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 wou
ld, 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 Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2 Page 120
