The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  Brother Stapleton brought the show to a dramatic conclusion, perhaps even overdoing it somewhat by having twelve pipe organs playing together as the bride and groom departed. The shivaree they gave that night for Bevis and Emelda was not imaginary; it was, as one participant remarked, the “shivareest shivaree ever shivered,” with an incredible amount of noise and harassment of the newlyweds, who were given not a moment to themselves to think any thoughts or read each other’s or even pretend to transmit a word into the other’s head. It was just as well that they were given no opportunity for sleep that night, because Bevis would have been much too shy to share a bed with his bride. The second night of their marriage, they slept in separate beds, although before falling asleep they enjoyed a lusty copulation in their minds, and when they fell asleep their dreams were all mixed together and exchanged; in the morning he was awakened by the “sound” of Emelda doing a perfect imitation of a rooster’s matinal crow. It required several more weeks of sleep to sort out the dreams and properly apportion them so that each had their fair share of nightmares. After a year of marriage, Emelda silently declared that although she had enormously enjoyed 365 incidents of imaginary albeit almost exhaustingly true-to-life intercourse, it was obvious that she would never conceive anything other than an imaginary baby in that fashion. Biology is biology, after all, and has nothing to do with make-believe.

  The year of imaginary intimacy had made Bevis not quite so shy with his bride, so it was not too difficult for him to permit her to slip into his bed one night. Yet both afterwards agreed that actuality is a weak stepsister of imagination, although it was successful in begetting their firstborn, John Henry. As soon as Emelda was got with him, she and Bevis reverted gladly to their old way of intercourses, sexual and verbal, and when Bevis withdrew his savings from the bank and built his house, its bigeminality was intended literally to make separate rooms for the two of them, where they went on sleeping apart and coming together in their minds, and mixing their dreams and nightmares in fair proportion. There must have been at least three occasions thereafter when one of them physically crossed through the interior door that joined the rooms, because they had three additional sons: Jackson, William Robert (“Billy Bob”) and Tracy. Along with John Henry, these four boys each noticed, in growing up, that their mother and father slept in separate rooms and never spoke to one another; since the only times the boys would not speak to one another was when they were angry, they assumed that their mother and father were always angry at one another, and therefore never on speaking terms. The boys had playmates whose parents were often heard to speak to one another, and some of the playmates claimed that their mothers and fathers actually slept in the same bed, and a few of the playmates went so far as to tell what their mothers and fathers did with one another when they were in bed.

  The Ingledew boys disbelieved this, but they still felt isolated; they felt that their own parents were eccentric; they knew their father was full of blood and always cheerful and animated; they couldn’t understand why their mother didn’t like him enough even to say “howdy” to him. On the other hand, their mother was sweet-natured herself, and a good cook besides; they couldn’t understand why their father didn’t like her enough even to say, “Them shore was good biscuit, Maw.” Their father talked freely and cheerfully to everybody else, but never to their mother.

  One by one each of the sons grew old enough to understand the meaning and mystery of sex; one by one each was forced to accept the uncomfortable truth that in order for them to have been born, their happy father had to have slept with their mother, and that since their mother and father never slept together and weren’t even on speaking terms, they couldn’t possibly have been born and were therefore only imagining that they existed.

  Imagination begets imagination. What lasting psychological effect all of this had upon the four boys may be imagined. The population of Stay More was declining, and one by one the Ingledew boys mentally subtracted themselves from it.

  The population of Stay More declined for several reasons. People who lost their money when the bank was robbed worked twice as hard in order to replace the money, and by working twice as hard were afflicted with the frakes, and after recovering from the long lethargy and sense of futility that follows a bout with the frakes they wandered out of Stay More and were never seen again. The ones that stayed never really worked very hard again.

  Tearle Ingledew, for example, who had been the most industrious of all the Ingledews because he had an excess of sweat, had worked so hard to replace his lost savings that he came down with perhaps the severest case of the frakes that anyone had ever seen: the rash was not confined to the genital area but spread all over his body; he was anointed with all the traditional remedies with all the traditional lack of effect; what little money he had reearned by working so hard he spent entirely for large quantities of Chism’s Dew, and by staying in a constant state of intoxication managed to slight if not ignore his affliction, and in their own time his blisters festered and healed, and he was left with the characteristic feeling that life is a joke. The strange thing was, the joke struck him not as bad and pointless but hilarious. For the rest of his long life, he worked only hard enough to pay for his heavy consumption of Chism’s Dew, and was full of good humor and could tell excellent jokes. He never gave up believing that life is futile, but the futility of it was always good for a laugh, and he was always laughing and causing others to laugh, and I believe I like Tearle Ingledew better than any of the others, even apart from his many kindnesses to me when I was young.

  If he does not loom large in this particular saga, it is only because nothing much ever really happened to Tearle Ingledew, which is as it should be for persons who can laugh at the futility of life. He sat on the store porch or the mill porch, depending on where the shrinking crowds were, and told jokes and swapped yarns until he began to feel sober, then he would walk up to Waymon Chism’s place and buy a gourdful to drink on the premises, then meander back to the village. “Meander” is the only word to describe Tearle’s style of walking, and it is revealed as a symbol of the whole Ozarks, where everything meanders. All the rivers, streams, creeks and branches meander. The limbs of trees, especially sycamores, meander. Snakes meander. Tearle Ingledew meandered not so much because of alcohol in his brain as because he had nowhere to get to, and loads of time to get there in. When creeks and snakes and tree limbs and men are young, they go in pretty much of a straight line. When they get older, they meander. A rushing brook becomes a river and meanders. A boy becomes a man and meanders. A story becomes a book and meanders. There is always an end, but no hurry to get there; indeed, there is almost a strong wish not to get there. Let Tearle’s meander, therefore, stand as a symbol both of the Ozarks themselves and of this, our study of its architecture.

  Nothing ever happened to Tearle, not even death, although he might be dying as you read this; one would hope not, unless he has laughed at the futility of life for so long that he has at last realized that that very humorousness of life’s futility is precisely the reason that life is precious, and, valuing it, loses it. Tearle, like all of his brothers save Bevis, never married, and has no descendants, and when he dies he will not be the last of the Ingledews to pass away, but he will be the last of the Ingledews born in that Century, and his death will seal the last vestige of that Century, so we have much reason for hoping that he is not on his last legs and that his liver is holding out.

  Others continued to die, though. One day the loafers on the store porch got to reminiscing again about various people they hadn’t seen for a long time, and the name of Eli Willard was mentioned, and they wondered if he were dead or if he would ever come back. The subject was good for a few minutes of speculation and then they tried to think of anybody else they hadn’t seen for a long time, and somebody suddenly realized that the woman Whom We Cannot Name had not been seen since the day of the Unforgettable Picnic. The loafers got up off their nail kegs and crossed the road to her house and politel
y knocked on the door for several minutes before opening it. They went into her room but she wasn’t there. They crossed the interior door into Jacob’s room and found her upon Jacob’s bed, dressed in her best dress with her hands folded upon her waist. They wondered why she had chosen Jacob’s bed to die on, and they decided that in her old age she must have become somewhat confused. Anyway, she was dead, and they took her up to the cemetery and buried her beside Sarah. Brother Stapleton apologized that he couldn’t show a eulogy because he claimed he didn’t know a blessed thing about the woman but he offered a five-minute short subject showing the scene where Jacob’s carriage is leaving Little Rock for his return to Stay More and he discovers that his wife Sarah is taking her social secretary home with her. Then the few people attending the funeral sang one chorus of:

  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.

  The woman had not left a will. Attorney Jim Tom Duckworth was consulted, and he advised that the house and contents should go to Isaac’s heir, who was his wife Salina. Salina did not want the house; she refused to leave the dogtrot, where she remained in seclusion. Next in line was the oldest son, Denton, but he didn’t want the house either. John wanted the house badly, but he had to wait his turn, because Monroe was next in line; Monroe thought about it and thought about it, deliberately taking his time because he knew how much John craved to have the house; it was, after all, the biggest house in town, one of the oldest and most impressive buildings in Stay More. The house that John was living in, and had reared his large family in, isn’t even illustrated in this study, not necessarily because of my personal bias against John but because the house is unnoteworthy in all respects, at least in my opinion. John would have made a large leap up in the world if he could have inherited his grandfather’s house. And for that very reason, Monroe kept it…or, rather, he accepted his inheritance of it, although he didn’t care to live there any more than Denton did; he and Denton had shared the same bed all their lives, and saw no reason to discontinue the habit in their fifties, although this is not in any way to suggest that anything funny was going on; it was common practice for bachelor or spinster siblings to share a bed all their lives: so while Monroe did not abandon his accustomed bed, he deeded the house to his and John’s younger brother Willis, making it convenient to Willis’s store, and Willis moved into it with his younger sister Drussie, who, noting the trigeminality of the house and counting upon her fingers, realized that she and Willis made two, whereas the house was three, so she converted the house into a HOTEL, and hung a small sign over the porch that said simply “hotel.” She gave the place a good cleaning, and ordered new linen and china and flatware from Sears, Roebuck and dressed up the three-hole privy out back with lace and chromolithographs of children rolling hoops, and ordered a case of expensive Nippon crepe toilet paper; then she sat in a rocker on the front porch day after day eagerly waiting her first guest, but the only people who came to her hotel were various neighbors, friends and relatives who did not intend to spend the night but only wanted to try out the novelty of using Nippon crepe toilet paper and discovering how superior it was to corncobs, sticks, leaves, mail order catalogs and old songbooks. Drussie had to order another case of rolls.

  But still no paying guests arrived to spend the night at her hotel.

  The economy was in bad shape, at least locally. The Jasper Disaster ran side-by-side stories about how Newton County was going to the dogs while nationally the city folks were all getting rich and lavishing their money on bootlegged booze and fancy autos and a strange music called jazz. Letters-to-the-editor poured in to the Disaster asking him to please stop rubbing it in. Drussie wrote pointing out that such stories of local poverty might frighten off potential guests for her hotel. The people of Stay More might not even have known they were poor if that dadblasted newspaper hadn’t told them so.

  John Ingledew asked Jim Tom Duckworth to bring suit against the newspaper, but it was too late: one by one the customers of John’s bank withdrew their savings in order to make the down payment on crank-up phonographs and records, player pianos, cream separators, fancy cast-iron cooking stoves, inner-spring mattresses, wristwatches, and new radiators for their Fords. After all their savings were spent, they tried to float loans from John, but he had nothing to loan them, and the bank failed. There was no need for a bank; every penny that was earned was spent to meet the installments on credit purchases. And not many pennies were earned, because the land itself had been used up over the years, worn out from one-crop farming: year by year the average size of an ear of corn became smaller and smaller, until the nubbins were too tiny to husk and shell, and there was no grain for Denton and Monroe to grind in the mill, and the mill closed down. Denton and Monroe had no choice but return to farming full time, but the earth was too poor to farm, and they talked of going off to a city and finding work, although they hated the idea, and did not want to leave Stay More, or at least Newton County, or at least the Ozarks, but since there were not yet any cities in the Ozarks, at least not in Arkansas, and since the only city in Arkansas was Little Rock, Denton and Monroe went there and found work and lived in a boarding house and were not seen again in Stay More for several years.

  Bevis Ingledew, who had a wife and four sons to support, was no more lucky at farming than Denton and Monroe, but he wouldn’t move to Little Rock, and he kept on farming, refusing to accept the fact that there was no profit in it. As soon as his four sons were old enough, he got them out of bed before daylight and put them to work until past sunset, and Emelda cried because she couldn’t scare up enough grub to feed them sufficiently for all that work. Nightly her dreams were shared with Bevis, but more often than not their dreams were nightmares, until the only dream that Emelda had remaining consisted of a doll fashioned from cornhusks. When they were awake, Emelda silently “discussed” with Bevis the possible significance of this cornhusk doll, but he, who had had his share of that image in their remaining common dream, did not know its meaning any better than she. Emelda treasured the humble cornhusk doll because it was the only pleasant dream that still came to her at night, and it appeared faithfully every night. In time, during a spare moment, Emelda fashioned a real cornhusk doll and clothed it with mother-hubbard and sunbonnet made of calico from a flour sack. Her sons admired it and wished their father would speak up and admire it too, not knowing he already had. Having created the female cornhusk doll, Emelda next created a male one dressed in dungarees. Having created thus a pair female and male, she couldn’t stop, and went on making cornhusk dolls until the house was filled with them, the females in her room, the males in Bevis’s.

  Bevis was embarrassed by this useless activity and was afraid that somebody might come and see it and spread the word around the village that Emelda Ingledew had slipped a cog. He realized, however, because he could read her mind, that she couldn’t stop. He knew also that she had given an individual name to each and every one of the dolls, from Abella to Zona for the females and from Aaron to Zuriel for the males. Furthermore, each of the dolls had a distinct personality, and in the dreams they shared at night these dolls began interpersonal relationships, usually of a happy manner that managed to crowd out many of their unpleasant nightmares. There were so many dolls that Bevis and Emelda might not have had any nightmares at all but for the fact that it was a drought year and the crops were failing and John Ingledew had no money to lend them even if he were willing to, which he was not, and Uncle Willis could not extend their credit at the store, and Aunt Drussie was unable to furnish them a free dinner at her hotel, and the only way they could eat at all was for their sons to go down to the bank of Swains Creek each night with a lantern and fish for a mess of catfish, which were always easy to catch after dark, until the Ingledews had caught and eaten them all. They went hungry for four days and then the boys asked permission from their mother
to eat a couple of her cornhusk dolls, but Emelda was shocked at the thought of what would amount to cannibalism to her, and could not permit it. Since all of them had given up work, they sat most of the day on the store porch, slightly consoled by listening to Uncle Tearle make jokes about the futility of life. Out of compassion Uncle Willis gave them a can of Vienna sausages; they each had one and saved the rest for breakfast. Surely, otherwise, they would have starved.

  One day a fancy automobile, in fact a Cadillac Four-Passenger Sport Phaeton with its top down, came into Stay More and drove around. The passengers were tourists, two ladies and two gentlemen, all wearing baggy knickers, golf hose and bow ties. They did not stop nor get out. They looked at the buildings and pointed at the people, and drove on. When they passed Bevis Ingledew’s house, one of the women shouted “Stop!” to the man driving, and he applied his brakes. “Look at that,” said the woman to her companions, pointing at Emelda Ingledew, who was sitting on the porch in her rocker, making a corn-husk doll named Romola. She was applying the finishing touch: a gingham sunbonnet. “I want one of those, Harry,” the woman said to her companion, and Harry dutifully opened the door of the Sport Phaeton and stepped out, extracting his wallet.