in the mood for sleep. He snarled a few of his cusswords and was restless, and when she tried to hold him close to get warm he pulled away from her and stood up and began to growl. He sounded like a grown-up bear might sound. And she realized there was another animal nearby that Paddington was growling at. The other animal made a hissing and then a distinct “WOO” sound that she recognized.

“Robert!” she said. “Is that you, Robert?”

It was a bobcat, but it wasn’t Robert. It was a bobcat who wanted to eat Paddington, and was getting ready to pounce. Robin grabbed a stick and clubbed the bobcat over the head. The first blow stunned it, and while she couldn’t see very well in the dark, she kept swinging the stick down where the bobcat had fallen, and kept on hitting with the stick and hitting with the stick and finally she must have killed the bobcat. The thought of having killed it made her sad, because it was one of Robert’s cousins, but it was either Paddington or the bobcat and she was not going to let anything harm her cub. He was making a kind of woofing sound that expressed his thanks to her for doing away with his enemy. They settled into sleep.

She was starving the next morning, and when Paddington caught a rabbit for his breakfast she was tempted to take a few bites of it herself, but did not, and of course had no matches or anything to start a fire to cook the rabbit. But for his breakfast dessert Paddington found in a glade a patch of wild strawberries, and she picked as many as he did, or more. They were delicious.

With something in her stomach, she had the energy to resume the aimless search for a way home or a way off the mountain, whichever came first, she really didn’t care, although she hoped it would be home. She hiked determinedly onward. Eventually she came to a small creek, and Paddington slaked his great thirst, and she decided it would be okay to drink the water too. Then she made another decision: using her head, she figured out that the force of gravity made creeks continue downward from the source, and therefore if she just followed this creek she might come eventually to a larger creek and then to a river, and if she followed the river she was sure to come to a town or a place where people lived.

So she followed the creek, even as it tumbled down boulders and meandered through the forest. Her eyesight was not good enough to detect the place the creek suddenly disappeared, and she was on the verge of disappearing with it when Paddington swatted her, knocking her down again, and again drawing blood. “You bastard bear!” she hollered at him, but the she saw why he had knocked her down. She had almost stepped over the edge of a high bluff, where the creek turned into a waterfall that fell a long way down. She had mistaken the gurgling sound of the waterfall for Paddington’s constant babbling comments on the world. She peered over the edge but her weak eyes could scarcely see to the pool far down below where the waterfall splashed. All around the pool in every direction was a great glen or holler, with caverns opening into the bluff-faces. It was a magnificent woodsy place, and she looked for some way to get down to it. She crept cautiously all along the top of the bluff, first in one direction from the creek and then in the other direction, but she could not find any way to get down…except, finally, she discovered a kind of vertical gorge that looked as if human beings had cleared away the brush in order to make a descent. Was this possibly the place where Adam had fallen and broken his bones? Was this the same place where, every day from the first to the fourth grades, he had to climb down to get to school and then climb back up to get home from school?

It was an awesome drop…and an even more awesome climb if there were any way to get down. Studying it, and realizing there was no way she could possibly get down there, at least not without a rope, she had a renewed respect and admiration for Adam, and she began to be more determined than ever to find her way home, so that she could tell his in-habit what a wonderful boy Adam had been.

It occurred to her to back away from that drop and search for any signs of the trail that had once led from here all the way to the house, the so-called South Way that Braxton Madewell had once blazed for the benefit of the doctor who would come for the birth of Adam’s father, Gabe. Sure enough, there were places where Adam’s daily hiking of the trail had left a faint but discernible indentation in the earth: a path, a way.

With Paddington eagerly following her, as if he too sensed that they were finally heading home, she happily climbed that South Way on and on, up through the hickory forest, up a long and slippery slope of some kind of gray slatey rock, up through a crag of boulders to a towering lone pine tree. At that pine tree she lost the path and a long search would not reveal any further trace of it. She walked this way and that. She saw wildflowers of every color and every shape but could not stop to study them, and Paddington saw butterflies of every color and every shape but could not stop to swat at them. She found no more evidence of the trail.

And that day too waned and the dark came and they were lucky to find a kind of cavern to shelter them from the cold.

Chapter thirty-nine

She didn’t even notice the first night Robin failed to return home. She knew that Robin and the bear were in the habit of going into the deep woods almost every day, and for a while it had given her some unshakeable feelings of jealousy that Robin was paying so much attention to the bear and neglecting her other animals. When was the last time Hreapha had received a pat on the head or even a kind word? But after a while it no longer bothered her. She knew that it was a phase Robin was going through, not just of getting through her crucial twelfth year but also of pretending to be Paddington’s mother and teacher, just as Hreapha herself had been mother and teacher for her brood. It had been a long time since any of Hreapha’s offspring had truly needed her or even asked her a question, and the last time she had even been made to feel useful was when they’d gone out to locate the bear cub and Hreapha had given some important advice, especially about getting Dewey to absorb the dead bear sow’s scent so that the cub would ride home on his back. At the same time that Hreapha could feel worthwhile for having made the coming of the bear cub possible, and thereby having discharged her birthday duties to Robin for this year, she could understand that the more animals were on the premises the less time Robin would have for Hreapha. It didn’t matter. Hreapha was happy as long as she could find something to eat. The fact that Robin had not been able to feed her anything for a long time, except occasional scraps from the table—a leftover biscuit or the dregs in some canned goods (and Robin was down to her last few cans)—was also part of the reason Hreapha was slow to notice that Robin was no longer around the house, nor was Paddington.

Still, she didn’t do anything about it, not until after Robin had been gone overnight for two nights. And then she simply remarked to Hrolf, Have you seen Mistress?

Come to think of it, not lately, he answered. I’ll ask around.

She was proud of Hrolf that he had become practically overseer of the demesne. He was not only Top Dog but also Top Critter save for Robin herself. And Hreapha wasn’t envious to admit that Hrolf was probably the smartest of them all, smarter even than herself. Robert was craftier, Ralgrub had more manual dexterity, Dewey was faster, Sheba was more cunning, and Hroberta was sexier, but Hrolf possessed not only brains but leadership qualities.

Thus when he reported back to his mother that nobody, not even Adam, had seen Robin or the cub for two nights, she asked him, What would you suggest?

Let’s see if we can’t pick up their scent, he suggested. Hreapha gladly accompanied her son as he went off sweeping his handsome nose over the ground (she reflected that the older he got the more he looked like his father) for quite a distance around the haunt until finally he stopped and said, There, take a whiff of that.

It was the faintest trace of the bear’s odor, and they followed it for a long ways off into the woods, far from the house, catching along the way a few traces of Robin’s scent too. But their quest eventually played out, and they changed their direction and went for a long distance without picking up any further smells of Paddington or Robin. They continued into the afternoon exploring the southern and eastern flanks of Madewell Mountain. Hreapha was pleased to note that they encountered no traces of the coyotes, who had probably deserted the environs entirely during the great drought. She wouldn’t have minded seeing her son Yipyip again, but she was glad to know that they didn’t have to share the mountain with the wild dogs.

Circling back northward toward the house, Hreapha found that they were in a ravine that seemed very familiar to her, and trying to place it without any olfactory clue she finally realized from some obscure crevices of her memory that this was the place where she had rounded up those chickens that had got loose when the man was trying to transport them from the truck to the house. Yes, if she went that way she’d find the route she’d driven the chickens to make them arrive at their new home. But she did not go that way. Something gave her a hunch to go the other way, which involved some difficult climbing along the side of the bluff, with Hrolf having just as much trouble as she did, until they reached another ravine or gorge which contained the burnt steel remains of the man’s truck. Hreapha’s heart leapt up: if she could somehow climb the bluff from this point, she’d locate perhaps the end of the road that led northward down the mountain.

As they tried to climb, Hrolf exclaimed, Shoot far, Ma, we’ll never make it up there.

Son, she answered, if we do make it up there, we’ll be on a road that could take us eventually to meet your father at last.

Why didn’t you say so? he said, and with a burst of energy clawed his way to the top of the bluff, with her right at his heels.

And sure enough, there was the trail that the man had driven his truck over so many times to bring all the food and drink and stuff up to the mountaintop, the trail that Hreapha had taken when she had run away from him and had found her way back to Stay More. As she loped happily down the trail, she realized she ought to have told the in-habit not to expect them back before nightfall.

Much of the trail had been obliterated over the years by hard rains, but she and Hrolf managed to follow the traces of it and in time reach the foot of the mountain where the trail met up with a road. They had headed only a short distance along that road when they heard many sounds of the names of their kindred being announced, and Hreapha clearly recognized one of them: “Arphrowf!”

She had scarcely returned her own name, “Hreapha!” when she caught sight of her former brief friend, the good old country lady that she had chatted with on her first and only trip past this place. Now Arphrowf was practically surrounded by other dogs, all of whom resembled her.

Don’t I know you from somewheres long ago? Arphrowf asked.

Yes, I stopped by here and we chatted one day about five or six years ago, Hreapha said.

All of them took turns sniffing one another’s afterplaces. Hrolf was delighted to discover that two of the dogs were comely young bitches. While he was shamelessly flirting around with them, Hreapha brought Arphrowf up to date on what had been happening since last they’d chatted.

Well fan my brow! Arphrowf said. You don’t mean to tell me that such things has been a-going on right up yonder on the mountain top! Why, I’d of come to visit!

You’ll recall you told me you’d never been up there because it was too far and snaky for you? Well, let me tell you about Sheba…

And Hreapha told her all about the friendly harmless queen snake, and the friendly bobcat who was in love with one of Hreapha’s daughters, and the friendly raccoon and the fawn grown into a friendly deer.

Can you beat that? Arphrowf exclaimed. In all my born days I never heared tell of such marvels.

And then Hreapha told her about the bear cub and the fact that the girl-now-woman, name of Robin, had been missing for two days with the cub and Hreapha was searching for them with the help of her handsome son there, Hrolf.

Them there’s my lovely young’uns, Arphrowf said, indicating the several other dogs. ’Pears like your boy is taking a shine to ’em.

Indeed it was difficult persuading Hrolf to leave when it was time to go. Arphrowf said, I declare, don’t you’uns be a-rushin off. Stay more and spend the night with us.

In fact, it was getting on to dark, and Hreapha decided it might be better to tarry here among friends until daybreak before resuming their journey to Stay More. Her sense of fidelity to Robin was only mildly disturbed by the thought that Robin and Paddington would have to wait another couple of days before Hreapha resumed looking for them. It was more important, now that a way had been found, to get to Stay More and see Yowrfrowr again.

So they spent the night. Sometime after dark settled in, the door of the house opened and a man stepped out, or staggered out, clumsily carrying a large bag, which he upended, spilling dog chow nuggets all over the place. He yelled, “Supper’s ready!” and went back into the house.

Blame if he aint drunk again, Arphrowf observed, as they congregated with the other dogs to chomp up the nuggets. Oftentimes it’s all I can do to keep from biting him. She explained to Hreapha that the mistress of the house had died a couple of years previously (Pore thang prolly worked herself to death) and the man had taken to drink and was allowing his small farm to go to the dogs.

Yessiree, me and my young’uns has to run the place for him. The cattle is allus getting loose and it’s all we can do to herd ’em back home. We’d even milk ’em if we could.

You wouldn’t happen to have a spare cow or two, would you? Hreapha asked.

Laws a mercy, we got spare everything, Arphrowf complained. We got more cows than we’ll ever know what to do with.

The next morning, Hrolf seemed to be more than willing to leave, although one of the bitches, a cutey named Alfalfa, didn’t want him to leave and whined piteously as they departed.

As they loped down the long road that led toward Stay More, Hrolf remarked, Ma, I sure am all tuckered out.

‘Tuckered?’ she said. Did you pronounce that correctly? And she laughed.

When they finally approached Stay More, Hreapha was apprehensive that perhaps Yowrfrowr might have died of old age or his mistress might have moved away. But even before they reached the dogtrot cabin at which he lived with the old woman (and countless cats), Hreapha had picked up not only his scent, but another scent that was disturbingly familiar to her, and which took her just a little while to identify.

Hrolf picked up the other scent too, and said, Ma? Is that who I think it is?

I think it is too, she said, and soon her suspicion was confirmed, as she beheld not only her long lost daughter Hruschka, but her brood of grandchildren too. The yard of the dogtrot cabin was positively overrun with dogs and cats living in a kind of peaceful coexistence that made the menagerie of Madewell Mountain seem mild by comparison.

Hruschka was as shy as ever. Ma, is that you? she asked timidly.

Yowrfrowr was embarrassed, which Hreapha had never known him to be. He pretended ignorance. Hreapha, old girl, he said. What a surprise! Are you and my wife perchance related?

Yes, and you and your wife are also related. She’s your daughter.

No! he said, pawing at the air. Then he turned to his wife. Hruschka, were you aware of that fact?

Sometimes I’ve had a hunch, she said.

Hreapha nudged Hrolf to come and sniff his father. And this is your handsome son, she said to Yowrfrowr.

The two males circled and sniffed each other, and Yowrfrowr declared, What an unmitigated pleasure! My boy! And such a rugged specimen! Well, come and meet your new brothers and sisters.

Or are they my nephews and nieces? Hrolf wanted to know.

It was all very complicated, Hreapha realized, but she was surprised to discover she felt no jealousy toward Hruschka, in fact she felt very happy for the girl, and was eager to sniff and examine each of her grandchildren.

The family reunion continued happily until the old woman, Yowrfrowr’s mistress, came out of the house and said, “Xenophon, I declare if you don’t attract strays the way shit attracts flies! You tell your new friends to get out of my yard. There’s too damn many of you already!”

I’ll walk a ways with you, Yowrfrowr declared, as he led Hreapha and Hrolf away from the cabin.

Goodbye, darling, Hreapha called to Hruschka, I hope to see you again sometime.

She’s been spayed, Yowrfrowr related to Hreapha. For that matter, I’ve been emasculated myself. Drat, we’ve all been unsexed. Mistress’ grandson took us all in his truck to a Harrison veterinarian, where the operations were performed. Isn’t that hideous? The lucky felines escaped such a fate and will go on propagating all over creation. But I suppose they’re not as conspicuous, nor as ravenous, as all of us dogs.

If there are so many of you, Hreapha said, your mistress won’t even notice if I borrow you for a few days.

Borrow me? But don’t you understand, I’m no good for coitus any more…although I must admit, ever since the operation I’ve felt much calmer and more contented.

I’m beyond coitus myself, she said, and then she explained what she really wanted Yowrfrowr for: to help her find Robin and the bear. It took her a while to explain the whole situation, and to bring him up to date on what had been happening on the mountaintop since last she had seen him. He was considerably impressed at her recital of the expansion and variety of the menagerie, and confessed that he had always been eager to see the Madewell place, especially since his wife spoke so fondly of her memories of it. Truth be told, since their brood had been born and grown now into their second year, he had urged Hruschka to take him on a sentimental journey back to her birthplace, but Hruschka had had such a terrible experience finding her way down off the mountain, including a plunge over a waterfall, that she was reluctant to attempt the journey.

Hrolf and I have found a new way to get up there, from the north, Hreapha declared. Come go home with us.

Hhmm, hummed Yowrfrowr. It’s a magnificent temptation. But it would just be a visit, you understand. I can’t join your menagerie.

You couldn’t anyway, not unless Robin asked for another dog for her next birthday, Hreapha said. And she wants an elephant.

Elephant? said Yowrfrowr. Did I hear you correctly? My ears are going bad in my old age.

Yes, that’s what she says…although I warn you, she has a weird sense of humor.

An elephant, eh? Of course they don’t grow in these parts. But I’ve heard of them. Mistress’ son-in-law, Hank Ingledew, has told the story of his experience as a boy, many years ago, visiting something called a ‘circus’ that came to Jasper, and encountering there an enormous elephant. As the story goes, the elephant used its long snout to fling Hank through the air, and Hank said to the elephant, “If Godalmighty made you, He orter make one more and quit.”

Most of the way back up to Madewell Mountain, Yowrfrowr romped on ahead of her with Hrolf, the two of them talking and laughing up a storm, and while she was happy to see father and son becoming so chummy she hoped they weren’t having any laughs at her expense.

When they finally attained the upper reaches of the mountain, near the spot where the man’s burnt car had crashed, Yowrfrowr remarked, It has been a long time since I caught the scent of bear, so correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this a bona fide bear scent?

She sniffed at the place he indicated but could scarcely detect any scent at all. Of course, Yowrfrowr’s nose was much longer than hers, which was one among many reasons she wanted his help in searching for Robin. Hrolf also sniffed at it but shook his head.

Not only is it distinct, Yowrfrowr declared, but it’s heading that way. And he indicated a westward route up through the forest, in the same area where Hreapha had been diverted by the sight of a deer with two fawns when she was supposed to be guarding the man’s truck, and had been punished for wandering away from it. The distant memory gave her a peculiar sense of freedom to be now following Yowrfrowr up through the same woods where she had followed the deer and fawns.

Yowrfrowr’s unerring nose led them a long way, until Hreapha herself could detect the scent, and was sure that it was Paddington’s, not, as she’d feared, some other bear’s. They went on, and emerged from the forest at almost the crest of the mountain, where the old orchard of the homestead met the woodland, and there, under an apple tree, both of them sound asleep, were Robin and Paddington!

“Hreapha!” she shouted exultantly, and woke them. The bear leapt up, snarling, and rose in front of Yowrfrowr to his full length, with his claws bared and raised, and his voice cursing to high heaven in a grinding roar that sounded much worse than any of the man’s snores had ever been.

“Hreapha!” said Robin and embraced her. “And Hrolf!” She embraced him too. “But who is this?” she pointed to Yowrfrowr, who was trying to defend himself against the menacing bear.

“YOWRFROWR!” Yowrfrowr barked at the bear, who in return said some obscene curses in his own language.

“Y’all hush!” Robin said to them. “They’ll hear us down there. Look, there’s a house down there and it looks like people live in it. But I’m afraid to go meet them. Looking like this, without any clothes. And what if they try to take me away, back to Harrison?”

Hreapha was slow in understanding what must have happened: Robin and Paddington, lost and like anyone lost, moving in circles, had made a huge circle that had brought them finally to the rear of the Madewell place, the northwestern side at the orchard, from where the house could be only distantly seen, and Robin with her poor eyesight, not even recognizing her own orchard from that angle, had not yet recognized that the house was her own.

Hrolf told Paddington to shut his yap. The bear cub, who was hardly a cub any more, understood that Hrolf was the boss.

“Hreapha Hreapha,” Hreapha said quietly to Robin, meaning, You silly thing, that’s your own house down there. Why don’t you go see?

But of course Robin couldn’t understand her, and looked fearfully toward the house. Fortunately, they were within the haunt, and thus it was not long before Adam In-habit made his presence known, saying, Boy howdy and jumping grasshoppers, I had done give you’unses up for lost.

Yowrfrowr was spooked at the voice and the presence of the in-habit, although he had encountered a number of in-habits in Stay More, left behind by the many citizens who had abandoned the town. Hreapha introduced them to each other, explaining to Adam that this was the selfsame Yowrfrowr she had told him so much about, the father of her children.

Right pleased to meet ye, Yowrfrowr. I’ve heared so much about ye.

Hreapha said to the in-habit, Could you please explain to Robin that that’s her own house down there? She’s confused.

I think she’s a-figuring it out on her own, the in-habit said. On account of I’m here, and so it must be in my haunt.

So they all walked joyfully down out of the orchard and to the house, where the others were waiting for them. And there they all lived happily ever after.

And these are the birthday presents that Hreapha arranged for Robin to receive in the years to come:

For her thirteenth: not an elephant, of course, but something pretty big and far more useful—a cow.

For her fourteenth: a pet rock, a chunk of crystal quartz which she named Sparkle.

For her fifteenth: a pair of mourning doves.

For her sixteenth: an opossum.

For her seventeenth: an armadillo.

For her eighteenth:…but let us, Hreapha will urge, be patient. As she will be.

Chapter forty

Dear Hreapha’s characteristically optimistic notion of that standard catch phrase, “happily ever after,” was not meant to imply any finality or even perpetuity in the ongoing saga of Robin’s adventures. The whole concept of “ever after” for a dog is limited mostly from one meal to the next, and the concept of “happily” can apply to anything which induces the wagging of one’s tail. Hreapha’s tail wasn’t very long but she wagged it often, and in those years to come she would have countless occasions to keep on wagging it, although of course there would be, in the great balance of things, a number of sadnesses, hardships, deprivations, disappointments and general malaises.

Earlier I proffered the caveat that we should not be lulled by the excitement of Robin’s life into feeling that her experience was totally idyllic. Her larder was empty and she had run out of such basic amenities as salt and kerosene and was essentially living directly from nature and from whatever her garden could provide. On the positive side, she was spared some of the grief that most girls suffer during adolescence, particularly in social relationships. For example, never would she feel slighted and lonely because her boyfriend ignored her whenever he was with his pals. Never would she be hurt because her boyfriend took out on her his anger or rage from fighting with his parents or peers. Never would her desire to belong and be popular compel her to have her body tattooed and to pierce various parts of it, including her tongue, for adornment. Her social calendar, her dance card, as it were, was filled with lovely interactions with her zoological garden, which, as Hreapha’s birthday list has already indicated, constantly grew from year to year.

Alas, Robin mostly lost interest in me, perhaps feeling she had outgrown me, which in fact she had, not just physically but intellectually. If she thought of me at all, it was as a kid brother. The only time she ever called upon me or solicited my help was once in her fourteenth year when she finally decided to finish that firkin she’d abandoned years before and she needed from me a brief refresher course on the use of the cooper’s tools. I was more than happy to oblige. She not only completed the firkin successfully, but, since the fractured churn of mine she’d been using to make butter was malfunctioning, she decided to start from scratch and see if she couldn’t make a churn entire, and I was pleased to guide her. Indeed, by the time of her seventeenth birthday she had made an active hobby of cooperage and was even riving her staves from the oak forest with axe and saw, and actually completed a not substandard barrel before she was eighteen.

During those years of her adolescence, she missed out on all the things that were happening to her generation’s delight in movies, music, literature and culture in general. In music alone, she never had the experience of hearing all the fabulous new songs and rhythms, just as she was also denied exposure to the great classical composers. But it may be observed that what she missed, she invented. Art, after all, is the expression of that which the ordinary mortal cannot express. Her solitude forced Robin into extraordinariness, and she filled the air with her own music, her own attempt to translate into pure sounds those universal emotions—exultation and despondency, the yearning and seeking and the glory in finding—out of which all music, classical and popular, springs.

Her health was quite good, in fact remarkable, but of course there were no communicable diseases for her to catch, not even the common cold. In her fourteenth year she had the usual problems with complexion: pimples, blackheads, pustules, and blotches, with no one to explain them to her (since I at twelve had not yet experienced these dreads the way that Adam in California would endure acne but grow out of it) and there were times she worried her complexion would be permanently disfigured. She continued to be (as she always would be) a chronic worrier, and sometimes her tension gave her stomach-aches or headaches, although she had long since discovered the very best outlet for tension was simply a quick (or leisurely, depending on her mood) reach, having eventually convinced herself that it was not the reaching which brought about the monthly bleeding.

She had remarkably few dental problems. In her sixteenth year she had a yeast infection, but in time it cleared up. It may safely and incredibly be said that she never had anything wrong with her that demanded a visit to the doctor or dentist.

A visit to an ophthalmologist might have been desirable, but the only real inconvenience her myopia caused her was in her shooting: it became impossible for her to bag game with the rifle, and her use of the shotgun was limited to things within easy view. In her thirteenth September a wild razorback hog, which she could not have caught in the rifle’s sights, happened to discover her sweet potato patch and was so busily preoccupied with rooting up and munching the yams that it didn’t notice Robin sneaking within range. She fired pointblank and enjoyed ham and bacon again for a whole year or more, although she had run out of salt with which to cure it and had to condescend to accepting my instructions on how to extract salt from hickory ashes, cow parsnips, and pigweed. By her fourteenth year she had run out of everything that Sog had originally stocked, except for a few jars of pickled pig’s feet, and of course the huge supply of Jack Daniels, which, by the way, she had begun imbibing on occasions. One summer she had an unusually severe problem with chiggers, those maddeningly itchy mites, and I happened to mention to her that whenever the chiggers had caused great distress in my family, we treated the bites with small applications of Chism’s Dew, as the local moonshine was called, a jug of which my mother kept strictly for such medicinal purposes (ironically, although their lives were devoted to making whiskey barrels, neither Braxton nor Gabe Madewell ever touched the stuff). Robin wondered if Jack Daniels might effectuate the same result as Chism’s Dew, and tried it, pouring some on the bites on her long lovely legs, and sure enough it did the trick, killing the chiggers, and as long as she had the bottle open she poured a small amount into a glass, diluted it with water, sipped it, and made a variety of grimaces which diminished on the second sip and disappeared on the third. She finished the glass and poured another, and, as the saying goes, acquired a taste for it. She learned it could greatly enhance her music.

Out in California Adam acquired a taste for the wine that went into the barrels which gave the wine the many flavors of the oak. Although California law prohibited Adam from going to work in the cooperage until he was sixteen, his father circumvented that restriction by taking Adam into the cooperage after hours, when Gabe Madewell, eager for the time-and-a-half they paid him for working overtime, often toiled at the cooper’s trade, sometimes late into the night. There, as Adam grew older and stronger, he learned the advanced labors and tricks of coopering, until, by the time he was sixteen and allowed by law to become officially employed, he was no longer an apprentice cooper but a journeyman. Still, despite being able to do anything his father could do as well as him, he was only his father’s assistant, constantly under orders and instructions and criticism from his father, who, when their arguments grew bitter, reminded him that he might have been left a corpse on Madewell Mountain, a notion that Adam sometimes dwelt upon, thinking he could still have inhabited the place as a ghost and not knowing that he was definitely inhabiting it as an in-habit.

The Inglenook Winery was in a great stone chateau, with the cooperage in one basement of it, and some nights when his father had no immediate task for him to do, Adam would wander into other parts of the chateau, where he discovered the sampling room and could help himself to different tastes of wine, always careful, of course, not to consume so much of it that his father would notice. Thus at an early age he learned how to avoid drunkenness.

The topography of Napa County bears some resemblance to that of Newton County, enough to have kept Adam from being hopelessly homesick. To the west of Rutherford rise the Mayacama Mountains, the highest point, Mt. Veeder, being the same height, 2,500 feet, as the loftier mountains of Newton County, and another peak, Mount St. John, still wild enough to remind Adam of his explorations of Madewell Mountain back home. To the east could be seen a muscular mountain called Stag’s Leap, the very name of it suggesting an affinity to Stay More’s Leapin Rock, from which at least four people had been known to commit suicide (and Robin in her now-outgrown paper doll period had emulated that tradition by having four paper dolls fall from the top of the davenport to their deaths, each followed by her ad libitum descant of “Farther Along.”)

Every available slope and terrace of the valley was covered with vineyards, all lovingly cultivated, the neatness of which presented a striking contrast to the wildness of Newton County. Whenever he could, Adam would get out into the countryside and wander limpingly among those vineyards, or hike up into the semi-wilderness of Mount St. John, where he found an abandoned house to explore, and a quicksilver mine. East of Rutherford the Napa River flowed, with a swimming hole that Adam visited on hot summer afternoons, although the other kids there teased him and mocked his Ozark pronunciation and vocabulary, and came to call him Arkie. There was also a large reservoir called Lake Hennessey, unlike anything Adam had seen before, since Newton County does not have a single lake. Nor does Newton County have a single mile of railway, and there was a track of the Southern Pacific Railroad running through Rutherford, which carried the huge cargo of wine off to market. Adam liked to visit the Rutherford Depot, a plain building in a long shed, and watch the loading of the big tank cars with wine or the loading of cartons of bottled wine into boxcars. Studying the train’s schedule and behavior, Adam learned how to climb aboard unnoticed and ride the train five miles down to Yountville, which wasn’t as big as St. Helena but possessed more shops than Rutherford and had a building that became Adam’s refuge during those years when he awaited the legal working age of sixteen: a public library. The kindly librarian, a young woman from San Francisco who told him it was all right for him to call her Frances, said to him at closing time one day, “You know, if you like, I could issue you a library card and you could take some books home with you.”

“I reckon not, ma’am,” he said. “Paw don’t allow no books in the house.”

“That’s too bad,” she said. Then she asked, “Why aren’t you in school?”

“Iffen I was let to go back to school, ma’am, I’d just be in the fourth grade, and I’m too big for that.”

“Oh. How old are you?”

He told her he was fifteen and she kept on asking him questions. He told her his whole story so far, how he’d hurt himself trying to get to school in the wild mountains of the Ozarks, how he’d lost the index finger of his right hand working in his father’s cooperage, and so forth. He even told her how he’d been coming to Yountville to visit the library by climbing up on the freight train. She told him she admired his desire to give himself an education, and she wondered if he needed any help picking out books. He told her he’d just been picking them out at random, but he hoped eventually to read every book she had.

“Who are your favorite authors, so far?” she asked.

“Arthurs, ma’am? You mean the folks who wrote the books? Tell ye the truth, I never paid much attention to that, just the titles.”

And from then on she told him some authors she thought he would like. Joseph Conrad. Mark Twain. Thomas Hardy. Did he know, by the way, that Ambrose Bierce, who wrote some fine satirical fables and some short stories shot through with savage irony, had lived just up the road at St. Helena? Yes, she said, and after Adam finished reading some of Bierce’s tales, she would be happy to drive him up to St. Helena some Sunday and show him the house in which Bierce had lived. Also he ought to know that the splendid Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, before he became famous, lived with his California bride in a squatter’s shack up the road on Mount St. Helena.

Among the hundreds of books that Adam read at the Yountville Public Library were Stevenson’s Silverado Squatters, based on that experience, as well as his Treasure Island. He also enjoyed Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and W.H. Hudson’s Green Mansions.

A railroad guard caught Adam climbing down from the freight train on one of his trips to Yountville, and that put an end to that mode of transportation. Desperate, he tried walking the five miles from Rutherford to Yountville, but with his bad leg the hike hurt him and tired him, and he told Frances he was going to have to quit, and why.

“It won’t be long anyhow, ma’am,” he said, “afore I’ll turn sixteen and be let to go to work, and my paw has plans to start me in to a-coopering at the place where he works.”

“Until then,” she said, “you know I have a car and I can come and get you any time you want me to.”

She not only did that, and took him to see Ambrose Bierce’s house, and to the site of Stevenson’s squatter’s shack as well as for Sunday drives all over the countryside, but she taught him how to drive, and eventually she taught him how to make love, that is, in his sixteenth year she taught him what he needed to do for her in order to get her ready and willing, and she taught him what he ought to try to do so that either he could hold off coming until she was good and ready or else how to be patient enough to make her come too. He’d had no idea that females actually came. It surprised him and filled him with wonder. He asked her if there were any books which explained it; she let him read a novel by D.H. Lawrence which belonged not to the library but to Frances herself. He’d had no idea that authors could actually write about things like that, and he acquired a taste for it, the way he’d acquired a taste for the Cabernet Sauvignon that all the local wineries made. She let him read some of the other books that were in her own private library, books by Henry Miller, and a recent novel by J.P. Donleavy, and his favorite, by some Russian named Nabokov about a girl and a man. He had nearly as much fun reading all those books as he did in the act itself, which they continued doing whenever they found the opportunity, especially on Sundays at her little house in Yountville, where sometimes they spent the whole afternoon doing it. Frances was a thin woman not nearly as tall as Adam, and her favorite place to be was on top of him, where he bore her weight easily and marveled at her velocity and shaking. When Adam was seventeen, his father found out about Frances. His mother had already known, or at least she had met Frances, and being blind could not see her and determine that she was older than Adam and believed him when he said that Frances was his girlfriend and he hoped to marry her eventually. His father was not blind, not physically; his soul was blind, but his eyesight was good enough to detect that Frances was an older woman, and when Adam finally introduced Frances to his father, the first thing Gabe Madewell said was to ask her how old she was, and she told the truth, which surprised Adam: she was thirty-one.

Later his father said to him, “How come you caint get yourself a gal your own age?”

“Tell me where I’d find one,” Adam replied.

Not that there weren’t any girls in Rutherford, or St. Helena, or Yountville, who were his own age. But they were all in high school, where Adam would never go. Usually he saw girls his own age at the movies in St. Helena, where Frances often took him, which he enjoyed more than anything next to sex and books. Frances had not only told Adam all the best books for him to read, for the improvement of his mind as well as for fun and pleasure and excitement, but she had tried to tutor him in a few things he might have taken in high school if he had gone: geometry, Spanish, U.S. and World history, and biology. He was always resistant to learning anything that he could not put to practical use, but it is fair to assume that by the time he would have graduated from high school he already possessed a greater store of learning than most high school students, and had a knowledge of social relationships and sex that went far beyond anything ever acquired in high school.

But when he proposed to Frances, she laughed. “Why do you want to ruin a good thing by doing something like that?” she asked.

That was about the time the little Russian fellow started coming into the Yountville library on Saturdays at the same time Adam was there. The Russian was a dapper, well-dressed man in his fifties with slick dark hair and very bushy eyebrows. He spoke with an aristocratic accent and for some time after he began coming into the library Adam worried that the man might be pursuing Frances, even though he wasn’t as tall as she, in fact he was an inch short of five feet, and Adam himself had already shot up beyond six feet. But when he confronted Frances with the notion, she laughed and said, “Oh, no, he’s just a very courtly and nice gentleman. André isn’t after me, he’s after some books he can’t find in the St. Helena library. Have you noticed the car he drives? He’s very well-to-do.”

Since Adam was so fond of Nabokov, he was not against Russians. This man’s name was Tchelistcheff, which, Frances told Adam, could be pronounced as Shelly-shef. He was a winemaker, a research oenologist, working for BV, as everyone called the large Beaulieu Vineyards. In fact, André had years before developed the Cabernet Sauvignon which became the valley’s principal wine, and was of course Adam and Frances’ favorite beverage. They sometimes consumed too much of it.

Eventually, since they shared the library every Saturday, Frances introduced Adam to André. Frances said to André, “Adam is my protégé in the realm of letters but in the realm of work he’s a master cooper.”

“Oh, indeed?” said André Tchelistcheff. “Where is your workshop?”

“In the oak woods on a mountain in the Ozarks, sir,” Adam said. “But if you mean the place I’m employed, it’s Inglenook.”

“You make barrels for Inglenook?” André said.

“Yes, sir.”

“I did not know they make their own barrels. We order ours, and it is huge bother to wait for them most of the time.” And then he asked, “Where is Ozarks?”

Adam explained that he had only been referring to his grandfather’s shop in the forest on Madewell Mountain, in the state of Arkansas, which he had left five years before.

“Madewell. Is good name for cooper. Will you show me your work?”

And that was how Adam became friends with André, the great oenologist, who, when he was taken to inspect the Inglenook cooperage, demonstrated the same discrimination that made a San Francisco Chronicle writer once say of him, “His palate was so refined he could tell by taste whether a wine came from Rutherford dust, Oakville dirt or a furrow in between.” After Adam introduced André to his father at the shop, André later whispered to Adam, “Let me see can I not distinguish your work from your father’s,” and after inspecting several of the finished barrels he did indeed select one and say, “This one you make.” Adam had a habit of burning his initials “AM” inconspicuously onto a stave of each of his barrels, but André had not noticed that or used it as a clue to distinguishing Adam’s work from his father’s. “Miss Frances said what is truth. You are master cooper,” André said. “But she spoke one mistake. She said you are her protégé. I would like you should be my protégé.”

And that was how Adam escaped from his father’s control, and, in time, from his father’s house.

Part Five

Whither with her

Chapter forty-one

In her sixteenth year she decided to make contact with the world again. Or, she thought, what ought to be called the other world, since the world in which she lived, not just Adam’s haunt but her own haunt that went far beyond his, was plenty of world for her. But it had been seven or eight years—she had lost count—since she had pulled the trigger on Sugrue and thus had her last sight of another human being. She had plenty of company from nonhumans; in fact, she had too much company from Paddington, who adored her and could barely (ha! bearly!) let her out of his sight, but sometimes she considered the fact that being the only human being in her world made it too easy to feel that she was the only person in the world, an incorrect and dangerous thought, a thought that allowed the more incorrect and dangerous belief that she had simply created the entire world in her imagination. She was proud of her imagination, whether it simply took the form of giving names to her pair of mourning doves, Sigh and Sue, or, as she had been doing for some time, rewriting the Bible in her mind to make the stories more interesting. She wrote a new version of creation showing that God created woman first and Eve had to wait a while for the man to show up. She attempted to tell what happened to Lot’s daughters after they had birthed their babies, and she told the story of David and Goliath from the giant’s point of view. But recreating the Bible shouldn’t be permitted to allow her to feel that she was in competition with God for creating the whole world, and she needed to get out into that world and see for herself that it contained human beings she had not created.

There was no longer any problem, really, in getting out. Over the years her explorations of the countryside, with or without Paddington or one or more of the dogs, and sometimes with Ralgrub and her offspring, had shown her several possibilities for escape. She had been as far south as the great waterfall which fell into the magical glen Adam had told her so much about, in which he had explored and found Indian relics. She had seen the treacherous place where he had fallen trying to get down, and she knew that even if she had a rope she wouldn’t want to try to get off the mountain that way. But her wanderings had also led her to the place where she found the crumpled, blackened remains of a vehicle, and she guessed it had been Sugrue’s truck, and climbing the bluff side above it, with Hreapha and Hrolf, who seemed to know where they were going, she had discovered the end of what little remained of the trail on which she had been brought to Madewell Mountain so long ago. She knew that if she followed that trail she could find her way down off the mountain. So momentous was the discovery that she was tempted to try it right then and there, but she was naked, as usual, and decided that if she ever encountered another human being, she would have to be clothed.

Thus, when she finally embarked upon her journey to the other world, it was only after substantial thought and preparation. She even considered cutting her hair, which now reached nearly to her knees, but instead she simply gave it a thorough washing and braided it into two long pigtails which she wrapped around the top of her head into a kind of crown or turban, held in place with small wooden pegs. She trimmed her fingernails with the scissors and used a knife to clean carefully under the remaining nails, then she did the same for her toenails, which had practically become claws. She considered using Sugrue’s razor to remove the hair from her legs and under her armpits but she decided that would be hypocritical if she allowed the bush of golden hair to remain around her poody, and besides, her clothing would cover her legs and armpits (and of course her poody). She donned Sugrue’s best shirt and his overalls, also freshly washed, and scarcely needed to roll up the trouser cuffs, since his clothes now fit her well. His shoes were too large, but she didn’t mind going barefoot; in fact, she preferred it. She remembered how once long ago she and Beverly had gone into her mother’s bedroom and put on her mother’s make-up, what fun it had been to pretend to be grown-up, and now that she actually was grown-up, she wished she had something to use in place of lipstick. She took the juice of pokeberries and stained her lips with that, although it wasn’t very neat, and rather purply.

Then she called for Adam and attempted to keep the condescension out of her voice, which was hard, because he was such a child, just an awkward, ignorant, backwoods kid. “Well? What do you think?” And she held her arms wide.

Holy moses, he said. You shore are dolled up fit to kill. Are you a-fixin to git married?

“No, I’m ‘a-fixin’ to see if I can’t find Stay More.”

You don’t mean to tell me. What for?

“Just to see what it looks like.”

Last time I looked, they wasn’t hardly nothing there to speak of.

“But I need to see whatever’s left of it. I won’t be gone long.”

We’uns will all miss ye. I’d admire to go with ye, but of course that’s right far out of my haunt.

“I’m taking Hreapha with me. I need you to explain to the others, particularly Paddington, that I haven’t abandoned them, I’ve just gone away for a day or so, however long it takes to get there and look around and get back.”

You might have to tie a rope and collar on Paddington to keep him from a-follerin ye.

“I’ll just sneak away. But I need you to tell me how long I can leave Bess without milking her.”

Well golly gee, I caint rightly say. I never heared tell of no cow that was left alone and unmilked unless she was dry anyhow.

“Think about it, Adam. Use your head. And let me know, soon. I’m in a hurry to get started.”

Adam needed a while to think about it. Or at least he took a while. She wondered if maybe his feelings were hurt, the way she’d spoken to him. Or possibly he simply didn’t know what to tell her but couldn’t admit it. From the time, three years before, on or around her thirteenth birthday, when Hreapha and the others had appeared herding the cow across the meadow and to the barn, Adam had told her all he knew about the care and keeping and milking of cows. He hadn’t been able to show her how to squeeze the teats but he had verbally described it so well that after several attempts she learned to do it, and ever since had enjoyed plenty of milk and cream and butter, with a surplus that kept the animals, especially Robert, happy. She had milked Bess for ten months of each year, nearly every day. It had never crossed her mind that there might ever be an occasion when she’d go away and not be able to milk her. Adam—or his voice—finally returned to tell her that he didn’t honestly believe it would hurt Bess any to leave her unmilked for a couple of days, or even three days at the most, although it wouldn’t be such a bad idea (Adam always pronounced that “i-dee”) to just tie Bess to her stall in the barn so that she couldn’t get out into the pasture and eat grass. That way, she wouldn’t store up too much milk. But Robin was sure she could return after a night or two away.

“Goodbye, Adam,” she said. “That’s a word that I haven’t used in a long time.”

Was he sniffling? Promise me ye’ll come back. Don’t let nobody take ye away and keep ye.

“Don’t worry about that.”

And you be keerful on that trail. It’s bound to be the hardest hike you ever made.

Robin had fashioned herself a sort of backpack, in which she had some provisions—sandwiches, a couple of tomatoes, a couple of apples, a couple of boiled ears of corn. The backpack also contained, just in case, one hundred bills in the denomination of one hundred dollars each.

She turned to Hreapha and beckoned for her to follow, and the two of them started out. It was not easy. Adam was right that it was the hardest hike she’d ever made. It took almost an hour simply to reach the end—or the beginning—of the trail that led down the mountain, the place where Sugrue had burned his truck. To reach it, there were places where she had to boost Hreapha to get her up the sides of bluffs and out of ravines and gorges. She herself slipped and fell more than once. And even after they reached the remains of the trail, the trail itself was washed out in places and in other places extremely rocky and rough, and it wound back and forth, back and forth, as it crept down the mountain.

When at long last the trail reached the foot of the mountain and met the dirt road at a T, and the dirt road actually had the imprint of car tires in it, Robin started singing, a swelling chant of exultation at having escaped the mountain. She blinked back tears of joy. At the same time she was fearful of actually meeting somebody for the first time, of a car coming along, of her being exposed and spotted and approached and caught. Also she wasn’t sure which direction on the dirt road she should take. Her inclination was to turn left but Hreapha said “Hreapha!” and nudged Robin’s leg in the direction of turning right. From the turning Robin could see a pasture in which grazed several cows of the same color and coat as Bess, and she asked, “Is that where you got Bess?” and Hreapha wagged her tail. The owner of the cows must live nearby, she realized, but it wasn’t Stay More, not the place she wanted to go. So she heeded Hreapha’s guidance and took the road to the right, to the southeast.

Along the road that flanked the east feet of Madewell and Ledbetter Mountains, a one-lane dirt road that climbed and dipped and twisted and turned, Robin noticed a few, a very few, houses or other buildings, not one of them in use. And she encountered no traffic, no people, and the only creature she saw was a skunk crossing the road. Still, she felt a constant sense of excitement in anticipation of soon seeing an actual person.

It was late afternoon when Hreapha said “HREAPHA!” and bounded on ahead out of sight, but she soon came back, in the company of several other dogs, one of them the big shaggy fellow that Robin recognized as Yowrfrowr, and another dog that Robin also recognized but hadn’t seen for many a year: Hruschka, as well as an assortment of dogs that appeared to be Hruschka’s offspring. They were all announcing their names and busily chatting with Hreapha in dogtalk. Robin patted them one by one, and then she followed them as they led her to their home.

Robin had never seen that particular kind of log cabin before, consisting of two separate log cabins joined in between by a kind of breezeway where the people (and the dogs?) could lounge around in the open air out of the sun or rain. At the moment the only loungers were cats, and they were all over the place, in the breezeway and around the yard. Robin loved cats and wished she could go closer and admire them, but she was very nervous because obviously somebody lived here and she might soon be meeting one or more live people, and she hadn’t even given any thought to what she would say. She was scared, really.

The dogs were barking and even the cats were meowing, and soon the door leading onto the breezeway from one of the cabins opened, and an old woman stepped out. Robin’s eyesight couldn’t clearly perceive her, but she must have been eighty at least, with snow-white hair.

“Xenophon, what in tarnation is all this commotion?” the woman said, and Robin realized she was addressing Yowrfrowr. The dog continued repeating his name. Robin savored the moment of having heard a human voice for the first time in years, and although the woman was speaking sternly to her dog it was a very kind voice. Then the woman caught sight of her, and spent a long moment just studying her. Finally she said, “Why, howdy, there.”

“Hello, ma’am,” Robin said.

“You’re a gal,” the woman said. “For a minute I thought you were a man, dressed like that. Come on up here where I can get a good look at you.”

Robin approached the breezeway, and up close could see the woman clearly. Despite being very old she still seemed to Robin to be one of the most beautiful women she had ever seen although of course Robin hadn’t seen any women at all for nine years. “Is this Stay More?” Robin asked.

The woman laughed a young laugh. “Not this,” she said, sweeping her hand over her home. “The village is on down the road a ways. You must’ve just passed it and not noticed it, there’s so little left of it.”

“I didn’t come that way,” Robin said. “I came from that way.”

“On foot?” said the woman, and looked down at Robin’s bare feet. “You must’ve got lost at Parthenon and took the wrong turn. I can’t imagine anybody coming to Stay More from that way, which used to be called Right Prong. But here now, I’m being chatty and rude. Pull you up a chair and rest your feet and I’ll get you a tall glass of lemonade.”

Robin couldn’t believe it, but soon she was holding in her hand a glass with ice in it and filled with lemonade, which she hadn’t tasted in so long she’d forgotten there was such a thing. The old woman had a glass too and raised it and said, “To your health,” then added, “You sure look pretty healthy, I’d say. How old are you?”

“Sixteen,” she said. “And I feel very healthy.”

“And tan,” the woman said. “Do you spend all your time out hiking the back roads?”

“No ma’am, today’s the first time I’ve ever been on a back road on foot.”

“Really? Where are you from?”

Robin started to say “Harrison” but realized that was totally false. “Madewell Mountain,” she said.

The woman looked at her. “That’s just up yonder a ways, not too awfully far at all. But here I’m being chatty and rude again and haven’t even told you my name. I’m Latha Dill.”

“Oh. You used to be the postmaster of Stay More.”

“Long ago, before you were born, when there was still a post office.”

“And you used to run the general store, where Adam got his flour and stuff.”

“Adam?”

“Adam Madewell.”

The woman was looking at Robin very intensely. “The Madewells went to California, oh, maybe thirty year or more ago. It’s still called Madewell Mountain, and you say that’s where you’re from, but how did you happen to know Ad Madewell? Are you some kin to the Madewells?”

“No, I’m just a good friend of Adam’s.”

“Oh, so you’re really from California, then?”

Robin realized that she was going to have some trouble explaining it all to this nice old lady. She doubted the woman had ever heard of an in-habit, or would even believe her if she tried to explain what an in-habit was. So she decided not to try. “No,” she said, “actually I’ve never really met Adam. Could you tell me what he looked like?”

“I think you’ve been out in the sun too long, young lady, and you need more ice than what’s in that lemonade.” She went into the cabin and returned shortly with a dishtowel in which she had wrapped a bunch of ice cubes. “Here. Hold this to your forehead.”

Robin obligingly held the bundle of ice to her head. It felt wonderful, although she had nothing wrong with her head that needed cooling off. “Where do you get ice cubes?” she asked.

“From the fridge, of course,” the woman said.

“Oh. You have electricity?”

“Sure. Don’t you?”

“No. I haven’t seen an ice cube for about nine years.”

The woman was smiling. “Whereabouts on Madewell Mountain do you live?”

“The top.”

“Oh, then you live in the Madewell place, I reckon.”

“That’s right. Have you been there?”

“Not since I was about your age. I was born and grew up on the east side of Ledbetter Mountain, out Left Prong yonder, at the old Bourne place, where Brax Madewell’s trail comes down off the mountain. That was the way your Ad used to get to school. Did you know that?”

“Yes, the trail goes up through a glen with a high waterfall.”

“That’s right. Have you been in that holler?”

“I’ve seen it.”

“Well, Brax Madewell built his house up there about the time I was born. Him and my daddy were friends, and Daddy took me with him once to visit up there. It sure is shut off and out of the world, isn’t it?”

“It sure is,” Robin agreed. “But I’ve got many friends, including my dog Hreapha, who’s sitting there with your dog Yowrfrowr.”

“Yowrfrowr? Is that what you call Funny? His name is Xenophon, or Fun for short. Yowrfrowr! The woman laughed, and the dog jumped up at the sound of his real name and came to her. She scratched him behind the ears. “Yowrfrowr, huh? Is that your real name, boy? It’s certainly what you say all the time.”

“And ‘Hreapha’ is what my dog says.”

As if to confirm it, Yowrfrowr said “YOWRFROWR” and Hreapha said “HREAPHA.” Not to be left out, Hruschka said “HRUSCHKA” and each of her offspring announced their names too.

The woman went on laughing, and eventually she stopped laughing and asked, “What are the names of your other friends?”

“Oh, there are so many of them, but their names aren’t always the sounds they make. There’s Robert the bobcat, and another one of Hreapha’s pups named Hroberta, who is Robert’s girlfriend, believe it or not.” The woman started laughing again, and Robin laughed with her, realizing that she had almost forgotten how to laugh. She went on, “Then there’s Hroberta’s brother, Hrolf, who thinks he’s the lord of the place, and Ralgrub the raccoon and her three children, and Sheba the king snake, or queen snake, and Dewey the buck deer, and Paddington the bear, and Bess the cow, and Sparkle the pet rock, and a pair of mourning doves named Sigh and Sue, and most recently we were honored with the presence of a clever opossum named Pogo.”

The woman was really laughing now, and could barely stop to say, “I remember Pogo in the funny papers.”

“He’s not still in the funny papers?” Robin asked.

“No, the artist who drew him, Walt Kelly, died seven or eight years ago.”

“That’s too bad. Well, my Pogo is just like the Pogo that used to be in the funny papers.”

The woman named Latha laughed some more, then stopped and said, “My stars alive, that’s quite a crowd of friends you have. But isn’t one of them named Sog?”

Robin’s skin prickled, and she thought she might be shivering, not from the bundle of ice cubes. “Do you mean Sugrue Alan?” she said. “Did you know him?”

“I knew him quite well. Too well. Until he disappeared, he was one of my few remaining neighbors. Not a near neighbor. He lived on the other side of Stay More. But I knew him all his misbegotten life, until he disappeared. How’s he doing these days?”

“He’s dead,” Robin said.

“Oh. I wish I could say that’s too bad, but I can’t. Did you kill him?”

“Yes.”

“Good for you. Good for you, Robin Kerr. Did this happen recently?”

Robin was almost certain she hadn’t mentioned her name to the woman. “No, I shot him when I was eight. But he asked me to. He was pretty bad sick.”

“Sick in the head primarily,” Latha said. “You must stay all night with me and tell me the whole story. But the first thing I want to know is: how badly did he hurt you?”

Robin thought about that. “Physically he never hurt me. Not much. He slapped me once, that’s all.”

Latha waited, then asked, “How often did he…did he molest you?”

Robin took time wording her reply. “I know that’s what he probably wanted me for, but he didn’t. He couldn’t. Something was wrong with his, his, his dick is all I know to call it. It wouldn’t get hard.”

Latha’s laugh was gentle, not mocking. “My,” she said, “you’ll really have a story to tell me. But let’s go start supper. Is there anything in particular you’d like to eat?”

Robin needed just a moment. “Could you make spaghetti?”

“Sure. With meat sauce?”

And for dessert they had real ice cream. And they talked and talked and talked, late into the night, Robin telling the whole story of the kidnapping, captivity and the killing of Sugrue, as well as life on Madewell Mountain (although she still couldn’t bring herself to include the in-habit). The inside of Latha’s cabin was very neat, and the woman had a telephone and a television and a bookcase, and the kitchen was really up-to-date, with appliances she had never seen before, including something called a microwave. Robin slept on a wonderful bed and in the morning Latha gave her some real woman’s clothes to put on, after her bath in a real shower: blue jeans that fit and a knit cotton top, and even a new pair of sneakers. After a breakfast with a real banana and some blueberries to put on her cereal (and Robin was almost sorry to discover how much she liked coffee), during which they talked and talked through the third cup of coffee, Robin asked, “How did you know it was Sugrue who did it?”

Latha explained, “I read the newspapers and watch television. I saw your mother on TV twice. I just had a hunch it was Sugrue because he disappeared at the same time, and because I knew him well. But I had no idea he’d taken you to Madewell Mountain. Now then. Let’s go look at the Stay More you have imagined so much.”

Chapter forty-two

Yowrfrowr really wanted to go with them, but he explained to her, My rheumatism, if that’s what it is, makes it increasingly wearying for me to get around. So I’ll just sit here and lick the place where my balls used to be until you get back. Have fun.

She debated with herself whether to stay with him or follow Robin and Yowrfrowr’s mistress. Since her first loyalty, despite her great love for Yowrfrowr, was to Robin, she chose to amble along behind them as they hiked down into the remains of the village. She enjoyed listening to their conversation, as the woman named Latha would pause to point to a building or house and relate its history, and since Hreapha was so good at minding Robin, she could absorb all of Robin’s feelings and reactions to the sights and sites of Stay More. “We probably won’t encounter a soul,” the woman said, “but if we do I’ll just say your name is Sally Smith and you’re a high school student from Jasper doing some research on the history of Stay More. Okay?”

They detoured over a low-water bridge across the creek, which was nearly dry this time of midsummer (“That’s Swains Creek or what’s left of it,” the woman said), and reached the schoolhouse, a modest white clapboard building with a well in the yard and a single outhouse. The woman, who said she’d attended school here herself long ago, explained that the single outhouse had been only for girls; the boys, including Adam, had simply “used the bushes”. They went inside the schoolhouse, which still had all its furniture in place although it hadn’t been used for a quarter of a century. “The first-graders sat down there,” the woman pointed, “and the eighth graders sat back here, with all the other grades in between. Right there’s where your Ad probably sat last, but he suffered a bad accident in the fourth grade and had to drop out of school.”

“I know,” Robin said. She sat down at the desk where Adam had probably sat, whose top was attached to the back of the desk seat in front of it. “He really loved this school, but I don’t think he missed anything after dropping out.”

“How do you know so much about Ad?” the woman asked, sitting down at one of the other desks. “The way you talk about him, I’d think you went to school with him. Did he leave a diary behind?”

“A diary? No, he left behind something a lot better than a diary. I don’t know how to tell you this, but…”

Hreapha sat too, on the splintery pine boards of the schoolhouse floor, and listened raptly as Robin attempted to explain to the kindly old woman the existence of, the nature of, and the habits of, an in-habit. Hreapha studied the woman’s face carefully to see what degree of disbelief she showed, but the woman, whom Hreapha was beginning to mind as well, had taken on the expression of a studious schoolgirl sitting at her desk listening to a teacher explain the most difficult of lessons, and while the expression contained elements of perplexity it was also filled with wonder and delight.

And Robin must have minded the woman too, because when she was finished she said, “You believe me.” It wasn’t a question.

For a while the woman did not say anything but stared at the room’s blackboard as if waiting for the teacher to diagram an in-habit. Finally she said, “Goodness gracious.” And a little while later she simply took a deep breath and said, “If that doesn’t beat all creation.” Then the two women got up from their desks and left the schoolhouse, and re-crossed the low water bridge.

That put them square in the middle of what had been the village, and there was really nothing left except the big two-story house, which, the woman explained to Robin, had been built by Jacob Ingledew, the founder of Stay More who had later been governor of Arkansas after the Civil War. The house had a porch with fancy balusters running the whole length of the front. “My grandson Vernon owns it,” the woman said, “as he owns most of everything around here, but he doesn’t live here. At the moment he’s renting it out to some college professor named Larry, who is probably sound asleep in there amongst the cockroaches. He has what they call a drinking problem.”

“Which Sugrue had,” Robin said. “And which I’m going to have if I don’t lay off all the whiskey he left behind.”

“I think you probably know when to stop,” the woman said. The woman pointed out where the big Ingledew general store had been, only its cement porch floor remaining, and where the big grist-mill had stood, and where Doc Swain’s house and office had been. “Did Sog tell you about Doc Swain?” the woman asked.

“Yes. He was my favorite paper doll,” Robin said.

“He was my favorite person,” the woman said. “Well, right there is where he patched up your Ad after he fell off the mountain.”

“You keep calling him my Ad,” Robin said.

“Well, isn’t he?”

They walked on up what had been the main street of the village and the woman pointed out where the bank had been, The Swains Creek Bank and Trust Company, the stone of its edifice now demolished and used to form a dike against the occasional rise of Swains Creek’s waters. Across from it was the only other remaining building in town, a three-part house also with a porch all along its front.

“Now that was my store and post office,” the woman said. “And also my house for many years before I moved out to the dogtrot, which was my husband’s home. After the post office closed and I moved out, it remained dusty and empty for many years, except for the old oak post office boxes, which are still in there. Recently my granddaughter Sharon moved in and fixed it up a bit. But let’s not talk too loudly, or she’ll hear us and come out.”

Robin asked, “Is she alone?”

“Yes. She had a very unhappy marriage which ended several years ago, thank heavens.”

“That’s interesting,” Robin said, “that she lives here and that man lives down there, and they’re the only people in town. Do they ever speak to each other?”

The woman laughed. “Rarely. In fact, Larry was her boyfriend for a while, in Chicago, where he taught, and he followed her here, but…oh, Robin, it’s such a long story you don’t want to hear it now.”

“If I still played with my paper dolls, I could make up a great story for them.”

“You certainly could. But you don’t have to do it with paper dolls. You could write it.”

“I don’t have any paper left.”

The woman put both hands on her hips. “Now that is inexcusable and I won’t allow you to leave without a supply a paper.” They resumed walking up the road, and Hreapha happily followed, with an inkling of where they might be going. “There’s only one other place to show you,” the woman said. “And it’s another half-mile or so up this road, the Parthenon Road, if you can walk that far.”

The old woman didn’t seem to mind walking. Probably she had a lot of practice, and had no infirmities like her Xenophon’s rheumatism. Hreapha reflected sadly that her lover Yowrfrowr might not live forever. For that matter, she herself was an old dog now, and she brooded that Yowrfrowr probably no longer considered her attractive. Well, certainly he no longer had any desire for her, not her fault or his.

They came to the man’s house, and a wave of nostalgia swept over Hreapha. “This was where Sog lived,” the woman said, “before he pretended to go off to California but instead kidnapped a seven-year-old girl and took her off to live on a mountaintop. Look, the note he left is still on the door: ‘GONE TO CALIFORNIA.’”

Hreapha was a little surprised to see how the house was falling apart now that it had been abandoned for so long. Time and the elements had removed all familiar scents and sights, and even the holes she’d dug all over the backyard had filled with silt. She could not detect any trace of her own in-habit at all, and decided conclusively that she must have taken it with her to Madewell Mountain.

“So this is where you grew up,” Robin said to Hreapha.

“Hreapha,” she said.

“You’re much better off now,” Robin said.

“Hreapha,” she agreed.

“And so are you,” the woman said to Robin. “Now let’s get on back home.”

That afternoon, as the two women sat in the dogtrot of the cabin (and Hreapha did not trot but sat), sipping their lemonades and taking in the breeze, Robin asked, “How do you manage to keep so many pets?”

And the woman returned the question, “How do you?”

“Well, I don’t have to feed them, much. They feed themselves.”

“My very generous and wealthy grandson Vernon, who is virtually my sole means of support apart from Social Security, regularly stops by to visit and always brings several boxes of canned cat food and dog food.”

“Is he also not married?”

The woman laughed. “No, but he’s been living for years with a woman, his cousin Jelena, and if you’ll stay with me for several days I’ll tell you their story too.”

“I’d really love to stay, but I do have to get home. You have such a nice house. And you and I are alike in so many ways, especially because we’ve learned how to live alone.”

“We certainly are alike, you and I. In fact, you remind me of myself at your age. Except you are much more beautiful.”

“I doubt that. When you were my age, you must have been the most beautiful woman on earth.”

“I doubt that. But why can’t you spend a week with me?”

“I’ve got to get on back home and milk the cow, for one thing.”

“Oh, when you first said ‘home,’ I thought you meant your former home in Harrison. You have no plans for returning there? Even though your mother remarried and lives in Little Rock now?”

“Really? No, I haven’t given any thought to going back to Harrison. I could never give up my friends, not even Adam, whom I was becoming too supercilious toward.”

“Does the in-habit know words like ‘supercilious’? Where’d you pick that up? Do you have books to read up there?”

“The only books I have are the Bible and a manual on farming and housekeeping, which Adam’s mother left behind, and one of those books must’ve had ‘supercilious’ in it.”

“It’s too late for you to start your journey home today,” the woman said. “So you’ll have to stay at least one more night with me.”

“Okay. I’ll be very happy to do that.”

“If I can find the number from Information, could I persuade you to call your mother and tell her you’re okay?”

Robin did not answer. Hreapha minded her and got an electric blast of panic, which was somewhat surprising. Didn’t Robin want to make any contact with her own mother? Finally, Robin said, “Please.” That’s all she could say for a while, and then she was able to add some more: “Please don’t let anybody know where I am. Don’t you understand?”

“Sure, Robin, I understand. Even if you told your mother that you want to stay on Madewell Mountain, there would be so much publicity over the news that you’re still alive that you’d be mobbed with tourists.” The woman laughed at her own exaggeration, then added, “Still, I think it might mean the world to your poor mother if somehow you could let her know you’re alive and well.”

“I’ll think about it,” she said, but before she said anything further on the matter, she and the old woman went inside the cabin to begin preparing their supper, and except for a brief moment when Robin reappeared to give Hreapha a nice dish of dog food, Hreapha didn’t see her again until the morning. Hreapha spent a good part of the night just visiting with Yowrfrowr, Hruschka, and their children. One of Hreapha’s grandsons said to her, “Granny, Pa says there’s all kinds of critters living with you up on the mountain. Is that true?” And Hreapha regaled her grandchildren with stories about the menagerie, particularly the additions that had been made since Yowrfrowr had visited. She told them about some of Pogo’s hilarious antics. Later, when all of them slept, Hruschka didn’t mind that Hreapha slept snuggled up next to Yowrfrowr, whom she might never see again.

In the morning, early, Robin and the woman came out of the house. Robin’s backpack was bulging with things the woman had given her. The woman asked, “Can you manage to take some kittens with you? I’ve got plenty. More than plenty.”

“Oh, I’d love to,” Robin said. “But one is all I could manage.”

“Take your pick.”

Robin picked out a very young, cute, female calico kitty, and nestled it into the open top of her backpack. “Thank you so much for everything,” Robin said to the woman. “Especially for the books and the paper and the pencils. I’ve already written on the first sheet of paper. Would you like to read it?” And she handed the woman a sheet, which the woman read aloud.

“Dear Mommy, I want you to know that I survived my kidnapping, and I am alive and well and happy and the man who did it is dead. Some day, not soon, I hope to see you again and tell you all about it. But for right now, I want with all my heart to stay where I am, so I can’t tell you where it is, and I hope you won’t try to find me. Please know I’m just fine and I love you very much. Robin.”

Robin said to the woman, “If you can ever find her address, and have your grandson or somebody mail that from Harrison so it has a Harrison postmark, do you think that will help?”

“Thank you,” the old woman said.

“No, thank you,” Robin said. “Thanks beyond words for everything. Thanks also for showing me how nicely you can live all by yourself. I hope you will stay alive forever because I want to see you again.”

“And you take care of yourself because I want to see you again too. Are you sure I can’t persuade you to take some oranges and bananas with you?”

“If I did, I might develop a hankering for them,” Robin said, and both women laughed.

The women hugged each other for a long moment, and then Robin said one more thing, “Remember your promise never to tell anybody where I am.”

Hreapha licked Yowrfrowr upside his handsome face, and he returned the lick, saying, Take care, old girl.

And then they were on the road home. Hreapha’s sadness was relieved by the gladness of going home, and apparently Robin was joyful too, because they were hardly out of sight of the dogtrot cabin before Robin began singing, not any of her songs or hymns with words but just those pure tones of hers that were so beautiful, rising and falling and revealing the colors of her heart. Hreapha felt like singing herself.

But going back up the mountain was much harder than coming down the mountain. Halfway up, Robin had to stop for a long time, panting and trying to get her breath back, and she said to Hreapha, “I don’t know if I can make it. Maybe you ought to go on ahead without me.”

“Hreapha,” she said, meaning, I wouldn’t hear of it.

So they sat for a while beside the trail and Robin got her lunch and the kitty out of the backpack, shared the lunch with Hreapha and the kitty, who, she said, she had decided to name “Latha,” and then she showed Hreapha the various other things the woman had given her: a package of writing paper, several pencils, a ballpoint pen, three thin books with paper covers, two packages of spaghetti noodles, a cylinder of Morton’s salt, six packages of yeast, as well as a dress, a pair of panties, a brassiere, a bath towel and washcloth, a hair comb, etc., etc. No wonder Robin was winded, trying to backpack all that stuff up the mountain.

“Wasn’t she the nicest person you could imagine?” Robin said. “I never could have dreamed up anybody like her. None of my paper dolls, not even Doc Swain, was as good as her. I left her some money. On the bed where she’d find it. Ten thousand dollars.”

After lunch Robin was ready to resume the climb, although she had to stop several more times before reaching the end of the trail. While they were resting again, they were startled by the appearance of a small but strange creature which Hreapha had not often seen but recognized as an armadillo, which looks like an opossum wearing armor.

“Good heavens! What’s that?” Robin asked.

“Hreapha,” she said, meaning, an armadillo.

“Okay, you might as well get me one for my next birthday.”

“Hreapha,” she said, meaning, It is done.

When they finally emerged into the pasture, the first of their friends to greet them was Bess, who mooed loudly. Bess’s udder was utterly swollen, and Robin took off her backpack and squatted to milk Bess right there, allowing the milk to run out on the ground. Robin explained to Hreapha, “Adam said the first milking after a delay wouldn’t be fit to drink, but we need to relieve Bess.”

Adam was the second of their friends to greet them. So how did Stay More suit ye? his voice asked.

“I had a wonderful time,” Robin said. “I stayed two nights with Latha Bourne Dill.”

You wouldn’t fool a feller, would ye? Is she still going strong?

“Adam, tell me something. What did she look like the last time you saw her? She wasn’t white-haired and stooped then, was she?”

Why, no, I reckon she must’ve been close to fifty but she still had a full head of dark hair and I relished her, I thought she was ripsniptious, I mean swelldifferous, I mean she was a real sight for sore eyes.

“That’s good, because she told me she thought you were the best-looking boy she’d ever seen. She said you were a ‘dreamboat.’” Robin waited, then said, “Adam? Did you hear me?”

I’m abashed, he said quietly. I caint imagine what would’ve give her that notion.

“Oh, I wish I could see you.”

I’ve got a gimpy leg and a missing finger, he said. I’m a freak.

“But your face must be lovely. Latha told me that Roseleen Coe thought you were a prize, and it broke her heart when you had that accident and couldn’t come to school any more. By the way, Latha showed me that schoolhouse, and I sat in your desk.”

That was Roseleen’s desk too. I’m happy to know it’s still there.

“Latha also said that when Roseleen left with her family for California, she said for Latha to tell you that she would always see you in her dreams, but Latha never saw you again herself.”

Who knows, maybe Adam ran into Roseleen out in California.

Chapter forty-three

Indeed he did, but not for a number of years, and I hope to reach their vital meeting somewhere in this chapter. We have left Adam still a teenager, about to become the protégé and assistant to the great oenologist (who preferred to spell it simply “enologist,” either form deriving from the Greek for wine, oinos) André Tchelistcheff, whom Adam began to worship and eventually to emulate, even to his detriment. For example, while T (as Adam and Frances began to refer to him to each other) taught him patiently and meticulously how to discriminate among the subtle tastes of different wines and of same wines of different age or quality, he also taught him how to smoke cigarettes, practically to chain-smoke, although strangely this did not affect his acute senses of taste and smell. Once on his doctor’s orders T attempted to give up smoking, and Adam dutifully gave it up along with him, but they both quickly discovered it ruined their taste discrimination, and they just as quickly resumed their constant nicotine habit. T told him that when he’d first come to work at BV for the legendary Georges de Latour, T had insisted on being allowed to sample everything in the winery, and De Latour had identified each of the samples, “This is Sauvignon Blanc,” or “This is Riesling,” and so forth through all the wines. “But I could not tell one from another,” T said, “not because I lacked the judgment but because they were all the same!”

When Adam first went to work for T, California wines were still cheap and undistinguished. Americans for the most part preferred sweet wines—ports and sherries—and they considered good table wine to be “sour.” Beaulieu Vineyards, under T with help from Adam, gradually changed all that. At the time Adam met him, André Tchelistcheff had already left the day-to-day winemaking business and spent most of his time in his small research lab, the Napa Valley Enological Research Laboratory, located up the road at St. Helena, conducting experiments and seeking to improve the quality of the wine. Adam was not merely a lab assistant; T taught him how to conduct experiments, chemical analysis and complicated tests upon different types of oak for the barrels, as well as different methods of “toasting” the oak. Nominally, Adam was the master cooper for BV, but actually he spent more time in T’s St. Helena laboratory, and he eventually became the leading expert on the composition of oak barrels. T had amassed a large library on wine and wine-making, most of it written in French, a language he insisted that Adam teach himself (with Frances’ help and with daily conversation from T, who said, “When I think about wine, I think in French, not English”). Neither T nor Adam were above mucking in the vineyards themselves, especially if frost threatened and help was needed at night setting out the smudge pots, whose kerosene smoke always reminded Adam of the fuel used in the Ozarks for illumination and starting woodstove fires.

Adam’s refined senses were constantly detecting something that reminded him of the Ozarks. Especially his sense of sight. On their rambles together, T showed Adam a one-room white clapboard building that had once been the Rutherford schoolhouse, which reminded Adam almost painfully of the Stay More school. T had a son named Dimitri, several years older than Adam, who had gone to school there. The author Nabokov also had a son named Dimitri, the same age as T’s son, although T had never read nor heard of that other marvelous Russian-American, who had many things in common with T, even the fact that they were both from aristocratic families who had lost everything in the Russian revolution, and T had also fought with the White Russian army against the Reds. Adam continued to buy and read each new book by Nabokov as it came out, until, by the time of the great writer’s death, he owned all of his novels that had been written in or translated into English. Otherwise his library consisted only of various wine books T had given him, or cast-offs from the Yountville Library that Frances had given him.

He continued living with Frances for several years. His father evicted him from his own home, not because of his relationship with Frances but because of his relationship with T, which Gabe Madewell bitterly begrudged him, since Adam was no longer obliged to his father for employment and thus Gabe could not continue his longstanding habit of criticizing everything Adam did. That habit had been the core of their father-son relationship, and breaking the habit cold turkey threw Gabe Madewell into a depression so irrational he would no longer tolerate the visits Adam tried to make occasionally to see his mother.

So Adam had moved in with Frances, and they lived as common-law man and wife (the acronym POSSLQ was just coming into vogue) for several years through Adam’s twenties, until Frances, nearly forty and beginning to lose her looks, insidiously stepped up her consumption not just of the splendid wines Adam brought home from work but also of more potent beverages such as vodka, rum, and scotch. For a while Adam appreciated that her regular intoxication left her completely free-spirited and uninhibited. But then she lost her library job as a result of her drinking, and while Adam could easily afford to support her so that she didn’t need to work, the absence of regular employment gave her more opportunity for drinking. Once she asked him, “Do you still want to marry me?” and he had to say in all honesty that he hadn’t given it any further thought. Whenever he came home from work, she was too far gone to speak coherently to him, let alone prepare meals or make love. He had his own car, and drove her to Napa city in the evenings to attend meetings of A.A., but that organization was not able to remove her thirst, which had gone beyond her control or his.

One year during his twenties, Adam was sent to France, at the expense of Beaulieu Vineyards and at the suggestion of T, who wanted him to study first-hand everything connected with the making of French wine barrels, from forest management to stave production to the actual methods of cooperage. Adam was thrilled, and not at all nervous, since he had learned to speak French so well. The problem was that Frances wanted desperately to go with him, and he couldn’t take her. Not that he (or BV) couldn’t afford it, but he was going as a businessman, not a tourist, and she would be in the way, and in the back of his mind he kept saying to himself I’m giving up Frances for France and indeed he hadn’t been in Merpins, his first stop after Paris, for two nights before he was sleeping with a tantalizing femme named Felise, who not only relaxed him after a busy day but began to accompany him as aide et secrétaire as he toured the tonelleries of France. Felise was his constant companion for three months as he absorbed everything there was to be learned about French cooperage, most of what was to be learned about French wine, and a good deal of what was to be learned about French lovemaking. About the latter Felise knew things that wanton Frances couldn’t have dreamed. For example, while Frances had shown him when he was only fifteen how a “French kiss” was done, Felise introduced him to maraichinage, the prolonged caressing of each other’s tongues, sometimes for hours, and usually to the point of orgasm. When it was time for Adam to return to America, he invited Felise to come with him; short of proposing marriage outright he made her an offer she couldn’t refuse, but she refused it, with the revelation that all along, she had been hired by a major tonellerie to entertain and assist him.

And when he got home, there was a note from Frances saying she’d gone back to San Francisco to live with her sister. Thereafter he dwelt alone for several years, except for occasional dates with women he met in the bars of St. Helena, until on one of his annual two-week vacations, he decided to visit San Francisco, which he had not yet seen. He had the address of Frances’ sister, and he intended to see Frances again and apologize in an effort to relieve the guilt that had been nagging him since his return from France. The sister would not let him in the door. “So you’re the famous Adam Madewell,” she said. “I have heard so awfully much about you. I thought of phoning to see if you’d want to attend the funeral, but I didn’t.” She told him which cemetery to go to and he put a dozen red roses on her grave. He wanted simply to drive on back home, but he spent a couple of nights in town, went to a Giants game, rode the street cars, visited the Palace of Fine Arts, and toured Haight-Ashbury, still inhabited by the counterculture. On a crowded sidewalk outside the Psychedelic Shop he bumped into a woman who cursed him, then grabbed him and said, “Man, you still smell like oakwood smoke.”

It took him too long to recognize her, with her long beribboned dirty-blonde hair, her floppy hat, the bangles and beads and all. “Well swoggle my eyes!” he exclaimed. “If it aint Roseleen!”

“My, my, I’d hardly know you, you’re so tall, and you’re even better-looking than, like, you ever was. Man, I always thought you was the best-looking feller I ever knew, you know? And I’ve loved you all my life, man.” She tried to sell him some crystals. He offered to take her to dinner. They went to an Italian restaurant, where, over the second bottle of wine, they told each other all about themselves. The reason he still smelled like oakwood smoke was that he’d been conducting a number of experiments on the optimum amount of charred “toast” on the inside of barrel staves. Roseleen had been married twice and had a daughter living with her father over in Fillmore. “It aint Stay More but its Fillmore, you know?” she said. Roseleen was “into” Zen Buddhism, if he wanted to hear about it. He didn’t. Would he like to crash at her pad? He would, if only to finally consummate the passion he’d felt for her when he first learned what passion was. As it turned out, she wasn’t spectacular, or even particularly adept, in bed. As she struggled to reach orgasm, she began to grunt, “Fuck me! Oh, fuck me, man!” and he suspected that the orgasm she reached was pretended. Later she said, “Man, that was like what I used to like dream of you doing to me like when we was only like ten years old, you know?”

“Me too,” was all he could say.

At breakfast the next day, she said, “Do you ever think about going back to Stay More?”

“All the time,” he said.

“But you haven’t, ever?” she said. “Me neither. I’d sure love to. Do you have a car? Let’s just like jump in your car and take off, okay? Man, let’s me and you just go like right home to Stay More.”

Oh boy, was he tempted. But whatever passion he’d felt for Roseleen Coe in their childhood was just a distant memory, indelible and remote, elusive as the fragrance of vanilla in oakwood. It made him sad to think that he’d probably changed as much as she had, maybe for the better, but still not the same Ozark boy he’d been. Frances and T had both kidded him sometimes about certain words he still used: he said “ary” and “I reckon” and “dusty dark” but for the most part his manner of speaking was much more sophisticated than it had been. Roseleen had lost all trace of her Ozark accent too but had replaced it with a kind of coarse hippie talk. “I dig but I don’t groove,” she said when Adam tried to tell her why he couldn’t take her back to Stay More.

But in the months ahead, while he was overcoming a serious case of gonorrhea he had probably contracted from Roseleen, he allowed his mind to fantasize that trip with her back home, if only just as a lark. He had been truthful in telling her that he thought constantly about going back to Stay More, but he had never admitted it, even to himself, and now that she had raised the subject, he couldn’t shake it loose. It would keep on bothering him until he did something about it.

André Tchelistcheff retired once again, as he had been doing periodically ever since Adam had met him and as he would keep on doing until he retired to that great Vineyard in the sky at the age of ninety-three. But this time, he had another reason: Beaulieu (the name means “beauteous place”) had been sold to Heublein, the liquor giant, who had also swallowed up Inglenook and Italian Swiss Colony and would eventually absorb Almaden and Glen Ellen. Heublein had bought the Regina Winery and turned it into a vinegar plant, and T loudly speculated that it might do the same to Beaulieu. “Or if we not make vinegar, what we make tastes like vinegar,” he said. He also advised Adam to get out. More than that, he offered to help Adam get set up in his own cooperage, an independent cooperage that would sell its barrels to all the Napa Valley winegrowers. Adam recalled that the top price Braxton Madewell got for a barrel was five dollars, the top price Gabe got was ten; now an American oak barrel was selling for hundreds of dollars (a French oak barrel for twice as much), with no end in sight to the rising price, the steepness of which was largely responsible for the increase in the price for a bottle of good California wine. Thus, with some backing from T and with the assurance of steady customers among the wineries of the region, Adam founded the Madewell Cooperage, whose name, it was widely assumed, boasted of the workmanship put into the product. In fact, the making of oak barrels was becoming increasingly automated, from start to finish, free from human hands, and much of Adam’s startup expenditure was for fancy machinery. Adam himself never again built a barrel from scratch at his giant cooperage. He spent most of his time at his large desk (made of oak, naturally), with paperwork or customers, or inspecting the products of his assembly line. Occasionally he sneaked away to the Napa Valley Research Laboratory, where T kept on tinkering, and where Adam could continue his own research and his search for the best possible oak and treatment thereof. Then the University of California, Davis, which operated a branch at nearby Oakville devoted to enology and viticulture, offered Adam an adjunct professorship. When they learned from his resume that he hadn’t even finished grade school, they changed the title to adjunct research specialist, but the job was the same: teaching one evening course each semester in the history, making and use of oak barrels. He certainly didn’t need the salary, and taught the course purely for pleasure. The students, including several women, were eager and hardworking, and they would go on after graduation into vineyards and cellars all over California. A few of the best Adam would hire for Madewell Cooperage. He enjoyed his students as much as they enjoyed him, and in time he would become so fond of one of them, named Linda, that he would ask her to marry him.

He was in his mid-thirties and she hadn’t quite reached her mid-twenties. Her father owned a vineyard in Sonoma County, and Adam was invited there for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and for Linda’s birthday, and he got along well with her parents and siblings. The wedding was planned as a big event for the fall to coincide with the grape harvest and be part of its celebration. But first, that summer before he tied the knot, he had a little thing he wanted to do, and he did it. He thought of it as strictly business, but he wasn’t fooling himself: somewhere in the back of his mind, homesickness was lurking. He was going to visit the Ozarks in search of the best possible oak for his barrels. He had searched the oak forests of Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin for the best-grained and best-fragranced standing oak, and his cooperage used staves from all those places, but most of his staves were cut from the big river oaks along the Mississippi near Perryville, Missouri, and he maintained a constant nagging suspicion that mountain oaks would have better flavor than river oaks. In the back of his mind was even the idea of getting up to Madewell Mountain and reclaiming some of its magnificent wood.

Surprisingly Linda didn’t ask to go with him. He was prepared to talk her out of it if she did, as he had talked Frances out of France or talked Roseleen out of Stay More. He knew he couldn’t use “business” as an excuse because Linda herself was just as fascinated with oakwood as he was. But he didn’t need any excuses. Have fun, was all she said. He said, “I reckon I’d like to take just one good look around the Ozarks before I settle down forever in California.”

“I don’t suppose you’re planning to search for some childhood sweetheart you don’t want me to know about,” she said.

“Yeah, maybe that’s it. Only she never wore a dress nor had long hair nor even a cute little nose like you’ve got. She was just a place, for heaven’s sake.”

He let her have the fancy German sedan and he took the sports-utility vehicle, as they were just becoming known in those days. In fact, his was a top-of-the-line English model with powerful four-wheel drive, which he assumed he’d need if he ever decided to climb Madewell Mountain. He drove up into the Rockies and across the plains, taking his time and studying a few stands of oak en route, spending a couple of nights on the road before finally reaching the place he’d spend the third night, Harrison, Arkansas. Although it was one of the principal trading centers of the Ozarks, he’d only been there once before in his life, when his father had put them into the back of a rickety truck headed for California. He spent the night at the Holiday Inn and had a decent supper and breakfast at their restaurant, where someone had left the Harrison Daily Times at his table, which he read while eating. Crossing the state line into Arkansas had thrilled him, entering Harrison had been a triumph, picking up this newspaper and seeing the names of his people (even if he saw no familiar names) gave him a sense of controlling his destiny.

The main local news concerned the continued search for an abducted girl, only seven, last seen in a roller skating rink, and the subject of a massive search by the state and local police as well as the FBI. The girl’s mother, Karen Kerr, had agreed to the organization of a national support group named after her daughter for parents of missing children. Adam wondered how he would feel if his daughter were kidnapped. He wondered how he would feel if he had a daughter. Linda had not yet broached the subject of whether they’d have children.

He drove to the dying village of Parthenon, which still had a post office in a humble stone building, where he made inquiries. There were no Madewells still living in the area. Adam’s mother’s sister, Aunt Effie, had died. The man who had owned the Parthenon Stave & Heading Company was still alive and in his eighties, and Adam visited him and was taken to the site of what once had been a school, the Newton County Academy, where only one ruined building remained, the former gymnasium, a dilapidated old stone building being used for the storage of what was thought to be worthless oak staves. He and the man went inside, and Adam staggered at the sight of thousands upon thousands of oak staves, neatly stacked and turning gray as they aged. He lifted one at random, scratched it with his thumbnail, and inhaled an oaken fragrance that he had not smelled since the age of twelve and which he’d been searching for ever since.

The man told him that most of the staves had been deposited there by Braxton or Gabriel Madewell, and since Adam was their heir, he was free to help himself. He gave the man the address of Madewell Cooperage in California and wrote him a check to cover the cost of hiring a convoy of trucks to deliver the staves.

The business part of his trip, to all intents and purposes, was accomplished.

Did he want to visit Stay More? It wasn’t a matter of did he but rather could he? He’d found that childhood sweetheart in San Francisco and knew her only in the Biblical sense.

Could he drive his powerful SUV up Madewell Mountain? He could try, although he discovered he was sweating and nervous.

His progress up the steep trail was halted when he encountered a pick-up truck mired squarely in the road. The owner of the truck, who said his name was Leo Spurlock, told him there was probably no way to get on to the top of the mountain, not even on foot.

Adam had a bad leg. Worse, he had a great fear that if he succeeded in reaching the top of the mountain and finding the place where he’d willed a part of himself to stay forever, he would never want to leave again. He just couldn’t do it.

So he returned to California. André Tchelistcheff was honored to be asked to serve as his best man at the elaborate wedding, held in the glowing, lovely vineyards of Linda’s family, a Madewell barrel serving as altar.

Chapter forty-four

She was a woman now. Latha had said so. She remembered how, long ago, the Woodland Heights Elementary had wanted her to skip a grade because she was so advanced over the others, and now she felt that she was not merely seventeen, she had grown entirely out of adolescence and if anybody asked her how old she was (if there was anybody anywhere to do such a thing—like Latha) she would have to say she was well along into her twenties. Maybe close to thirty. Yes, she was at least as old as her mother had been the last time she’d seen her. And much better than her mother in so many ways. Prettier. Smarter. Funnier. Shapelier. Friendlier. Sexier (God, yes). If only she had a man (not a boy but a man) to demonstrate it with. At her birthday party, when the dogs had presented her with the petrified but soon relaxed Armageddon, her armadillo, she had worn the dress Latha had given her, an old-fashioned country calico dress that Latha herself had worn in her twenties, and it made her look much older than seventeen, and she enjoyed being clothed for that one day, and finally understood for herself why human beings are the only creatures who wear clothes, not so much for bodily protection but rather because what is hidden is more tantalizing than what is revealed; that humankind, blessed with greater imagination than animalkind, needed to play a kind of constant hide-and-seek with the body itself, as all human creative work, which animals cannot do, is the expression of a hiding and a seeking and a finding, especially stories, and even music, yes, musical notes hide themselves and find themselves constantly (what else is melody?), as she demonstrated in her birthday descant. Then she said, “Adam, do you think I look more appealing in this dress than I do stark naked?”

He was slow in answering, as usual. Sometimes she didn’t know whether his slowness was just a matter of being an ignorant twelve-year-old, or because the older she got the more reserved he was toward her, and now the five years that separated them was actually like ten or more. Finally, he said, rather wistfully, Tell ye the truth, hit don’t matter too awful much, one way or th’other, since I caint have ye, anyhow.

“Have me?” she said. “Do you really want me?”

Again he took a while pondering or formulating his answer. I’ve always wanted ye. But come to think on it, I reckon I’d want ye more in that ’ere dress than I’d want ye as you generally are, a-running around all over creation a-wearing nothing but a smile.

“There!” she said. “That’s what I figured. Clothes can be naughtier than skin, if they stir up your thoughts.”

My thoughts don’t need no stirring up.

“You’re clothed, aren’t you?” she asked him. “What are you wearing?”

Just my same old overalls.

He pronounced it “overhauls.” She pretended to be staring down at him. “Don’t look now,” she said, “but you forgot to button your fly.”

There was almost a visible stirring in the air; she could imagine him trying to button himself. Darn ye! he said. That weren’t funny.

An idea occurred to her, but they were surrounded by all their friends, including the innocent new kitty, Latha, and the latest haunter, Armageddon, who hadn’t made up his mind (actually, as she’d soon learn, it was her mind) whether he (or she) liked birthday cake or not. “Adam,” she requested, “sometime before the day is over, as one more birthday present, even an immaterial one, let’s you and I get together for a private conversation. Would you do that for me?”

He didn’t answer, and she wondered if her tone had once again been too supercilious for him. She finished her own piece of cake and offered seconds to all the guests, but only Ralgrub and Pogo wanted more. She thanked Hrolf for leading the expedition to procure Armageddon. Then she went into the storeroom and got a fresh bottle of Jack Daniels and opened it. She offered it around, but nobody wanted any. Paddington would have been glad to have some, but she hadn’t seen her bear for quite some time, and his absence was the only shortcoming in her birthday celebration. While she was relieved to be free from his constant devotion, she hoped that she hadn’t hurt his feelings by locking him out of the house. She was sorry that he had never acquired the ability of the other animals to understand her; he had never grasped what she had tried to tell him: that he was too rough, and sometimes his claws raked her. Probably, she had consoled herself, he had simply wandered off across the mountain in search of a female bear who could love him in a way she could not. But giving up this Paddington had been far more difficult for her than giving up the original stuffed Paddington that she had loved so much. Now she drank what would have been Paddington’s portion of the Jack Daniels, in his memory or honor or whatever.

After a while she needed to pee and she stumbled out to the yard but instead of lifting her dress and squatting there she had an impulse to use the outhouse, which she hadn’t done for nine years. One of the two holes was still occupied by the skeleton, who was still holding his own bottle of Jack Daniels, and when she sat down over the other hole and began to tinkle, it was somehow more embarrassing, or more daring, to be doing it in the presence of Sugrue’s skeleton than it would have been to be doing it in the presence of all the live creatures who inhabited these premises. She knew she wouldn’t have done it if she hadn’t been drinking so much. “Excuse me,” she said to him, rather tipsily, “but maybe I’m getting too old to squat in the yard. Tee hee.” Then she asked, “How’ve you been?” And she said, “Latha Bourne was asking me how’ve you been, and I had to tell her you were dead. She seemed to think that was good news. She’s doing just fine, herself, despite being past eighty. I had a real nice visit with her. She gave me some nice things to bring home with me. She gave me three books, or she let me pick them out, telling me just to take whichever three I wanted and she could have her grandson Vernon replace them if she still wanted copies, although I left behind ten thousand dollars of your money. I picked Mythology by Edith Hamilton, which is very interesting and a lot of fun. Also I took a handbook on wildflowers, which has been very helpful in my study of my favorite subject. And finally just for fun I chose a book called Lightning Bug, which is a novel-book but has some interesting stuff on fireflies, and I’ve also started studying bugs a lot lately, even spiders, and you’d be surprised if you ever stopped to count the different kinds of bugs that are running and flying around all over this place. Latha also gave me a little bottle of cologne, because she doesn’t ever use it any more. It’s called “Tabu” and I’m wearing it right now. Can you smell it? Hey, it’s my birthday, did you know? I’m seventeen, ten years older than when you first took me. There’s not a single present left for me in all that stuff you left behind, except your whiskey, and I suppose there’s enough of that for me to have a birthday bottle from you for the rest of my life. I’m all finished peeing but I’ll just sit here a while with you, and bring you up to date.”

She kept on talking to Sugrue’s skeleton for a very long time. She told him how much she had tried to live according to his precepts, such as everything in this life worth getting requires being stung a few times, and be careful what you wish for, and don’t ever sing before breakfast. When her mouth got dry, she borrowed the bottle he had in his bony fingers, and opened it and took a swig now and then. She actually got drunk, which she’d never done before and would never do again, because among other things she would have a hangover the next day that she never wanted to have again. She drunkenly told Sugrue that she wished he still had some flesh on his bones. She told him that if he did, she’d be glad to suck his dick, to get it stiff and hard so he could put it inside her. What she really wanted, more than anything, was a man. “If you had stayed alive,” she said to him, “and if only you’d been able to wait several years and give me a chance to grow up, you and I could have really fucked. Let me tell you how we would have done it…”

She was busy describing a hot sex scene to the skeleton when a voice said, Scuse me for buttin in, but didn’t ye say you wanted to have a private conversation with me? She jumped, her butt actually rising above the outhouse hole, then she realized it wasn’t Sugrue speaking to her. The voice went on, Leastways I could answer ye, which this here skeleton caint do.

“Hi, honey,” she said. She’d never called him that before. “Have a drink with me.” She held out the bottle to him, but of course he couldn’t take it. “Could you just pretend?” she asked. “Are you any good at play-like, Adam?”

Iffen I wasn’t, I’d sure be up salt creek.

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. So why don’t you play-like you’re having a big swallow of this fine whisky?”

Okay. Glug glug glug. Umm, mighty fine hooch, ma’am.

“Don’t call me ‘ma’am.’ Let’s get away from Sugrue. We don’t want him watching.”

Watching what, ma’am? But his ghost can foller us wherever we go.

“Really? Does he have a ghost? Have you seen it?”

He’s all over the place. All the time. Like me, he never sleeps, ma’am.

“Please don’t call me ‘ma’am.’ It makes me feel old. If Sugrue’s ghost is everywhere, why haven’t I seen it?”

I wish I could tell ye on account of he’s just shy, or just invisible like me. But that aint it. Y’see, us in-habits outrank ghosts, I mean we’re more powerful than them, so I’ve let that there ghost know that I don’t never want him to show his hide—or his spirit.

“Do you mean there’s nowhere we could go that he couldn’t see us?”

Out to the barn, maybe. He don’t never go near that barn, cause he’s afraid it’ll fall on him, but me and you know that ’ere barn’ll still be a-standing there when me and you both are ghosts.

She’d been keeping Bess in the barn for some time now, and knew it was safe, but she didn’t like the idea of ever becoming a ghost. If she became a ghost, she’d really have to associate with Sugrue again. She wondered if ghosts could ever have sex. But she went out to the barn, and she assumed that Adam was somewhere behind or beside her. The kitten Latha tried to follow, but she shooed it away. Then in a dark corner of the barn, she said, “Now, Adam, if you’re so good at play-like, would you like to pretend you’re giving me my first kiss?” She held out her arms.

Silence. Then his voice said, When you was still my age, I used to kiss ye all the time, specially when you was asleep. You may not know it, but you’ve been kissed many a time before.

“Kiss me now. So I’ll know it.” She continued holding out her arms. She closed her eyes, to aid her own make-believe. And behold, verily it seemed that a pair of warm lips pressed against her own, for a long moment. She whispered, “Put your tongue in my mouth,” and she opened her mouth and her tongue seemed to feel a wet tongue sliding along it, all the way to the back, and then rolling around inside her mouth. Her knees buckled and her whole body trembled with desire. “Kiss my neck,” she requested, tilting her head. And behold those splendid lips of his kissed her in several places from her collarbone to her earlobe. “Oh, Adam,” she said. She unbuttoned her dress so that the top of it would fall below her breasts. “Kiss my breasts,” she asked. His kisses there turned her knees to jelly. Fortunately they were standing amidst the hay that she’d cut and stacked for Bess’ winter feed. She reflected that it was Adam who had taught her how to cut hay and how to stack the hay, and she wondered if he had even anticipated this use that they would put to the hay. She pulled him down with her into the soft hay. She asked, “Is your dick hard?” Silence. Had she said the wrong thing or in the wrong way? She waited, and then apologized, “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

I jist don’t much care to hear you call it that, on account of that’s what Sog called it.

“What do you call it?”

Actually, I don’t call it nothing. But if you’ve just got to mention it, I reckon you could call it my dood.

She laughed. “Oh, goody! What if I called it your doody? Then it would rhyme with my poody, which it’s supposed to fit.”

Call it whatever you care to.

“But you do have a doody?”

Sure as shootin.

“And is your doody stiff right now?”

Iffen you’re so good at make-believe, why don’t ye take aholt of it and see for yourself?

She closed her eyes again and took a deep breath and reached down between them. It was her duty to feel his doody. And there it was! He must’ve already unbuttoned his fly. Good heavens, but it was big. Much bigger than that limp weenie that Sugrue had had. She wrapped her fingers around it and used her index finger to explore the smooth knob on the end of it. In the back of her mind she knew that she was just imagining all of this, that this was just play-like, and she knew also that she had had so much to drink that she could imagine she was flying away if she wanted to. But she did not want to fly away. She wanted to lie here in Adam’s arms and she wanted Adam to put that walloping doody inside of her. “Your turn to feel me,” she told him. And he did, timidly at first, lifting the hem of her calico dress. She was wearing the pair of silk panties Latha had given her, and she let Adam feel her through the silk for a while and then she took her hand off his doody so she could remove her panties. “Adam,” she requested, “why don’t you take off all your clothes?”

I aint never done that in all the years I’ve been here.

She sniffed. “It’s a wonder they don’t stink if they’ve never been washed.”

Aint you a barrel of laughs, though? Okay, there, do I look any better now?

Adam had just a little hair on his chest and around his doody. She was fascinated, as she was with jacks-in-the-pulpit, with the two large lumps clinging to the root of his doody, which her girlfriend Kelly had first taught her to call nuts, or balls. She cupped them in her hand; they were not hairy but downy. She wondered if he had a special name for those too, and she asked him, and he coughed and said them was just his cods.

She had an overpowering urge to creep down and take his doody into her mouth and see if it was more fun to do it because she wanted to do it and not because he, like Sugrue, had made her do it. So she did. Adam gasped and she could feel his fingers in the back of her hair. She understood that what she ought to do is not suck it as you would suck a thumb or a nipple but move it in and out of your mouth over and over. So she did. She took her mouth off long enough to ask him, “Do you like that?”

He confessed, I used to allus imagine ye a-doing that whenever I…when I was…when I didn’t have nobody to…when I was trying to…

He didn’t have a word for that, whatever it was that happened to boys when all of a sudden their doodies throbbed and spewed out a lot of fluid, the equivalent of what she had called reaching. So she used that word to supply the end of his sentence, “…when you were trying to make yourself reach?”

Yep, if ye wanter call it that, and if you keep that up, I’m sure enough a-going to.

Instead of understanding that he wanted her to stop or slow down, she speeded up and, recalling a scene from Lighting Bug that was so exciting she had memorized it, she was swallowing and unswallowing his doody as rapidly as she could bob her head and her head was bobbing so rapidly it shook her whole body, and he grabbed her hair and tried to pull her away but she hung on for dear life and buried her lips at the root of his doody and waited until the last spurtle had dribbled down her gullet. It was so real, the taste of him, all that warm liquid in her dry mouth, that she knew she could not possibly be just making-believe.

He lay there panting and she waited a long time to see if he might reciprocate what she had done for him, but either because that would be beyond the thoughts of a twelve-year-old or because he didn’t even realize how good it would make her feel and that she could come too, he made no move to do it and she lacked the words to ask him. She said to herself, “For heaven’s sake, woman, you’re in charge of this whole thing for yourself, so do whatever you feel like doing.” But she could not will him to do that. By and by, they began to talk again, about nothing important, or about the barrel she was going to try to make in the shop, or about the saxifrage plant she’d found, which he called alumroot, with small but lovely white flowers and large glorious hairy leaves. He talked about the uses of alumroot, but then he said, It’s got hard again, if you got any more idees. And she certainly had one idee, which she’d intended all along: just to do it the way it is supposed to be done, with her legs spread and him above her. She cried out when the mighty dood pierced her poody. All he knew to do was to thrust, in the same way but faster and faster, which was fine but not the best, and she wrapped her legs around his waist and used her hands on his butt to show him the best.

What convinced her beyond doubt that she had not merely created this whole thing in her imagination or make-believe was that she never once touched herself. When she finally and triumphantly reached, it was entirely from what he was doing to her and for her. And he let her know that it was happening again to him too, and she could actually feel herself filling up with his fluid. When they were both recovered and stopped breathing so hard, she remarked, “This has been the best birthday I ever had.”

Through the rest of the autumn and the relatively mild winter and on into the spring, they did it whenever they felt like it. He helped her make her own barrel in the cooper’s shop; it was so much more complicated than just making a firkin, but it was a real barrel. Twelve-year-old Adam had not ever made an entire barrel himself, only a churn, so in a sense she was making it for both of them. Of course they often had to interrupt the making of the barrel to make love in the cooper’s shop, on the earthen floor or even standing, or sometimes with her sitting on the toolbench and him standing between her legs.

She never again had to use her hands on herself. She was so filled with longing and love that she was inspired to use the paper Latha had given her to begin writing stories. She wrote one story about what was going on down in Stay More between Latha’s granddaughter and the man named Larry, who lived in separate houses but finally got together. She wrote another story about the skeleton Sugrue. She wrote a witty story about Robert, her bobcat. One story which she couldn’t finish although she even read it aloud to Adam and asked for his suggestions, was about what happened to Adam when he went to California and grew up and became rich but did not live happily ever after. She had better luck writing about things that she knew from her own experience, and the best of all these stories was about a seventeen-year-old woman and her passionate affair with a twelve-year-old boy.

But despite the believability of this story, and of her own experience upon which it was based, it was not “real.” It lacked tangibility, or palpability or whatever you call the actual contact of living flesh.

For a long time she had been thinking of asking Hreapha to get her a horse for her eighteenth birthday. A horse was powerful and she could ride it all over the mountain. Her lover Adam agreed with her that a horse would be a mighty fine thing to have. He could ride it behind her…although he could never ride it beyond his haunt.

But as the summer came and her eighteenth birthday loomed, she realized it was not a horse she wanted or needed. More than anything, what she most desired to have was a living, breathing, visible man.

Chapter forty-five

Woo. The bad news about the babe Latha was that she was a night sleeper. The tough shit about all these so-called tame cats was that they took up the habits of humans, who for some stupid reason liked to sleep away the best time of day or rather night, namely dark, when everything is happening, man. For ten fucking years now he had had to put up with it, even pretending, early on, that he was asleep himself, just so’s he could cuddle up with them under the blankets, when all the while, for hours, he’d have rather been perched on a rock ledge in the moonlight, watching the world go by and ready to pounce or score or just hang easy and let it all happen. He’d hoped, when Latha signed on with the crew, that she might join the night shift along with himself, Ralgrub and her boys, Pogo, and now the other new one, Ged, or Alma Giddyup or however the fuck you pronounced her long name. (He wasn’t sure about Sparkle, who seemed to sleep all the time anyway.) But no, Latha, a real bearcat who didn’t take long at all to grow out of kittenhood into ripening puberty, was always asleep when he came pussyfooting around, midnightish, with action on his mind. If he had any hope of banging her, he’d have to do it at night when his wife was asleep and he could sneak away.

Hroberta had never been able to accept the simple law of nature that no self-respecting wildcat stud is monogamous. He’d never forget the first time he’d slipped away from her and was gone all night, coming home in the morning soaked with the fragrances of a dame, of his own species, mind you, and Hroberta had torn into him and chewed him up and then went and told her brothers and her mother, his sweet old mother-in-law, and they had ganged and jumped him and chewed him up and left him for dead. Woo.

He ought to have learned a lesson, but there is simply no going against nature, which dictates that wildcat dudes must mate up with anything they meet up with. Meet up with, mate up with, that had always been his motto. How else would he have mated up with a dog in the first place, for godsakes? Hroberta probably liked to think that he thought she was charming and alluring and desirable, but actually she had just been a handy hump, and a bit too big for him at that. Females of his own species were less than a third the size of males, which means that a female bobcat is not much bigger than a so-called housecat, which unfortunately Latha was determined to become, spending all her nights curled up at the head of the Queen’s bed. By the way, that was one of the differences between cats and dogs: dogs wanted the foot of the bed. In his childhood and youth, about which he often had sentimental memories, Robert wanted the head of the bed, where he just pretended to sleep while he had thoughts of a rock ledge in the moonlight.

The dogs thought that because the Queen loved them and provided them with a home and took good care of them and petted them, she must be God. Robert knew that since she loved him and provided him with a home and took good care of him and petted him, he was God.

The dogs, and some of the other animals too, especially Paddington before he took it on the lam, were always “marking” what they thought was their territory, pissing all over the place. Robert didn’t need to do that because he knew that all of the territory was his. The only marking he did was to spray his special atomizer on anything he desired, such as Hroberta or a passing chicken or the davenport.

There were other differences: the dogs always came running whenever the Queen called them. Robert (and he hoped now Latha too) let it be known that he was immune to verbal summons. Whenever the Queen talked to them, the dogs, particularly his sweet old-lady-in-law, would tilt their heads and act as if they were listening. If the Queen tried any of that language-stuff on him, Robert would just yawn in her face. The dogs were always doing things for the Queen, getting her new pets for her birthday and fetching things and even, woo, digging holes for her. In the beginning Robert had brought her a dead mouse but she didn’t like it, so he hadn’t brought her anything since.

And now she wanted them to bring her a man for her eighteenth birthday. Man, a man. Right. Big deal. He understood what she needed one for, not to patch the roof or plow the garden but to plow her garden, which he himself at one time had attempted in a fumbling roundabout way to do, not knowing she was years short of puberty but driven by his motto, meet up with, mate up with. (When they’d acquired Sparkle for the Queen’s fourteenth, that dazzling hunk of crystal quartz, he’d made at least a shot, albeit futile, at humping it too. Woo.) What was apparently a secret to everyone else—where the hell had ole Pad gone—was no secret to Robert: Robert knew for a fact that ole Pad had gone off in search of ass.

Had they forgotten that it had been Robert who had found Pad in the first place, in a cave down the mountain? That particular cave was a lair for bears, and Pad had wandered off and revisited his childhood home and discovered there a comely sow who quickly made him forget whatever fun he’d had in the Queen’s menagerie.

Robert had watched them balling, enjoying the show without being detected, a thing he was good at. If you needed any skulking done, Robert was your cat. He didn’t have a dog’s nose that could smell a turd a mile away, but he had in the roof of his mouth two little holes that led directly to whatever olfactory power his brain possessed and whenever he held his mouth open to allow the various vapors to congregate inside, he could discriminate among the most subtle pheromones. That, coupled with his limitless territory and his ability to climb trees and go anywhere, made him the perfect snoop, sleuth, tracker, bloodhound if you will. So if they wanted to find a man for the Queen, who better to ask?

In fact, unbeknownst to the rest of the stay-at-homes, he had ranged widely all over the countryside and already knew the whereabouts of all the eligible men. That time when they’d all gone out on the bear cub hunt for the Queen’s twelfth, and everybody was perishing of thirst, and Robert himself had complained, Woo, there’s got to be some way to get off this fucking mountain and find a creek, he was actually just pretending, just to conceal his knowledge of the countryside. He’d known damn well how to get off the fucking mountain, in any one of several different directions. Otherwise he’d literally have perished of thirst, because next to ass, water was his favorite thing in all the world. He couldn’t live without it (and he nostalgically remembered swimming in his future mother-in-law’s water dish when he was just a kitten). Frequently during that bear-cub expedition he had sneaked away from the others to a few sources of water known only to him. So all right, he was sneaky. He was born that way. He was also born a loner and didn’t give a shit for the clubbishness of all the Queen’s other critters, including especially this latest, Ged, who you couldn’t even give a friendly poke because she had hard plates all over her pudgy body. And he’d never got along with Sheba; who wants to be friends with a bitching snake anyhow? Even though he’d saved her life twice by killing an owl who tried to eat her and again by chasing off a possum (not the same one who became good old Pogo), he resented Sheba for her inroads on his food supply, sometimes beating him to the mice that were his staple food. Come to think of it, he didn’t even like females in general, as a rule, except when he had the hots for them. He liked the smell of the Queen, he liked to nuzzle her armpits and lately he was nuts about that warm woodsy Tabu stuff she was wearing, but any kind of strong scent just drove him wild anyway, him who was so wild to begin with.

So, being so unsociable, he didn’t like the idea of this jam session that his brother-in-law Hrolf called to discuss the acquisition of a human male for the Queen’s benefit, but he went anyhow, just to avoid further unpleasantries with his old-lady-in-law.

You don’t fool me, Hreapha said to him. I know that you’ve been around, and you’ve smelled a lot more men than I have.

Yeah, Moms, he replied, but they’re all old farts.

You’re an old fart yourself, she said.

Which was true, maybe. He’d lived at least half of his expected life span, which somehow hadn’t dimmed his libido. The babe Latha had called him a “dirty old cat,” and he didn’t like being thought of as such. But presumably the Queen needed some manflesh that was still fairly fresh, somebody if not her own age at least not a dirty old man, as all of the eligible males Robert had sniffed probably were. This past year the Queen had become so desperate for fresh manflesh that she’d taken up imaginary banging with that fucking figment who supposedly lived here. Among his other idiosyncrasies, Robert was the only one of them all who refused to believe in the existence of the so-called in-habit, a harebrained notion if ever he’d humped a hare. Sure, Robert had heard the voice, and it always spooked him, it really creeped him out because he couldn’t smell any saliva or halitosis producing the voice, but he was a dogmatic cat and couldn’t accept the idea of invisibility. It might be fun, and it certainly was comforting, but it don’t put no groceries in your belly. Just to try to understand or sympathize with the Queen, Robert had tried to imagine the sexiest possible babe, of his own species, mind you, and he had tried to get it on with her, and it hadn’t worked at all, man. Woo.

So he was glad that “Adam” was excluded from the jam session. Hreapha began the meeting by explaining that they wanted to keep the upcoming birthday gift a secret from the in-habit, because in view of the fact that “Adam” had fallen in love with the Queen, and vice versa, it would make the in-habit very jealous to know that he was about to be replaced by a real live male. So the jam session was being held at a time and place when the Queen was in her bedroom making out with “Adam” and neither of them would know about the proceedings. Robert didn’t buy this “in love” stuff, whatever it meant, but he was willing to go along with the idea of making sure that an invisible entity remained out of sight.

The meeting is called to order, Hrolf said. First order of business: volunteers for the expedition. I’ll lead it, of course.

Count me out this time, Robert said. He didn’t like speaking in dogtalk, but it was required.

The others all stared at him. Hrolf said, Do you mind telling us why?

I don’t like human men, Robert said.

You’re just jealous, his wife Hroberta put in. You just don’t want any more competition for her affection and petting and favor.

No, hon, that isn’t it, his mother-in-law said. Robert doesn’t want to go on the expedition because he doesn’t need to. He already knows where all the men are.

Is that true? Hrolf demanded of him.

He took his time replying. He didn’t like the know-it-all attitude of his mother-in-law, but he was willing to grant that if there was any creature on this earth who did in fact know it all, it was she. Finally he grumbled, Yeah. If the purpose of your foray is just to find a man, I could save you the trouble and tell you where all of them are.

Holy cats, Hrolf said. So tell us.

Robert got to his feet. His joints were getting a bit creaky in his early middle-age, and he didn’t relish a long hike anyway. But he had already been to the four little villages or almost-ghost towns that lay to the four points of the compass from this mountain, and he had inspected the few inhabitants of those villages, not one of whom was in the bud of youth, and he could present a catalog, as he now began to do, of all his findings. After he had finished describing to the best of his ability each and every man he had ever beheld, at least those who were not living with women, the members of the jam session discussed each in turn, and they came up with a short list, three of the best, or rather, considering that two of them were drunkards, three of the least undesirable. One was rather handy: the farmer who dwelt at the north foot of the mountain, from whom they had stolen Bess, the cow.

Bess spoke up, as best she could in dogtalk, not her natural tongue. That man is an asswipe, she said. I wouldn’t give him to my worst enemy.

Another of the three lived alone in what had been called a “hotel” in Stay More. Hreapha knew his name to be Larry but knew him to have a severe drinking problem and also to be possibly involved with a neighbor-woman named Sharon.

The third, the only reasonably sober one of the three, although Robert had observed him imbibing too, was a man named George who was in charge of the ham-processing operation in Stay More valley and lived alone at the west foot of Madewell Mountain.

The jam session was being held at Early Bright, to accommodate members who were nocturnal as well as the night sleepers, and as Early Bright changed to Later Bright, the meeting was adjourned so that all the nocturnals could grab a few z’s. The meeting was resumed at Early Dark, and went on until Later Dark, when the night sleepers were beginning to nod off, but a vote was taken and a decision was finally reached: George was the man.

Second order of business, Hrolf declared. How for godsakes do we get George to come up here on the mountain?

Since Hrolf loved to organize and lead expeditions, he suggested a reconnaissance to George’s domicile, and Robert grudgingly agreed to take them there. What became known as the Man-Snatching Crew consisted of Hrolf, Robert, Pogo, Dewey, Ralgrub and three of Ralgrub’s grown sons, Rebbor, Tidnab, and Feiht. The brazen Ged wanted to go too, but her armor slowed her movements. They went not once but several times over the next several weeks, trying to gather as much intelligence as possible about the man, his appearance, his habits, and his movements. In time they knew almost everything about him that was worth knowing, and the more they learned about him the less Robert thought that George would make a desirable addition to the population of Madewell Mountain.

But the Queen’s birthday was coming up in just another week or so and they had to fulfill their commitment. Woo, it wasn’t going to be easy. Robert remembered all too well their acquisition of Bess; how they’d had to open her gate and threaten and cajole her away from the other cows and scare her into climbing the mountain and help her out of a ravine she fell into, where she lay bawling for hours, and, man, like try to get her to understand that she was not going to be harmed but given a chance to live in Paradise. How were they going to persuade George? They couldn’t just bark at him and nip at his heels and get him to climb the mountain.

George had a pick-up truck with a rifle mounted in the rear-view window, and he often drove that pick-up all over the back roads of the countryside. And it was one of those powerful machines that could climb the most rugged trail. Like Robert, George was in early middle-age, muscular but pot-bellied, a not unkindly face but not handsome either, never seen without a billed cap on his head, bearing an image of a redbird, a cap in which he even slept. He reminded Robert too strongly of Sugrue Alan. The Man-Snatching Crew, in their study of his movements, determined when they could expect that he might be driving along the road that passed the entrance to the winding trail on the north side of Madewell Mountain.

Ralgrub and her sons, true to their assbackward names, stole the contents of a case of whiskey from the Queen’s storeroom, and under the cover of darkness positioned the contents at intervals away from the house, a bottle every so hither and yon left standing upright along a route from the house to the end of the North Way trail, a total of twelve bottles.

Then, on or around the Queen’s birthday, Dewey, a magnificent buck with a rack of antlers having a dozen points, would be positioned strategically at the point where the North Way trail met the road at the foot of the mountain. It was going to be tricky, man. Dewey said he’d sacrifice his life if necessary for the Queen’s birthday.

The idea was that George would come riding along, spot Dewey and take off after him. Dewey would head up the mountain trail as fast as his legs could carry him. George would not stop to load his gun but would keep driving in pursuit of Dewey, all the way to the top, where he would discover, just as Dewey disappeared into the woods, the first of the twelve bottles of good booze. George would take the edge off his disappointment at losing Dewey by sampling the fine whisky. At that point Ralgrub herself would sneak up behind him, snatch that prized cap off his head and run with it toward the second bottle of whiskey, where she would deposit it atop the bottle. George would find the second bottle, drink therefrom, replace the cap on his head, drink some more, and one of the other raccoons, Rebbor, Tidnab, or Feiht, would grab the cap off his head and take it on to the third bottle. And so on, on up the path that led to the house. It was assumed, or hoped, that by the time he reached the house, George would be completely docile, if not totally sloshed, and would not object to becoming a birthday present for the Queen.

It is an ingenious strategy, but Robert, although he is proud of his contributions to the planning of it, is skeptical that it will work. And sure enough, as he takes his supervisory position at the foot of the trail on the afternoon of the appointed day, things begin to go haywire. For one thing, the whole motherfucking tense switches from past to present, a sure sign that expectations are either getting out of hand or else are so supercharged you can’t tell your ass hair from your whiskers. He tests it: he turns this way and that, he shakes his head. No mistake, he’s caught tight in the present. Hey Hrolf buddy, he calls to his companion, did you notice? Are we now in the now? You know, the present tense?

Yeah, Hrolf says, and don’t look now but there comes our man George.

George drives his present-tense vehicle up the road, spots old Dewey, slams on his brakes, reaches for his gun, Dewey takes off lickety-split up the mountain trail, George turns into the trail, shifts into low-lock, spins his wheels, takes off after Dewey, but then slams on his brakes again.

George rolls down his window, sticks his head out, and yells at Dewey, “You’re shore lucky it aint hunting season yet!”

Then George looks for and finds a place to back his truck and turn around and leave the mountain trail.

Ralgrub, Robert shouts, grab his cap now!

She leaps for the open window but misses and crashes into the door. George says to her, “It aint coon season yet neither!”

And then, in this crazy present tense, another vehicle appears. It is one of those big rugged automobiles, not a pick-up, which can go anywhere in the back country. The man driving rolls down his window. He and George exchange howdies.

“Have you been up there on the mountain?” the man asks.

“Naw,” George says. “I was a-fixin to take off after a thirteen-point buck, and then I recollected the season don’t start till November. If I had me a bow ’n air I reckon I could shoot him commencing October first, but that’s still a ways off.”

“Say, aren’t you George Dinsmore?” the fellow asks. “Latha told me you were still around.”

“Yeah, that’s me. Don’t I know you?”

“I reckon you ought to. We went to school together.”

“Holy hoptoads, don’t tell me you’re old Ad Madewell! Why, I aint see you in a coon’s age. And yonder runs the old coon.”

Woo.

Chapter forty-six

Woo indeed. I have forgiven Bob for not believing in me. I had noticed, very early on, another difference between dogs and cats that he did not consider in the above soliloquy: dogs just drop their business in the yard; cats cover their business. They conceal it. As Robin had recently realized, apropos the wearing of clothing, all art is a form of a hiding and a seeking and a finding, and that which is hidden is more magically stimulating. Which is not to suggest, or even hint, that Bob, or any cat, considers his feces a work of art to be secreted and secreted. Rather, the point I’m clumsily trying to make is that Bob ought to have believed in me, as most who believe in God do, because I was hidden from ordinary perception.

Soon enough, in another tense, he will have plenty of reason to have faith in me, just as the clever reader has long since grinningly suspected that somewhere toward the conclusion of this marvelous tale I would materialize in the flesh so that we all could go have our breakfasts and get on with the workings of our lives.

I said to my darling Robin, early that day, Darn if it aint your birthday again, and I reckon I caint give ye ary a thing. I had spent considerable effort taxing my twelve-year-old brain to think of some way to give her, without the power to lift a gift, something.

And she said, “Dear sweet Adam honey, you don’t have to give me anything. You know that. But there is something that the others are possibly going to give me, and I think I’d better ask you how you’d feel if…”

At that moment Adam Madewell, 46, was driving his expensive four-by-four SUV up the dirt road that winds out of Parthenon, and instead of bearing left toward the Madewell Mountain road he kept on going up the road that led to Stay More, which he had not taken on his previous visit eleven years before. As one’s thoughts while driving have a habit of coming and going in rapid, random succession, he was recalling the way Linda used to challenge his occasional use of the Ozark language. “Do you ‘reckon’ on an abacus or a slide-rule?” she’d say. “And is it ‘ary’ or windy or gassy or what?” She couldn’t even allow him to speak of “dusty dark” without asking, “Why can’t you simply say ‘dusk’? I don’t see any dust.”

There had been a time that Linda had taken an interest in his “roots,” as she referred to them, wanting, as she said, to learn what made him tick. She had taken an interest in genealogy, long enough to thoroughly research his name, which she’d traced through its variations—Maydwell, Maydewell, Maydenwell, Maidwell, Maidenwell, Medwelle, Meidwell, Meadwell, etc.—back to Alanus de Maidwell of Northhamptonshire in the time of King Henry ii in the 12th Century and his son Alan de Maydewell, Sheriff of Northhamptonshire (Adam was uncomfortable at the spelling of the given name, identical to the family name of his old nemesis Sog) but Linda had not been able to establish any connection between the titled Maydwells and those who settled in the Ozarks. “I guess you were white trash,” she once said to him. One of the few magazines he subscribed to was The Ozarks Mountaineer, but Linda was not interested in glancing at it.

They had so few common interests, apart from barrels and wine. From the beginning, while still on their honeymoon in the Bahamas, they had disagreed on where they’d make their home. He liked his fine big house in St. Helena, but she wanted to live in Glen Ellen, near her father’s winery (of which she was now manager), and talked him into it. The Mayacamas Mountains separated the two places, and there was a steep winding road between Glen Ellen and Oakville which he had to take to get to work, a daily nuisance. They were almost in different worlds, Napa and Sonoma counties. Red and white. Steak and lobster. Cabernet Sauvignon was the principal wine of the former, Chardonnay of the latter. Linda’s father owned Chateau Duplessis, one of the best vintners of an award-winning Chardonnay, although at the time of their marriage the wine had not yet acquired its reputation; in fact, California wine in general was still little more than jug wine or at best the “fighting varietals” as the affordable but undistinguished table wines would come to be known. Linda’s father was the first to admit that his Chardonnay did not acquire its excellence until he began to store it in barrels that were not merely from Madewell Cooperage but were the special “private reserve” barrels made well from Madewell oak staves from Madewell Mountain, Arkansas. Adam, wisely, was stingy in his distribution of these special barrels to certain select customers for their certain select wines, which, because he charged so much more for the barrel itself, became the first truly expensive California wines. Adam, while he still had a sense of humor, liked to joke with Linda that she had married him not for his money or his looks or his brains but for his barrels, which had made the Chateau Duplessis Chardonnay famous.

But it wasn’t a joke that her father had never paid him for the barrels, and certainly Adam had never considered sending his father-in-law a bill. Adam’s bookkeepers had complained; his sales manager had complained, but Adam had his accountants write it off as a loss for tax purposes, literally hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of barrels. Sometimes, particularly after one of his bitter quarrels with Linda, he wondered if indeed she and her father had simply plotted to have her marry him in order to get all those barrels. André Tchelistcheff had been furious when Adam had confided the situation to him. T remained Adam’s principal confidant and, to the extent he had any friends at all, his only friend. For a number of years, they had lunch together at least once a week at Terra, St. Helena’s best restaurant. It was T who had to listen to Adam’s gripes about the wine industry in general, and to Adam’s revelations of disharmony with Linda, and to Adam’s increasing dissatisfaction with the whole state of California, which he had come to feel had lost its soul, if ever it had one in the first place. T never disagreed. “Yes,” T said, “Californians are all a bit runny around the edges.” Adam could never forget those words.

When Adam was in his early forties and beginning to brood that his life had never yet reached any sort of fulfillment, Linda stopped speaking to him. But of course as with any marital rift, she claimed that he had stopped speaking to her. Eventually they visited a counselor, and Linda played back for the woman a recording she had made of Adam’s silences, that is, her own observations and questions captured on the tape followed by complete silence from Adam. So all right, he no longer spoke to her, because, as he told T, “The more we talked, the more reasons we found for not talking.” The counselor had also told him that his nightly dreams of flying were a wish to escape from his marriage.

Linda used that as the primary excuse for her affair. She announced, “I met someone who listens to me, who pays attention to me, who cares who I am.” For a while, a few months only, Adam moved into an apartment in St. Helena, but then one day when he dressed for work in his suit he poured into his trousers pocket the handful of dirt from the floor of the cooper’s shed he had kept since he was twelve. Then he simply called a meeting of the board of directors, resigned as chairman and CEO, appointed his able COO as the new CEO, sold all his stock in the company, and had a long final lunch with T, who was stricken to hear of Adam’s intentions, but kissed him on both cheeks in parting and said, “Send me your address when you have one, and each holiday season for your birthday and Christmas I will send you a case of my ’79 Pinot Noir.”

But Adam wasn’t sure he’d have any address to send to André Tchelistcheff. He had no idea what would become of himself. He only knew that, having felt homeless for over thirty years, he was going home. In the back of his SUV he had folded up a tent and a sleeping bag and an air mattress, as well as cooking equipment. He didn’t know what to expect; his grandfather had built the house and barn and cooper’s shed to last forever but they might have rotted away or been hit by lightning and burned…or maybe his failure to piss on the fire as his father had demanded might have caused the house to burn down. He also had with him all of his possessions worth keeping; three boxes of his favorite books, two boxes of his wine collection, and all the clothes he’d ever need, and he made a last stop at a supermarket in Harrison to pick up as many provisions and groceries as he still had room for.

He noticed that nearly all the houses between Parthenon and Stay More were abandoned. One of them, a ruin he recognized as the old Alan place, had a sign taped to the front door, and he drove up close enough to read it: “GONE TO CALIFORNIA.” He breathed a sigh of relief because he hadn’t relished the idea of having any contact with Sog Alan. As he approached the village itself, or what had once been the thriving little town of Stay More, tingles ran up his spine. This here’s my town, he said aloud and laughed to hear himself speaking in his old Ozark accent.

There was just one building in town that still seemed to be occupied, the house and store that had once been Latha Bourne’s and had once held the post office, shut down even before Adam had reached school age. On the long front porch, upon which he had sat himself many times in the company of other citizens of the town, there was now a man and a woman, neither of whom he recognized. He didn’t know how to ask if Latha was dead. So he asked, “Latha Bourne don’t live here no more?”

The woman said, “She lives up yonder a ways at the old Dill place.”

“Thank ye kindly,” he said, and drove on. He hadn’t intended to visit Latha Bourne Dill, he hadn’t given it a thought, but he was so delighted to know that she was still alive that he decided to stop at the old Dill dogtrot which he’d passed every day on his way to school.

He pulled into the yard, which was filled with cats and dogs. He remembered fondly how much she liked cats, but he hadn’t known she liked dogs too. The dogs were yelling their heads off at him, and one of them, a big handsome golden retriever, was really yowling or yowering at him. Very soon Latha came out of her house and he got out of his SUV to meet her. She was white-haired and a bit stooped but just as gloriously glamorous as he’d always remembered her.

“Howdy, Miz Latha,” he said bashfully.

She did not stare long at him. “Goodness gracious,” she said. “Lord have mercy. Is that you, Ad?”

“Yes’m,” he said. “You’re sure looking pretty good.”

She held out her arms to him, and they embraced. He had never been touched by her before, but now, as they held each other tightly for a long moment, he remembered one of his favorite movies, “Harold and Maude,” and decided that he would just ask Latha to marry him, even if she was…he suddenly realized that she and T were exactly the same age.

“So how was California?” she asked.

“It was real sorry,” he said. “It was the sorriest place on earth.”

She invited him to lunch—dinner actually, which, he recalled, the noon meal was always called in this world. He furnished a 1973 Stag’s Leap Cabernet. They talked well into the afternoon, and he reflected that she was easier to talk to than T had been. She brought him up to date on everything, that is to say, nothing, that had been happening in Stay More. He told her what he’d done in California. He mentioned having run into Roseleen Coe, and remarked, “I hope she doesn’t bump into Sog Alan too.”

“No danger of that,” Latha said. “He passed on some ten or eleven years ago.”

“Oh. I wish I could say that’s too bad but I can’t.”

“Yes. It’s a better world without him,” she said. Then as he got up to leave she said, “So what are you fixing to do? Don’t be a-rushing off. Stay more and spend the night with me.”

“Thank ye kindly, but I reckon I’d better just get on up home.”

“Home?” she said. “You don’t mean the old Madewell place, do ye?

“Yes’m,” he said. “That’s where I’m a-heading. Why don’t you just come go home with me?”

“Thank ye, I’d admire to, but I reckon I’d better not, this time.” Before he got back into his SUV, she gave him another hug, and said, “You must’ve really left a part of yourself up there at the old place.”

“I sure did, ma’am,” he said.

“You’uns be sure to come and visit me whenever you can,” she said.

As he drove off up the Right Prong that skirted the east end of Ledbetter Mountain, he reflected that maybe he didn’t remember Ozark speech as well as he’d thought. He’d always considered “you’uns,” which is a contraction of “you ones,” to be plural, referring to more than one person. In the Deep South, supposedly people said “You all” or “Y’all” when they were addressing only one person, but not in the Ozarks. Maybe he simply hadn’t heard her correctly.

When he turns into the mountain trail at the north foot of Madewell Mountain, he notices another grammatical oddity, which gives him pause: time seems to have reallocated itself into the present tense, which doesn’t bother him greatly. He understands that the present tense is more cozy and immediate, at least if you don’t allow the urgency of it to make you nervous. And he isn’t nervous at all. He’s exultant. He’s rapturous. He’s going home.

Hardly has he turned up into the trail when he encounters a man in a pickup. He is quick to recognize good old George Dinsmore, who’d been just a year ahead of him in school. He is glad to have learned from Latha that George is one of the few remaining citizens of Stay More. But it takes George a little while to recognize him, and when he does he is flabbergasted.

They chat a while, and he asks George, “Have you been up yonder to the top lately? Do you know if my house is still there?”

George laughs. “I aint never been to the top of that mountain. I been practically everywheres else, but for some reason I never been up there. If you’re a-fixing to go and see if you caint make it up to your old homeplace, why, good luck to ye.”

Further up the steep trail, which is in such terrible condition it gives his mighty SUV the workout of its life, Adam encounters a bobcat, who scampers off into the woods. Before Adam reaches the gulley where he’d had to turn back before, where that fellow named Leo Spurlock had mired his pick-up, he encounters, or catches glimpses of, several other animals: a mongrel dog, a possum, three raccoons, and that thirteen-point buck that George had mentioned, a magnificent animal. Adam knows that this isn’t typical of the animal population of these environs; he’d never in his boyhood seen such a diversity of animals together in one spot. As he is rounding a hairpin curve on the trail he glances into the rear view mirror and it appears that all those animals are following him! He stops, and waits, to see if they catch up with him, but the animals stop too, and keep their distance until he drives on.

Maybe it is the present tense, after all, which is making him feel funny. He is having distinct premonitions of disorder even before he reaches the spot where, he discovers unhappily, the trail comes to a complete end, far short of its original destination. He must stop and exit the vehicle, taking his rifle with him. He examines the terrain, trying to spot anything familiar, but apparently time and thunderstorms have transformed everything. The original course of the trail, over which his grandfather and father had driven so many mule-team loads of barrels and staves, has been totally obliterated. Not a trace remains of the ledges his grandfather had hacked into the bluffs. Now in every direction there are only deep gullies and ravines. In one of the ravines appears to be the remains of a burnt pick-up which had crashed, maybe years before.

Adam makes slow progress on foot. His bad leg hampers his descent into the ravines and his climbing out of them. Looking behind him, he catches an occasional glimpse of one or more of those animals who have been following him, even that big buck.

Finally he comes upon a very strange thing: in a clearing above one of the ravines, in a patch of grass, is standing a bottle of Jack Daniels Black Label whiskey! He opens it, sniffs it, and determines that it is a fresh bottle, untouched, undiluted, unpolluted, perhaps recently left behind by some hunter. But the hunting season, as George has reminded him, hasn’t yet begun. His hiking has left Adam thirsty, so he takes a generous swig of the stuff, and it tastes just fine. He lights himself a cigarette. He carries the bottle with him as he continues his hike. But then he comes to another bottle, identical to the first. He does not open the second bottle but continues onward with the first, until he comes to the third, at which point he is distinctly beginning to feel funny, and needs more than a swig from the bottle to settle his nerves. From the lay of the land he has a distinct feeling that he is nearing his destination, and this drives him onward. By the time he arrives at the tenth bottle, he is stumbling not because of his bad leg but because he has consumed nearly a third of the one bottle he carries.

And then he hears the sound. At first he thinks it is just the wind in the trees, but as he listens, limping onward toward the source of the sound, he realizes that what he is hearing is too liquid to be the wind—it is an angel singing, or, no, not singing but vocalizing in wordless tones that rise and hide themselves and then reappear. He stops and listens, entranced. He is reminded of the soprano solo in Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 3, the Pastoral, the soft off-stage cantilena, incredibly beautiful and incredibly haunting. Yes, that is the word: haunting. When he reaches the eleventh bottle he converts that adjective into a noun: haunt, and he looks down at the earth beside the eleventh bottle, seeing there an imaginary boundary line, and knows that something truly fantastic is happening to me.

This is not merely present tense, it is present tense first person singular, and I having reached my haunt have come at long last into full possession of myself.

But perhaps not completely full, just yet. Because as I reach the twelfth and last bottle, which stands at the very edge of my meadow, and I happily behold in the distance that my beloved house and its outbuildings are all still standing, I descry the source of that lovely singing. In the yard of my house stands a tall woman, nude, her blonde hair cascading to her knees but not concealing her nakedness. There is a serpent entwined around her neck and upper torso. My whisky-fuddled head is a vortex of thoughts; I am thrilled beyond measure to be home at last but I am uncertain if I am actually alive or just dreaming of some Eve in Paradise. I am Adam. And then practical reality takes hold of me, and I realize that probably my homestead has been expropriated by some hippies, and she is just some free-spirited flower child left over or lost from a previous time, as the Ozarkers themselves were left-over and lost from the mainstream. This thought fills me with chagrin.

And then she spots me. She seems to be having trouble focusing her eyes on me, but she has seen me. Although I have an impulse to turn and flee, I am visited by the last and most powerful of this day’s haunting oddities; she may or may not be Eve, but I am certainly Adam, and I have not ever left this place, my haunt, nor shall I ever leave it again.

Chapter forty-seven

It was the most challenging and wracking thing she’d ever had to do, and the doing of it had practically ruined this special day of days. She cared so much for his feelings and did not want to hurt him in any way. She really was deeply in love with him, but she had to make him understand that she simply could not face a future in which he not only remained ethereal and invisible but also remained twelve years old forever. What would it be like when she was thirty or forty or fifty years old, and he was still only twelve? She had hoped that his wisdom and mother wit, greater than she herself had possessed at twelve, would permit him to accept and even welcome the presence of the newest addition to the circus, but she could hear her own voice quavering when she said to him, “I think I’d better ask you how you’d feel if my eighteenth birthday present from the others was a man, I mean a real live one, I mean one who could truly lift things and eat what I cooked for him and even be able to go to sleep at night…”

In yore bed. His voice was matter-of-fact, and he added, Tell ye the honest truth, I druther see a man a-sleeping there than a bar, but you’uns would just have to be able to sleep with me a-watching over you’uns.

“And you’d be watching everything else we did, wouldn’t you?” she asked. “Would you be terribly jealous of him? Would you hate me for it?”

As was so often the case that it didn’t even bother her, he did not answer. She waited, as usual, giving him plenty of time to come up with the courtesy of a reply, and, as usual, he did not. She had much to do today, to get ready, and as she put the layer cake into the oven, she went on talking. “Don’t you see? That’s one of the main things I want him for, that he’ll answer me when I say something to him, which you won’t do.” But he still did not speak. “Or at least, if he won’t answer, at least I can see his face and tell what he’s thinking or feeling. Don’t you understand how frustrating it is for me that I can’t even see your face?”

There was not any response to that question, either. She poured hot water into the tin tub and got a fresh bar of her special lavender-scented beeswax lye soap. She climbed into the tub and said, “Would you like to get in here with me? I’ll scrub your back and behind your ears and under your cods.” But he did not make his presence known or felt. She decided, for the first time, for this special occasion, to shave her legs, which were just too downy and even hairy in places, and she used Sugrue’s razor to scrape it all off, although she nicked the skin in a couple of places. “There,” she said when she was finished. “See how smooth they are. Put your hand on them and feel them.” But he did not.

She trimmed her fingernails and her toenails and cleaned under them. She washed her hair and was tempted to cut it, and she asked Adam if he’d mind if she cut her hair, but he wouldn’t answer. She decided not to cut it; she started braiding it but then determined it would look better if she just let it hang loose to her knees. She studied herself in the mirror, and carefully brushed some pokeberry juice onto her lips to empurple them. She dabbed a generous amount of Tabu around her chin, her neck and the top of her full breasts. “Before I get dressed,” she said to Adam, “could you see your way to making love once again?” Surprise: he didn’t answer. “Oh, Adam,” she sighed. “Don’t you understand? When the man is here, I’ll still always love you and I’ll still make love to you whenever you want to. Whenever you get hard, all you’ll have to do is let me know. We’ll have to keep it a secret from him, but that shouldn’t be too difficult, should it?”

She put on Latha’s old-timey dress, which had already gone through several washings since Robin had acquired it, and was beginning to look faded and frayed. She studied herself in the mirror again with the dress on and was skeptical. She wondered, for the first time, how particular the man might be. Would he think she looked cheap? She had no idea what sort of man she’d be getting for her birthday. All she knew about him was that he’d have two arms, two legs, a head, and a dood…no, that would have to remain Adam’s private word. And it was to be hoped that the man would be able to speak English. She believed without any doubt that Hreapha and the others would be presenting her with a man for her birthday. If she had asked them for an elephant, they would have got one for her. Or at least a horse, and now with her misgivings she began to wish that she’d asked for a horse instead.

She was starting to feel uneasy about the arrival of the gift, and she went into the storeroom to get a bottle of Jack Daniels. An entire case was empty, and she wondered if she had been consuming more of the stuff than she had realized. She opened a bottle, and drank straight from it, which she didn’t usually like to do. “Care for a swig, honey?” she asked, but Adam was still sulking and silent and maybe even absent. Maybe he had gone out to the cooper’s shed to escape from her entirely, and possibly he was curled up inside her barrel. He had told her that he was so proud of the barrel that she’d made with his advice and instructions that it had become his favorite place, not to sleep, since he never slept, but just to curl up and hide from the world. “Why would you want to hide from the world?” she had asked him. “Especially since you’re invisible anyhow?” And for once he had tried to answer her.

Sometimes it’s just too much with me, he’d said, and she had thought about that for a long time.

The man coming was of the world, and she feared that he might be too much with her. She didn’t care if he was young or old, so long as he was older than Adam and ideally younger than Sugrue. She hoped he would be good-looking, and perhaps tall, and she hoped he would be intelligent enough to carry on a decent conversation with, and she certainly hoped, above all else, that he would be marvelous at sex. But what if he was too much with her? What if he couldn’t accept her as she was? And love, or learn to love, her as she was?

And what am I? she asks herself. Do I know? The question haunts her almost as much as she is troubled by the sudden realization that her entire past, her whole story of eleven long years endured in this lonely aerie, is all now past, behind her, and she is living in and for the present, the very real but still fantastic present.

She removes the dress. She thinks aloud, “If he will have me, he will have me as I truly am, unadorned.”

She takes another lusty swallow from her bottle, and steps outside the door. Many of her family are there, those who have not gone off on the quest for a man—Hreapha, Ged, Latha, Bess, Hroberta, Sigh and Sue, and Sheba, resting atop Sparkle—Robin lifts Sheba, gives her a kiss, and wraps her around her neck. Robin breaks spontaneously into song, or rather an inspired vocalization of abstract sounds born deep inside her lungs and transformed through all her vocal chords and tongue and the chamber of her mouth and even her nose. Such music delights most of her family, except Adam, who has complained that her melodious chants are jist a lot of hootin and a-hollerin. Another reason she wants a man, and with any luck a man who appreciates her singing.

She dances out to the cooper’s shed and peers into her barrel. She is prouder of that barrel than anything else she’s ever done. It is tight and solid and although she has not yet attempted to fill it, it will probably hold any liquid without leaking. Is Adam in there right now? She takes Sheba temporarily off her neck and puts her down. Then she whispers into the barrel, “Adam, dear sweet wonderful Adam, could you at least kiss me for one last time before he gets here?”

She begins to fear that Adam is permanently silent, perhaps even permanently gone. Maybe he has left his haunt and established another haunt somewhere else. But how could he do that? The afternoon is getting on, and perhaps those members of the family who have gone to find a man have not had any luck. She has not even tried to imagine how they might possibly have obtained a man. She has not wanted to risk trying to imagine. And possibly her birthday wish is not going to come true, after all. She decides to go inside and light the cake’s eighteen candles that she has made out of beeswax.

Then she hears, far off, the faint sound of the motor of a vehicle laboring uphill. It is a sound she has not heard since Sugrue’s truck made its final trip with her in it. She suspects that it is the man, coming up the mountain, and when she sings again, she truly sings with passion and joy. But the trills and tremolos in her soprano voice are not controlled and deliberate; they reflect her increasing anxiety. What if the man is simply not nice? What if he isn’t interested in making love but only in raping her? What if he’s cruel?

During her long wait, she practices her taekwondo. She discovers that she can sing and kick and chop at the same time. An hour passes, and her legs and arms grow tired. She has to save some of her energy for the actual employment of the taekwondo, if need be. As one more precaution, priding herself on the resourcefulness of the idea, she loads both barrels of the shotgun and all six chambers of Sugrue’s service revolver.

She sets the weapons down on the porch, and resumes her singing, a distinct tone of elation now in her music, because she is ready. Ready for anything. Ready for the man, the world, for life. If the melody of her music consists of a hiding and a finding, then it is now mostly discovery, and the thrill therein.

Now she sees him, across the meadow. Her eyesight being so poor, she can only discern his fuzzy silhouette. Behind him stands the majestic silhouette of Dewey, his branchy antlers a calligraphy on the sky. She continues singing, interrupted only by her beloved dog, who says “Hreapha,” that is, Happy Best of All Possible Birthdays.

Then Hreapha’s son comes bounding across the meadow, barking HROLF! HROLF! HROLF! at the top of his voice. He arrives quickly and seems to be trying to tell his mother something. Behind him come Ralgrub and her thieving sons, Rebbor, Tidnab, and Feiht. And then Pogo and Robert, the latter running as if he’s being pursued. But the man is not pursuing him. The man is walking slowly across the meadow. In fact he is limping, and for a brief terrible moment Robin thinks that this is Sugrue’s ghost, because the limp resembles that of Sugrue’s final affliction, and even the man himself, what little she can see of him, seems to have Sugrue’s shape. And worst of all, there is smoke rising from him, smoke coming out of his mouth, smoke from a cigarette in his fingers. And in his other hand he holds a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels! Yes, it could be Sugrue, but her credulity, which can accept and even love an immaterial in-habit, cannot accept the idea of a daytime ghost.

Robin stops singing. As if to continue her music, Sigh and Sue on a nearby limb are cooing, or at least Sigh is, since Sue doesn’t sing; and Bess is mooing, and Robert is wooing, and the dogs are barking, and there is even Ged on percussion, grunting.

She has not even given any thought to what she will say. Maybe the man, who has now almost reached her, will speak the first words, and all she’ll have to do is think of something clever to say in response. Maybe he’s just some guy who has lost his way and will ask her for directions…as if she’d know.

Will they do something as piddling as shake hands? Or will they rush into each other’s arms? Or will they just keep their distance and make idle chitchat?

Suddenly her nakedness bothers her, and she wishes she had not chosen it. Her nervous hands try to arrange her long hair so that it covers her breasts and her poody. Then she can only stand and stare as he nears her.

He is only a few feet away when he stops. She can see him fairly well now. He is tall and extremely good-looking, but he is not young. He is perhaps as old as Sugrue was. She is relieved that he certainly is not Sugrue, nor his ghost. And he has thrown away his cigarette.

Finally it is he who speaks first. “Howdy,” he says with a big smile.

“Howdy yourself,” she says. She even imitates his accent, which is like Sugrue’s, like Latha’s, like Grandpa’s. She realizes she hasn’t thought of Grandpa Spurlock in a very long time, and she surprises herself that she is standing here wondering what Grandpa Spurlock would think if he could see her like this.

The man has an enormous smile on his face, as if she has said something funny. Or maybe he is just loopy from drinking. “You sure sing pretty,” he says. “I’m sorry I interrupted ye.”

Well, at least he doesn’t share Adam’s low opinion of her singing. “Thank you,” she says. “I’m very glad you like it.”

At her feet, her dog is asking, “Hreapha?” that is, Well, do you like him?

And she can only say, “Thank you, Hreapha. I guess he’ll do.” She won’t tell Hreapha that the man is not exactly her ideal, and he certainly isn’t perfect: in addition to his limp, he has an index finger missing from his right hand. Missing finger? She is beginning to have an uneasy thought. The thought is superceded or supplemented—she isn’t sure which—by something she remembers Latha had said. Although she doesn’t have any lemonade to offer the man, she can repeat Latha’s words, “But here I’m being chatty and rude and haven’t even told you my name. I’m Robin Kerr.”

“Yes,” he says, and holds out that missing-finger hand for a shake, and she takes it and accepts his handshake.

She waits, and then she says, “But you are being ruder if you don’t tell me your name.”

That enormous smile again, and there isn’t a bit of humor in what she has just said. “I think you know who I am,” he says. He waits for her to recognize him, but how can she? Then he says, “Why don’t you take off that there snake and run in and put on your pretty dress?” And when her mouth drops open in awe or whatever, he adds, “Because, come to think on it, I reckon I’d want ye more in that there dress than I’d want ye as you generally are, a-running around all over creation a-wearing nothing but a smile.” She cannot say a blessed thing. So he observes, “And you’re not even wearing a smile, now.”

Racking her brain, she comes up, at last, with a single word. “Adam?”

His smile is about to cleave his jaw. “Madewell,” he says.

“I cannot believe this,” she says. “I simply cannot even begin to believe this.”

“If you’re having trouble believing it,” he says, “just imagine how I started out the day without any inkling of what I’d find up here at the old home place, and as soon as I step over the line into my haunt, here it all is! And here am I! And here are you! Boy, I’m plumb jiggered and struck all of a heap!”

“But where is Adam?” she wants to know. “I mean, if you’re Adam, then where’s the boy who in-habits this place?”

He touches his heart.

She thinks about that, and the thought disturbs her. “Do you mean I’ll never see him again?”

“You never saw him to begin with.”

“But I can’t ever be with him again.”

“You’ll always be with him.”

In time, she believes him, and believes in him, and her only disappointment is that she cannot show him the place because she doesn’t need to. You’d expect, if a man came back to his boyhood home after thirty years, that he’d want to take a long, leisurely tour of the premises and see all the little changes, but Adam doesn’t need to do that, since he’s never left. She wants to show him the barrel she’s made, and he dutifully inspects it, and honestly tells her that it wouldn’t pass muster at Madewell Cooperage but it is certainly a remarkable piece of workmanship and he is proud of both of them, her and Adam, that is, himself, for having done it. She realizes that she doesn’t need to explain the presence of a skeleton in the outhouse to him, because he knows all about it. “How do you feel about indoor toilets?” he asks, and she, remembering Latha’s house, grants that they are a lot more convenient and comfortable than outhouses.

At least he can participate wholly in her birthday party, unlike the in-habit, who has never been able to sample the birthday cake except in make-believe. He can even light the candles for her, there in the midst of the whole menagerie, all her family and friends, and he can applaud, which the others cannot do, when she blows out all the candles. She will not tell him her wish, nor will she tell it to us, but only those of us with the most impoverished imaginations could fail to guess what it is. She wants to inform him that he is her birthday present, but she assumes he already knows that. He has retained, or has never quite lost, the in-habit’s ability to communicate with all the animals, and he tells her the fascinating story of how they had originally planned to acquire a man named George Dinsmore for her birthday, luring him with the bottles of Jack Daniels, but, owing to some of those quirks of fate which never cease to delight us, Adam himself came along and took George’s place. So, in a sense, the animals have not presented him to Robin for her birthday. He has presented himself.

Nevertheless, he is still her present, and of course she is free to do with him whatever she has hoped. The adult Adam is experienced, far beyond the boy’s wildest fancyings. As but one example, his adventures in France, where lovemaking is nearly as important as cooking, have left him with the ability to show her something called maraichinage, which is not just a kiss but an escapade, and the very first time she tries it with him she reaches so explosively that she can hardly stand it. Adam is so much better than Adam, and so much less inhibited or clumsy or inept or simply unknowledgeable.

They sleep late, and she is charmed that Adam can do something which Adam could never do—sleep. When he finally wakes, she shows him a present she has for him: hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash. He tells her that he is very touched to be offered such a large sum of money, but, if truth be told, he doesn’t need it, and he would much prefer that she keep it and spend it on herself. “I’ll give you many a chance to spend it,” he promises. After breakfast she goes with him, holding hands, to the place where he has left his car, and she helps him in the slow, tedious carrying of all his worldly goods from the car to the house. For lunch he opens for her a bottle of what he says is the rarest, finest Cabernet Sauvignon of all time. She has never tasted wine before. She isn’t sure, at first, that she likes it, but he tells her she will, as she will acquire a taste for all manner of things she has never known. He tells her that he would like to convert part of the meadow into a vineyard, if it’s all right with her.

September is growing a bit chilly, and he does something else that Adam couldn’t do: he chops up and splits a lot of wood for their stoves. She is so glad to be spared the chore; she can devote more time to preparing their meals. But there too he wants to use his hands and help her, and he knows things about cooking that the Cyclopædia couldn’t have dreamt.

No, she decides, she hasn’t lost her childhood playmate who became her phantom lover: he has just acquired all the talents and strength and wisdom of a man.

Chapter forty-eight

She does not like the present tense. So she bites it. She has tolerated it only for its ability to furnish a setting for the presenting of the birthday present: a man for Robin, but now that that present has been presented, the present tense is an annoyance and a hindrance, slowing everybody down, and she snaps “Hreapha!” at it and chomps her canines into its leg, and it will yelp and flee in panic, and in its running away it will be transformed into the future tense. Which will suit her just fine. Because the future tense will be everlasting, even eternal. She will realize that she is getting old and she will not be able to live forever (although she will have been happy to learn from Adam that Yowrfrowr will still have been going strong down in the valley), but as long as she will have this enduring future tense to live in, she will be able to hang around and watch all the wonderful things that will be happening.

Although the first time that she and some of the others will trot or creep or amble down the mountain to watch the strange men in their huge machines moving the earth and even building a bridge, one of the men will take his gun and fire at Robert. He will miss, but she will be indignant, even though she will continue to feel that her son-in-law is a rascal and a reprobate. She will run to Adam and will say to him, Master, those men are shooting at us.

Adam will go to the men, yell at them, talk to them, and he will collect all of their weapons, keeping them until such time as the men will have finished their job. He will pat her and say “Good dog,” reminding her of the first words he will ever have spoken to her. She will be able to remember so many things about him when he was still invisible and unsmellable: how he had helped her find the scissors and the turkey caller, how he had told her how to find her way to Stay More, how he had assisted at the births of her children. She will have always felt that she was his dog as much as she will have been Robin’s, and she will be especially thrilled that now she will have been able to actually feel his pats upon her head and his occasional hug. He will be purely and simply a nice man. A kind man. The nicest and kindest she will ever have known, so vastly different from her first master that it will be difficult to think of them as having belonged to the same species.

She will also appreciate the many ways that he will make Robin happy too. Not a day will go by that he will not tell Robin how beautiful she is, never in the same words twice, always with some convincing and well-spoken variation on the same essential theme: that she is, and always will be, the most attractive and desirable female on earth. And whenever Robin will raise her voice in song, the opaque tones that will drift out across the meadow will seem to express her joyful thankfulness for not just his kind words but his ability never to use the same words twice.

Hreapha will be sorry that sometimes their words to each other will not be entirely pleasant, and Hreapha will attempt to lower her ears and cover them on those occasions when the Master and Mistress will be having an argument. She will be especially sad when they will have discussed the coming of the strange men with their huge machines, even before one of them will have taken a shot at Robert. The building of the road and the bridge will have been the Master’s idea; the Mistress will not have been certain that she wants it or appreciates it. When the men will have surrendered their weapons and gone on with their work, they will begin using what the Master will tell Hreapha is called “dynamite.” The Master (he will have asked Hreapha not to call him that, but she will think it is at least preferable to “in-habit,” which he will never be again) will organize on an October day what will be called a “picnic,” far off in a glade on the western side of the mountain, where all of them, even Sparkle, will go to escape the horrible sounds, which they will only be able to hear in the far distance, the frightening sounds, worse than thunder, of great explosives blasting away the bluff where the bridge will be. The picnic will be so much fun, despite the distant explosions, that they will decide to have a picnic each week, which they will do regularly as long as the future tense will survive and weather will permit.

When the bridge will be finished, the road will be constructed onward to the dooryard, making it possible for Adam to park his vehicle at the house, and he will use his vehicle, for the first time after the road and the bridge are finished, to take Robin to Stay More, and Adam will explain to all the other animals that for this trip only Hreapha will be allowed to accompany them, because she is the first and oldest of all the menagerie, but that for future trips in this wonderful future tense he will give the others, even Sparkle, but not Bess or Dewey, a ride in his wonderful car. Hreapha will be thrilled, and although riding down the mountain sitting on the front seat with her head out the window will remind her of all the many long-ago times she will have ridden in the man’s pickup truck down that mountain, she will come to understand what thrills the future, and the future tense, will have for her, riding in cars, and, that very first trip, riding down to Stay More to visit with Yowrfrowr and her daughter and grandchildren, and, my goodness gracious sakes, one great-grandchild. Adam and Robin will spend hours visiting with the nice old lady who lives in the dogtrot, so Hreapha will have plenty of time to visit with dear Yowrfrowr and the multitude of their offspring. If there is a heaven, this will be it. But Yowrfrowr will not be in good shape. He will say to Hreapha, Dear Girl, I am afflicted not merely with rheumatism but an host of other sufferings, and I fear I am not long for this world.

Hreapha will chide him for speaking in the present tense and she will tell him how she has bitten the present tense and chased it away. Sweetheart, she will say to him, in the future tense I will never let you leave us.

And he will give her a grateful lick. She will ask him if he understands that this man, Adam, is indeed the in-habit, the same one whom Yowrfrowr met in the orchard of the Madewell place that time that Yowrfrowr had helped them hunt for Paddington.

Yowrfrowr will say, Don’t you recall, my dear, that it was I who taught you all about in-habits in the first place?

Adam will invite the nice old lady to ride with them back up to the Madewell place, and they will decide that they have room for Yowrfrowr too, although Adam will explain to all the others, to Hruschka and everyone and even the dozens of cats, that he’ll give them all a ride too eventually, but for this trip he will take only Yowrfrowr, because he is the first and the oldest. Hreapha will be delighted, although they will have to sit together in the back end and will not be able to stick their heads out the windows.

Crossing the new bridge, which will be just wide enough for one vehicle but will seem to be suspended hundreds of feet above the ground below, both Yowrfrowr and his mistress will be amazed. “It’s just a viaduct,” Adam will say, “but it sure is extending our haunt.”

Yes, their haunt will reach at least as far as Harrison, where Hreapha will ride with them one day to do some shopping at some of the same stores where the man had stocked up for his abduction of the little girl, and Robin will show Adam the house where the little girl lived, still there, almost unchanged, but inhabited by strangers. Adam will offer to knock and ask that Robin be allowed to visit the interior, but she will not want to. She will say to Adam, “I’m not ready. I don’t want anyone to know who I am. Not anyone who doesn’t already know.”

One problem of Hreapha’s new and greatly improved life will be the matter of returning after so many years to commercial dog food. She will have become so accustomed to a diet from the wild—of rabbits and squirrels and various birds—that she will not immediately relish the idea of Purina Dog Chow again. But Adam, with Robin’s help, will pick out a lot of canned dog food of the very best grade, as well as cat food, and Hreapha will eventually decide that she appreciates the comfort and convenience, if not the taste, of not having to chase down, capture, kill and chew up her supper. It will be a comfort in her old age.

The viaduct and the new road will also make possible the crew of men who will come and dig big holes all along the mountain trail and plant in the holes tall poles, upon which will be strung wires. Just in time for their Christmas tree, a traditional red cedar, traditionally strung with Robin’s garlands of popcorn and many of the stars she had cut from toilet paper tubes and hand-colored so many years before and had used every Christmas since. But in addition to those, there will now be many new glass ornaments and garlands and tinsel and bows and boughs and sprays, and, most marvelous of all, myriad wired bulbs, large and small, which, when Robin flicks a switch on the wall, in a ceremony in the presence of all of them, will burst with light and will sparkle throughout the holiday season.

But several days before that ceremony, Hreapha, knowing that it will be Adam’s birthday, will say to him, Sir, as you know, I have always obtained, or directed the obtaining of, a pet for each of Robin’s birthdays, including, for the most recent one, yourself, Sir, if you don’t mind being called a pet, which you are, of course. Anyway, I should like to continue this tradition by getting you a pet for your birthday. You name it, I’ll get it.

Adam will laugh and laugh. His eyes will water. When he will finally get control of himself, he will say, “Dear Hreapha, you are not merely a good dog. You are the world’s best dog. But the ‘pet’ I reckon I’d like doesn’t grow in these woods or anywhere hereabouts. And it isn’t an elephant. It’s something I’ve wanted all my life, which Robin almost wanted for her eighteenth birthday instead of me, or before she thought of me. You wouldn’t have been able to get it for her either.”

A horse? Hreapha will ask. And when he will smile and nod, she will say, Well, don’t put it past me. I’ll find you a horse, by golly.

“I have a better idea,” he will say. And he will take her with him in his big car, just the two of them, and he will drive a long way, farther than Harrison, to a big farm surrounded by paddocks with many horses. He will hook to the rear of his big car another car, which he will say is called a horse trailer. “Now, pick one out for me,” he will tell her, a tall order, but she will carefully examine all of the horses, and will choose the one which she considers most noble, most stately, and most handsome. They will take him home. When Robin will screech and whimper, he will tell her that for a Christmas present he will take her back to the horse farm and let her pick one out for herself.

So, that day, after they will light the Christmas tree, Robin and Adam will ride out together across the meadow and all over the mountain on two horses who Robin will have been named Wish and Desire, objects of envy and admiration for all the other animals. Much to Hrolf’s dismay, neither Wish nor Desire will ever attempt to learn dogtalk, the official language of the menagerie. Rather, they will teach him a passable horsetalk, and he will spend the rest of his life, whenever he feels lordly, as he often will, speaking it.

Hrolf will remain always nominally in charge of the menagerie, even when, on those many occasions when Robin and Adam are gone away, sometimes for days on end, the care and keeping of the menagerie will be taken over by the very good man named George, the very same George who will have been intended as the original birthday present for Robin but through no fault of his own will have been relieved from that responsibility by the miraculous coming of Adam. Hreapha will like George very much and will often speculate about what life will have been like if he will not have been supplanted by Adam. George will not be nearly as handsome as Adam, nor as intelligent, and certainly not as wealthy, but he will have many admirable qualities which will always make Hreapha glad to see him, whenever he comes to feed them all during the occasional absences of Adam and Robin.

Adam will always tell Hreapha where they are going and how long they will be gone, and while Hreapha will wish she could go with them, she will know that she could not possibly ride in a vehicle which rises above the earth and flies over mountains and rivers and even oceans, which she will not even be able to imagine. She will be happy for them that they will be able to extend their haunt to the entire world, but she will miss them terribly while they will be gone.

While they will be gone, she will just take it easy and wait for them to come back. She will laze under her favorite tree, a white oak of course, and will watch the world either go by or fail to go by, as it will choose. Her favorite lounging hole, in the earthen floor of the cooper’s shed, will have been covered with hard cement in the renovation of the shed. She will not have minded. That is, minded in the sense of being offended or bothered. The better sense of minding, which Yowrfrowr will have explained to her so many years before, namely, the faculty of knowing what is in one’s master’s mind, is a talent that she will continue to employ whenever in the presence of Robin or Adam, and which she will regret being unable to employ while they will be gone.

There under her oak tree, she will reflect that the nicest thing about an in-habit’s becoming visible, as Adam’s will spectacularly have done, is that one will be permitted to mind more readily by examining the lineaments and demeanor of the master. That is, one will be able to read and therefore to mind the visible face. You can’t very well mind something you can’t see.

While she will be having these thoughts, she will suddenly sit up, and she will perk her ears, and will sniff the air, and will look all around her, but she will perceive nothing, except, eventually, a small, timid voice, which will say to her, Ma, things sure is a-changing hereabouts.

Her memory will not be that good. It will be a voice she will not have heard for a number of years and it will be speaking in coarse, guttural accents. Because it will have no body nor scent attached to it, it will obviously be an in-habit, and she cannot mind it. Because it will have addressed her as “Ma,” she will only be able to assume that it is a relative of hers, and she will correct it: Son, we will be in the future tense hereabouts. You will not be able to say ‘is a-changing’. You’ll have to say ‘will be a-changing.’

Thanks for the grammar lesson, Ma, but don’t ye know me? Or I reckon I should say ‘will ye not be a-knowing me?’

She will be standing now, fully alert, and focusing all her senses on the source of the voice. In a voice as hesitant and awestruck as Robin will have first used to say to the rematerialized in-habit, “Adam?” Hreapha will say, Yipyip?

Ma, I’m sure sorry I took off with them fellers, he will say. But I left my heart behind. I’ve actually been right here ever since but I just couldn’t bear to let ye know it. Now I want to come home.

Then come home, boy, she will say. This here will be the future tense and you will be able to do anything you will like in it.

She will gaze out across the meadow and will see him, in full trot. He will be an old dog, or at least a middle-aged dog, and he will have changed, but she will know him. It will be Yipyip, and very soon he will be surrounded not just by her but by his brother Hrolf and his sister Hroberta and all those of the menagerie who will have remembered him and all those who will never have met him but will be eager to sniff and ogle and listen to a wild dog of partial coyote parentage. He will be very hungry, but as soon as they will have fed him he will regale them all with stories of his many adventures in the pack of coyotes, who will have long since departed this countryside and roamed far away.

He will attempt to explain that he will have come home not only because of his desire to encounter his in-habit and return to his boyhood haunt but because he will have missed his mother, and he will never want to leave her again.

She will permit him to establish a loafing spot under her own private oak. She will attempt to bring him up to date on everything that will have happened around here, but he will hush her, saying, Ma, in-habits know all that stuff anyway.

She will not even need to show him all the improvements that will have been made around here, the renovations of the house and barn and cooper’s shed and henhouse, as well as the construction of a garage and toolshed and greenhouse and something called a gazebo, because supposedly his in-habit will have already witnessed all of those.

But there will be one building that will not have been renovated, which will have been left exactly as it was, and Hreapha will direct her son’s attention to it.

The outhouse, with its door open wide, will yet be occupied by a skeleton, the remains of a man who Yipyip will never have known. The skeleton will be wearing a big grin, and it will occur to Hreapha that he must be finding this future tense very funny.

Let me tell you all about him, she will begin to tell her son. Once upon a time, long ago, I decided to run away from him because

Chapter forty-nine

We will be charmed by darling Hreapha’s conversion of this recital into the future tense, which, whether or not it is perpetual and boundless, is best-suited for dénouement, a graphic French word derived from the untying of knots.

The principal knot of this whole narrative will not of necessity have been our love story, but the more intricate knot of a girl’s passage into womanhood in a condition of isolation and seclusion from the mundane milieux of society. The untying of that knot, consequently, will be a matter of that woman’s decision either to remain in seclusion or to allow herself to accept and to receive certain satisfactions from the outside world. We will not wish to rush her into becoming sociable, because we ourselves will have led a rather private and circumscribed life, but at the same time we will feel obliged to steer her away from her determination to remain a hermit.

“I’m scared,” she will confide to us one night in bed on the day that the finishing of the road has allowed us to park our SUV in the dooryard. “What’s to keep the whole world from driving up that road?”

“For one thing, a big iron gate at the bottom of the trail,” we will assure her. “But I reckon nobody would have ary motive for coming up that road anyhow even if they could get in.”

She will roll over into our arms. “Promise me you won’t let anybody find out about us.”

That will be easy for us to promise. But that iron gate will have to open to let us out, and there will be any number of places we will want to go, things we will want to buy, things we will want to do, pleasures we will have earned the right to enjoy. The first trip back to Harrison, for example, which Hreapha will have already mentioned, having been allowed to ride along with us. Robin will point out to us the modest little house in which she had spent all her early years, and we will drive past the Woodland Heights Elementary School, which she will have attended but not finished, and the Harrison High School, where she will never have been able to go. (A topic we will already have discussed: she will have been too old to go back to high school but will she want perhaps to prepare for some sort of high school equivalency certificate so that she will be able to go to college, if she desires? “I don’t think so, but let me consider it,” she will say.) Robin will even show us the roller skating rink from which she was abducted, and we will get out of the SUV and examine the low little balcony from which Sog Alan had snatched her. We will watch her carefully, we will mind her in Hreapha’s sense, to see if any remnants of the trauma cling to her, but while she will obviously be lost in thought in the effort of remembering, she will not be disturbed. (Long, long ago we will have learned that one of the many things we love about her is her imperturbability in the face of hardship, shock, disappointment, and loss.)

Among the several and sundry stores where we will stop to load the SUV with all the food and goods and needs that we can haul, is the discount supermarket where once her mother will have worked. Robin will want to buy a few things there, including, for sentimental reasons, a quart jar of pickled pigs’ feet, and she will call to our attention the fact that the manager of the store will still be the same Mr. Purvis who will have been her mother’s boss. We will already have reflected and observed, not simply here in Harrison, that the world does not really change very much in eleven years, that except for the coming and going of new fads and fashions and the latest developments in technology, the world of this future tense will not essentially differ greatly from that world of the past tense in which Robin’s story will have begun. Now she will tell us that she wants to speak to Mr. Purvis. She will not have spoken to anyone except us, our good friend George Dinsmore, and our excellent friend Latha Bourne Dill, and she will tell us that she will never have spoken to Mr. Purvis before. He will have seen her on several occasions at the ages of five, six, and seven, but he will not recognize her now, as she will have expected him not to do. The falls of her extraordinarily long hair (about which we’ll soon be making suggestions) are concealed inside her winter coat.

“When did Karen Kerr quit?” she will ask him. She will have to repeat herself, because he will not immediately recognize the name.

“Oh, my, I don’t believe she’s worked here for a number of years,” he will say. “You know, she married that FBI guy and moved to Little Rock, I suppose it must’ve been at least six or seven years ago. Are you a relative or friend?”

“Both,” Robin will say, and will take our arm and lead us out through the check-out.

In time we will feel constrained to offer, “Robin, any time you feel like it, we’d be glad to take you to Little Rock to see your mother.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” she will want to know.

“Well, I reckon it was just sort of an editorial ‘we,’ just meaning me myself.”

“Let’s not talk like that, okay?” she will request.

So we will—that is, I will—abandon the first person plural for the remainder of this untying of knots. But for a while there I will have liked to have thought, correctly I will hope, that I will have been including you in our story, as I will have been occasionally but consistently aware of you throughout. A good denouement will not merely untangle the knots of a story but will attempt to unscramble the reader’s feelings, or, to use the overworked analogy of narrative climaxes and sexual climaxes, a good denouement will leave you sighing in dreamy contentment, exhausted but satisfied.

I will first, before taking her to see her mother, persuade her to go to Fayetteville, the Ozarks’ most civilized city, for a variety of purposes: to obtain the latest things in the way of a whole new wardrobe, to have an ophthalmologist examine her eyes and fit her for contact lenses as well as an assortment of eyeglasses, to visit a dentist for some evaluation, x-rays, and cleaning (the man, Dr. Michael E. Carter, will express amazement to learn that she hasn’t been to a dentist for a dozen years, and he will tell her that her teeth will be lovely once they are cleaned, and he will remark, “Looks like you haven’t been to a hairdresser in a dozen years either.”)

Although she will be smiling with clean teeth at her new ability to see the world in sharp detail, it will have been a major problem to have persuaded her to allow her hair to be cut.

“No,” she will have said, holding her long tresses in her two hands, “this is something I did. I haven’t done very much, but I grew this hair, and I plan to keep it.”

“For how long?” I will have asked rhetorically and heuristically. “Until it reaches your ankles?”

We will have had several lover’s quarrels centered around her locks, and I will have almost been swayed by her contention that the long hair will have been a symbol as well as a crest betokening her freedom, her originality, and her history. I will have admired her greatly on the one warm day that, totally nude like Lady Godiva, she rides Desire long enough for me to have photographed her long hair streaming down the mare’s flanks. But I will slowly and methodically have brought her around to the realization that her hair will have stood in the way of her introduction to (I will almost have said “return to”) civilization. And it will have been her desire to look her best when her mother will have first laid eyes on her that will, in the end, allow her to be taken to a Fayetteville establishment called Dimensions, where she will submit herself to the artistry of the town’s best hairdresser, Patti Stinnett, who will cut Robin’s impossibly long hair. The ends will be split, but Patti will know what to do, and the result will both startle and delight me. I will next want to stop at a good bookstore for a thesaurus, because I will have run out of fresh ways to tell Robin how beautiful she is. We (and I will be speaking only of she and I) will go to some fine restaurants and stay at the best hotel before heading down the Interstate toward Little Rock.

When Robin Kerr will meet Karen Kerr Knight on the latter’s doorstep in the old Quapaw Quarter neighborhood of Little Rock, the former will be radiant in her beauty, neatness, stylishness and general marvelous attractiveness. The two women will only vaguely resemble each other, although I will suppose they might pass for sisters. I will note that Karen will seem to be several years younger than myself. She will of course not show any recognition at all of this old guy and this stunning blonde movie star standing on her porch.

“Hello, Mommy,” Robin will say with a clean and lovely smile.

Karen will need a very long moment, not to recognize her long-lost daughter, but to accept the reality and the loveliness of the apparition. She will not be able to say anything. She will burst into tears. Blinded by her tears, she will reach fumblingly to embrace Robin; her hands will find her at the same instant Robin’s find her mother, and I will admire the neighborhood while the two women have a long embrace.

Then Karen will examine me critically. “Is this him?” she will ask. “Is this the man who kidnapped you?” I will be afraid for a moment that she will be about to strike me, and I will reflect, as I will have done more than once before, that the difference between Robin’s age and mine will be approximately the same as that between the kidnapped Robin and her abductor. “But you said he was dead,” the woman will answer her own question.

“This is the man who kidnapped my heart,” Robin will say.

“Well, don’t just stand there,” the woman will say nervously to both of us. “Come inside. Have some refreshments. Meet my husband. Meet your brother.”

It will be an early Saturday afternoon, and we will be there for the rest of the day. Karen will require a long time to get her hysteria under control. She will be totally beside herself as she will introduce us to her husband, Hal Knight, and to their son, a boy of five or six named Richard, or Dicky, who will at least five or six times ask Robin, “Are you really my sister?”

Conversation in the beginning will be ridiculously trivial. Karen: “Where did you find that gorgeous dress?” Robin: “At Colony Shop in Fayetteville.” Hal, to me: “What do you do?” Adam: “I’m retired. I ran a cooperage in California.” Hal: “What’s that?” Adam: “They make wooden barrels for the wineries.”

Then Karen will have a flood of more serious questions, punctuated by practical questions from her husband, the professional questioner.

Karen: “Are you all right, honey? I mean, are you completely okay?” Without waiting for Robin’s answer, she will ask me, “Is she sound? Is she having any bad problems, here—” she will touch her head “—or here.” She will touch her heart. Flattered that my diagnosis will be sought, I will answer, “Your daughter is a survivor. She has endured indescribable adversity, but she has emerged from it with all her faculties intact, and a heart of platinum.”

Karen and Hal will stare at me with thanks, and Karen will ask, “How did you two meet?”

Robin will answer that one. “The house where I have been living all these years was his boyhood home, and one day—in fact, it was my last birthday—he just showed up.”

Hal will ask: “Of course I’m very eager to know who took you to that house in the first place.”

“His name was Sugrue Alan,” Robin will say.

Hal will smite himself on the brow. “I knew it,” he will say. “He was my number one suspect, but because he was a police officer I couldn’t seem to persuade the others that we should go after him.”

“Where is this house?” Karen will ask.

Robin and I will have agreed, in advance of our coming here, that we will always respect our privacy by not divulging the whereabouts of our domicile to anyone who will not already have known it, namely George and Latha. We will also have agreed that we will never tell anyone who does not already know it, namely only Latha, not George, about in-habits.

“It’s in the Ozarks,” Robin will say. “I’m sorry but I really can’t tell you where.”

“You don’t want me to come and visit?” Karen will say. And before Robin can answer, Karen will have a barrage of additional, possibly related questions. “You’ve really drifted apart from me during all these years, haven’t you? Don’t you blame me for a lot of things about your childhood? Aren’t you holding a lot of stuff against me?”

“No, Mommy,” Robin will say. “I have the most happy memories of living with you and I have missed you terribly. But as I tried to tell you in that note I sent, I want with all my heart to stay there, so I can’t tell you where it is. Not that you’d try to prevent me from staying there, but just that you’d know how to find me.”

Hal will say, “You know of course that I could probably find out very easily where you live. I could simply find the locations of any places where Madewells have lived and check them all out. So you might as well tell us.”

I will respond to that. “Your investigation, Hal, is over, and your case is closed. The victim has been found, and the perpetrator is dead.”

“How did he die?” Hal will ask.

Karen will add, “You said in that note you’d tell us all about it. So tell us.”

For the next hour or so, Robin will deliver a remarkably concise but comprehensive synopsis of her entire experience on Madewell Mountain, omitting, as we will have agreed, any mention of myself in the form of a twelve-year-old in-habit.

At one point, little Dicky will wander out of the room, and his mother will take advantage of his absence to ask Robin, “The monster repeatedly raped you, didn’t he?”

“Not even once,” Robin will say. “He was a sick man, physically as well as mentally, and fortunately for me he was impotent.”

“Why didn’t you try to escape, after you’d shot him?” Hal will ask.

“I was eight years old. I had tried to escape, but got lost. The trail that he had used to take me there was destroyed in a rainstorm. Winter was coming, and snow was on the ground.” Robin will sigh, and will take a deep breath. “But even if rescuers had shown up in a helicopter, I would not have wanted to leave. I had several pets. I still do. I love them. And I love the mountain. Adam never wanted to leave, but they made him do it. And now he has come back. And he and I will live there happily ever after forevermore.”

A long silence will seize the room after that, as if there is nothing more to be said, and in a sense there will not be. Or it will all be denouement. It will soon be time to leave.

“Let me show you the house,” Karen will offer her daughter, wrapping an arm around her shoulders, and the two women will leave the room.

Hal and I will step out onto the porch to light our cigarettes. Robin will have nearly broken me of the nicotine habit, but it will be an addiction, after all, and I will need some time. I will need some time.

“You will need some time,” Hal will say, surprising me, as if he will have been reading my mind. But he will not be referring to the breaking of my nicotine habit. “She’s young enough to be your daughter, and she’s probably just very grateful to you for coming along when you did, but now that you’ve helped her to find the rest of the world again, she might grow tired of you or she might discover someone else, you know?”

“I’ve considered that possibility,” I will grant. “I’ll take my chances.”

“But thank you very much for returning her to us,” he will say.

“It’s just a temporary loan,” I’ll point out.

“You won’t mind if I run a check on you?” he will ask. “Just routine. Just to see if you have any priors, or anything questionable in your past.”

“My whole past was questionable, but you’re welcome to check it all out.”

“The name of the company you worked for?”

“Madewell Cooperage, Inc., St. Helena, California.”

“Oh. You own it?”

“I did. I sold it.”

He will notice my SUV parked at the curb. “Nice wheels,” he’ll say. “You going to be able to take good care of our Robin?”

“The best,” I’ll say.

And there will really not be much more to be said. All the knots will be free, straight, clear. We will live happily ever after forevermore. I will take the very best care of Robin. And she of me. We will want for nothing. The homestead on Madewell Mountain will have all the comforts and amenities that we will desire or will discover through our subscription to Architectural Record. I’ll be an old man, and Robin in her elegant forties, before she will finally succeed in spending the last of the money from Sog’s heritage. We will have taken trips to England, France, Germany and Italy, with pleasurable layovers in our favorite city, New York. But our happiest memories will be of the thousands of days and nights on Madewell Mountain, in the fragrance of oakwood, the sound of the nightingales, the taste of wild strawberries, and the sight of lightning bugs. With all of our pets, including those that Hreapha will surprise Robin with on her subsequent birthdays.

In time, the marvelous menagerie of Madewell Mountain will have two human additions, children born to us. Robin will name the first, Deborah, after the prophetess and singer of the Book of Judges, and I will name the second, Braxton, after my grandfather who built our homestead.

Each year on my birthday I will receive from California a carton of twelve bottles of the very finest private-stock Pinot Noir, with a card inscribed “Many happy returns, André,” and each year for his birthday I will send to him the monetary equivalent in the form of a single barrel made from Madewell Mountain oak by the loving hands of Robin and the strong hands of myself. Our only hobby, hers and mine, will be the making of barrels—burgundy and bourbon barrels, as well as churns and piggins and firkins. And whenever we finish one of the latter, she’ll say, “Did you say ‘fuckin,’ Adam?” and we will of course have to do that.

It will be so easy for us to live in the past, and to remember, to speak of, to reenact the scenes of our puberty together. Believing sincerely in in-habits, we will discover that Robin will have an inhabit of her own, who will be able to become any of the ages she has been, and to consort with my in-habit happily ever after. Our in-habits will cohabit.

There will remain only one chapter in this story, and Robin’s in-habit will have it. There will remain only one more wonder in this wondrous journey: the moment when your in-habit, dear creative reader, will come into existence and will take possession of these pages.

Chapter fifty

Her mother will have said to her, when alone, “It just kills me that you grew up missing out on so many things. Don’t you ever think about all the things you missed?” And although she will have nodded in acknowledgment that she will indeed have, her mother will have begun enumerating all the things she will have missed: education, friendships, fun, and knowledge of current events, of the world, of things like etiquette. “Every mother wants to teach her daughter some manners,” she will have said. “But I was deprived of that chance. I was deprived of the chance also to help you with your social life, with boys, with going out on dates. My God, you never had a date! With nice boys your own age. And here you’ve taken up with that man and have nobody to compare him with! He’s handsome and well-spoken and courteous, but he’s the only guy you’ve ever known, except for that bastard who stole you away from me. It just kills me that you’re planning to marry him and will have to live the rest of your life without knowing if there might be a far more desirable man.”

“I’m not planning to marry him, Mother,” she will have said. “He has been married before, and doesn’t think much of the institution.”

“Really? So you’re just planning to go on living in sin together up there in your hideaway?”

“Mother, I’ve read the Bible several times, cover to back. It was practically the only book I had to read. I have a pretty good idea of what sin is. Adam and I are without sin.”

“Do you mean he’s impotent too?”

Robin will have laughed. “Far from it.”

“I guess the point I’m trying to make is that you have nobody to compare him with. How do you know if another man might not be…better in bed?”

“If any man were better in bed than Adam, he would be too much for me.”

“Oh, let’s not get to talking about such things, but I just want you to know how much I missed you, and how much I cried for you, and how much I will always regret all those lost years of your life.”

“You never forgot me, did you?”

“Of course not! And your stepfather and I never stopped looking for you. Your Grandpa Spurlock is still looking for you, so you’d better let him know that you’ve been found.”

Robin will be keeping lists of things to do, and she will add to that list a visit to Pindall to see her grandparents. She will not have mentioned to her mother the fact that Adam once met Grandpa Spurlock on the trail leading up to her Madewell Mountain aerie, and that if on that occasion either Grandpa or Adam had found her, she would have been deprived of some of the most wonderful adventures of her entire experience. But the Fate-thing will always have a way to prevent such happenstances.

Her mother will have told her about an organization called The Robin Kerr League, a nationwide group of the parents of hundreds, even thousands of abducted children. Her mother will have begged her to go on television or make a videotape to address the members of the League and tell them to have hope because she herself never gave up hope, etc., but Robin will have had to remind her mother that there will not be any publicity whatsoever about her existence.

It will have been a condition of their meeting and their resumption of their relationship as mother and daughter that there will not be the slightest public mention of the story.

Occasionally Robin will perforce give some further thought to some of the questions her mother will have raised, particularly one that will have already engaged her: despite her deep love for Adam, will she not be haunted by never having had a date to compare him with? Will she be completely happy with a man twenty-eight years her senior? Is it possible to fall in love only once and never again? To have that first love last forever?

Although she and Adam will watch innumerable movies because they both will love and crave that form of entertainment, their principal diversion will remain an overpowering thirst for reading, and they will consume enormous quantities of novels, the reading of which will provide Robin with a vast knowledge of human relationships that life will not have given her. Those many novels will also confirm her in her belief that her story will be unique, as well as settle whatever lingering doubts she might have about being madly in love with a man so much older. Eventually Robin will be strongly tempted to write a novel herself, but this future tense that Hreapha will have bestowed upon her will not extend that far into the future. And although she will come to understand the meaning of such novelistic concepts as self-referentiality, or self-reflective postmodernist fiction, she will have some difficulty accepting the idea of a novel wherein the main pursuit of the hero and heroine, apart from sex, is the reading of novels. Even if the setting for their reading, in that comfortably refurbished living room (the davenport alone will remain), with a nice fire going in their Vermont Castings woodstove, with glasses of Pinot Noir at hand or better yet the Sauvignon Blanc that Adam will make from his own grapes, will be sufficiently novelistic unto itself. Yes, she will allow, it might just be possible to write a novel about the reading of novels.

But she will have so many other things to do. The hobby of cooperage will keep both of them busy. And her garden: she will continue growing all their vegetables and flowers. Although she will have been slow and reluctant to accept all the advantages and material comforts that their unlimited financial resources can provide (she will never become materialistic, let alone acquisitive), and will have learned to lament PROG RESS, as it will have been spoken and lamented by earlier generations of Stay Morons, one benefit of PROG RESS which she will welcome heartily will be her Troy-Bilt® Rototiller, with which she will be able to make short work of churning the soil of her garden.

Of course she will be bothered by the noise that her Troy-Bilt® makes. And so will her pets, especially Hreapha, who will always escape deep into the woods whenever Robin starts up the tiller. Robin’s readjustment to civilization will encounter several irritations, principally the sounds of civilization: the roaring of the tiller, the ringing of the telephone, the whirring of the fax machine, the screeching of the printer, the beeping of the microwave, even the midnight moans of the refrigerator. But somehow these noises will give her an appreciation of what she took for granted all those years of her growing up: the sheer loveliness of silence, when not even the wind is stirring the evening air. The soothing comfort and solitude of quiet. Likewise the distress of brightly lit rooms will give her a new appreciation of the darkness that was her element for so many years and will remain her favorite condition. And likewise the obtrusion of smells, of chemicals—cleaning products, repellents, her beauty products even—will make her love all the more the smell of dirt and the smell of green. She will learn to adore green as if she had never noticed it before.

Many of her garments will be green, a color that will go very nicely with her golden hair. She will frequently examine herself in the mirror, not with any trace of vanity nor self-criticism, but simply out of curiosity about her appearance as a modern woman, and her identity. Will she have remained and retained herself as she truly is despite fitting into society after a long absence? Will she really fit? What will show? Will anyone ever be able to tell just by looking at her that she will have been lost for all those years? Adam will continue to describe her to herself, each day without fail, in different words every time but with the same message convincingly reiterated: that she is a goddess incarnate, beauty personified, a living dream, a feast for the eyes. He will have said it so many times in so many different ways that she will almost begin to believe it, but there will always be the lingering doubt in her mind that any female who will have been subjected to such isolation and struggle, who will have been deprived of hygiene and balanced meals, let alone any knowledge of etiquette, algebra, civics and world history, who will never have had a chance to go out on a date, who will not have had a best girlfriend, who will have lived by choice in nakedness and wildness, who will without ever having learned the ugly term masturbation have practiced it so much throughout her later childhood and adolescence, whose only sexual experience apart from that will have been an eventual passionate affair with an invisible in-habit, could not possibly have expected to appear real, let alone normal, whatever that might mean.

“Adam, sweet honey,” she will ask him one night during one of those postcoital moments of—what was the term he used? detumescent denouement—“do you think we ought to give up birth control?”

His silence will remind her of the way the in-habit Adam often would not answer her questions. Moments will drift by. She will hear him, in the dark, in the bed, quietly chuckling. Then he will say, “I reckon there’s sure room for another of us.”

There will be room for not just one but two of them, and the noise they make crying for her will be the one most tolerable noise in her life.

“This future tense is nice,” she will sometimes comment to him. “Everything about you is nice. What’s nicest about you is that you know me so well and yet you love me so much.”

“Do you want to know when I first fell in love? Not the first time I watched ye reaching by yourself. That was pure frustrated craving, not love. The first time I knew I loved ye was when you weren’t but ten or eleven and you told me that my initials which I burned into the first churn I made, ‘AM,’ could be taken to mean that I am, that I exist, that I have an identity. No one else could have given me that. You created me, Robin.”

“I didn’t create you. For the longest time I thought I might have just dreamed you up, and even when you appeared in the flesh I continued to wonder if you were just a reverie, if maraichinage is just a mirage, but then you made me believe that I am too, that I am not merely some storyteller’s wildest fancy, and that Madewell Mountain with all its inhabitants is really my domain, and, believing that I am, I know that you are.”

“Future tense, remember? Always ‘will be.’”

“Always will be with,” she will say, leaving the sentence, like the future tense itself, unfinished, indeterminate, open to infinite possibility.

With a determination never to finish, they will go on expanding their haunt, to the world, but first to the world around them, until they will know every rock and flower of Madewell Mountain, and then beyond it to Ledbetter Mountain and all of Stay More. Robin will never feel truly sociable, and she will hate crowds to the point of being almost agoraphobic, but she will learn to feel comfortable with her neighbors. She will visit often with Latha. Adam will visit often with George Dinsmore. They will occasionally have Latha and George to dinner. In time Latha will introduce them to her grandson Vernon Ingledew and his lovely companion Jelena. Latha will introduce them also to her granddaughter Sharon and the man Larry she is living with in the old Stay More post office/store/house that had once been Latha’s home. They will also meet another couple who will be living in the house that had been built by Daniel Lyam Montross, who was the grandfather or father of the woman Diana Stoving who will now be living in the house with her companion Day Whittacker. Montross had been the hermit who had kidnapped Diana as a child and been killed by Sugrue Alan. Robin and Adam will learn the stories of all these people, stories that Robin had already foretold to herself when she had created Stay More out of paper.

Denouements, Adam will have warned her, should not contain surprises, but there will be one little astonishment in the confession by Day Whittacker, a professional forester, that on one of his regular reconnoiterings of the timberlands of Stay More, a number of years before, he had stumbled upon the Madewell Mountain homestead, had taken a good look at a naked girl playing with a fawn in the yard, and had decided not to intrude upon her privacy.

Day’s audience will have been curious: did he not wonder if she lived there alone? Was he not tempted to speak to her and find out? Had he ever wondered if she might be in need of rescue? “Something,” Day will have said, “simply told me that she wasn’t in need of me.”

They will be in need of him now, will be in need of all of them, as friends. Eventually Vernon Ingledew, a very intelligent and wise person, will decide to run for governor of the state of Arkansas, and Adam and Robin will contribute gladly and generously to his campaign. Stay More will temporarily be invaded by others during the campaign, and there will be a few additional people that Robin and Adam will want to know. The old Stay More hotel, which had been the home of Vernon’s ancestor, Jacob Ingledew, who had been governor of Arkansas during Reconstruction, and which Larry had temporarily inhabited when it was overrun with cockroaches, will become the home of a strange woman named Ekaterina, not from Russia itself but near enough to it to have piqued Adam’s interest, since he will never forget André Tchelistcheff, who will continue until his death at ninety-three to keep in touch with Adam and send him a case of wine on his birthday. Two additional new residents who Robin and Adam will enjoy meeting will be an Oklahoma oil heiress, an Indian woman, and her manservant, also Indian. All of these people will also have their own stories, not ones that Robin will have foretold in her paper Stay More, but ones she will enjoy hearing and reading about.

Although there will come an occasion in the distant future when articles will be written about the coincidence, or design, that the impoverished backwater ghost town (one of which will propose a neologism, “in-habit town”) of Stay More will have happened to have contained half a dozen millionaires, including Adam and Robin, no one, according to their proscription, will ever write about Adam and Robin, who will be allowed to enjoy their seclusion and privacy for as long as they will wish.

They will rarely leave except, before settling down to have and to raise Deborah and Braxton, their daughter and son, they will go to Europe. After her very first trip to England, which she will enormously enjoy, Robin will return home and will be surprised to discover that Hreapha and the other animals have not missed her. She will be almost hurt, and will say accusingly to Hreapha, “You haven’t seen me for several weeks, and you’re acting as if I didn’t even leave.”

You didn’t, a sweet female voice will say to her, and she will wonder if at last she has acquired the ability to hear Hreapha’s speech.

She will stare at Hreapha, who in her nonchalance will seem to be smirking. She will think about what she will have thought that Hreapha will have just spoken. Can it be?

Welcome home anyhow, the voice will say. I missed you. I wanted you back. I’ve always been the model of patience, but your absence was beginning to get to me. I’m with you now, though.

“Robin?” Robin will say.

“Hreapha,” her dog will say, that is, Well, it sure isn’t me. And Robin will realize that she will be hearing Hreapha speak those words, that if her in-habit is now part of her, she will have acquired the ability of in-habits to know the language of animals, particularly dogtalk, that most noble of them all.

“Do you mean to tell me,” she will ask Hreapha, “that my inhabit has been here with you all the time I’ve been gone?”

Yes, and she tells better stories than you do, Hreapha will reply.

Robin will give Hreapha a hug. Robin will give the in-habit Robin a hug, so happy to be with her again, and happier to have her and to be able to talk to Hreapha.

Robin’s in-habit will look around in search of Adam’s in-habit, and will find him, and the two of them will frolic and chat and cavort, and cohabit, conceiving Deborah, who, though created by sex between in-habits, will be born of woman and man.

Isn’t this wonderful? the in-habit Robin will say.

Don’t ye know it’s future tense? Ye ort to say, “Won’t this be wonderful?”

All right. But it sure will be wonderful.

She will be delighted in all the things that in-habits can do, in what they can say, and hear, and what they can see. She will be surrounded by all the eloquent animals of her menagerie, and she will recall those words from Isaiah, “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.” I will have led them, she will say.

In looking at the wonderful world through the eyes of her in-habit, she will not be surprised, because dear Adam will have already told her, that in-habits can see ghosts and she will be able to see Sugrue again. But Adam will have been mistaken about one thing. Sugrue’s ghost will not be free to roam and prowl and trouble the premises. The poor thing will be imprisoned eternally inside the skeleton in the outhouse, like an inmate behind bars, sitting there forlorn and unhappy. She will stare at Sugrue’s ghost with a return of the compassion she will have felt when she will have killed him. She will also know that none of this will have been possible without him.

Thank you, Sugrue, she will say.

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 lectured for twenty-one years.

His first novel was published 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

Ekaterina

Dedication

Contents

Part One

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

Part Two

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

V. Kelian

Afterword By Clive Henry

Butterfly Weed

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

When Angels Rest

Dedication

Contents

Part One

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Chapter six

Chapter seven

Chapter eight

Chapter nine

Chapter ten

Chapter eleven

Chapter twelve

Part two

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

Thirteen Albatrosses (or, Falling off the Mountain)

Dedication

Epigraph

Contents

First part: Primary

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Chapter six

Chapter seven

Chapter eight

Chapter nine

Chapter ten

Second part: Election

Chapter eleven

Chapter twelve

Chapter thirteen

Chapter fourteen

Chapter fifteen

Chapter sixteen

Chapter seventeen

Chapter eighteen

Chapter nineteen

Chapter twenty

Acknowledgments to the First Edition

With

Praise

Dedication

Contents

Part One: Parted with

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Chapter six

Chapter seven

Chapter eight

Chapter nine

Chapter ten

Part Two: Sleeping with

Chapter eleven

Chapter twelve

Chapter thirteen

Chapter fourteen

Chapter fifteen

Chapter sixteen

Chapter seventeen

Chapter eighteen

Chapter nineteen

Chapter twenty

Part Three: Without

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

Part Four: Within

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

Part Five: Whither with her

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

About the Author