We will find this all very illuminating, but we will be more interested in whether or not he will find Jelena, and we will urge him on. He will return to the moment of her conception, on page 354 and will determine that it was Doris who was in fact her mother, so the Dorisites were right all along, and Vernon, who is a Jelenist, will cease being one and become a Dorisite, and being a Dorisite he will search all the harder for Jelena, tracing her page by page through this book; he will shed a tear over her lonely childhood and he will curse himself for having ignored her when they were growing up, and he will ask for permission to change page 400 so that when on her wedding day she asks him if he will marry her when she grows up he will be able to answer that he will, but we will not be able to grant him that permission, for what will have been done will have been done, so he will go on, turning the page, and when he turns to page 401 he will find her standing at the edge of Leapin Rock, and then he will begin running, running as hard as he has ever run, until he reaches page 419, and reaches Leapin Rock again. She will see him and say, “Don’t come near me, Vernon. I’m going to jump and you can’t stop me. If you come near me, I’m going to jump.”
“If you jump,” he will tell her, “I will jump too.”
“You will?” she will say.
He will nod.
“What reason would you have to jump?” she will want to know. “I’ve got all kinds of reasons. Mark has taken the boys and left me, and you won’t ever marry me.”
He will ask our permission to tell her that he will marry her, but we will be constrained to point out that he has firmly declared that he will never marry.
“Aint a feller got a right to change his mind?” he will ask us.
“You mean you will?” she will say.
“I wasn’t exactly talkin to you, Jelena,” he will say.
Her face will fall. But then he will say, “We could live together, couldn’t we? We don’t have to git married.” And her face will light up again, and she will move away from the precipice and embrace him, and they will make desperate love right there on top of Leapin Rock. Leapin Rock is a hard rock, but they will not seem to notice.
Walking down from the mountain, hand in hand, she will ask him, “How did you know I was up there?”
“It’s a long, long story, Jelena,” he will reply, but he will begin to tell it to her, and when he reaches the third line of page 420 she will remark, “Isn’t this wonderful?” and then she will suggest, “Vernon, let’s run away. You’ve got loads of money, haven’t you? Let’s run away, and go clear around the world, so that we can find out how much we want to stay in Stay More.”
The adventures of Vernon and Jelena in their trip around the world will perhaps furnish material for another volume, but we might notice here that Vernon will find, in an old basement bookstore in Rome, an ancient volume, whose Latin title will translate roughly as The Archaic Architecture of Arcadia; it will be expensive, but he will have, as Jelena will have observed, loads of money, and he will purchase it.
When they will have returned to Stay More after their trip around the world, he will study and learn Latin for the purpose of being able to decipher it; then he will read the volume, which will be about the architecture of a mountain village in ancient Arcadia. The author of the volume will have been a Roman writing at the time of the Decline of the Roman Empire, writing out of nostalgia because of the contrast between his life and the life of ancient Arcadia. Vernon will be amazed to discover that the book, although ostensibly architectural, will actually be about the lives of six generations of a peasant family named Anqualdou, the first of whom, Iakobus, despite being a peasant, will become provincial eparch of Arkhadia, and the last of whom, Vernealos, who will be the last of his line because the woman he will love will not be able to bear children, will discover an ancient Persian manuscript which will trace this whole process back further to a Mesopotamian cylinder cycle and thence to a sheaf of Egyptian papyruses, and on back to the beginning of language.
We don’t change much, Vernon will reflect, and will be further amazed to discover that the person of Vernealos will be himself and that the book will predict everything that will happen to him for the rest of his life. When he will realize this, he will stop reading, just at the page describing one of his epic marathon love-makings with Jelena, and he will close the book and wrap it up and mail it off to the Library of Congress with a covering letter saying the book is theirs on condition that they never let him see it. Vernon will never know what is going to happen to him in the end. He will know only that he will be the last of the Ingledews, that there will be no more, until in some distant future century this whole cycle will be repeated once again.
Being the last of the Ingledews, he will want to stay, for as more as he can. He will not want to end. On his trip around the world, he will have discovered, and been appalled at, how very little the sciences really do understand, all by and by. He will have been struck with wonder at the way mankind is using—and misusing—the resources of this earth, sucking it dry and gouging it bare of its fossil fuels while letting the energy of the sun go to waste, the energy of the wind go to waste, the energy of the tides go to waste. In the obscure illustration of this final chapter, we will at least be able to discern what seems to be a windmill, and conjecture that part of the energy for Vernon’s last domicile is furnished by wind, and we will further assume that the roofs or domes of this domicile will be wired or rigged for solar energy. In fact, Vernon will work so hard just in planning this house that the very planning itself will give him a bad case of the frakes, which will be the last case of the frakes in Newton County. No one, ever again, will have to work hard enough to get the frakes. Frakes, like the plague and smallpox and typhoid fever, will become obsolete. But Vernon will have the last case, from his labors in planning his house. Trying to cure it, he will search again all through this book for the many cases of it, and will discover that not a single one of them was ever cured. Fighting against the terrible itching and the despair that he knows will follow it, Vernon will suddenly discover the cure for the frakes.
To Jelena he will announce, “I do not have the frakes.” “But you do,” she will point out. “Yeah, but I choose to ignore them,” Vernon will say. And, ignoring them, they will go away. They will be no more. Never again will man be punished for his efforts to accomplish something.
And Vernon will accomplish something: ignoring his frakes, he will build this house. Although it will be smudged and obscure to us, it will be very real to him and to Jelena, who will live in it and love in it, for the rest of their days. Although they will enjoy their privacy, they will not be exactly recluses, for they will invite their friends, Day Whittacker and his wife or girlfriend (whose name, we will now know, is Diana Stoving) to visit them. Vernon’s sisters and their husbands will never visit, because his sisters will be ashamed that Vernon will be “living with” and “running around with” his own cousin, and because, in fact, all but one of his sisters will leave Stay More and move to California and St. Louis and Kansas City and Eureka Springs, respectively. (The population of Stay More will be only nine.) The one sister who will stay more will be Patricia, who will be Jelena’s age and will have been her best friend in childhood and who will at least speak to Jelena whenever she sees her, but who will not visit her at home. Vernon’s father will visit occasionally, because, as Hank will remark, “If a feller is crazy enough to build a house like this, I reckon I’m crazy enough to come and see it now and again.” Also Vernon’s great-uncle Tearle, the last survivor of his generation of the Ingledews, will visit occasionally, complaining, “It aint got no porch. Nobody builds a porch to set on no more.” But Jelena will have a beautiful garden bordering the cool spring that bubbles up out of the property, and there will be lawn furniture to sit on in that garden.
I will hope that on my next visit to Stay More I will be invited to sit with them in that garden. I will also hope that Vernon will be willing to discuss the architecture of his house. I wil
l expect him to let me have a look at some of those documents he will have found. I will look forward to sampling some of that fabled Ingledew Ham. The old Ingledew General Store will be disintegrating, and I will attempt to persuade Vernon and his father to allow me to assist them in removing the glass showcase containing the body of Eli Willard and giving it a proper burial in the Stay More cemetery, for even if Eli Willard was not a Stay Moron, he will have to have a permanent resting place, with a permanent headstone, the inscription of which I will be glad to furnish.
I’m sure that Vernon will understand.
Acknowledgments
The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks is not purely a work of the imagination. Over the years I have attempted to read everything about the Ozarks that has been written, as some small consolation for not being able to go there and dwell there as long as I would like. My ancestral roots are deep in the Ozarks, and I know its people and its architecture and its traditions intimately, but I have tried to write this book with a self-imposed detachment which required a geographical detachment too. During the time of the writing of this book, I was able to visit the Ozarks on only one occasion, of one day’s duration, and the roll of film I shot that day did not develop. But here in my small room I am surrounded by books and magazines on the Ozarks, piles of photographs taken earlier, souvenirs of my childhood, letters from Ozark friends and relatives, and a mountainous landscape of notes that I obsessively write to myself. The view from my window is of a sycamore tree exactly like Noah Ingledew’s, backed by a meadow and a mountain.
Some of the more unbelievable situations and people in this novel are based upon “reality”; indeed, the more implausible or incredible an episode or person may seem to be, the more likely that true history is being imitated. For example, John Cecil was an actual person and the Battle of Whiteley’s Mill was an actual battle, fought as described here. The governor of Arkansas during Reconstruction actually was a blue-eyed Ozarks mountaineer. The woman homesteaders from the cities actually did homestead in Newton County. Of course there is an actual Newton County in the actual location of the Ozarks given, with a county seat named Jasper, and another town named Parthenon, and, as far as you and I are concerned, another town named Stay More. I would be happy to show it to you, but I feel I have.
Walter F. Lackey’s History of Newton County, Arkansas was the principle reference for this book, but I have also been influenced by the Ozark writings of Vance Randolph, Otto Ernest Rayburn, Waymon Hogue, Charles Morrow Wilson, John Gould Fletcher and many others, as well as such periodicals as The Ozarks Mountaineer.
Before writing the novel, I corresponded with many persons in the Ozarks. Mrs. Oliver Howard, reference librarian of the State Historical Society of Missouri at Columbia, was especially helpful, and her colleague, Lynn M. Roberts, editorial secretary of the Missouri Historical Review, furnished me with Xerox copies of several illustrations in their collection of Missouri Ozarks buildings, which are strikingly similar to Arkansas Ozarks buildings. Amanda Sarr of the University of Arkansas library furnished me with a complete bibliography of books and articles on Arkansas architecture, and Martha McK. Blum, graduate assistant in the University of Missouri library, did the same for Missouri architecture. I exchanged several letters with Professor Cyrus Sutherland of the Department of Architecture at the University of Arkansas, and I am grateful for his help. I also exchanged several letters with Tom Butler, a resident of Newton County, and with Day Whittacker and Diana Stoving, also residents of that enchanted county. My letters were generously acknowledged by Dorothy Doering of the Drury College library, Christopher Darrouzet of the Missouri State library, John L. Ferguson of the Arkansas History Commission, Robert E. Anderson of the School of the Ozarks library, Charles McRaven, also of the School of the Ozarks, and the anonymous librarian of the Arkansas Gazette.
In its original form, this novel was much more sexually explicit than it is now, replete with such language as “joist,” “beam,” “stud,” “timber,” “pole,” “erection,” “rear elevation,” “door,” “gable,” “sill,” “rail,” and “jamb.” I am very grateful to my editor, Llewellyn Howland iii, for persuading me to leave such things to the reader’s imagination, and I trust that the reader’s imagination has succeeded. My editor was the first person to hear of this project, the first person to encourage it, and the first person to see it when it was finished. In addition to removing certain passages, he made two other sweeping changes of an important nature.
His devoted secretary, Rosemary Gaffney, not only spent many hours making his letters to me legible and coherent, but also spent days tracking down a crucial but elusive doctoral dissertation in the archives of Harvard University. She is simply a wonderful person.
Helpful in a way they did not realize were the few people who wrote letters of appreciation for my previous volumes, and I would like to list them here: George Eades, Katherine Berry, Sandee Jo Joy, Rhode Rapp, Weld Henshaw, Juanita Melchert, Sue Anderson, Mrs. John Ingle, Gretchen Keiser, Linda Gray, Alex Humez, Sharon Karpinski, Joanna Noe, Willie Allen, John Braden, Carol Cross, Eleanor Jacobson, my two United Kingdom “fans,” Capt. Archibald A.J. Dinsmore and Gayle Harrison…and Dione, wherever you are. Without the encouragement of these good people, this book would not exist.
To my students in my architecture classes at Windham College, I am indebted for a spirited give-and-take over the years that has taught me much about architecture, and I apologize to them for never discussing the architecture treated in the present volume.
As to the chapter head illustrations, there is no point in claiming that any resemblance between these buildings and actual buildings living or dead is purely coincidental. Most of these structures no longer stand, but that fact makes them no less “real.” They stood, and that is, like all of us, what matters.
For my daughters: Jennifer, Calico, and Katy, and
my stepson Mickel, who never
heard a bedtime story like this one.
The author is very grateful to Jack Butler for a careful reading of the manuscript. He found what was good and said so; he saw what was missing and wrote it himself.
Contents
INSTAR THE FIRST: The Maiden
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
Chapter five
Chapter six
Chapter seven
INSTAR THE SECOND: Maiden No More
Chapter eight
Chapter nine
Chapter ten
Chapter eleven
Chapter twelve
Chapter thirteen
INSTAR THE THIRD: The Rally
Chapter fourteen
Chapter fifteen
Chapter sixteen
Chapter seventeen
Chapter eighteen
Chapter nineteen
Chapter twenty
Chapter twenty-one
Chapter twenty-two
Chapter twenty-three
Chapter twenty-four
INSTAR THE FOURTH: The Consequence
Chapter twenty-five
Chapter twenty-six
Chapter twenty-seven
Chapter twenty-eight
Chapter twenty-nine
Chapter thirty
INSTAR THE FIFTH: The Woman Pays
Chapter thirty-one
Chapter thirty-two
Chapter thirty-three
Chapter thirty-four
Chapter thirty-five
INSTAR THE SIXTH: The Convert
Chapter thirty-six
Chapter thirty-seven
Chapter thirty-eight
IMAGO: The Mockroach’s Song
INSTAR THE FIRST:
The Maiden
Chapter one
One time not too long ago on a beginning of night in the latter part of May, a middle-aged gent was walking homeward along the forest path from Roamin Road to the village of Carlott, behind Holy House in the valley of Stainmoor or
Stay More. The six gitalongs that carried him were rickety, and there was a meandering to his gait that gave a whole new meaning to the word Periplaneta. This wanderer gave a smart nod, as if in agreement to a command, though no one had spoken to him yet. His wings were not folded neatly across his back and were neither tidy nor black but flowzy and brownish. Presently he was met by a plump parson whose wings were very black and long and trim like the tails of a coat, and who was humming a hymn, “The Old Shiny Pin.”
“Morsel, Reverend,” said the flowzy gent, and spat, marking his space.
“Good morsel to ye, Squire John,” said the pudgy parson, and spat too.
“Now sir, beggin yore pardon,” the wanderer said, spitting again, “but we bumped inter one another last Sattidy on this path about this same time, and I said, ‘Morsel,’ same as now, and you answered me, ‘Good morsel to ye, Squire John,’ same as now, didn’t ye?”
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