He had tried to imagine what it would be like, watching Sonora going down on the secretary’s husband, and he couldn’t even get the picture in focus. “He wouldn’t insist on that,” the secretary assured him. “I just don’t like the whole idea!” John Henry said so loudly that several other customers in the bar turned to stare at him. “Well,” the secretary concluded, “we’re giving a party Saturday night. Would you consider coming to that? It wouldn’t be just the four of us. There will be a lot of other couples there.” “I’ll think about it,” John Henry told her, and for the rest of the week he thought about it. He didn’t want to go, and he wondered what kind of party it would be, whether they would play games or even start fooling around. But Sonora was depressed lately, as she always was several weeks after the birth of a baby, and he thought it might do her good to get out of the house and meet people and have some good clean fun or even some good unclean fun if that was what it was all about. These are modern times we are living in, he kept remembering, over and over. So he said to Sonora, How would you like to go to a party? and when she said whose? he said some people at the factory were giving it. She didn’t have anything to wear, because she was still overweight and didn’t have her figure back, but he offered to buy her a new dress and she was dying to get out of the house for an evening, so she gave in, and they went to the party at the secretary’s and her husband’s house.
It was not a wild party. There was plenty of drinking, but no fooling around. The secretary’s husband complimented John Henry on his wife’s beauty, but he made no passes at her. Sonora seemed to be enjoying herself. Several men made decorous small talk with her, and one man flirted with her, but nobody laid a hand on her. Occasionally a couple would disappear upstairs for a while, but all in all it was a warm and sociable occasion, and John Henry thanked the secretary’s husband for inviting them. On the way home, Sonora, who was tipsy, babbled on about what a good time she had had, and in bed that night she was exceptionally passionate and adventurous. Just two days later, one of the men they had met at the party phoned and invited them to another party the very next weekend. The secretary and her husband were also at the second party, but there were a lot of people who had not been at the first, and the Ingledews broadened their circle of acquaintances. Toward the end of the party, Sonora was deep in conversation with two men on the sofa, and did not notice when the secretary came and took John Henry’s hand and led him off to a bedroom.
When the Ingledews got home that night and went to bed, John Henry wasn’t in the mood, and Sonora accused him of drinking too much. As they were dressing for the third party the following Saturday, she made him promise not to drink so much. At the party, he told the secretary, “Look, let’s do it early so I’ll have time to recuperate before bedtime.” Sonora lost interest in the man she was talking to, and noticed John Henry was missing. When he reappeared, she asked, “Where did you go?” He replied, “I was out in the kitchen, talking to some guys.”
Later in the evening, Sonora found herself in conversation with the secretary’s husband, who kept refilling her drink until she was too tipsy too early. She had made John Henry promise not to drink so much and now here she herself was drinking too much. She liked the secretary’s husband, and thought he was witty. Every time he finished a joke he would lean down and kiss her underneath her ear. One time when he did that, he whispered in her ear, “Let’s get some fresh air.” The room was stuffy with cigarette smoke, and also hot, and she thought they could continue their conversation out on the porch, so she stepped outside with him. There weren’t any chairs on the porch. “Let’s sit in my car,” the man suggested. They sat in the car. The man put his arm around her, but she brushed it off. He put it around her again, and she was too tipsy to bother brushing it off again. She didn’t care. After a while he took one of her hands and placed it on his groin and she felt him swell; she tried to take her hand away but he held it there. “Let me go,” she protested. He whispered in her ear, “I’ll let you go if you’ll kiss it a while.” She slapped him, hard, and got out of the car and returned to the party, where she found Hank and apologized to him for having drunk so much and asked to go home.
At the next party, she avoided the secretary’s husband. But late in the evening everybody started taking their clothes off, declaring they were going to have an orgy. John Henry and Sonora argued; she wanted to go, he wanted to stay. She left, saying he could get somebody else to drive him home. After the orgy, which John Henry didn’t particularly enjoy, the secretary and her husband drove him home. “You ought to have a talk with that girl,” the secretary’s husband told him. Sonora was in bed, but she turned on the light when he came in, and they had a talk. It was quite a talk. Sonora began by demanding to know if he had had sex at the orgy, and when he told her that was the point of the whole thing, she was furious. “Do you think I would ever do a thing like that?” she demanded. “You’d have to get used to it, gradually,” he said. “You think I would?” she said. “Would you want me to?” “I don’t know,” he admitted, but allowed, “I guess if I was doing it I couldn’t object if you were.” “Oh ho!” she said. “Did you know that that man, that…what’s his name…the husband of one of the secretaries at your plant…when we were at the last party he somehow talked me into sitting in his car with him, and then he tried to get me to give him a blow job! Would you have let me give him a blow job?” John Henry did not answer, because he had still not settled the question in his own mind. In order for him to settle the question, he would have to permit himself to visualize the act, and he was unable to get the picture in focus. The tube was blown. “Would you?” she persisted. At length he admitted, “I honestly don’t know. His wife has done it to me. With him watching.”
Sonora began beating at him with her fists, yelling “Get out! Get out of here! Get out of here and don’t ever come back!” He resisted, but her fists drove him out of the bedroom and down the hall and down the stairs and out the front door and down the steps. He spent the night in a motel, and returned to his house the following day. She wouldn’t let him in. He protested that all his clothes and things were in the house. She began dumping his clothes and things out the window. “Sonora, for crying out loud!” he complained, but she continued throwing his effects out of the house, until there was nothing of his remaining in the house and the front yard was littered and the neighbors were standing on their porches watching and whispering as John Henry loaded all his effects into his van and drove to the motel.
After a week he returned to his house and rang the doorbell and then pounded on the door and hollered, “Sonora, at least let me say goodbye to the girls!” But she would not open the door. He lived in the motel for another two weeks, and called her every day on the telephone, but as soon as she recognized his voice she would hang up. He tried to write her a letter, but got as far as “Dear Sonora,” which caused him to remember the first letter he had ever sent her, and made him sad, but he mailed these two words to her anyway, with the return address of his motel; there was no reply.
Of course, he went to no more parties, and when the secretary came into his electronics shop to find out why he was avoiding her, before she could get a word out of her mouth he said, “Just skip it. Just git the hell out of here and don’t bother me anymore,” and the tone with which he said these words was such that she left him alone and he never saw her again. After work Friday he drew his paycheck and got it cashed and checked out of the motel, and wrote Sonora one more note: “Dear Sonora: I’m going home. Going home. Love, Hank.” He mailed this, and pointed his van eastward and drove all night across the desert and up into the mountains and beyond. He parked and napped beside the road a couple of brief times, and kept moving; on the morning of the third day he reached Fort Smith, Arkansas, and turned northeastward toward home.
On the road from Jasper to Stay More he noticed an abandoned house. And then another one. Parthenon was all run down. At the church/schoolhouse outside Stay More he stopped and got out and wal
ked for a while among the headstones in the cemetery: a dozen Ingledews, many Swains and Plowrights and Coes and Dinsmores and Chisms and Duckworths and Stapletons. He drove on into the village. There was no village. His mother-in-law’s small general store seemed to be still in operation; at least its front door was open, but he did not stop to speak to her. The bank was a shell of stone. The dentists’ and doctors’ offices were empty or gone. The mill was rotting and seemed as if it would collapse any moment. Aunt Lola’s big general store was boarded up, its gasoline pump immobile with rust. The canning factory was stuffed with bales of hay. Someone seemed to be still living in the old hotel, but he did not stop. He drove on to his folks’ house and was almost surprised to find it lived in. His mother and father stared at his van as if it had come from the moon, and read the lettering on the door: “Ingledew Television Service, Anaheim, Calif. 433-8991.” To his father and mother, he said simply that Sonora had kicked him out of the house and it was purely his own fault because he had been fooling around, but he was awful glad to come back to Stay More because he never cared much for California anyway.
After his mother fed him dinner, he left his van at their house and went for a long walk, to start getting rid of his potbelly. The walk took him past many more abandoned houses; he tried to remember the names of the people who had lived in them. The ones he could remember all lived, if they still lived, in Anaheim or Fullerton or other California towns. But while the human habitations were abandoned, nature was not, and nature welcomed Hank back to Stay More: the air was nice and had a fragrance that he had never found anywhere out west. The smell of weeds that he had taken for granted all his life was a new perfume for him. A car stopped beside him and its driver said “If it aint ole Hank! Git in, Hank. No sense walkin,” and Hank was obliged to explain that he was walking for exercise and then to offer some reasonable explanation for why he had come back from California.
During his long walk, which lasted most of the afternoon, seventeen cars stopped and offered him a ride, and each time he had to explain why he had come back from California. One of the drivers said, “I heared that Snory and the gals didn’t come with ye,” and Hank, remembering that news travels fast in the backbrush, said “Naw, but they’ll be along, directly.” “You and Snory busted up?” another driver asked, and Hank replied, “Jist fer a little spell.” His walk took him in a roundabout way almost to Jasper, and walking back from Jasper on the main road he remembered that the last time he had traveled this road on foot he was only ten years old and was accompanied by the World’s Oldest Man, who had died after giving Hank a gold chronometer wristwatch for his son and telling him the whole story of his many visits to Stay More. Hank could still remember most of the story, but damned if he could remember where he had buried that wristwatch. It didn’t matter. He had no son to give it to.
Hank hoped to avoid explanations to his mother-in-law, but when he walked into Stay More she was sitting in her rocker on the porch of her store, and he couldn’t very well just walk on past her. So he stopped and sat on a porch chair and told her that her daughter had evicted him because he had foolishly “been with” another woman, but he hoped that time would heal all wounds, and that Sonora would bring the girls and come back to Stay More to live, because as far as he was concerned he wasn’t ever going to leave Stay More again. His mother-in-law said she was very glad to hear that, and she hoped that Sonora would forgive him and come home too. They chatted a while longer about other things, and then the subject came up of Hank’s regret over having fathered no son. His mother-in-law laughed, and she, who probably knew more about the old-timey ways than anybody else in Stay More, told him of an old tried-and-true superstition that had never been known to fail: if a husband sits on the roof of his house near the chimney for seven hours his next child will be a boy. Hank scoffed, but his mother-in-law named all of the men of Stay More who had been born males as a result of their fathers sitting on the roofs of their houses for seven hours. Hank was impressed, but he observed, “Heck, I aint even got a roof to set on.”
That set him to thinking, and the following day he began construction of the ranch-style house which is the illustration for this chapter. It is located at a higher elevation of Ingledew Mountain than any of the other Ingledew buildings, and has a fine view of what is left of Stay More, as well as the mountains around. The architecture of it might seem Californian, but while there are many houses similar to it in California, there are also many houses similar to it elsewhere in the Ozarks. Hank didn’t know anything about carpentry, having never done any before, but he was good with his hands, and could learn. Stay More still did not have electricity, so he couldn’t use power tools, but he went to Harrison and persuaded the electric company to run a line from Jasper, and thus it might be said that the building of this house was indirectly responsible for the coming of electricity to Stay More. Hank’s uncles dropped by from time to time to give him advice and to saw a board.
When the foundation was laid, he wrote a letter to Sonora, telling her what he was doing. She did reply, but he wished she hadn’t: it was a very cool letter mentioning the fact that she had run into the secretary’s husband at a supermarket and gone with him to his car in broad daylight and knelt on the floorboards and blown him. Pure spite. Hank was tempted to modify his plan for the house, eliminating all of the extra bedrooms for his daughters, but he was convinced that even if Sonora never came back to Stay More, his daughters would come, at least to visit. So he went ahead and built five bedrooms in the house, one for himself (and Sonora if she ever came back), three for his daughters to share, and one, finally, for the son that he never gave up hoping to have.
Chapter eighteen
John Henry “Hank” Ingledew worked so hard on his house that, expectedly (although he had forgotten to expect it), he came down with the frakes when he was finished with it. It is of course quite possible to get the frakes more than once; having them does not produce immunity as in the case of so many other dread diseases. His second attack of the frakes was, however, not quite as uncomfortable as the first, because the experience of the first had taught him that the itching would be terrible and that afterwards he would sink into irrevocable despair, and there was nothing he could do about it, so he resigned himself to it, and his resignation kept him from suffering quite so much. Still, he was bedfast, and would have starved to death, had not his mother, taking him a pie she had baked, discovered he needed far more than pie. After she had cooked a meal and forced him to eat it, she told Sonora’s mother of his condition, and his mother-in-law had his father-in-law drive her into Jasper, where there was a telephone. She put in a long distance call to California, and told Sonora that Hank had the frakes, and Sonora immediately booked airplane passage for herself and her five daughters, and was picked up by her father at the Fort Smith airport and driven to Stay More, where she burst into Hank’s bedroom hollering “Why didn’t you tell me?” He replied, “Who cares?”
She threw herself upon him, weeping, and the five daughters crowded timidly into the doorway, staring at their father. “Is he dead?” one of the younger asked the oldest. “No,” the oldest assured her, “he just wishes he was.” Then the girls wandered off for a tour of their new home, and fought over whose bedroom was whose, and who would get a room all to herself. It was decided that the oldest would have that privilege. There was no furniture in any of the rooms, except the bed in Hank’s bedroom, so the girls spent the night at their grandparents’. Sonora slept with Hank and even tried to interest him in intercourse, but he wasn’t interested. She apologized for the nasty letter she had sent and the awful thing she had done with the secretary’s husband, but Hank honestly felt no animosity, nor, for that matter, anything. Wasn’t he the least bit glad that she had come home? Sonora persisted. Well, he observed, it would be convenient because he wasn’t able to cook for himself, provided he was interested in eating, but since he didn’t give a shit about eating, it wasn’t convenient, so she might as well go back to Califor
nia. No, she said, it was too late: before she left she had placed their house on the market and instructed a mover to pack up all their furniture and stuff and transport it to Stay More. So see? she said. Hank shrugged. She sighed and went to sleep. Hank knew that the purpose of sleep is to restore the mind and body for the challenge of the coming day, and since the coming day held no challenges for him he didn’t care whether he slept or not, but Nature, who runs this show, put him to sleep anyway.
Because there was no longer a school at Stay More, the daughters of school age were driven into Jasper each day by Sonora’s father, who worked as a mechanic in the Jasper Ford agency. The daughters came home each day complaining of the school’s shortcomings compared with the schools they had attended in Anaheim. Sonora was sad about this, even though it meant nothing to Hank. She tried to assure the girls that they would get used to it. She tried to instill in them a respect, if not a love, for their native state, reminding them that all of them except the baby had been born in the Ozarks. And in fact, one by one, eventually, they no longer complained of their school but even reported on the more positive aspects of it. They began complaining that their father was indifferent to them. Even though he was no longer bedridden, and could move around just as easy as anyone, he wasn’t interested in anything, and his daughters couldn’t talk to him, although they tried.
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