No, Sonora wasn’t buying that. For one thing, she knew that the boy would eventually grow to be bigger than his father, and therefore the Little Hank designation would be as absurd as “Li’l Abner.” For another thing, she had been thinking that names ought to mean something. Her own name, Sonora, had been given to her by her mother because it meant “little song” and her newborn cries had been like little songs. “John Henry” didn’t mean anything. Taken literally, it meant “God is gracious and is the ruler of an enclosure, or private property,” which, even apart from the fact that the Ingledews didn’t even believe in God, was contradictory: a gracious John cannot be a tightfisted Henry. Sonora wanted a meaningful name. It was springtime; things were growing; she wanted her baby to grow and flourish. So she named him Vernon. Hank didn’t much like that, but there wasn’t much he could do. He hoped that before the ink was dry on the birth certificate the name of the Connecticut peddler might suddenly return to him, but it never did. Vernon Ingledew it was, and remained.
We come now to a difficult matter. What psychological effect would it have upon a growing boy to have five older sisters? Wouldn’t he be dreadfully spoiled? Would he become effeminate? Or wouldn’t his congenital Ingledew woman-shyness be magnified a hundredfold? It was true his sisters doted on him—and during the summers there were not five but six of them, in a sense: his first cousin Jelena, raised by his Uncle Jackson in Harrison during the school year, spent all her summers, every summer, in Stay More and was such a close friend of his sisters, especially of Patricia, who was the same age, that as far as Vernon was concerned she was one more sister. She and Patricia were eight years old when Vernon was born, and that is an age for being particularly interested in watching Sonora change Vernon’s diapers. Soon Patricia and Jelena were volunteering to change Vernon’s diapers.
Jelena was to claim, years afterward, that she fell in love with him the first time she laid eyes on him. Was he aware of her in infancy? Dubitable; to him, her face was just one of seven female faces that came constantly in and out of his field of vision. But he was four years old before he understood that he was in any way different from these seven persons. By the age of four he had begun to misbehave, and his father, in order to induce good behavior, threatened to cut off his tallywhacker unless he behaved himself. He could not help but notice that the other seven persons did not possess tallywhackers, and assumed that they had all flagrantly misbehaved, and were doomed to go through life tallywhackerless and wearing dresses and sitting down to pee.
He did not want to wear a dress, nor did he want to have to sit down to pee, so he tried his best to behave. In the years of his growing up, Vernon was preoccupied with behaving himself. He felt sorry for the seven persons who had lost their tallywhackers, but he tried to avoid all of them except the one who was his mother, for whom he felt an emotion that was not pity or compassion or wonder but a deep feeling that he could not understand, and which frightened him in its intensity, causing him to do his best to suppress the feeling, lest it lead him into misbehavior and the loss of his tallywhacker.
There are two things that can happen to a boy who has five (or six) older sisters and a mother with whom he is unknowingly deeply in love: on the one hand he can lose all of his courage and self-confidence and be a pampered emotional cripple for the rest of his life, or, conversely on the other hand, growing up masculine in a feminine household, fiercely determined to keep his tally-whacker, he may be forced by himself into great achievements. Vernon Ingledew forced himself into great achievements.
His first great achievement, however, was almost accidental, and occurred at the age of sixteen. On one of his many solitary walks in the fastnesses of Ingledew Mountain, he discovered a razorback boar. It had been thought that the razorback, if it ever existed at all outside of legend, was long extinct in the Ozarks, but to Vernon, who had seen pictures of them, there was no mistaking that this was indeed a razorback boar. In the end of the following, penultimate chapter, we will have to witness Vernon’s struggle to capture the boar. And in the final chapter we will learn what he did with it.
Chapter nineteen
Jackson Ingledew was a janitor in the Harrison public school system. He got the job in the same year that Jelena, who had become his ward, was old enough to start to school. During the summer months, when school was not in session, he was unemployed, and the two of them returned to Stay More for the entire summer. That is part of the reason why he bought the “mobile home,” shown here; the other part of the reason was that he thought the mobile home looked “modern.” The Ozarks were filling up with mobile homes, and Jackson got the latest model. Stay More was full of abandoned houses that were his for the asking, but he opted for the modernity and the convenience of a mobile home. For nine months of the year, while school was in session, Jackson’s mobile home was parked in a “trailer camp” in the small city of Harrison; for the other three months it was parked beside Swains Creek in Stay More, halfway between the old canning factory and the sycamore tree which had held Noah Ingledew’s treehouse.
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-h
ermit 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.
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