The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  The baby Jelena was taken to live with Sonora Ingledew and her four daughters, but when Hank came home from the war, and decided to go to California, he and Sonora discussed it and agreed that they had too many girls already, so they asked Hank’s brother Jackson, who was a bachelor, if he wouldn’t mind rearing the child, and Jackson said it was the least he could do. When the little girl was old enough to go to kindergarten, Jackson moved with her to Harrison, where she grew up, and became a beautiful woman, and is going to reappear significantly in the end of this saga. Like so many of the Ingledews, Jackson didn’t talk much, and unless he ever told it to her, which I doubt, she’s never heard this story.

  Chapter seventeen

  Southeast of Los Angeles, in neighboring Orange County, California, is the city of Anaheim; founded by Germans in the middle of the last Century, it was discovered early in this Century by a wandering Stay Moron, who was struck by the novelty of having an orange tree in one’s own front yard, from which one could help oneself when the oranges are ripe. He settled there, and from time to time wrote his various cousins back home in Stay More to tell them about the excellent winterless climate, high pay, and the fact of being able to pick an orange in one’s own front yard, in some cases the backyard too, and by the end of the war, the Second one, there were a dozen Stay Morons living in Anaheim, as well as several hundred persons from other places in the Ozarks, so that the atmosphere of Anaheim was distinctly Ozarkian although there was no topographic, climatic or architectural resemblance. (The illustration to the left is of a house not in Anaheim but in Stay More, and was not built until the end of this dreadful chapter.)

  People from the Ozarks transplanted to Anaheim still greeted one another with “Howdy” and dropped their “g’s” and periodically they observed “Old-timey Days,” particularly the Second Tuesday of the Month, and some of the men whittled, and some of the women held quilting bees, although all of the old-timey superstitions and remedies were forgotten, and there was no condemnation of PROG RESS, because PROG RESS was going on all around them: Anaheim was growing at a phenomenal rate, everybody was prospering. When John Henry Ingledew arrived with Sonora and his four daughters, the other Stay Morons gave them a big welcome party, because they were delighted to have at last a genuine Ingledew among them, since they already had a Dinsmore, a Whitter, a Duckworth, a Coe, a Chism, a Plowright, a Swain and a Stapleton.

  John Henry “Hank” Ingledew quickly found employment, at high pay, as an electronics technician for a huge canning factory, an operation that made Oren Duckworth’s snap and ’mater canning factory look like nothing to write home about. (The Duckworth factory did reopen for a few summers after the war, but the competition, most of it coming from California, killed it, and Duckworth too moved to Anaheim.) The factory Hank Ingledew worked for was automated, and his job was to service the electronic apparatus which automated it. Also he “moonlighted,” after hours, as a repairman of television sets, and made so much money that he and his family could afford to live in an opulent twelve-room “Spanish colonial” house (which will never be illustrated in any history of architecture). Sonora joined a women’s club, and the daughters went to good kindergartens and schools. Every weekend, if somebody’s TV set wasn’t in urgent need of repair, they all went to the beach, where Hank could stare at his ocean, or rather John Henry could, because as soon as he arrived in California he let it be known that he would prefer not to be addressed by the nickname of his Stay More boyhood, although it took Sonora a full two years to get out of the habit of calling him Hank, and even after two years she would sometimes forget herself, especially when she was being endearing, as she often was, unhampered by worry since a California gynecologist fitted her out with a diaphragm.

  But when her youngest daughter, Patricia, was old enough to leave home and go to kindergarten, Sonora found that her days were empty. She thought of getting a job, but John Henry pointed out to her that they already had more money than they knew what to do with. Sonora became addicted to daytime soap operas and quiz shows on television, and her days were long and lonely and repetitious. When she simply could not stand to watch the tube, she began to write long letters, to her mother and a few other chums back home in Stay More. She told them of all the things she did, and all the things she possessed, and how happy her daughters were, and how busy John Henry was. They replied with what little news Stay More yielded: deaths mostly, the changing of the seasons (which Sonora missed), drought, flood, a rare wedding, and Decoration Day at the cemetery.

  Without discussing it with John Henry, out of fear that he would say no, Sonora took to leaving her diaphragm in its case. She was, after all, only twenty-seven, and they could, after all, quite easily afford a large family, and there was always a chance, after all, that they might have a son. For three months Sonora went without her diaphragm, and took her husband into her at least every bedtime and often on waking, so that John Henry no longer had any enthusiasm for moonlighting, and gave up his sideline repair of television sets, with some loss of income, offset by an automatic generous raise at the automated canning factory.

  In the middle of the fourth month, it worked: Sonora knew the night she had conceived, and her days thereafter were still dull with television and an occasional women’s club meeting, but she no longer felt purposeless. She was five months pregnant before John Henry even noticed, and that was because she said “Ow” when his paunch was bearing down too hard upon her middle, whereupon he looked down between them and observed, “Hey, you’re gettin a potbelly too.” She just smiled, and he went on, “Unless…” He finished what they were doing, and then lay beside her and asked, “Have you not been wearin that thing?” She shook her head. He asked, “Wal, what was the sense in gettin it, then?” She shrugged her shoulders. John Henry did not get angry. He concluded, “Well, it durn well better be a boy, this time.” Not only was he well aware of the heavy responsibility he carried to perpetuate the Ingledew name, but also his daughters were spoiled and they were all over the place. He was constantly tripping on their toys, and constantly bringing home more toys for them to leave for him to trip on. And when all four of the girls were gathered around their mother, gossiping away like some gabby hen party, John Henry felt excluded from his family.

  He missed males. He missed his uncles and his father and his brother. Twice a year, on the average, the Stay Morons of Anaheim would get together with the other Ozarkers of Anaheim for an Old-timey Day, where the women would load tables with platters of fried chicken and ’mater dishes and every manner of pie and cake, and the men would congregate to themselves to swap remembered hunting and fishing yarns, or to attempt to remember and relate the old jokes, although nobody was very good at it. These bull sessions always wound up with each of the men declaring fervently that, while, yes, he shore missed them ole Ozarks and shore aimed to git back fer a visit one of these days, it was frankly obvious that after all has been said and done, in this day and age California is the place to be endowed with this world’s goods and to feel well repaid for our efforts and to entertain high hopes of enjoying the finer side of life or even be cradled in luxury or at least live the even tenor of one’s ways to the heart’s content.

  John Henry thought these men seemed a little bit runny around the edges. He had grown up with some of the men, and they seemed to have changed. Maybe, he realized, he was runny around the edges himself, and didn’t know it. He touched his potbelly and noticed that the other men had potbellies too. He ought to walk more, he decided, but there weren’t many sidewalks in Anaheim outside of downtown, and pedestrians on the roads were stared at by drivers as if they were in trouble. John Henry had taken a long walk, once, and seventeen cars had stopped and offered him a ride. Dogs had barked and howled at him. Children had stared and pointed. A housewife had come out of her house and offered him the use of her telephone, and when he had said he was just walking for exercise, she had invited him into her house for a beer, and after he had finished it she had opened her housecoa
t revealing nothing underneath and had thrown herself upon him, and he had marveled at the novelty of fucking an absolute stranger, but he hadn’t gone for any more walks since then.

  He told himself that he would make up for it whenever they went back to Stay More for a visit. He promised himself that if they went back to Stay More for a visit he would walk up and down every road in Newton County. But every year, when his two-week vacation came, they went to Yosemite or Grand Canyon or San Francisco or down into Mexico. There were a few Stay Morons in Anaheim who went back for a visit, and returned to report that Stay More was dying and just about gone, and this saddened John Henry and Sonora, who told themselves and each other that this was the reason they didn’t want to go back, but they both knew, without telling each other, that the real reason was that if they ever did go back to Stay More they would not be able to leave it. Few if any of the Stay Morons in Anaheim remembered the curse that Jacob Ingledew had placed on any Stay Moron who would leave it to go west, but one by one the Stay Morons in Anaheim began to experience calamities and misfortunes: one was killed in a freeway crash, one died of lung cancer, one was wiped out at a Las Vegas crap table, one was mangled in the machinery of a factory, one drowned in the surf of the Pacific, one was murdered by a jealous husband, one choked to death on an orange, and so on. Nothing ever happened to John Henry, but he kept wondering if something would.

  During her fifth pregnancy, Sonora put on an exceptional amount of extra weight, so that toward the end of the pregnancy she felt that she was fat and gross and ugly and could not understand why John Henry would want to keep making love to her, so she stopped him from it. It was a bad time to do such a thing, because there was a girl, one of the secretaries at the factory where John Henry worked, who had been flirting with John Henry for a long time although she too was married. They sometimes had a cocktail together after work at a lounge near the factory, and during one of these meetings he revealed to the secretary that his wife was no longer permitting him to have relations with her. “Call her and tell her you have to work late,” the secretary suggested. He did, and the secretary likewise called her husband and told him the boss was keeping her overtime, and then they got into the secretary’s convertible and drove up into the hills, and walked into a dense grove of orange trees and lay down on the ground and spent an hour doing it and redoing it with variations, and that was the beginning of their affair.

  The secretary told John Henry that he had shown her what sex could really be like. She was always flattering him. Sometimes they would lie around tired after doing it and she would take his part in her hands and admire it, making original complimentary remarks about it. On weekends, the secretary’s husband, who was an ardent sports fan, often went off to a ball game, leaving his wife alone, or, now, alone with John Henry, so that they did not have to lie upon the hard ground but on a soft bed, soft rug, soft sofa, or standing up together in the shower.

  It was on one of these Saturdays that Sonora went into labor. She didn’t know how to find John Henry; he had told her he was going to some ball game. She phoned for a taxicab to take her to the hospital, and decided that her oldest girl, Latha, who was nearly ten, could baby-sit. John Henry came home from his tryst to find Latha trying to break up a fight among her younger sisters, who were wrecking the house. He found a teenaged baby-sitter for the four of them, and went off to the hospital, where Sonora was in her room napping after the delivery. He did not wake her, but went to the glass wall to view the baby. There were many of them. He asked a passing nurse, “Which’un’s mine? Ingledew’s the name.” The nurse pointed, to the second row. John Henry couldn’t see the baby very clearly, but he noticed that each bassinet had a card affixed to it, some of the cards were trimmed in blue and some in pink, and the bassinet the nurse was pointing at had a pink-edged card on it. “Shit,” said John Henry. “Oh, shit.” The nurse gave him a distasteful look and walked away. He found another nurse and told her that when his wife woke up to tell her that he had come and seen the baby and would come back tomorrow. Then he telephoned the secretary’s house, but her husband answered, so he hung up, and went out to a cocktail lounge and got drunk, and came home in the wee hours of the morning to find the baby-sitter’s irate parents taking her place and asking him if he didn’t have any idea of what time it was, and if he didn’t have the common sense to let the sitter know where he could be reached. When he got rid of them he fell into bed, and had no dreams until well after daylight, when he had dreams of Stay More alternating with dreams of running off to Mexico with the secretary.

  It was almost noon when he woke, and found that his daughters had tried to prepare a breakfast for him, but had burned the coffee and overcooked the eggs. “Girls! Girls! Girls! Girls! Girls! Girls!” he said, and the smaller ones began to cry. “Aw, cut it out, and let’s all go out to Howard Johnson’s for breakfast,” he suggested. They told him that they had had their breakfast at breakfasttime and it was almost lunchtime. So he took them out to eat their lunch while he had his breakfast, and then, because children aren’t allowed in maternity wards, he had them stay in the car reading comic books while he went into the hospital. He kissed Sonora on her forehead, and she took his hand and held it and said “Poor Hank,” then looked at him apologetically.

  “Wal,” he observed philosophically, “it don’t look like there’s going to be any more Ingledews.”

  “This one’s the prettiest of them all,” Sonora declared. “Wait till you see her.”

  They named the fifth daughter Sharon and she did indeed grow up to be the prettiest of them all, although they were all pretty. John Henry decided that he had better go back to repairing television sets on the side, and save his money in order to be able to pay for five fancy weddings eventually. When he met the secretary at the cocktail lounge after work on Monday, he remarked, not facetiously, “Maybe if I was married to you, I’d have a boy.” The secretary shook her head, telling him that she didn’t want to have any children. That struck John Henry as peculiar; he had never heard of a woman who didn’t want to have children. “How come?” he asked. She explained that she liked sex so much that she didn’t want to spoil it by having children. That struck John Henry as ironic: to refrain from procreation for the sake of enjoying the procreative process. The secretary asked, “Do you want to marry me?” He said he had given it a thought or two. She laughed and held his hand and told him to hurry and finish his drink so they could drive up into the hills, but he said not this evening, because he had decided to return to the nocturnal repairing of television sets as an extra source of income, to finance his many daughters’ eventual weddings. “I didn’t know you could fix TV’s,” she said. “Come and fix ours. You can meet my husband.” So that night, on his rounds, he stopped by the secretary’s house in the guise of repairman, and met her husband. He was a tall fellow, but not as tall as John Henry. Sure enough, the television set needed a new tube.

  The husband didn’t pay much attention while John Henry replaced the tube, and when it was finished the husband just took out his wallet and said “How much?” The secretary said, “I think that other one up in the bedroom has something wrong with the channel selector. Come on, I’ll show you.” She took him up to the bedroom and closed the door and giggled and unzipped his pants and knelt before him. Soon they were doing a sixty-nine on the bed, with John Henry on the bottom, when the door opened and the husband came in and said, “Well, well, this is interesting. But don’t let me interrupt you.” John Henry tried to get up, but he was on the bottom, and the secretary whispered to him “I think he means it,” and she went on doing him until she had finished him off. John Henry wasn’t worrying about getting beaten up afterwards, not by that guy, but maybe the fellow had a pistol somewhere. When the secretary had finished him, the husband remarked, “Lovely. Doesn’t she give wonderful head?” and then went out and back downstairs.

  John Henry asked the secretary if her husband had a gun, and she said not that she knew of. He checked the bedroom’s
television set; there was nothing wrong with it. He went downstairs, where he found the husband mixing drinks, and offering him a glass. John Henry’s drink was Scotch, whereas he preferred bourbon, but he didn’t quibble. They sipped their drinks, and the secretary introduced them, saying, “This is John Henry Ingledew. He’s in charge of electronics at the plant, but he repairs televisions on his own.” “Glad to meet you, Jack,” said the husband. “How’s your wife?” “She’s fine,” John Henry replied. “Just had a baby.” “I mean,” said the husband, “how is she at giving head?” “Oh, pretty good, I guess,” John Henry said uncomfortably, feeling that his privacy was being twice invaded. “Would she give it to me?” the husband asked. “Now, look here…” John Henry said, getting angry. He didn’t have to listen to this. He would just as soon bash in the guy’s face for him. “Turn about is fair play,” the husband insisted, “don’t you think?” “You don’t even know my wife,” John Henry pointed out. “No, but wouldn’t it be easy to get to know her? Let’s have a party.” “No, thanks. I’m too busy,” John Henry said, and he set down his unfinished drink and went out the door and got into his van and went on to the next house that needed its television set repaired. The lone occupant of this house was a woman who said her husband was out playing cards and told him the bedroom television set also needed repairs. “No thanks, lady,” he said, and got away from there.

  He avoided the secretary thereafter, but after he had been avoiding her for several weeks she came into the electronics shop at the factory at the end of the day and said, “Couldn’t we have a drink and a little talk, like old times?” He gave in, and took her to the cocktail lounge again. When their drinks were before them, the secretary began, “After all, these are modern times we are living in,” and she proceeded to elaborate an argument in favor of free love. She loved having sex with him, she said, and she had been missing it terribly these past few weeks, and she was awfully glad to know that her husband actually didn’t mind, one teensy bit. “But he wants me to return him the favor,” John Henry said. “And you honestly can’t?” the secretary wanted to know. “I don’t think so,” he said. “At least, I sure as hell wouldn’t care to watch.”