Time and the rains and the flooding creeks will fill with silt our foxholes until, in time, no one will know that we ever played here. Sometimes when it will be raining very hard and no one will be watching me or hearing me, I will let myself cry, for a little while. But once Doc Swain will catch me crying and will take my Indian Chief and write something in it, but then he will scratch it out, black it out, think better of it and delete it. Later I will hold it to the light in just such a way that I can make out the effaced letters: You will find another Ella Jean. Latha will tell me a little about Doc’s own story, enough to suggest that he himself had once had his own Ella Jean, a girl named Tenny, whom he had lost and never again found a replacement for, and thus I will understand why he will have had second thoughts about leaving that sentence in my old Indian Chief. But before I can ever get old enough to ask him about his Tenny, he will be killed by lightning, and at his funeral I will watch him being interred beneath a double headstone beside Tennessee Tennison Swain, his long lost love. “Are you still there?” I will ask, not of either of them but of you, and on the spot will solemnly promise to learn their story and tell it to you, farther along, all by and by.
Among the men of Stay More who had been Our Boys Overseas and who will return after the war long enough to pack up their families and take them to California will be Ace Dingletoon, returning alive and unhurt but without medals or promotion. He will be evicted from his rent-free farm and will resume his former habit of instant evacuation, blowing his horn to summon his family into removal. Eyewitnesses will give the lie to the hoary legend about his pulling a rope tied to all their belongings but will report that it will indeed be true that the chickens will lie down with their feet in the air so that Gypsy can tie their legs. And with the help of her trophy Corporal Jarhead, they will escape a step ahead of the sheriff to some other unoccupied farmstead at a far remove from Stay More. We will miss them.
Willard Dinsmore will miss Gypsy so much that in time he will go off on a heroic quest in search of her, only to learn that the Dingletoons too will have been rumored to have joined the endless emigration of Ozarkers to the promised land of California. He himself will go to California, only to discover that California has no abandoned farmsteads because of its incredible growth and prosperity. Unoccupied farms in California are as rare as mansions in Stay More. But by persistent search, and the exceptional sense of tactics that had once made McPherson call him “General Willard Dinsmore,” he will in time locate, not an abandoned farm but at least an abandoned shack out in the middle of a vast grove of orange trees near Mission Viejo, where the Dingletoons will be squatting. I will wish desperately to have seen Gypsy’s face at the moment Willard will appear, but I will just have to be content in the hope that he will convey to her the message that we will all have missed her and will continue to hope that after she and Willard are married they might want to come back to Stay More on a visit out of nostalgia. But they never will.
Even my aunt and uncle will move to California, good riddance. But I will not go with them. I will rather have committed myself to the Deaf School than go with them. Latha will let me convert the office of the Star back to its original function: it had once been the bedroom of her daughter Sonora, who will be gone to California. The Stay More school, for lack of enrollment, will shut down and its few remaining pupils will be bused to Parthenon.
My seatmate on those yellow bus rides to and from Parthenon will be Sammy Coe. Of all the original members of the Axis and Allies, Japs and Yanks, only Sammy Coe and I will remain—and Sog Alan, the miscreant, when he will come back from a stint in the Korean War. Sammy and I will grow out of the rivalry of our childhood and become good friends. I will even take him with me when I go to explore the lost glen of the waterfall, not telling him that the place still spooks me, not looking for traces of the samurai but for traces of the Indians who made a community there hundreds of years before or for anything else we can find in that cornucopia of splendid stories.
You will come too. On every visit to the lost glen of the waterfall, I will find it not with Sammy’s help but with yours, Gentle Reader. We will find what we will be certain is the spot where Sewell Jerram was assassinated in 1914, and the cavern where Nail Chism hid out with his true love Viridis Monday, as sung by the choiring of the trees. We will find the spot where I at the age of nearly six spent a night lost, haunted by lightning bugs, alone except for my dog Gumper. And we will find, although we will not yet know it as such because it will not yet have happened, the spot where ole Dan will be shot and killed by State Police Corporal Sog Alan, a story to be told in some other place, which will become one of your favorite stories.
From that moment when you watched and heard and identified with that breaking of my arm on the first page of this writing, you have kept the faith that all things of this world have become, for a while, your world too. But that while, that time, will draw now to its closing although the future tense of this closing will suggest that it might never end.
Just as McPherson and I exchanged all those promises and secrets when first we met, I’ll need in return a promise and a secret from you, Gentle Reader, himitsu to himitsu-ni suru, in return for mine: you have had the privilege, throughout all of this, of sitting there silently, noticing everything, missing nothing, and you have unquestionably noticed things that have escaped my attention. If I could see all of this story through your eyes, with the power of your imagination, how grand it would be!
So this story, this world, if it will exist at all, will exist only in your mind, for as long as you can hold onto it. That will be your promise. Mine will be to find all the stories of Stay More. We will conspire: my secret to you is that you will be, as you have been, the real creator of this world. Your secret to me is that you will have known that, all along.
Ja ne!
For Jacque and Micky Gunn
Perfect folks-in-law
Some of the backwoods farms in the Ozarks are pretty steep, and steep also are the stories that the natives tell about them. Many of the wildest of these tales are true, at that. The old gag about the farmer falling out of his cornfield sounds like a tall tale, but people who live in the Ozarks know that such accidents are not uncommon.
—Vance Randolph,
We Always Lie to Strangers
ex•tir•pate tr.v.
1. To pull up by the roots.
2. To destroy totally; exterminate.
—American Heritage Dictionary
Contents
First part: Primary
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
Chapter five
Chapter six
Chapter seven
Chapter eight
Chapter nine
Chapter ten
Second part: Election
Chapter eleven
Chapter twelve
Chapter thirteen
Chapter fourteen
Chapter fifteen
Chapter sixteen
Chapter seventeen
Chapter eighteen
Chapter nineteen
Chapter twenty
Acknowledgments to the First Edition
First part: Primary
Chapter one
You’ve never heard of Vernon Ingledew unless you’ve read a book by the name of The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, but that’s not essential. That book, under the cover of being a scholarly examination of the vernacular buildings of a lost but pastoral backwater, was a chronicle of generations of Ingledews in a village called Stay More, founded by the first of them, Jacob, and still inhabited by the last of them, Vernon, who was last for several reasons, most particularly because the woman he loved could not conceive a child if she’d wanted to and she didn’t want to for several reasons, most particularly because Vernon was her first cousin.
Now that book ends when Vernon becomes so wealthy from raising razorback hogs and processing them into the Ingledew
Ham that is sold in gourmet shops everywhere that he and Jelena, his cousin, whose last name is also Ingledew, build themselves a fabulous house on a mountaintop above Stay More and set out to live happily ever after.
That book appeared twenty-seven years ago, when Vernon was just turning twenty-one and Jelena was eight years older than he, and sure enough they had been living as happily as June bugs, happier than Heaven, ever since. I never heard a word about any afflictions or problems or even stresses that bothered them. Jelena had a lovely garden that I’d heard a lot about but never seen. I’d remarked at the end of the architecture novel, “I will hope that on my next visit to Stay More I will be invited to sit with them in that garden.” But I never had. I didn’t visit Stay More very often. Neither Vernon nor Jelena had anything happening to them that would have merited even a good short story, let alone a novel. Happiness doesn’t inspire books, although books can cause a lot of happiness.
Speaking of books, that’s supposedly how they spent most of their time, reading them. And supposedly it was one or more books he read which gave Vernon the peculiar notion to run for governor.
He had no political experience whatsoever when he made his romantic decision to run for governor. He had few friends; not one of them was an elective official on the local, state, or national level. His only qualification for office was that he was the great-great-great-grandson of Jacob Ingledew, who had been governor of Arkansas during Reconstruction, and was remembered as a courageous Unionist in a hotbed of the Confederacy. While Vernon Ingledew had inherited his ancestor’s courage and independence and sense of ethics, as well as his mountaineer’s fierce pride and native wit, he ran for governor in spite of an avowed disparagement of politics. In addition, he had no experience at all in law (a fact which would earn him a lot of votes) and indeed he was not even a college graduate. As for Jelena, she was not only eight years older than Vernon but was also a mother of two sons by her divorced husband, and even if she were not Vernon’s first cousin he could not have married her, not because of his pathological woman-shyness (somehow he was never shy with Jelena) but because it was his destiny never to marry. Yet he chose to live with her (or cohabit, if he’d ever learned a legal word), and he was still living with her almost thirty years later when he decided to run for governor, and one of his first all-night sessions with his campaign manager (or political consultant, as they’re called nowadays) concerned the best “spin” to put on the relationship he had with Jelena. Never mind the jokes about Ozark hillbillies loving their cousins. Never mind the fact that Jelena had been the valedictorian of her high school class and, if she’d ever had her IQ measured, was possibly as much a genius as Vernon himself. Never mind that she had not borne children to Vernon (she’d requested a tubal ligation following the birth of her second son). Never mind, even, the fact that handsome Vernon and beautiful Jelena had created the most gorgeous love story that a specialist in the field could have ever imagined. There was simply going to be no getting around the fact that, as incumbent Governor Bradfield put it (somewhat desperately), “Those two have been living in incestuous sin long enough that God ought to blast ’em both with plague upon plague.”
When Vernon Ingledew made his decision to seek the governor’s office, the first person he told, apart from Jelena, was his best friend of many years, a forester living in Stay More named Day Whittacker. Although Day, who was the same age as Vernon, the same age as my wife Kim, had lived in Stay More for most of his life, he was a native of New Jersey and possessed an outsider’s perspective on the ways of the Ozarks. He and his wife Diana had been back-to-the-landers years before the influx of hippies had hit the Ozarks, and they had not permitted themselves to be caught up in the turned-on and tuned-out lifestyle nor the drug culture that briefly tainted the lovely mountains and left a lingering odor into the Eighties. They were an eminently sensible couple, and their son Danny had gone away to college and was now living and working in Rome.
On the average of once every two years, Day and Diana drove the two hours from isolated Stay More to Fayetteville, the shopping and cultural Mecca of the Ozarks, and my home for the past couple of decades. Naturally on these trips they stopped by to say hello and bring me up to date on what little news the languishing village of Stay More managed to generate. My wife Kim was always delighted to see them, because in fact it was their story in my early novel called Some Other Place. The Right Place. which had first made her aware of the obscure novelist who wrote it and which had led, indirectly, to our meeting and eventual marriage. We exchanged Christmas cards with Day and Diana and on those very rare occasions when we could find time and incentive and nerve to take ourselves to Stay More, we always stayed at their house, a 1930s cottage painted a fading yellow, up Banty Creek a mile or so from the remains of the once-thriving but now defunct village. The house had been built by Diana’s grand-sire—or sire, too—a strange hermit by the name of Daniel Lyam Montross, who has appeared in several other of my novels and even narrated one of them, and who might even turn up in this one too.
Unlike Vernon and Jelena, who may have borne me some resentment for laying bare their history for all the world to see, Day and Diana knew that all the world was too busy to pay much attention to them, and thus they’d never complained about my invasion of their privacy, not even my shocking revelation of who Diana’s real father had been, not even my mention of Day’s youthful habits of prodigious masturbation, nor any of the other details of their private lives. I once asked them if they’d ever had any strangers knocking at their door who had been inspired to seek them out by having read Some Other Place. The Right Place. Their answer, which on one hand was an unpleasant reminder that that novel had never really enjoyed a large audience but on the other hand reassured me that I had not caused Day and Diana any real embarrassment or inconvenience by revealing their story, was that once in a blue moon somebody would turn around in their driveway after having satisfied themselves that that yellow house did in fact exist. But nobody stopped to inquire if it was really true that they’d been to all the ghost towns the novel said they had and done all the strange things it said they’d done.
I served a supper of my barbecued butterflied leg of lamb (with parsleyed new potatoes and asparagus) to Day and Diana on that particular visit when, after I’d broken out the second bottle of Merlot, Day said, “Did you know that Vernon plans to enter the gubernatorial primary?”
Since I’m very hard of hearing, he may as well have been telling me that Vernon was entering a monastery or a psychiatric hospital.
Kim helped by giving me the sign-language gesture for “governor,” a circling of the temple with the index finger, just a few inches removed from the common gesture for “crazy.” She said, “It’s about time. When I first moved in with Don, he was writing a novel about Vernon Ingledew as governor of Arkansas. That was seventeen years ago. He couldn’t finish it.” She turned to me. “What was the title of that novel?”
“All the King’s Horses,” I said. It was loosely based upon Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. But Vernon was just thirty then, too young to be governor, and naturally I wasn’t going to get any cooperation from him in the project. “You tried to talk Vernon out of it, of course,” I remarked to Day.
“Of course,” Day said. “I still can’t imagine what’s possessed him.”
“Jelena hates the whole idea,” Diana said. “She told me that if Vernon runs into problems because they’re first cousins and not married, she will be only too happy to ‘leave the country.’ She doesn’t want to be a politician’s consort. Not if she has to live at the governor’s mansion in Little Rock.”
“What does George think?” I asked. Jim George Dinsmore was Vernon’s plant manager, his farm manager, his majordomo, his right-hand man, and a very strong and level-headed Ozark hillbilly. I had known him since my childhood.
“We don’t know yet,” Day said. “Vernon hasn’t told him. That’s his next step. He showed me his schedule: he’s taking this w
hole thing step by step. He plans to tell George this week, and then the two of them are flying around the country to interview some prospective campaign managers.”
I fished my index cards out of my shirt pocket and took my ballpoint and began jotting notes. I really didn’t want to start a novel about Vernon running for governor; my problems with the previous attempt, although only a vague memory now, still came too readily to mind. I was immersed in a critical study of Arkansas painter Carroll Cloar, actually in the form of his “autobiography,” and I expected Cloar to keep me busy through the next several breaks and vacations from my teaching duties. “When Vernon told you of his decision,” I asked Day, “did he indicate any event or person or circumstance which prompted him to it? Was it just a spur of the moment thing?”
Day smiled. “Last year he got to the Ps in his Program, and the second P was politics. So you can imagine what he’s been doing for the past six months.”
I could imagine. I knew about Vernon’s “Program,” which was exactly that: a programmatic system of self-enrichment, almost rigid in its demands—although Vernon would have preferred calling it “orderly” rather than rigid—and going all the way back to Vernon’s teenage years (which I summarized in the conclusion of my architecture novel), when he had discovered that, on a trip to a used bookstore in Harrison, all the areas of knowledge and inquiry were tantalizingly available in softcover. Since then, Vernon’s whole life had been devoted to reading and study, a kind of continuous, obsessive adult education, a pursuit that I could only envy. What I envied most, perhaps, being a slow reader of the sort who “hears” every printed word as I read it, is that Vernon was a speed reader, phenomenally rapid, reading pages as fast as he could turn them. Not only that but he was apparently able, when he chose, to ignore sleep; he could stay up all night if he had thirty books to read before breakfast. And after breakfast, supervising the swine rearing and the ham-making consumed only a small part of his daily hours (George and his crew handled most of it), and, since Jelena was an inveterate bookworm herself, they deliberately did not possess a television (in all the Ozarks, there were less than half a dozen similar households, but the reason most of the other few did not possess a television was that they couldn’t afford one). The walls of both chambers of the strange “double bubble” house Vernon had constructed in the early Seventies, before the first hippie had erected the first yurt or geodesic dome anywhere in the Ozarks, were lined, floor to ceiling, with bookshelves fitted to their circular surfaces. In fact, a decade ago Vernon had been required to build a barn-sized “annex” for the purpose of housing the overflow of books. I had never seen Vernon’s weird house; I had included a vague illustration of it in my architecture novel, based on a smudged Polaroid that Day had taken and sent to me. When I took Kim on her first trip to Stay More, I spent all of one afternoon trying to find Vernon’s dwelling to show it to her, but I could not, and I had to respect Day’s determination never to reveal its location to anyone, not even God. But I knew the place was overrun with books.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2 Page 103