Hank said, “Sit down, son. Can you spare an hour or two?” It took more than an hour or two, more like three, but Hank told Vernon the story of the old peddler from Connecticut. Vernon was delighted. Even more delighted than by the story of the old peddler, he was delighted by the past of Stay More; he had known that Stay More had a past, and he had explored all of its abandoned buildings, but he had never inquired into that past. “We was even going to name ye after him,” Hank informed his son, “but we plumb fergot what his name was, and nobody could recall it. The reason we was even going to name ye after him was that he left somethin fer ye, let me see if I caint remember whar I buried the thing.” Hank took his shovel and went to Bevis’s house and asked his father if he could dig up something in the backyard. Bevis was seventy-eight years old, and his mind had begun to fail him, but he could still use Emelda’s mind, which he did, and she said okay. Hank dug his hole, but that wasn’t the spot. He dug another hole, and then another. Darkness came and he had to give up digging for the day, but rose early the next morning and resumed digging, until the backyard of his parents’ house looked as if it had been bombed. The reporter of the Jasper Disaster, who had been a mere reporter when Hank had sat on his roof for seven hours, was now the editor, and showed up and began taking pictures before Hank could stop him. “What are you looking for?” the editor wanted to know. “Oil? Gold?” “None of your business,” Hank replied. The editor beseeched, “Nothing ever happens in this county anymore. Give me a story.” Hank would not.
The Disaster folded with the next week’s issue, which consisted only of grocery ads and a picture of Hank destroying his parents’ backyard with a caption, “Stay More citizen, J.H. Ingledew, 48, shown with shovel in left background, is mysteriously excavating the rear yard of the home of his parents, Mr. and Mrs. B.H. Ingledew, also of Stay More, this county. We were unable to determine his motive, and, after reflection, we ceased to care. This is the last issue.” There have been no more newspapers in Newton County.
But Hank found the watch. The lard pail was so rusted it disintegrated in his hands, but the heavy wad of flannel within the lard pail was still intact, and in the heart of the wad of flannel was the gold chronometer wristwatch, in perfect condition.
As Hank winds up the watch, time changes to the present tense. Now. The watch runs. Hank apologizes to his parents for having torn up their yard, and promises to smooth it out and reseed it as soon as he gets the chance. “You jist better,” says Bevis, whose mind has failed but who is using Emelda’s. Hank takes the watch home and gives it to Vernon. He says, “This is it. This is what that old peddler left for you. He made me promise to keep it for you.”
“Gosh dawg,” exclaims Vernon, dazzled by the sight of the expensive gold chronometer, whose band is gold too. He takes it and looks at it closely, turning it over and over in his hand. He discovers on the reverse of the gold case, which is not gold but some kind of polished silvery alloy, an inscription, engraved into the metal: “For Vernon Ingledew, from Eli Willard. Tempus fugit. Carpe diem. Etc.” He calls this to the attention of his father, who reads it and exclaims, “That’s him! That’s his name! Eli Willard. That’s your name, boy! That’s what we were fixin to name ye.” “No,” Vernon points out, his name is “Vernon,” as can plainly be seen in the inscription. There is something puzzling about that circumstance to Hank. He rereads the inscription. “Hhmmm,” he says. “What’s this here ‘ect.’ for?” “Not ect,” says Vernon, “etc. Et cetera. It means everything else.” He says again, “Everything,” he is so proud to have that watch. He holds the watch to his ear and listens to its precise, firm, assertive ticking. Then he slips the watch over his hand and onto his wrist.
As Vernon puts the watch on his wrist, he becomes aware of us.
He stares at us. We stare back at him. We notice how, at the age of sixteen, he is already a full-grown Ingledew, past six feet tall, eyes as blue as his great-great-great-grandfather’s.
“Who are those people?” Vernon asks his father.
“What people?” says his father.
Vernon realizes that he is aware of us because he wears the watch. We make him uncomfortable, self-conscious, and the women among us make him extremely woman-shy. He takes off the wristwatch and puts it in his pocket, losing his awareness of us.
“You aint gon wear it?” his father asks.
“Not yet,” says Vernon. “I aint ready for it. But I’ll carry it around.”
He carries it around, in his pocket, and at night leaves it on his bureau with his pocket change, rabbit’s foot, etc. Sometimes in the middle of the night, he wakes up, in pitch dark, takes the watch and puts it on, to see if we are still here. We still are.
Toward the end of his sixteenth year he leaves the house and goes off into the forest of Ingledew Mountain and into a deep dark cave, where he hides and puts on his watch again. We are still here. “What do you folks want with me?” he asks.
As our spokesman, I reply, “Listen, Vernon, we’ve got great plans for you.”
“Who are you?” he wants to know.
“We are students of the architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks who have become interested in Stay More and particularly in the Ingledews. You, Vernon, could become the greatest Ingledew of them all. You know already that you’re the last Ingledew, because you aren’t going to marry or have any children.”
“That’s right,” he acknowledges, “but I aint so certain that I’d care to be the greatest Ingledew of them all, and even if I did, I don’t want you folks following me around. Darn it, that lady there is a-laughin at me, and if you folks is such students of the Ingledews you know how shy Ingledews is toward women. Make her stop.”
Madam, please.
“Look, Vernon,” I continue, “we already know practically everything about you, and about all of your ancestors. Our study is just about finished, and we want to conclude it with something important. The building that heads this chapter, if you can call it a ‘building,’ is just a trite mobile home, like trite mobile homes all over the Ozarks and elsewhere. Architecturally, it’s a cipher, even if it is bigeminal, a duple, which means that it is divisible by two: two rooms, two doors, two bays, whatever, symbolizing the division of creatures into male and female, and of sexuality, although in the case of this particular mobile home, which belonged to your Uncle Jackson and in which Jelena represented the female side, there was no sex between them. But speaking of Jelena, haven’t you ever had sexual fantasies about her?”
“That aint none of your business!” he says, and grasps the watch as if to remove it from his wrist.
“Oh, indeed it is our business,” I declare, “but let it go, for the moment. Our immediate problem is to construct the building of the next chapter, the last chapter. You are going to do it by yourself.”
“What am I supposed to do? Get out a saw and hammer?”
“No. First you must do something that will make a lot of money, for your house is going to be expensive. You will be twenty-two when you build it, and you’re only sixteen now, which means that you have six years to raise the money.”
“How? Jobs are pretty scarce hereabouts.”
“Create your own job.”
“Doing what?”
“Growing and selling something.”
“Jelena’s husband Mark Duckworth grows and sells chickens, but he aint gittin rich.”
“Not chickens. Pigs. Vernon, aren’t you awfully fond of ham?”
“That’s right.”
“But haven’t you been constantly suspicious that nobody makes really good ham anymore?”
“Sure. It troubles me.”
“Then do something about it.”
“Okay. Where do I start?”
“Find a razorback.”
“There aren’t any razorbacks anymore.”
“You seem to know an awful lot for a boy your age.”
“Aw, heck. Everbody knows there aren’t any razorbacks.”
“Get up and walk outside of thi
s cave.”
Vernon obeys. Outside the cave, foraging on acorn mast, is a razorback boar. He softly whistles in recognition of it. “Say, thanks,” he says to us, and removes his wristwatch and puts it into his pocket. It is too bad he cannot put us into his pocket too, to spare us the sight of the terrible contest that is about to occur.
Vernon improvises a halter out of black-jack vines, and sneaks up on the boar. Having had no experience in capturing razorbacks, because there have been no razorbacks to capture, he does not realize that razorbacks will fiercely defend themselves. When the boar sees Vernon, it does not run, but stands its ground until Vernon is close to it, then it charges him, toppling his legs out from under him, goring his calves with inch-deep wounds. Razorbacks are not nearly as big as domestic swine, but they are much swifter and meaner for that reason. Vernon can hardly stand up, and as soon as he is on his feet, the boar charges him again, but he sidesteps like a matador and throws the halter over the boar’s head as it charges past, keeping a firm grip on the other end of the line. He is pulled off his feet and dragged along the ground, and the wristwatch in his pocket is broken.
Chapter twenty
Our last illustration, regrettably, is smudged and obscure. Vernon Ingledew refuses our request to view the final dwelling of Stay More. We can just barely determine that it has certain things in common with the first dwelling in our study, which perhaps suggests that time, and architecture, are cyclical: we began with an ending, we end with a beginning. But I have not seen this building myself; Vernon refuses to divulge its exact location in the forest fastnesses of Stay More; our illustration, or what is left of it, is based upon a Polaroid snapshot taken by a young couple who are friends of mine, and the last “outsiders” to immigrate into Stay More. But Vernon will not build this structure until his twenty-second year, and he is still only sixteen.
Yes, he finally succeeds in capturing that razorback boar, tethering him to a tree while he hobbles home to dress his wounds, then borrows his father’s four-wheel-drive truck, which he drives up old logging trails to the place where he has captured the boar. He drops a ramp from the truck-bed, and forces the boar up the ramp and into the truck, and takes it home and pens it up. Word quickly spreads that Vernon Ingledew has captured a real live razorback. This is so fantastic that the editor of the defunct Disaster is tempted to start it up again, but he has already sold his printing press. A Harrison newspaper publishes the story, and the students at the University of Arkansas, whose mascot the razorback is, take up a collection of two thousand dollars for the purpose of buying Vernon’s razorback, but two thousand dollars isn’t enough to pay for the building of the house of this chapter, so he rejects the offer.
Vernon sets about breeding the boar to three Poland China gilts. The boar is disdainful, but a gilt in heat is too much for him. Vernon turns seventeen, and after three-and-a-half months the Poland China sows farrow a total of twenty-six pigs. Instead of black-and-white like Poland China pigs, they are red-and-brown, and have bristly spines like razorbacks. Vernon fattens them; instead of feeding them corn, as domestic swine are fed, he feeds them the diet of razorbacks: acorn mast and wild fruits, all they can eat. One of the Chism boys up on the mountain is still distilling Chism’s Dew, and Vernon asks permission to haul off the corn mash that is used in the distillation process, and he feeds this also to his pigs; there is enough alcohol in it to keep his pigs constantly happy. In hot weather, when most pigs suffer, and wallow in mud to alleviate their suffering, Vernon regularly showers down his pigs with cold water from a hose, which makes them actually smile and grunt with pleasure. All of this contributes to a superior type of pig. When the gilts are old enough to go into heat, Vernon breeds them to their father, producing pigs that are even more razorback than themselves. Normally, wild razorback sows farrow only four to six pigs, but Vernon’s hogs have become so contented and domesticated that they farrow eight to twelve pigs each.
Vernon’s great-great-aunt Drussie Ingledew, ninety-eight years old, is on her deathbed, but before she dies she tells Vernon how people used to cure ham back in the old days when there were still razorbacks at large, but Vernon refuses to share his secrets with us. He will not reveal the special time of year when he slaughters his hogs, nor will he reveal the arcane but humane method he uses to slaughter them. He smokes the meat for an amount of time that he will not reveal, using smoke from burning objects the composition of which is a closely guarded secret. Many spies try to learn his secrets, but they do not succeed.
“Ingledew Ham” is the best stuff in the history of ham-making. There is nothing else comparable; it practically melts in your mouth, and is much sweeter than ordinary ham. At first Vernon sells his total output to the supermarkets of Jasper and Harrison, but the demand for it keeps forcing the price up, until the local supermarkets cannot carry it, and it becomes a mail order item affordable only by the wealthy. Vernon’s five sisters, who are married to, respectively, a Whitter, a Chism, a Coe, a Plowright, and a Stapleton, help him raise and process his hams, as do their husbands; it becomes an increasingly large operation. Vernon branches off into smoked sausage, cased in cornhusks the old-fashioned way, and far superior to commercial sausage. Then he branches off into sugar-cured and smoked bacon; also spareribs and head cheese, letting nothing go to waste.
One day he takes his watch to Harrison to be repaired. The watch repairman examines it, declaring he’s never seen one like it. The repairman gently opens the case, and shakes his head; he says it will take him months, maybe years, to find replacements for the damaged parts and to put the watch back together. “Take your time,” Vernon assures him. He is only eighteen years old. (It’s really too bad about that watch. I had planned to tell Vernon what the next step was: he was to go away to college, to the University of Arkansas, where he would play football, becoming a “Razorback” himself, making the first string in his sophomore year, as a defensive end, and becoming the best defensive end in the history of the Razorbacks, making All-American in his senior year. That would have made a great sports story, which we could call simply Razorback, but the watch is broken and we cannot get to him to tell him about it. So he does not go to college. But he studies.)
On the same trip to Harrison to take his watch to be repaired, he discovers a store that sells a kind of book with soft covers called “paperback.” The paperback more than the razorback is a momentous discovery for Vernon. He buys a handful of paperbacks on astronomy, geology, genetics, anthropology, linguistics, and architecture, which he takes home and reads in his spare time when he is not supervising his swine industry. Periodically he returns to Harrison to see if his watch has been repaired, and finding that it hasn’t, he buys more paperbacks, on chemistry, geometry, zoology, history, philosophy, musicology and literature.
His sisters, and his father too, to a lesser extent, tease him about becoming a “bookworm.” The only other person in Stay More who reads books is his cousin Jelena. When Vernon finishes his paperbacks, he takes them to Jelena and trades them to her for her paperbacks on physics, biology, art history, theater, sociology and eschatology, which is a subject that interests him most because he is still trying to understand why his mother died. One day Jelena swaps him a book on sexology. He has not been exactly ignorant of the subject, for, after all, he has been personally responsible for breeding his razorback boar to many Poland China gilts and their offspring, the sight of which has given him many a throb. And yes, although he refuses to admit it, he has had sexual fantasies involving his cousin Jelena. When he swaps books with her, he is careful not to get too close to her, because she has a certain venereal scent or fragrance that drives him wild.
The next time he goes to swap books with her, he finds her alone, her children in school and her husband off somewhere for the day selling his chickens. She gives him a Coke, and asks him what he thought of the book on sexology. He admits it was “interesting.” She asks him if there is anything he doesn’t understand. He understands just about everything, he
allows, but he doesn’t quite understand why it is that animals “mate” only at certain times whereas humans apparently do it all the time. “Sit down, Vernon,” she suggests, “and we’ll talk about it.” He sits down, careful not to sit too close to her. She says, “You’re nineteen. Are you still a virgin?” That isn’t any of her business, he tells her. “I’m just trying to find out if you know what sex feels like,” she says. I can imagine, he says. “Then you have a rich imagination,” she comments, and begins her mini-lecture: “If sex is pleasurable for all creatures, why is it that for animals it is confined only to the time of rutting or ‘heat’? Did you know, by the way, that compared with animals, it is more exceptional for women than for men to be able to indulge in sex at any time of the year?” Vernon admits that he had not thought of that. “It’s true,” she goes on, “and since it’s plain that the purpose of human sex is not for procreation but for pleasure, more often than not, then this pleasure, and the absence of it, and the strong emotions inspired by both the desire and the unfulfillment of the desire, are on one hand the source of art, literature, music, religion and science, and on the other hand greed, selfishness, malice, envy and war. We are different from animals because we have a mind, imagination and an ability to reason, and these attributes originate out of our longings and desires for sex. Does that make any sense to you?”
The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks Page 44
