Bevis Ingledew took his wagon and drove around to all of the farms in Stay More, buying cornhusks for 5¢ a bushel. No one thought him crazy, because word had quickly spread of Emelda’s talent for converting cornhusks into money, and most of the other women were dying to learn her secret, but Emelda pulled down all the shades in all her windows and arranged her four sons into an assembly line, and together, with Bevis guarding the exterior of the house to ward off peepers, they turned out cornhusk dolls by the thousand, and shipped them off to St. Louis, and made a fantastic lot of money, more than they knew what to do with, so much more that they were easily persuaded by John, whose bank they practically owned now, to invest it. John faithfully read The Bankers’ and Investors’ Weekly, and he had dreamed for years of dabbling in securities analysis or becoming a “Customer’s Man,” but he had no potential customers until his own son Bevis had more money than he knew what to do with. He took Bevis’s surplus money and sent it off to a brokerage office in Little Rock and invested it in those issues which The Bankers’ and Investors’ Weekly recommended as growth stocks, and sure enough they grew and grew. It mattered naught that their growingest stock was General Electric although they had never seen electricity and did not believe in it. They made so much money in the stock market that John’s commissions from this one customer were enough for a full salary, and John was thinking of renovating his bank, while Emelda telepathically pestered Bevis to build a larger and finer house for them. John began to pay attention to those issues which The Bankers’ and Investors’ Weekly classified as “high risk speculative ventures,” investment in which was practically gambling, but John began to gamble, and to win. One stock in particular, Poupée Industries Inc. of St. Louis, was particularly attractive, and John bought more and more shares of it, and it continued to rise, until it was one of the highest priced stocks on the under-the-counter market, and Bevis and Emelda owned practically all of it. A lavishly printed annual stockholders’ report was mailed to them, and they discovered that Poupée Industries Inc. was merely the distributor of quaint dolls “which consist of some sort of dried plant material covered with bits of cloth in the fashion of women’s long dresses and men’s working overhalls and are manufactured at a secret location in the enchanted Ozarks.”
Then the stock market crashed. It wasn’t John D. Ingledew’s fault any more than it was John D. Rockefeller’s, but the latter survived while the former didn’t. A small headline in the Jasper Disaster noted the fact: “Stay More Stockholders Wiped Out in Panic of Wall Street” and a small editorial said simply “We hope some lesson has been learned from all of this.”
Bevis Ingledew was always cheerful and full of blood, and he took the bad news in good part, but John D. Ingledew took to bed, and stayed there, looking gloomier and doomier than he ever had, if that were possible. Doc Colvin Swain was called in. Doc Swain was not only the best of Stay More’s physicians, but he was also the seventh son of a seventh son (who was Gilbert Swain, Lizzie’s seventh), and a seventh son of a seventh son has the power to cure any sickness known to man except the frakes. But even with this power, Doc Swain could not cure John D. Ingledew, and John D. died. Doc Swain was so puzzled as to the cause of death that he asked for permission to perform an autopsy, expecting to find perhaps a broken heart, but John D.’s heart, when Doc Swain finally succeeded in finding it, was not broken but only atrophied, severely.
At the funeral, Brother Long Jack Stapleton discovered that he was unable to show the eulogy. Something had gone wrong with his power; it wouldn’t work. The show would not go on. He tried and tried to turn it on, but not a single image appeared. So he said a short prayer and they sang several choruses of “Farther along we’ll know all about it” and Brother Stapleton went home, wondering if farther along he ever would understand why he had lost his power to show. He never did, and he never regained it, and some folks said that the loss of his power was the reason he himself died, not long after, leaving Stay More without a resident pastor for the rest of its life.
Chapter fourteen
When John Henry “Hank” Ingledew was ten years old, he ran away from home, to join the circus. The year before, he had grown mighty tired of making cornhusk dolls. Making cornhusk dolls all day long leaves the mind idle to think idle thoughts, and although Hank was pretty good at thinking no thoughts at all, he could not help but continue to speculate upon the fact that he probably did not exist because he could not have been born if his mother and father did not sleep together and were not even on speaking terms with one another although they did seem to cooperate at least in the making of cornhusk dolls. Other boys his age did not have to make cornhusk dolls, and that was one more reason for feeling that he did not really exist but was only imagining things. His reasoning was that if he did not exist he might as well not exist someplace else instead of here in Stay More. The trouble was, he couldn’t conceive of someplace else, until one day in the late summer of his tenth year, when a billposter in a bow tie and a straw boater, driving a Ford truck, came into town and received permission to glue an enormous circus bill to the side of the barn that had been built by Denton and Monroe and was prominently located in the center of town. Hank Ingledew, along with all the other children of Stay More, gazed in awe at the poster, which showed in garish colors pictures of ferocious tropical animals, women in tight clothes standing up on the backs of prancing horses, acrobats leaping through the air, and announced that Foogle Bros. Three-Ring Shows would play at Jasper, Ark, three days only, Aug. 24–27, with a Grand Midway.
It occurred to Hank that a circus was a someplace else that would beat hell out of not existing in Stay More, even though he wasn’t required to make cornhusk dolls anymore since the stock market collapsed and people out in the world were spending their money on apples and pencils instead of cornhusk dolls. Hank began to hatch a plan: he would sneak off to Jasper in time to be there when the circus arrived, and he would get a job with the circus, so when his folks showed up to attend the circus they would see that he already had a job, and might even be proud of him, and they wouldn’t make a big fuss when the circus moved on and took him with it. So on the eve of August 24th, when nobody was looking, he “borrowed” one of his father’s mules without telling anyone and rode it bareback into Jasper, where he found to his dismay that the circus had already arrived in town and was being erected, by the light of strings of intensely burning glass bulbs. Jasper had not yet received electricity, but the circus had its own portable generator.
Hank could do nothing at first but stare with fascination at all of the light bulbs, until one of the workmen said to him, “Show aint open yet, kid. Come back tomorrow.” Hank told the man he was hoping to get him a job of work. “See the punk pusher,” the man replied, and directed him to a tough-looking man in a teeshirt, who was supervising a bunch of local boys, many of whom Hank recognized. “No cash. Free ticket only,” the man said to him. “Go help those punks hold that rope.” Hank said that he wanted to join the circus for keeps and do something important like impossible stunts. The man laughed at him and asked what kind of impossible stunt he could do. Well, Hank said, he could touch his elbows together behind his back. He demonstrated. “Hey, that’s pretty good, kid,” the man remarked sincerely. “Come with me.” The man took him to a trailer where another man in a teeshirt was just sitting in a canvas chair, doing nothing but smoking a cigarette. “Hey, Cholly, get a load of this,” the first man said and told Hank to repeat his impossible stunt of touching his elbows together behind his back. Hank did. Cholly pursed his lips and stared at Hank through squinted lids. “He’ll do,” Cholly said and took Hank and fitted him out with a clown suit and showed him how to tie a rubber ball over his nose and put white and purple paint on his face. Then Cholly took him to another man in a teeshirt and said, “Phil, watch the kid,” and as Phil watched Hank touched his elbows together behind his back several times in quick succession. “What else can he do?” Phil wanted to know. Hank said that he could also pat his stomach wh
ile rotating his other hand on top of his head, and vice versa. “Great,” said Phil. “Can you juggle?” Hank couldn’t, so Phil took three oranges and began to show him how. Hank was getting sleepy, but he kept practicing until he could not only juggle the three balls but throw them all up in the air, touch his elbows behind his back three times, and catch them as they came down.
The putting up of the circus was finished, and all the other local boys were run off the grounds, but Hank was allowed to stay. It must have been close to midnight, but none of the circus people seemed to be sleepy. They sat around and played cards and smoked cigarettes and told dirty jokes. Phil said to him, “Well, let’s meet some of the finkers and geeks,” and he took him around and introduced him as “the new joey” to several of the circus people: the other clowns, acrobats, horsemen, and even to the sideshow people, who made him uneasy: a bearded lady, a very fat lady, a midget, a man covered with tatoos, another man who seemed normal but Phil whispered into Hank’s ear that the man did an act of biting the heads off of chickens, and a man who was very, very old, who Phil said was billed as “the World’s Oldest Man.” None of these people showed any particular interest in meeting Hank, but the man who was the World’s Oldest Man seemed to be studying him keenly behind his wrinkled eyelids. The old man’s eyes seemed to be still working, although none of the rest of him looked like it would work; Hank doubted that the old man could speak, so he was surprised and momentarily disbelieving when the old man asked him a question, “Where are you from, Joey?” After Hank had persuaded himself that the old man’s mouth actually had moved and that he had spoken, Hank answered, telling him that he was from Stay More, which was a small town about ten miles south of here. He was required to repeat himself, loudly, for the old man was nearly deaf. Then the old man nodded his head almost imperceptibly and spoke again: “You’re an Ingledew, aren’t you? I would recognize an Ingledew anywhere, even behind that rubber nose and that greasepaint.”
Hank went away wondering how the old man had known he was an Ingledew, but he decided that anybody as old as that man was probably knew everything that was to be known. And then the magic electric bulbs were going out, and Phil told Hank that he would have to do a star pitch. When Hank looked puzzled and asked what a star pitch was, Phil laughed and slapped him on the shoulder and said, “You’ll have to learn the circus lingo, kid. A star pitch is sleeping out in the open, on the grass.”
Hank slept on the grass, sleeping fitfully, having dreams of performing his stunts in his clown suit in front of a whole bunch of people, many of whom might recognize him behind his rubber nose and his greasepaint, as the old man had done. When he woke and rose up from the grass, he discovered that nobody else in the camp was awake even though the sun was well up in the sky. He figured that people who stayed up so late at night probably slept late in the morning. He smelled coffee a-making somewhere, and tracing it, found a trailer with the back end open and a man inside cooking up a bunch of flapjacks.
It was the first time Hank had ever seen or heard of a man doing the cooking; maybe the man was also one of the freaks. But Hank was hungry, and he eyed the flapjacks hungrily, licking his lips, until the cooking man noticed him, and said, “New kid, huh? Welcome to the crumb castle.” The cooking man loaded a plate with flapjacks and gave them to him along with a mug of coffee. Hank sat down at a nearby table to eat but the cooking man explained to him that that was the “long end,” reserved for the circus workmen; the performers had to eat at the “short end.” Hank moved, and ate his breakfast, joined gradually by other clowns and acrobats. He learned that the Midway would not open until noon, and the first performance under the Big Top was not scheduled until two o’clock.
After watering his mule, Hank wandered around the grounds, treating himself to a free preview of the animals. There was a lion in an iron cage on wheels and it roared at him, giving him a slight start. There was an elephant tethered by one enormous ankle to a stake; he had never seen an elephant before, but he knew what it was because he had studied African geography in the fourth grade. It did not roar at him; it seemed to be very slow and calm and gentle, lifting an enormous foot slightly from time to time. He patted it on its tremendously long snout; suddenly the elephant coiled its snout and uncoiled it with such force that Hank was flung through the air a distance of nearly two hats and landed on his back in pain. He got up gingerly, resolved to go no closer to the elephant; he fingered himself all over for broken bones; none were, but his upper lip was beginning to swell, and by the time the Big Top opened his lip would be so swollen that he would have the most comical face of all the clowns. He stared malevolently at the elephant and said to it, “If Godalmighty made you, He orter make one more and quit.” He wandered on, and found a monkey in a cage; the monkey was so small and timid-looking that he couldn’t possibly do Hank any harm, but when Hank tried to shake hands the monkey scratched him, leaving bleeding lines halfway up his arm. Hank decided to leave the animals alone, and wandered over to the area where the sideshow people were loafing around in the morning sunshine. A reporter from the Jasper Disaster had arrived, and was interviewing the fat lady, asking her questions about her diet and how much she weighed, and did she have any trouble rolling over in her sleep at night? Then the reporter interviewed the midget, the bearded lady, the world’s strongest man, and he tried to interview the man who bit heads off of chickens, but the man would answer no questions, so the reporter went on to the World’s Oldest Man and asked him, “How old are you?” There was no response.
Hank told the reporter, “He’s near deef. Talk loud.” The reporter repeated the question loudly.
“I can’t be certain,” replied the World’s Oldest Man, “but several years past a hundred, I can assure you.”
“How did you manage to live that long?” asked the reporter. “Are you an abstainer?”
“I’ve never tasted alcohol, no,” replied the old man, “but I don’t think that had anything to do with it.”
“Well—?” the reporter waited, then persisted, “To what do you attribute your longevity?”
The old man was silent, as if thinking, then he said quietly, “I kept moving. I never slowed down long enough for death to catch me.”
The reporter admired that answer and commented, “You seem to have all of your wits about you.”
“Thank you,” replied the old man. “I do.”
The reporter pursued the question. “But why did you keep moving?”
Again the old man was silent, as if meditating and discovering the answer for the first time, and when he spoke the answer it was with a self-wonderment. “I felt there was something I had to do. Ought to do. Was foreordained to do.”
“No fooling?” said the reporter. “And what was that something?”
“Whatever I have done,” said the old man, and would not elaborate.
“How long have you been with this circus?” asked the reporter.
“Oh, it’s hard to remember. Maybe twenty years.”
“And what did you do before that?”
“I traveled. I was engaged in various sales campaigns.”
“Where are you from, originally?”
“Connecticut.”
The reporter thanked the old man for the interview and went on to interview the tattooed man. Hank wandered back to the crumb castle or chuck wagon or whatever it was to see if dinner was ready yet. After eating, he saw that the Midway was open, and he strolled it, keeping an eye out for any of his folks, whom he did not want to see until he had his clown suit and make-up on. But there weren’t many people on the Midway. He had two dollars and seventy-five cents in his pocket, which was all of his life’s savings after the stock market crashed, so he spent some of this to ride the Ferris Wheel and get a cone of cotton candy. Then he realized he’d better go practice his juggling before the Big Top opened. As he was leaving the Midway, he passed a peanut vendor and was surprised to discover that the peanut vendor was the World’s Oldest Man, hawking peanuts out of a tr
ay that was suspended from his neck on a string. Not very loudly, the old peanut vendor was calling, “Fresh roasted peanuts! A nickel a bag!” Hank went up to him and gave him a nickel. The old man looked at him and gave him a bag of peanuts but refused his nickel.
“You’re an Ingledew,” said the old man. “I can’t charge an Ingledew anything.”
Hank commented, speaking loudly, “That thar sideshow must not pay ye very well, that you’re obliged to sell goobers on the side.”
The old man shook his head. “No, boy, I don’t need to sell peanuts. I’ve been selling things all my life, and I just can’t give up the confounded habit.” And he hobbled off down the Midway, croaking, “Fresh roasted peanuts! A nickel a bag!” Hank wondered again about how the old man was so old that he knew everything and therefore knew that Hank was an Ingledew, although that didn’t explain why he would give away a bag of peanuts free of charge to any Ingledew.
Hank went to Phil’s trailer and with Phil’s help put on his clown suit and his rubber nose and greasepaint. He confessed to Phil that he was a bit nervous about appearing in front of all those people. Phil snorted. “What’s the name of this place? Jasper? Well, in circus lingo a ‘jasper’ is a local person who buys a ticket. There’re not many jaspers in Jasper.”
The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks Page 34
