While they lasted, the war games were noisy and nerve-wracking. All the dogs of Stay More ran away from home. All the Stay Morons who were interested could watch the games and could not help listening to the games, but most of the spectators were the young folk of the town. There were rumors that some of the older girls, like Rosa Faye Duckworth and Betty June Alan, were not merely flirting with the soldiers.
Chapter forty-one
The war games came to an abrupt end. The army departed Stay More. But Lieutenant McPherson remained, to help Dawny during the special ceremony that was held beside the schoolhouse to award the Congressional Medal of Honor to Lawlor and Dulcie Coe in memory of their son Gerald, who had died at Iwo Jima. The ceremony, attended by Congressman J.W. Trimble, was the most elaborate event in the history of Stay More. Captain (formerly Lieutenant) McPherson sat with Dawny at the Press table, but was unable to persuade Dawny to bring out an Extra, or for that matter any further issues of The Stay Morning Star, which joined the mausoleum of America’s small newspapers. But he kept his little office in the side room of her store, not as a newspaper office but as a place to get away from his aunt and uncle. McPherson had given him an army-issue Underwood upright typewriter, and he taught himself how to hunt and peck, and years later he would write upon it a novel called When Angels Rest, which tells the whole story of that visit of the Army to Stay More.
But for most writing, Dawny had an Indian Chief writing tablet which he used to take notes when Latha took him to the Stay More cemetery, where she told him the histories of all the Stay Morons buried there as well as a few who were not Stay Morons, like Tennessee Tennison, a beautiful young girl that Doc Swain, when he was a young man teaching school at Parthenon, had fallen in love with but could not cure of the tuberculosis that carried her away. Everybody in Stay More had some secrets, and Latha told Dawny many of these without telling her own. Dawny years later would tell Tenny Tennison’s story and Doc Swain’s story in his novel, Butterfly Weed.
When the war was over, although the servicemen returned to Stay More, the population went on declining. Estalee Jerram the schoolteacher eloped to Wisconsin with a man who had been one of McPherson’s sergeants. Betty June Alan eloped to California with a soldier who had left her pregnant. Dan’s daughter Annie eloped with a man who had been the tank captain during the war games but he didn’t take her to California; the man, whose name was Burton Stoving, was an insurance excecutive in Little Rock. Art Dingletoon took his whole family to California in search of greener squatting places, and not long afterwards Willard Dinsmore went out there in search of Gypsy. Hank Ingledew had little trouble persuading Sonora that California was the Promised Land, which was very hard for Latha, who could hardly stand to lose her daughter once again, as well as her three grand-daughters. They had been keeping baby Jelena Ingledew after the suicides of her mothers (no one had been able to determine whether it was Doris or Jelena who had actually given birth to the child, and as for its name, some held that they had named the baby Jelena as a kind of Jelena Junior like Sonora’s third daughter, while others believed that Doris had named it that out of love for her sister) but when they decided to go to California, since they already had three daughters, they gave the baby Jelena to Hank’s brother Jackson for upbringing, and thus she remained a Stay Moron (and would come to be thought of by Latha almost as a favorite grandchild).
Hank and Sonora settled with their children in Anaheim, a city southeast of Los Angeles, where they discovered that most of their neighbors had also come from Arkansas. Eventually there were so many of them in Anaheim that they constituted a kind of Stay More-in-exile colony. Hank had a high-paying job as an electronics technician at a huge automated canning factory, and he also moonlighted as a repairman of television sets, and made so much money that Sonora wrote Latha to say they had moved into an opulent twelve-room “Spanish colonial” house. They were rolling in riches so much that Hank wasn’t even perturbed when their next baby was also a girl, Patricia. Sonora sent photographs of the girl to Latha. Her letters to Latha were long and rambling and not always happy. She spent too much time watching soap operas on television in the daytime and quiz shows at night. Her daughters were happy and Hank (who now preferred to be called John Henry) was rich and good-looking, but Sonora missed Stay More and had a feeling that the Stay Morons around her were no longer Stay Morons, not simply because they had not stayed more in Stay More but because California had taken away their integrity and sense of fun and their “sharp edges,” as Sonora put it. They were all kind of blurry.
Latha answered her daughter’s letters, with what little news there was to report: Junior Duckworth, who had once been Hank’s rival for Sonora’s affections, had moved to California, but she didn’t know where. So had Merle Kimber and the others who had built the W.P.A. bridge and fought for Sonora’s attention in the yard. There wasn’t much else to write about to Sonora except the changing of the seasons, but eventually Sonora wrote back to say that since California had no seasons it made her terribly homesick to hear about autumn and spring in the Ozarks. So Latha tried to tell her about the summer droughts and the spring floods, which were just as awful as ever. Sonora wrote to say that maybe out of boredom she had stopped wearing her diaphragm, and as a result was pregnant once more. As the pregnancy progressed, Sonora wrote to complain that she was losing her looks, getting fat, and her stomach was almost as extended as John Henry’s potbelly when in the fifth month he finally noticed it and wanted to know why she hadn’t been wearing her diaphragm and warning her that this baby had pretty damn well be a boy. Toward the end of her pregnancy Sonora told her mother that she was not only fat but gross and ugly and she suspected that John Henry was not being faithful to her. Anything that Latha could think to say to Sonora in response would have been meaningless. “Men are that way.” “Don’t blame yourself.” “Let’s hope that everything will be back to normal after the baby is born.” Sonora wrote to say that when she went into labor, Hank wasn’t even around but out somewhere fooling around with his girlfriend. When he finally showed up and found out that the baby was one more girl, he observed philosophically that it didn’t appear there were ever going to be any more Ingledews. She assured him that this one was the prettiest of them all. Latha felt such sympathy for Sonora that for the first time since she had bought the store from Bob Cluley she wasn’t able to open it. There wasn’t much business anyway, and the post office had been closed permanently since the war, so Latha simply left a large hand-lettered sign on the door saying WE ARE NOT OPEN. IF YOU BADLY NEED SOMETHING, AND DONNY ISN’T HERE TO OPEN UP FOR YOU, COME TO THE DILL HOUSE. Dawny made a point of being available in case anybody came to the store, but he later reported to her that no one had, except a couple of drummers. Latha stayed home until she was able to write some sort of letter to Sonora, with no advice or consolation but with reassurance that Latha loved her very much and was willing to do anything for her, short of coming to California. In the weed patch on the north side of the store there were a whole bunch of mulleins, and she went out and began to bend them down one by one, naming them Sonora, John Henry, Latha, Eva, June, Patricia, and, the new baby, Sharon [who was me]. Each morning she would go look at the bent-down mulleins, and each evening before closing the store (which had done no business) she would also have a word or two with the lame stalks of mullein. None of them responded. But one morning she saw that the stalk she had named John Henry was standing proud and tall and she could not believe it. Why would that one alone have risen? All day long she was in a quandary, and told Every about it at dinnertime, but he never had given much credence to her superstitions. But late in the afternoon, when she was sitting in her rocker on the porch, here came John Henry walking up the road!
“John Henry as I live and breath!” she yelled at him, and stood to give him a hug, but they only shook hands.
“Hank’s what everbody hereabouts calls me,” he said.
“Where’s the rest of you?” she asked, as if he had left an arm
down the road.
“Aw, they’re still out to Californy, but I hope they’ll come back soon.”
“Did you just walk all the way home?”
He laughed. “Naw. My van’s parked over at my folks’ place. I’ve just been out for a stretch and to say howdy to old friends.”
Hank sat in a chair beside her rocker and they talked for quite a spell. Hanging his head, he told her that Sonora had evicted him from their house because he had foolishly “been with” another woman, but he hoped that since time wounds all heels it would also heal all wounds and maybe Sonora would bring all the girls and come back to Stay More to live, because as far as he was concerned he wasn’t ever going to leave Stay More again. His ancestor Jacob Ingledew had placed a curse on California, and now Hank placed so many curses on it that he had to keep asking Latha to excuse his French. Latha told him that she understood and she hoped that Sonora would forgive him and come home too. When the subject came up of Hank’s regret over his fifth daughter, Latha laughed and told Hank of an old tried-and-true superstition that had never been known to fail; if a husband sits on the roof of his house near the chimney for seven hours his next child will be a boy. Hank scoffed, so Latha named for him all of the men of Stay More who had been born males as a result of their fathers sitting on the roofs of their houses for seven hours. Hank was impressed, but he observed, “Heck, I aint even got a roof to set on.” That set him to thinking, and the following day he began construction of a ranch-style house up on an elevated bench of Ingledew Mountain that afforded a fine view of what was left of Stay More and all the mountains beyond. He even went to Harrison and persuaded the power company to run an electric line into Stay More to run his power tools and thus he could be credited with the coming of electricity to Stay More, which led to his eventual credit for bringing television to Newton County because, as soon as he had finished the house with the help of his several uncles and his brother Jackson, he bought a vacant store building on the Jasper square and turned it into Ingledew Television Service & Sales. Since people needed electricity to run their TVs, this led to the establishment of power lines all over the county.
Meanwhile, Latha wrote regularly to Sonora, telling of her meeting with Hank and of his determination to have Sonora come back, but Sonora answered she could never forgive Hank for what he had done. It had been so terrible that Sonora had deliberately started an affair with the husband of Hank’s lover, to get even with both of them. Latha kept her informed of the progress on the house, which was going to have five bedrooms, three for the daughters to share, and one for the son that Hank never gave up hoping to have. Latha tried to assure her son-in-law that Sonora would eventually forgive him. “If California is as bad as you say it is, she can’t stand it much longer,” Latha said. Other people kept on going to California, though. Frank and Rosie Murrison decided to pack up and go there, but when it was time for them to leave, they couldn’t find Dawny, who hid out somewhere in the woods until they were gone, and then was permitted to stay in his room at Latha’s store when he reappeared. Latha wanted him to move in with them, but he didn’t want to be their child. He was grateful, however, that Latha fed him, and packed his school lunch, and he kept on working at the store as her stockboy and even minding the store whenever she was away or didn’t feel like showing up. Every’s business was slow, but it was fast enough to keep enough cars and pickups running smoothly so that folks could drive into Jasper to do their shopping at the new supermarket there. The day came when Latha had to close her store for good. She didn’t evict Dawny, but she told Dan to help himself to whatever he wanted that remained of her merchandise.
As predicted, Sonora finally came home. Every drove to Fort Smith to pick her and her daughters up at the airport. Latha wanted to go along but there wouldn’t be room for all of them in his car. So Latha waited patiently for hours until they got home and she could embrace her daughter and all her granddaughters. Sonora looked so aged, but the baby Sharon was truly beautiful. [Thanks, Gran.] Then they all went up to the new house to surprise Hank, who had worn himself out building the new house and was practically bedridden. There was no furniture in the house yet except his bed, so Latha had the privilege of putting up her granddaughters in the dogtrot’s other wing. The girls were struck with wonder at an actual house made out of logs, and they were crazy about all the cats all over the place, and tried to hold or pet as many of them as possible before bedtime. Maybe Hank was disappointed in having so many daughters, but Every certainly loved having so many granddaughters, and he doted on them, making the older ones laugh at his jokes and letting the young ones ride the little horsy down to town on his knee. Every closed his garage for lack of business, leaving one engine block hanging from an oak tree because nobody had come to claim the car it was supposed to run, but he left the gasoline pump operative in case anybody ever needed gas, but nobody did. He got himself a job as a mechanic for the Ford dealer in Jasper, which enabled him to take his older granddaughters to school at Jasper, slightly better than the Parthenon school that Dawny was attending. Every didn’t really need a job, because he and Latha had made so much money during the Army maneuvers that they could retire any time they wanted to, but Every needed an excuse for driving his granddaughters to school, and he always made a point of asking them to tell him all about their school day. When Dawny finished the eighth grade at the Parthenon school, Every began taking him along to attend the Jasper High School.
When Hank and Sonora were all settled in their new house, and Hank’s TV business in Jasper was booming, Sonora came to Latha and said, “Hank wants to sit on the roof for seven hours. When’s he supposed to do it? Before conception or before birth?” Pleased that her superstition had been accepted, Latha replied that it was supposed to happen just prior to conception. So the following Sunday, the first day that was both a holiday for Hank and the middle of Sonora’s fertile cycle, Hank went up on the roof, equipped with a Mason jar of ice and water because it was a hellishly hot day. Latha could stand in the back of her dogtrot and see him up there, far up atop that bench of Ingledew Mountain. After he’d been up there about three hours, and Sonora had taken him a sandwich, Sonora came over to Latha’s to report on the “project” and on the various friends and customers who had stopped by attempting to get Hank to come down, who claimed he was adjusting his TV antenna. Sonora arranged to bring all the girls over at six o’clock, which would be the seventh hour, and Latha offered to feed them while Sonora tried again to get impregnated.
Sure enough, nine months later they had a son. But neither of them could remember the name of the Yankee peddler that they had intended to name the boy after. If they had thought to ask Latha, she could have told them. Sonora decided to name the boy Vernon because it was springtime.
Latha was very fond of the boy but she was careful not to overdo it the way Hank did. You’d think Hank considered himself a hero. He handed out cigars to everyone he knew, including Latha, who dutifully smoked at least part of it, the first time she’d ever used tobacco in any form, and the last. Vernon’s five sisters each took a puff, but that was all they could stand, and the only way they could understand the significance of the cigar was that it was shaped like a magnification of the part of Vernon’s anatomy that distinguished him from them. In fact, Vernon had not merely five sisters but six, in a sense: his first cousin Jelena, daughter of the ill-fated Dinsmore twins and ill-fated Billy Bob Ingledew, came from Harrison each summer, where her Uncle Jackson was raising her, to spend the summer with her cousins, especially Patricia, her coeval and favorite. Jelena and Patricia were eight years old when Vernon was born, and that was an age for being particularly interested in watching Sonora change Vernon’s diapers, a job which both girls eagerly volunteered to do. Jelena was to claim, years afterward, that she fell in love with Vernon the first time she laid eyes on him. Latha didn’t believe that little Vernon could distinguish among all those girls who were his sisters and his cousin but she did believe that somehow he was more drawn
to Jelena. When Jelena picked him up and held him, he actually cooed.
Chapter forty-two
Dawny told Latha that he was spending a lot of his time with ole Dan, learning that it was ole Dan who had found him when he was lost in the dark glen of the waterfall at the age of almost six, and that he had told Dawny about his childhood in a place called Dudleytown, Connecticut, and the fact that he was not much older than Dawny was now when he began teaching school in a place called Five Corners, Vermont. And he reminded him of how, in his search for some other place that would be the right place, he had lived in a dying town called Lost Cove, North Carolina, which was where he had fathered the girl that Dawny had known as Annie, who had eloped with the tank captain Stoving to Little Rock.
“Are you sad because of that?” Dawny asked ole Dan. But Dan said, “I am not especially sad because Annie left me. She had good reasons for that, and she needed to get out and see some of the world. But I’m sad that she now has a child of her own, a little girl named Diana, and that child is going to have to grow up in the corruption of Little Rock. I was never successful in persuading Annie that there were certain aspects of our country life which must be preserved against the encroachment of ‘civilization.’
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 3 Page 84