In many ways Jackson Ingledew resembled Noah Ingledew, or at least Noah is the only other Ingledew to whom Jackson is comparable in any respect. Jackson’s favorite (but not exclusive) oath was also “shitfire” but he always pronounced it as a drawn-out “sheeeut far,” and he never uttered it in the presence of his niece and ward Jelena. He was extremely conscientious about his responsibilities as substitute father; the position did not rest lightly on his shoulders, but he tried his best: for instance, when Jelena grew up and became a beautiful and highly desirable girl, Jackson highly desired her, and it required the highest exercise of self-control to keep him from seducing her, but he never seduced her, which more than any other fact tells us what kind of man he was. When she was only one year old she climbed into his lap and uttered her first word, “Da da.” He put her down, perhaps literally as well as figuratively, and said, “Not Dada. Uncle.” She looked at him strangely and tried to pronounce “uncle,” but it came out “ugla” and he is still Ugla Jackson to her to this day.
Although he was unable to give her the affection of fatherhood, he was at least attentive to her; whenever she requested, he would read her storybooks to her, so often that she already knew how to read by herself even before she started school. When school was over, each day, Jackson had to sweep the halls and rooms for a couple of hours, so during those two hours he would leave her in the school’s library, where she read and reread every book over the years. She loved reading, but it was a dull way to grow up, and she always eagerly looked forward to the summers, when Jackson would hitch the mobile home to his pickup truck and haul it back to Stay More. It was even more fun for Jelena when Hank and Sonora Ingledew came back from California with their five daughters and Jelena discovered that she had a first cousin, Patricia, who was the same age as she. Jelena never read a book in the summertime.
One summer when Jelena was eight, she arrived in Stay More to discover that she had another cousin, recently born, and that this cousin had a tail, or rather a tail that was on backwards, or rather frontwards, a tail on the front of him, just an inch or less long. When she looked at his face, she fell in love with him. Although she had not ever seen one of those tails before, she knew that all the world was divided into boys and girls, and that when boys and girls grew up they got married and became mothers and fathers, although she herself for some reason had no mother and father, and she decided on the spot that when Vernon Ingledew grew up she was going to marry him. She couldn’t wait for him to grow up, but he took such a long time doing it, and by the time she herself was already grown up he was just a little kid starting the first grade of school. What was worse, he wouldn’t have anything to do with her. He ignored her. She and his sisters played “house,” frequently, but Vernon refused to join them. They also played “mobile home,” but he would not even volunteer to drive the “truck.” They played “school” and “store” and “bank,” and tried their best to recruit him as a “pupil” or “customer,” but he would have none of it. They played “church” and told him he would go to hell unless he joined them, but he opted for hell.
One summer old Doc Swain died, and his little clinic on Main Street was abandoned, along with the other abandoned doctors’ and dentists’ offices, and the abandoned bank and mill and general store—in fact, everything on Main Street was abandoned except the old hotel, which was no longer a hotel but just a residence for Drussie and her niece Lola, both old ladies who sat on the porch all summer long staring at the boarded-up general store. When Doc Swain’s office was abandoned, all of the contents of it were left in it, and Vernon’s sisters and Jelena decided to play “doctor” and again they tried to persuade Vernon to join them, telling him that he could be the doctor and they would be the nurses and patients. This time Vernon, who was six, at least thought the matter over without flatly rejecting it, and at length decided that he didn’t mind being a doctor, so for the very first time he joined them in their play. The clinic was as fully equipped as country doctors’ clinics ever were; they dressed Vernon in the doctor’s smock, rolling up the sleeves until they fit him; and put a stethoscope around his neck and a round reflex mirror on his forehead. Sharon was the nurse, Eva the receptionist, and the rest of them patients. Vernon at the age of six had been taken to the doctor often enough, with whooping cough and measles and mumps and chicken pox, to know how a doctor deports himself, and he gave a reasonably good performance. He felt each patient’s pulse and put his stethoscope to their chests and listened—with some awe—to their heartbeats. Jelena’s breasts were well developed at the age of fourteen, and it thrilled her when Vernon’s hand put the stethoscope on her breast. “What’s your complaint?” the six-year-old boy said to her in as deep a voice as he could manage. It was the first time he had ever spoken to her. “I’m going to have a baby,” she told him. “Hhmm,” he said, and gave her a bottle of yellow pills. “Well, take two of these a day, and come back if it doesn’t go away.” The girls laughed, embarrassing him, and “Nurse” Sharon told him, “You’re ’sposed to examine her. She’s ’sposed to git on that table and have you take a look at her.” Jelena was reluctant but also excited at the idea, and she climbed onto the examination table and raised her skirt and removed her panties. Vernon came and took a look, but wouldn’t come close. “Nothing wrong with you,” he said, “’ceptin they cut off yore tallywhacker fer bein bad.” The girls laughed uproariously, and Vernon threw off his smock and stethoscope and marched out, declaring “I don’t want to play dumb games.” He never again joined any of their games, and then they were too old to play games.
When Vernon was six, he noticed for the first time that his father also had a tallywhacker, which he had already guessed, since his father wore pants and had short hair, so the next time he saw his grandfather he asked Bevis, “Grampaw, was Daddy always a good boy?” Bevis replied by telling him of the time that Hank had “stolen” one of the mules and run away to join the circus. “But you didn’t cut off his tallywhacker for it?” Vernon wanted to know. “Didn’t he never do nothing that was bad enough for you to cut off his tallywhacker?” “Huh?” said Bevis, and Vernon revealed to his grandfather that his father had on several occasions threatened to cut off his tallywhacker and make him into a girl unless he behaved himself. “Aw, he was jist a-funnin you,” Bevis told him. “He’d never do nothin like that, and even if he did, that wouldn’t make ye into a girl. Girls are born that way.” “Why?” Vernon wanted to know. “Wal,” Bevis hedged, “you’re a mite too young to understand things like that. Why don’t ye jist put it out of your mind ’till you’re older?”
But Vernon could never put it out of his mind, nor could he completely shake off the fear that his father might cut off his tally-whacker unless he behaved himself, so he continued to behave himself, and he continued to be obsessed with the subject of sex, although he continued to withstand the efforts of his sisters to involve him in their activities and the efforts of his cousin Jelena to get him to notice her. There were no boys in Stay More his own age, although he had a few friends at the Jasper school, with whom he played boys’ games during recess. He excelled in sports. But he would just as soon stay home by himself, or help his mother; he was always striving to do things for his mother, whom he loved. She loved him too, perhaps too much, because her husband never did completely regain his potency after sitting on the roof for seven hours; he suffered recurring bouts of impotency, and went to see a specialist at Little Rock, who examined him and talked about “distinctly low testosterone assay” and prescribed medicine that didn’t help much; he later went all the way to St. Louis to see another specialist, who examined him and talked about “estimation of urinary 17-ketosteroid excretion” and prescribed another medicine which was just a little better, but didn’t cure the problem; so, during a national convention of televison salesmen in Chicago, he slipped off to see a psychiatrist, who traced the problem back to the episode of sitting on the roof for seven hours but was unable to help Hank understand how sitting on the roof for
seven hours would make him impotent, so he traced the problem further back to Hank’s childhood when Hank had often wondered whether or not he actually existed because in order to exist his mother and father would have had to have gone to bed together, which they had never done.
“How do you know they didn’t?” asked the psychiatrist. Because they had separate beds, and never slept together, Hank told him. “But,” said the psychiatrist, “that doesn’t mean they couldn’t have had intercourse somewhere, at some time.” Well, anyway, Hank said, the problem never bothered him anymore so he didn’t think it had anything to do with his impotency. “Aha!” said the psychiatrist. “The roots of our problems lie where we least expect them,” and he suggested that Hank commence psychoanalysis, but Hank told him that he was just temporarily in Chicago for a convention, and he went on back to Stay More. Because he didn’t make love to Sonora very often, she was somewhat frustrated, but she had determined never to “cheat” on him again, so she remained a faithful wife but compensated for her frustration by being overaffectionate to Vernon, who returned her affection. They frequently slept together, until he was nine years old, when his growing manhood tempted her and made her ashamed of her temptations, so that she never slept with him thereafter, which he could not understand. There were so many things that he could not understand, although in his fantasy he concocted elaborate and even outrageous explanations for them. When he was ten years old, his mother discovered that she had irreversible breast cancer. At her funeral Vernon listened to them singing:
Farther along we’ll know all about it,
Farther along we’ll understand why;
Cheer up, my brother, live in the sunshine,
We’ll understand it, all by and by.
He did not understand this. He did not understand that what was meant by “by and by” was the “sweet by and by” of the hereafter. Even if he believed in a hereafter, which he did not, he understood the song to mean that there would come a time, on this earth, when we will finally know the meaning of life, and time, and death, and he was determined, from that moment forward, to learn the meaning, if it took him all his life.
The rain that fell during Sonora’s funeral was the hardest that had fallen on the Ozarks since the flood of Noah Ingledew’s time, and it caused all the creeks to overflow their banks. Hank, grieving though he was, had the presence of mind to realize that the old mill and probably the store too would be swept away in the flood, so after the funeral, he and his brother Jackson backed a pickup truck, up to its hubcaps in swirling muddy water, to the porch of the old mill, and they went into the mill, feeling its floor trembling, and lifted the glass showcase containing the body of the old Connecticut peddler, whatever his name was, and loaded it into the pickup truck and got it away just in the nick of time: with a thunderous roar the old mill collapsed and was swept away down the creek. They transported the showcase to higher ground, to the abandoned yellow house of the old near-hermit Dan, where they left it in an upstairs bedroom, and then returned to the village, and with the help of the other men of Stay More used sledgehammers to demolish the old abandoned bank building and stack its stones against the side of the road in an effort to keep the swollen creek from washing away the road. The effort did not succeed; the road was washed away; but after the creek had returned to its normal level, they partially rebuilt the road.
Jelena graduated from Harrison High School at the age of eighteen; she was the valedictorian of her class, and undoubtedly could have won a college scholarship if she had applied for one, but after the death of Vernon’s mother, Jelena was old enough and smart enough to realize that it had been foolish of her to plan, all her life, to marry Vernon when he grew up. When he grew up, she would be twenty-six, at least, past marriageable age. Even if that wasn’t past marriageable age, he was her first cousin, and nowadays first cousins did not marry. Even if first cousins could marry, she could never get him to notice her, except for that one time when they had played “doctor.” At his mother’s funeral, when Jelena had tried to embrace him and say something comforting to him, he did not seem to be aware of her existence. So, if she could not be his wife, perhaps at least she could become his mother, or his stepmother. Waiting for a suitable time some months after the funeral, she said to Hank, “Would you like to marry me?” “That’s real kind of ye, Jelena,” Hank replied, “but I’m your uncle and I caint marry you.” “Vernon needs a mother,” Jelena insisted. “I don’t know about that,” Hank observed. “I reckon he’s jist about old enough to take care of hisself. And he’s got lots of sisters to look after ’im.” “You won’t marry me?” Jelena tried one last time. “I have to tell you somethin, honey,” Hank replied. “I don’t know how to say it, but even apart from me bein twenty-four years older than you, I aint able to…well, you know what a man is supposed to do to his woman, well, I aint able.” “I don’t care,” Jelena replied, “we don’t have to do that.” “Don’t ye want children?” Hank asked. “No,” she said, “Vernon can be my child.” “Tell you the honest truth, Jelena,” Hank said, “nothin against you personal, but I don’t honestly believe that Vernon would want to be your child.”
Crestfallen, Jelena gave up on the idea. Mark Duckworth, son of Mont, son of Oren the erstwhile canning factory operator, and Jelena’s third cousin twice removed, asked Jelena for a date, took her to the drive-in movies at Harrison, kissed her during intermission, took her there again the following Saturday, petted her some, was petted in return on the third date, and after the fifth date persuaded her to get into the back seat with him. The movies bored Jelena, but there was nothing else to do, and she soon discovered that she really liked the things that she and Mark could do with their bodies. When he proposed marriage to her, she turned him down, telling him that she was waiting for Vernon Ingledew to grow up. He laughed at that, and went on proposing, pointing out that his chicken ranch was just about the best chicken ranch in Newton County and that he intended to make it even bigger. (While we have Jelena and Mark in his car at the drive-in movies, we might notice that the car too is bigeminal, usually having two doors, his side, her side, and that cars have traditionally been used for “making out,” which in essence is what bigeminality is all about.)
Mark was a good-looking chicken farmer, twenty-two years old; Jelena was a beautiful brunette close to nineteen. We have not yet reached the point where we could tap her on the shoulder, as it were, and point out to her that she could never have a happy marriage with Mark Duckworth because of the discrepancy between their respective intelligences. He was no dumbbell, by any means, but Jelena Ingledew was just about the most intelligent female in the history of Stay More. If she had been willing to leave Stay More, she could have found boundless opportunities elsewhere, and boundlessly more attractive prospects for husbands, but she was not willing to leave Stay More. So she married Mark Duckworth. The old abandoned school/churchhouse was given a good dusting, a minister was imported from Jasper, and everybody (there were only twenty-nine Stay Morons that year) came to the wedding. Jelena was even surprised to find Vernon there, dressed in his first suit and his first necktie. As Uncle Jackson was leading her down the aisle, she paused and bent down and whispered in Vernon’s ear, “I was going to wait and marry you when you grew up. Will you marry me when you grow up? If you say ‘yes,’ I’ll call off this wedding.” Vernon looked into her eyes to understand if she were teasing him, and, understanding that she was serious, shook his head and declared, “I will never marry.” And he was right. He never will. He is the last of all the Ingledews. There will be no more.
We are so close to the end of this epic that if it were a snake it would bite us, as folks used to say in Stay More, but don’t anymore, because there are so few folks remaining. Yet endings make me nervous, not because I don’t know what to expect but simply because they are endings, and there is nothing beyond them, as there is nothing beyond death and nothing beyond the universe. There will be something beyond this ending, but not for now. We do not have time to
accompany Vernon on one of his numerous solitary walks in the woods, when he studied nature as intently as possible, trying to understand it. We do not have time to listen to one of the heated quarrels between Jelena and her husband Mark, who discovered very quickly that marriage takes something out of romance. Jelena bore Mark two children, both sons, and with his permission had herself sterilized after the birth of the second son. She was a good mother, but eventually decided that she could not stand her husband; it was a loveless marriage, and the chores of a chicken farmer’s wife were endlessly boring. She had fantasies, sometimes, of taking her life, and once she even walked up the mountain to Leapin Rock and stood on the edge of it, looking down. Vernon, on one of his woods walks, spotted her. He was fourteen then, and as big as she, and he sneaked up behind her and threw his arms around her and pulled her away from the precipice. “I was just enjoying the view,” she told him. “Oh,” he said, hangdog, “I thought ye were fixin to jump.” “Why should I jump?” she said. He studied her eyes, trying to understand whether or not she had intended to jump, and understood that she had, and told her, “You’re unhappy.” “Why should I be unhappy?” she demanded, but then she broke down, not weeping but just losing control of herself, and told him all her problems. He was embarrassed, not only because she was a woman talking to him and he was shy of women, but also, and more so, because he had not reached a level of understanding to be able to tell her what she should do or even to offer her words of comfort or solace. “Well,” she observed at length, “it did me good to talk to you,” and she went back home.
On one of his weekend woods walks, at the age of sixteen, Vernon discovered the abandoned yellow house of the old near-hermit Dan, who was buried on the hill behind it. Exploring the interior of the house, he found upstairs a feather mattress, and lay down on it; he had never lain on a feather mattress before and was surprised at how comfortable it was, so comfortable that he fell asleep and slept for several hours. When he got up he went into the other of the two bedrooms of the house and was startled to discover an old glass showcase containing the body of an old, old man. He stared at it for a moment, trying to understand, then he ran all the way home and said, “Dad, there’s a dead body in a showcase in an old yellow house about a mile up Banty Creek.”
The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks Page 43
