The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  Sonora’s conception was quick; the new infant would be born less than ten months after the first one. That summer Sonora went to work in the canning factory, to earn money for a second layette. Sonora parked her baby in the “baby-trough” at the canning factory, which was one of the former cow cribs reserved for the babies of the women who sat around the cleaning-trough snapping snaps and peeling ’maters. The several babies did not socialize much; mainly they lay or sat watching their mothers snapping snaps or peeling ’maters and wondering what in the name of heaven was going on, all day long. At night Sonora protested to Hank that she was simply too tired to make love, much as she wanted to, and her refraining from it overloaded Hank with new reserves of life, so that he was compelled to work harder, and even began clearing some new land, the first time that that had been done in Stay More for ages and ages. As a result of this labor, he was waylaid with a severe case of the frakes. His mother, Emelda, attempted to administer the old but unproven remedies, but he would not let her, because, although he had no interest in superstitions, folklore nor old-timey ways in general, he had at least heard that there was really no earthly cure for the frakes. Sonora’s old high school chum who clerked in the Jasper drugstore furnished an ointment containing acth, and this, although it didn’t cure Hank’s frakes, was at least as effective as the panther urine ointment had been a century before, which is to say, it was worthless. Hank took to his bed and waited in agony for the itching to stop, and then gave himself up to the deep feeling of utter futility that came afterward. When news of the birth of his second child reached his bed, he remarked, “I don’t give a shit what it is.”

  It was another girl. Sonora solicited his help in naming it, but he said she could name it Eulalee Wilhelmina for all he cared. Sonora named it simply Eva. She pointed out to Hank that while all of his siblings were male and all of his many uncles were male, this was no guarantee that his children would be male, because, after all, her mother’s siblings had been female, and there had been a lot of females in her father’s lineage. Hank said he didn’t care. He really didn’t. He would just as soon have girls as boys, or neither. He would just as soon have nothing. He didn’t give a damn. It was all the same to him, one way or the other. He could straddle the fence and leave well enough alone. In fact, he could leave everything alone and didn’t feel like making the effort to straddle the fence, even. Nothing mattered. It made him no difference whatever.

  Hank’s case of the frakes was one of the worst. In the winter, beneath their heavy quilts, Sonora would cuddle up to him and try to warm him, but he would not be warmed. She was scared, because she had grown up in the city and had never seen anyone get the frakes before. She told him that she loved him, and that therefore she loved his frakes too, but he did not even bother to reply. He couldn’t care less. Sonora’s mother counseled her that she would just have to wait and be patient. “How long? Oh, Mother, how long?” Sonora wailed. But her mother could only say that nobody ever knew.

  Then the world went to war again. This time, the Stay More town meeting lasted for a little longer than the three-and-a-half-minute discussion of the previous war, but not much: the general consensus was that if this feller Hitler wanted Europe, why shouldn’t he have it? But he was also trying to get England, and that was where our foreparents came from, and we oughtn’t to let him have that, so we ought to at least help the British hang on to their lands. Several Stay More boys went off and joined the service. Sonora hoped that maybe the war would rouse Hank from his lethargy and despondency. It did not.

  But then some yellow people who lived halfway around the world sent their ships and planes to a place called Pearl that was part of America even though it was out in the middle of the ocean, and bombed hell out of it. That was going too far. Hank got out of bed, dressed, kissed his wife and babies goodbye, and said so long to his parents and brothers and uncles, and went off to join the service. He didn’t know which branch of the service to join. The Army offered to teach him a trade, and the Marines offered to make a real man out of him, but he kept thinking of Pearl, which was way out in the ocean, and he decided the best way to get to it would be the Navy. So he joined it, and after basic training they let him come home for a little while to show off his uniform and get his picture in the Disaster and impregnate Sonora again. Then they sent him to a school where they taught him how to take apart and repair and put together radio equipment. There was hardly any trace of his frakes remaining, so he studied hard, and by the time he was shipped to sea he could write to Sonora and tell her that he was “Semen First Class,” to which she replied, “You sure are, honey.”

  He was the first Stay Moron ever to see the sea. His ship went all over the ocean, but it didn’t go to Pearl. Because the enemy commenced shooting at and trying to bomb his ship, they raised his pay, and he didn’t have anything to spend it on, so he sent most all of it home, and Sonora and her babies were able to live a good life. Hank was so good at patching up and operating radios that he was transferred to a bigger ship, and promoted to petty officer. He survived the sinkings of two destroyers, a battleship, and an aircraft carrier, and by then he was a master chief petty officer (and also the father of a third daughter, Janice). Eventually they shipped him back stateside for shore leave, and once again he came home to show off his uniform and to attempt once again to create Eli Willard Ingledew.

  The Jasper Disaster took his portrait and printed it on their front page, and noted that he was eligible for commission as ensign. Hank was saddened to learn that some of his childhood friends had been killed in France and on the beaches of the Pacific. His brothers Jackson and Tracy had been drafted and were fighting in Europe, and his youngest brother William Robert (“Billy Bob”) would have been drafted, except that he was the last son in the family, and there was a law against it.

  There were very few young men in Stay More; in the previous war there had been very few young men out of Stay More. The canning factory was no longer operating, on account of a shortage of tin, but the women and boys and old men went on harvesting the snap crop and ’mater crop and canning it in re-used Mason jars. The war was good for Stay More in the sense that all its young men fighting overseas sent most of their paychecks home, and there was so much mail from them and to them that the post office was permitted to reopen for the duration of the war, and of course both general stores did a fair business. Odell Ingledew even thought of reopening his father’s bank, but Tearle talked him out of it, saying that the war was only a temporary thing and would probably be over before Odell could install a new floor and replace the busted-out winder lights, not to mention the vault door that had been ripped off and gone God knows where.

  Hank returned to the Pacific with the rank of ensign, and his ships began invading islands and atolls all over the place. He himself never fired a gun, nor killed an enemy, but his expertise with radio helped conquer the foe, and by the time of the invasion of Iwo Jima his rank was captain, in charge of all the radio operations of his entire fleet. The officers and enlisted men under his command still referred to him as “Rube” behind his back, and did bad imitations of his country accent, but they respected him and never gave him any trouble. In the invasion of Iwo Jima, another Stay More boy, Gerald Coe, who had been a boyhood friend of Hank’s, made a heroic charge of a machine gun nest that was instrumental in taking the island, but was killed in the process, and posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. There is a bronze plaque in his memory in a hallway of Jasper High School. When the war ended after the surrender of the enemy, Hank was promoted to commodore and offered a stateside desk job, but he wasn’t interested, and came home to Stay More just in time for the birth of his fourth daughter, Patricia.

  He didn’t hold it against Sonora, but he somehow felt that it cast aspersions on his manhood that he had been unable to produce a son. It was hard for him to hold his head up in Stay More. Also, there wasn’t much use in Stay More for a highly trained electronics technician. Stay More didn’t even h
ave electricity yet. Also, Swains Creek and Banty Creek put together weren’t much water compared with the ocean. Hank dreamed, nearly every night, of that ocean. Finally he could stand it no longer, and said to Sonora:

  “Let’s go to California.”

  “Anytime,” she replied, thinking he only meant to show her the place. She did not know the story of Benjamin Ingledew, who had tried to go to California and got as far as Mountain Meadows. Nor did she know of the curse that Jacob Ingledew had placed on any Stay Moron who dared try it again.

  When they left for California, Hank had forgotten about the gold chronometer wristwatch. Perhaps he had even forgotten where he had buried it.

  Chapter sixteen

  During the war there came to maturity, in Stay More, two twin sisters, Jelena and Doris Dinsmore, who were destined to intrude, indirectly, into the Ingledew saga. It was Bevis Ingledew who first referred to them as “the Siamese twins.” Those listening to him didn’t know what that meant, but he could remember being taken as a child to the St. Louis World’s Fair, where he had seen a pair of Siamese twins in a sideshow. So when Bevis started joking in his high-spirited fashion about Jelena and Doris Dinsmore as the Siamese twins, the rest of the Stay Morons picked up the habit.

  Jelena and Doris (their full names were Jelena Cloris and Helena Doris, but this confused their mother when she was yelling at them) were inseparable, not physically, but in all other ways. One was never seen without the other. Never. The men loafing and joking on the store porch had a ready mine of mirth in the inseparability of the Dinsmore sisters, speculating, for instance, that the two girls probably “went out back” together too, since it was known that the Dinsmore outhouse, though primitive and airy, was a two-holer. Although they were twins, there was a very slight difference between them, which gave rise to rumors that their fathers had not both been Jake Dinsmore, who, when the sisters were five years old, had gone out to California looking for a job, and had never returned, abandoning a family of fourteen children to a mother who did her poor best to feed them.

  The mother’s name was Selena—her father had named her that because he had been an admirer of Salina Ingledew but didn’t know how to spell. Selena Dinsmore had first noticed the closeness of Jelena and Doris when they were infants: she had only one crib, and the two girls began very early the practice they would continue for the rest of their lives: sleeping in the same bed. Their mother nursed them together one to a breast, a not very difficult balancing act to those who saw her doing it. As soon as they were old enough to sit up and eat at the table with the other children, they always made certain that their chairs were side-by-side and their identical chipped bowls contained the same amount of gruel. From the first through the eighth and last grades, the two sisters shared the same desk, and the teacher of those years, Estalee Jerram, could scarcely ever tell them apart and was always calling upon one of them by the other’s name. The difficulty was compounded because Jelena and Doris insisted that their mother sew their clothes from identical patterns of flour-sack gingham and calico. If one of them was punished in school for some infraction of the rules, the other would insist that Miss Jerram mete the same punishment to her. If one of them was hurt and cried, the other’s tears were no less profound. They had few friends and seemed to need none.

  The men who loafed on the store porch and made joking allusions to “the Siamese twins” began to speculate jokingly about what was going to happen now that the sisters were growing up and filling out. There were not, to anyone’s knowledge, two brothers anywhere hereabouts who were sufficiently twinned themselves to make a proper match for Jelena and Doris. But that was not what Jelena and Doris had in mind anyway, it seemed. What they had in mind became apparent at the first play-party they attended, Etta Whitter’s birthday celebration, where the games played were “Marching ’round the Levee,” “Build the Bridge,” “Post Office,” and “Snap.” All of these were kissing games, and whichever boy kissed Jelena had to kiss Doris too. Some of these games involved being “it,” and whenever Jelena was “it,” Doris would also be “it” at the same time, which some of the others felt was unfair in the running and catching games, because it made the sisters doubly quicker to catch when they were “it.” Usually, when they were caught by the boy who was “it,” they would both kiss him at the same time, Jelena on the right cheek, Doris on the left. The men on the store porch, hearing about the party afterward, made jokes about what was going to happen when Jelena and Doris were old enough to start going to square dances. As a matter of fact, the sisters did nearly wreck the first square dance they attended. Tobe Chism, the caller, had to stop the music and take the girls aside and try to explain to them that it is simply impossible for two girls to square dance with the same partner at the same time. When he was unable to persuade them to take turns, one doing one dance and one the next, he at least worked it out so that they wouldn’t both be moving with the partner at the same time, although this didn’t work too well either because Jelena or Doris or both would be inclined to forget to stand still and let the other do the moving. Folks were laughing at them so, they finally walked home together and didn’t go to any more of those romps.

  They decided to get religion, because religion held that any kind of dancing was sinful, and even frowned upon the play-parties, because kissing was involved. On the next rare Sunday when a passing evangelist came to Stay More to give a meeting and baptism, the sisters offered themselves up for salvation, but when the congregation gathered at the creek for the baptizing, the revivalist discovered that the sisters wished to be baptized simultaneously. He argued that they ought to be baptized in the order of their birth, Jelena going first, but they refused. He protested that he didn’t think he was stout enough to submerse them both at the same time.

  “You got two hands, ain’t ye?” Jelena observed.

  “Yeah,” said the minister, “but generally I clamp one of ’em on yore face to keep the water out of yore nose and mouth.”

  “We kin clamp our own faces,” declared Doris.

  So the baptist, after studying and pantomiming the possibilities for a while, standing with his legs spread wide in the waist-deep water, had the girls face one another, and put one of his hands on the back of each, and lowered Jelena to his right and Doris to his left into the water. But to get them both completely under in this position required him to go under too, and there was no sign of any of them for a long moment; then the man’s head emerged, his hair plastered and his spectacles all wet, struggling mightily to get both girls back out of the water.

  The men on the store porch got a lot of mileage out of that story, and began to make jokes about what would happen when Jelena and Doris were old enough to receive their first caller.

  Although most of the old-timey ways were forgotten or unused, courtship was still formal and old-fashioned. Couples, especially those who had got religion, did not go off on “dates”; a respectable girl would never find herself alone with a young fellow before marriage, which was why Sonora Twichell’s premarital conduct with Hank Ingledew had scandalized a small segment of the population. For proper folks, the suitor or swain, if he had matrimony in prospect, would call at the girl’s house, be invited to spend the night, and have the privilege of staying up late and talking with his intended after the others had gone to bed—in the same room, usually within earshot of anyone who could not, or did not want to, sleep.

  The Dinsmore hovel (there is no other name for it), shown in our illustration, is perhaps typical of lower class dwellings built throughout the “Hoover” years when “things was so bad we’uns jist stood around lookin at one another and wonderin who to eat next.” In fact, it was built during the Roosevelt administration, but it still represents the decline of architecture in the Ozarks. It had but two rooms, and when Mont Duckworth, son of the canning factory owner, came to court Jelena, he would sleep in one room, in a bed with three of her brothers, Willard (named after some peddler), Tilbert and Baby Jim. In the other room he woul
d do his courting while Mrs. Dinsmore slept with Ella Jean, Norma and—Mont hoped—Doris. But Doris, and Jelena too, could not conceive that anyone would court one of them without the other. Thus, when the others had gone to bed, Mont found himself sitting in front of the woodstove, Jelena on one side, Doris on the other.

  “Well, uh…” Mont began. He had heard some of the jokes that the men on the store porch had made. If he had listened well enough, he could have remembered what they had suggested that he say or do in a situation like this, but he could not. To help his nervousness, he bit off a chaw of tobacco and began chewing. From time to time he would make some idle talk such as: “Right airish tonight, aint it?” and from time to time he would spit accurately into the open door of the stove. Doris and Jelena would both smile and make dove’s eyes at him. After midnight, when the fire in the stove was almost out and no move had been made to rekindle it, Mont announced, “Well, uh, reckon I’d best turn in,” and he went and slept with their brothers and departed early on the dawn.

  The men on the store porch made jokes at the expense of Mont as well as Doris and Jelena. But one of the younger of them, Boden Whitter, declared, “By God, ole Mont aint got the melt to spark them gals proper, but I kin shore give it a try.” Boden Whitter did not report back to the men on the store porch about the outcome of his attempt, but word got around anyway, and Boden became no less a victim of the men’s jokes than Mont had been. It seems that at one point during the evening he had suggested to Jelena, “Well, honey, you keer to traipse out fer a look at the moon, or somethin?” and Jelena said she didn’t mind, and rose, and went out, but Doris was right on her heels. Boden followed, trying politely to get them to take turns, but Jelena said, “It’s jist as much her moon as it is mine.” Boden sat down on a big rock, and the sisters sat on either side of him; by and by he put an arm around each of them, and a little later he started in to kissing Jelena, but then he had to kiss Doris too. The kisses got longer and harder and Boden began to think he could talk Jelena into lying down, but then he realized that Doris would be watching or, worse, lying down beside Jelena, and he began to doubt if he could do anything if he was being watched, and in any case he might be expected to do Doris too, and he wasn’t at all certain that he could. The more he thought about it all, the less sure and more nervous he became, and finally he gave it up.