Duncanby

By Belle Waring

/ Fiction /      

“Learn to obey, you who are but dust! Learn to humble yourself, you who are but earth and clay!”

—Thomas à Kempis

It wasn’t like we kept people prisoner. You could just walk off down the driveway if you wanted, two lines of dark grayish brown curving into dusk, with the huge oaks over it, and the hummock between. We would play that was fairy hills with the green moss, and the little things like fir trees, and slender, tiny orange mushrooms. If we walked far enough we could sometimes hear the road, but we weren’t supposed to. That was more than a mile each way, and India was only five. 

Anyway, people had to go work at the store, on Pecan Drive up in Mayersville. It was the county seat, but there still wasn’t much to it except the prison. But people drove through on plantation tours and stopped at Elise’s for fried chicken. It really was good. We sold handmade leather goods, tooled keychains being the littlest and elk bags with antler closures the biggest. Duncanby Leather Company, just like Duncanby Communal Living for Organic Social Change. DCLOSC wasn’t a very good acronym, so we were just Duncanby Commune to anyone who asked. Really though, SNCC wasn’t that great of an acronym either, and it was good enough for Stokely Carmichael. It was pronounced cooler.

My mother and father had been in a different commune before, out west. It was called the Church of the Five Star, in Taos, New Mexico, and it was partly run by an actor named Dennis Hopper. The whole thing was a bringdown. I saw his picture, but I never saw the movies—he was a bad guy in Westerns. On Wednesday we would project movies onto the side of the shed where we kept horse feed and hay. (If we had done it on Sunday it would be reinforcing capitalist structures of leisure.) So, my mother was experienced but she said it was an inversion that was also an innervision, because it was experience on how you shouldn’t run a commune. 

Hopper got into it one time with the local sheriff about the New Buffalo commune too, and pulled a shotgun, and I guess he really was big stuff because they didn’t get run out of town! Our sheriff would have run him out before he could blink, and I could never believe everyone in Taos wasn’t sick to death of them by then. Although, our sheriff might have wanted to run us off, but there was no running any Duncans out of Duncanby. Sometimes violence is necessary in self-defense so that whole episode was alright by my parents, even when it got cold, and drop-ins had stolen the wood stoves. But when my mom was taking a shit one time into a shallow pit latrine she turned around and a dog was eating it, this black lab with a bandanna she knew from around, named Jodie. That was it. They left that hour. There were almost three of us when they left, because she was pregnant with me but didn’t know yet. But only two came home. My dad never did make it back; their VW van got T-boned at an intersection in East Texas.

Duncanby Commune was different, though. First of all, we didn’t have nearly so many people as they did in Taos, nothing like, so we could feed everybody, and people did jobs that made sense. Some people had trucks with campers, and we still had the van though it was stove in on one side, and the plantation house of course. It was like a crash pad that died and went to heaven, room for any amount of people. Some rooms opened directly onto the hallways and people were just balling in there with us kids around. That sparked debate. It was decided that getting it on was a natural part of life and not shameful, which I was pretty OK with, even though it looks weird. But my mom kind of enforced on keeping things nice after a few disasters. A redneck from Missouri chopped up a Duncan Phyfe chair for firewood before anybody got to him and now there was a set of five. It wasn’t like there weren’t three cords of wood or something right by the house. 

Everyone on duty would drive to work together in a little convoy. I loved to go, and tool scraps of leather for keychains. When I was four I thought I’d get a hundred percent of the price. I was unhappy when there were the costs of the materials and the contribution to the Commune, but that made sense now. I’d hide under the cutting table, watching my mom work the treadle of the special Singer sewing machine that was for leather. It could stab the black, waxed thread through five layers of cowhide, and then we would shave down the edge and dye it black. There is no place in the world that has ever smelled better than that, not even a tobacco-curing barn. If ever there’s a Lord in His heaven it smells like the second floor of a leather store.

But something is always wrong every place. So, people would join us and then cop out, sit on their ass smoking our weed, complaining about the vegetarian chili. My godfather was a pretty patient dude, and I guess he gave people some time to get it together, because maybe they ‘came in burnt out.’ They would take mushrooms on the dock and have a man-to-man kind of talk, I don’t know much about that. You could see the other bank from our plantation but that just made the river seem wider somehow, the tiny line of trees scribbled there in raw umber, wide ochre water with the sun atop a great glittering path, falling down to sunset.

Eventually he would kick them out if he had to, and one time this guy Joseph started crying like you just shot his dog, snot coming down on his moustache and all. Bawling. No one knew what to do, and Honey, who was my favorite new person, patted him gently on the upper arm. Eventually he started babbling about how he could change as a person, and leave his rigid chrysalis, and he knew he was a drag, but he couldn’t stop being a drag till now when the pathway opened, and my godfather let him stay just out of embarrassment so it would be over. And then Joe turned it around, and he learned to free-hand cut with the biggest roller knives, it was so pretty to see. So, it just went to show that you can’t say about people, and to show that we for sure weren’t holding anyone captive when they were about begging on their knees to stay.

Honey was our teacher, along with my mother, and my youngest godfather. It was a one room schoolhouse, of course, but that had been good enough for lots of people in history. It was a room inside the house. Right now, there were eighteen of us; that was down from nineteen because Lane Cowell’s mom had come down in a very serious-looking sedan and read him and his wife the riot act for maybe half an hour, and then their whole family spent one night in the Motel 6 near Grace and drove back to Nyack the next day. That’s what they said. I was sad because I liked Marigold, she was cool. She could make those paper things you fold for telling fortunes, but special ones in different designs. I don’t know what the grandmother had to say that was so convincing, but it was probably money. 

So, eighteen of us, and India was five like I said, so she was reading little kid books. I read Glinda of Oz with her because it’s the strangest thing in the world, Frank Herbert wished he thought of any of that. Paul’s baby sister who knew everything wasn’t half as weird as when Glinda scooped the canned brains onto the Flatheads after those koi turned into maidens and they figured out how to raise the sunken city using the sorceress’ own name against her. We could read whatever we wanted, but we had to learn math, and study philosophy and Eastern Religion, and my mother taught us French, and my youngest godfather taught us Latin. 

I guess there was some debate about this—well, I spied on it. He made his point by saying we could read esoteric doctrines, like what Irenaeus condemned, but read them the other way around, so the gnostic heretics were good. And maybe we could learn Greek and Sanskrit eventually. There was some murmuring about that because it would be pretty far out, but everyone knew we were way likelier to get a new person with theories about Hesse’s Siddhartha than someone who could teach us Sanskrit. Some college professor would have to flip, or we would need a real Indian person. It was still a cool idea.

All of us students were also working to make a new school, a free-standing one out of homemade brick. We were doing it how people used to, clay and lime and straw and water. We had to burn limestone for the quicklime and that was almost the worst part, getting it into chunks and then putting it the kiln, kind of an egg-shaped depression with walls. We had to get the limestone from a ways away. We had all the clay in the world on the riverbank, so there was that. It took a couple of days to burn, and it wasted a lot. I sometimes wished we could just buy lime like a normal farm, in fifty-pound sacks at the feed and seed, but we were the Duncanby Commune, that would be beneath us.

We mixed up the clay with the straw and the lime, stiff about like divinity setting so quickly on the spoon, my favorite candy. We forced it through a grid we made out of welded wire fencing in a frame of two-by-fours, slicing off all the extrusions with sharp wire when they were eight inches out, and laying them carefully down to pierce with two holes. That part was cool. There were play-doh things like that, I heard about them from the other kids, since we didn’t have a television to poison our minds with mainstream culture’s commercialism. But this was real, those were just plastic. Then we had to fire them all. They never did turn out well air-dried. We made a scove kiln, where you piled the bricks up with holes and arches underneath, and lit fires under there, and covered the thing with mud to keep the heat in, feeding the fires for quite a while. It was fun, really. And then we laid them also, with the little kids mixing up the mortar, and the olders laying them, filling in the patterns of string and sections of plywood, and steel posts, all set according to the plan my godfather made. It was part of Duncanby Commune that even children could make real things. The grown-ups were impressed that we had it so right on.

But that wasn’t to say there was never hassle. People would get drunk and haul off and hit each other. This cat Jeb almost lost a tooth to my middle godfather and ended up hitchhiking away. Honestly the drinking was more trouble than anything, and I think that’s why my mom didn’t like the still. Stills can also blow up and kill a bunch of people and that’s no good. And even though growing a ton of weed was probably worse law-wise, there was a kind of old-timey feeling about being a bootlegger, that the feds were going to real-deal come and get us, and we should maybe buy tommy guns. I think we did have one or two machine guns already that had been converted to fully automatic, but not with that special round drum. Of course, we weren’t going to sell the liquor, just drink it, using the horses’ sweetfeed as the mash, to save money, and to not pay stamps and duties that would acknowledge the authority of a corrupt government. 

We did sell more things than just leather out of Duncanby Leather. If you paid enough for one of the elk-hide bags my mom designed it would have two nicely vacuum-sealed kilo bricks of dressed bud inside, and it was still a good deal. One of the older kids had explained this to me one time, and once I picked up on it I could see we were producing more than we could consume even in mad revels. Now that I was eleven I smoked a good bit myself, even though I wasn’t sure it made a difference to how I felt. Some kids said you never did feel it till you were thirteen and then it hit you like a truck. I stole one of my great-uncle’s surgical forceps, that the grown-ups used as roach holders. They were really where it was at, you could keep the tiniest thing going and have to close one eye against the smoke. It looked cool.

There wasn’t so much of a reason for us to have a vacuum sealer otherwise, once I thought about it. I had thought it was like putting up fruit in Ball jars. My aunt was a genius of canning, she could do any old thing like dilled green beans or persimmon or chowchow—and hers was spicy, too—or the best things, like concord grape jam, or figs in syrup. She had been well-known for it before she kind of dropped out and everybody made the Duncanby Commune. I guess they all dropped out together, but it was her place, her and my mom’s. Minus all the people that used to work there, that used to take care of them. They weren’t in the commune, but I saw them sometimes. Looking at photographs I had to say they took better care of the place than the grown-ups now, but maybe it did make a difference if you got paid, or they were just more experienced. A lot of our people were from Michigan or someplace and didn’t know their ass from their elbow, like Syl used to say.

Miz Letitia took care of my mother and aunt when they were little, so we used to go visit her sometimes, and bring pound cake or preserves or something nice. She lived just to the other side of the road from the back of the plantation. She laughed at me when I asked one time if any of our black neighbors might join Duncanby. Really laughed, so when she settled down she felt bad about it because she could see I was blushing and my eyes felt hot. She said she loved her girls but no one else could afford to be so stupid.

Really there was only one thing that could go wrong, that worried me, and that was us getting narced out and busted, all sent away for a long time. We had to pass the Issaquena Correctional Institution on the way to the leather store all the time. Not the kids, but they would probably send us to get adopted by cops to make us little narcs or something. The very tip-top boring books in the house were law books from my great grandfather, and after one hundred pages I suddenly read something I understood, and panicked, sitting up and getting tangled in the hammock on the sleeping porch upstairs. It seemed everyone could get swept up like leaves into a dustpan: criminal conspiracy. 

I tried to ask subtly how we knew the new people were good, and what if it were a put on, but I only got a lot of positive answers about vibes which started to get on my nerves. Finally, I just asked my godfather straight out how we would know if someone was a narc. He gave me a long look from his light brown eyes. They were like our old cat’s. Then he hugged me tight.

“Harriet, don’t you worry about that. I have it under control.” He pulled his head back and stared again until I looked up to meet his gaze. “I’m not going to let anybody hurt you, or your mother.”

This was a funny way to put it, just us two, but they had been friends since they were children. I did worry anyway, though, at night. Thinking back there had been fewer new people just lately, except for Dave. Dave seemed OK because he had a really cool speedboat and he always let people use it, he wasn’t stingy. He would take us kids out too, upriver, or across to a good fishing place. All the river would look different, the far bank from another angle, what seemed a gentle curve would be straight, the sun a wide strip of silver, everything opening up like shining paper, out and out and out. And he was good with the still, too. They had that running along nice. I had tried the ‘white lightning,’ but it was like drinking gasoline. The older kids liked it. Sometimes Dave would take the boat out and be gone a while, a good few days, but he always came back.

Then one night I decided to lie on the sleeping porch upstairs, because it was getting hot. And there was a huge argument going on, like what Enid Blyton would call a ‘blazing row.’ The Adventure Books were my favorite. Mostly it was Dave and my youngest godfather, but my mother was yelling too.

“I never signed up for this bullshit and it’s my goddamn plantation!” They all got quiet there because it was one of the rules of the commune that everybody owned it equally. But of course, it would be a world of trouble to amend the deed every minute and in real life it was just like always: my mom’s and her sister’s. And then this dude named Faro, who had always been kind of a bummer in my opinion, said,

“We’re not going to profit on the suffering of people who are slaves to hard drugs. This isn’t the Duncanby way! I’m leaving.” But then, it seemed like my godfather didn’t want him to leave. 

I snuck out to follow them. They locked him in the air-dried brick building, a little thing, as far away from everyone as they could. And then in a few hours we had breakfast like usual, hoecakes with cane syrup. The vibe was bad, like you bit ice and your teeth hurt. I could see Honey looking around from one face to another.

“Where’s Faro at?” My godfather shrugged, forcing an entire hoecake into his mouth, and gestured towards the space where the little gold Toyota usually was. I guess they had moved it. She stood up in one fluid movement, her shining hair falling down her back, and before you could turn around she was back at the edge of the porch with a revolver in her waistband, the Colt Paterson, which was actually mine.

“Hey—” 

“Hush, Harriet. This is serious. James?” She glared at my godfather, who did not waver at all. “Did he say something stupid?” To the outside eye he seemed like he was just shoveling hoecakes into his mouth, two, three, but I knew he was thinking. He stood up, such a big man, and brushed the crumbs from his union suit.

“Come on. Not y’all,” he held up his hand, so that only a chosen few went with him. We all waited. My mom made black cherry Kool-Aid which meant she was nervous, because we never ate packaged food like that unless she was nervous. Normally we made sun tea in lines of gallon jars on the back porch balustrade, with three kinds of mint, and lavender, and lemon verbena, and cinnamon sticks. Then we’d put rock sugar. It was called Duncanby Dew and people put bourbon in it. 

We heard them from down by the river, little cracks, sharp. Three. And then I could see my godfather walking back, with Dave, and Syl. Sue-Bird had gone down with Honey also, but they were nowhere to be seen, Arthur neither. My godfather seemed two ways at once, as if he were far away and up close: genuine cheer and merriment, and a greenish pallor on his red face. There was plenty of time until the store opened. So, we started some music, him on the fiddle, and this dude named Bill on the guitar, and my mother played the autoharp, we did some of the best, like “I Bid You Goodnight.” When I was really little I was afraid of the beast from the ending of the world who would eat all the children if they wouldn’t be good. I was sick to my stomach wondering. And then she grabbed me from behind, smelling like Johnson’s Baby Shampoo: Honey, fresh from the shower. Smiles. She pulled me very close to her and whispered in my ear,

“They were narcs. All three. But we’re safe now.”

And we were. My godfather explained later to the others that they had taken off, that Faro came back to pick them up once he rented a car in Grace, that they weren’t Duncanby Commune material. Eventually Dave went away and didn’t come back, and there could have been a lot of reasons. Even just regular going to the Florida Keys in a boat like that could be dangerous, and they always say smuggling is risky or you wouldn’t get so much money, and that’s why even though cocaine was normally expensive we were kind of self-sufficient in it. As I got older people fell away, so we were fewer, but there were still maybe thirty-five of us. Sometimes kids would come back to visit, and they had been going to government school, and I felt like they had been going to school on the moon. 

The grown-ups tried to hide it from us, but it was only logical, and why burn out the lime kiln in the middle of the night? Ashes is how you make quicklime; it would be a waste otherwise and it was part of the Duncanby way, “waste not, want not.” I stood for a minute over the clay mixture and wondered if I felt strange about it. It was a true hot day, mid-July hot but come at the start of June, the cicadas so loud like a turning wheel of life, the river opaque and glassy, still atop the swiftness. Sweat was gathering low on my back, in the invisible hairs you only see in sunlight, prickling. Beautiful heat, not ‘the heat’ come down. If that was the cost of everything, the fried fish, the music, all the new people, of my beautiful mother never going to jail—it wasn’t so bad. I plunged my hands into it, cool and grayish brown.