GUEST COMMENTARY: From ‘Let Us Build Us A City’

By DONALD HARINGTON

Posted: November 23, 2009 at 3:27 a.m.

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Back in Brookings he found a substitute for the knock that never came at his door: a letter in his mailbox. Apart from his monthly bank statement and the usual offers of instant riches if he would but subscribe, there were not even bills. He had no memberships and he had escaped from Visa. He had also escaped from the few living friends of his past and from all but his wife, who did not write. He had given his Main Avenue address to only a few, including his publisher, who had not published him for years but needed to send semiannual computerized royalty statements attesting to the absence of sales, and, less than semi-annually, a forwarded fan letter. This appeared to be one of those, its return address in Minnesota, whence he had just come. One of those little sad accidents of destiny: had its gushing author written a few days earlier, he might have gone to visit him (or her) during this recent trip.

The writer had carefully typewritten the letter and thus could not be easily sex-checked;

he (or she) had recently read an old Harrigan novel about a young couple’s exploration of Eastern ghost towns. “Never has a story so totally captured my interest and attention… I reacted with varied emotions-curiosity, uneasiness, fascination, sadness, and finally, awe…. ” Before he could get a word in edgewise, the reader continued this prefatory flourish. “…captivating…such suspense and romance…portrayed beautifully…” Harrigan realized why he had been so reluctant to open this letter: he did not need such praise at a time when he had almost convinced himself that he was not worthy of it. He did not want to be enticed into any more ambitions, to give up the mere teaching of art history and turn his hand again to fiction. “stop!” he nearly yelled, but waited until the enthusiastic fan paused forbreath and asked Harrigan an abrupt question: “Have you ever lived in Arkansas? How did you know so much about it?”

Before answering, he stole a quick glance again at the return address. His mistake: Minnesota was the name of the street, not the state, a certain Minnesota Street in a certain Beebe, Arkansas. He remembered, vaguely, Beebe (pronounced identically with the projectile of the airgun manufactured by Daisy of Arkansas), and he mentally changed his reply from “You’ll be surprised I drove through your town just the other day” to “You’ll be surprised to know I’ve driven through Beebe a thousand times, but never stopped. Maybe next time I’ll stop.”

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” he said to-what’s the name? the signature at the bottom, Kim, was bold and boyish; Kipling’s Kim was very much a boy - “I was born in Arkansas, and grew to manhood there. I’ve been through Beebe many times.”

The New Year’s Eve party of the Brookings Singles Club went on without him. The students returned from Mound City, Lake City, Rapid City, Silver City.

The blizzards blew in and his Blazer’s engine block froze and cracked, making him walk to the university each day, better than coffee for sobering up. One evening he came back with both arms full of groceries, necessities, half-gallon of bourbon, bag of ice cubes, carton of cigarettes, and just enough fingers to pluck the letter out of the mailbox.

“How interesting you’ve traveled through Beebe so many times. It’s a small and comfortable little town. The library has your other novels, and now I’ve read them all! Yesterday I hopped into my Z and drove off to Newton County and tried tofind ‘Stay More.’ I didn’t; I found Jasper, though, and Parthenon, and some other places. Being there gave me a sense of history, of serenity, and”- she paused, seemed to be groping for words - “and a longing for something I am not even sure of.”

A longing for the author, perhaps? Every writer writes, one of them once said, in expectation of love. Suddenly the music of the Theme of the Meditation Upon Ruins began playing in his tinnitus as she went on: “It is as you wrote, in that most haunting of passages, interrupting your own narrative of the love story to interject: ‘Oh, this is the 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 ghost villages of the mind…. ‘”

He wished she had not quoted back his words to him. Of all the words he had written, those were the ones he could not bear to hear.

“You say that Stay More does not exist,” she continued. “Maybe not. But while driving around Newton County in search of it, I came upon a place that is called, or used to be called, Marble City.

It isn’t Stay More by a long shot, although the people who once lived there must have been the same kind of folks who populate your books. I couldn’t help wondering, Did they really expect it to become a city? It could have been one, if all their dreams had come true. But it never even came close to being a city. And now there’s nothing there.” PRINTED WITH PERMISSION FROM THE TOBY PRESS, WWW.TOBYPRESS.

COM. HARINGTON’S LAST NOVEL, “ENDURING,” WAS PUBLISHED IN SEPTEMBER.

Opinion, Pages 5 on 11/23/2009

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