The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

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.”

  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 this 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 hi
s 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.