He had no heart for searching further for moonshiners, not for several days at least, so he checked into a hotel at Jasper, where, several days later, the Jasper Disaster noted the fact under a headline reading MANIAC AT LARGE IN TOWN. People barred their doors and the sheriff got up a posse. The man in the brown shirt was run to earth on the courthouse lawn. He flashed his I.R.S. badge. The sheriff asked him what he had been drinking, and he replied, “Chism’s Tea.” “Wal, did ye cut down his still?” the sheriff wanted to know. “What for?” the revenuer said. “That tea is the best stuff I ever drunk.” The sheriff and his posse looked at one another and grinned, and winked. “I’ll let ye go,” said the sheriff, “but next time don’t drink a whole gourdful,” The revenuer went on his way, busting up stills all over the Ozarks, but after a few weeks of such hard work, he developed an overpowering thirst for some more tea, so he returned to Stay More again and hiked up the Ring Prong road to Waymon Chism’s. He asked if he could buy just half a gourdful, explaining that the county sheriff had ordered him not to drink a whole gourd. Waymon said he was sorry but a gourd was the least amount he could see his way to sell. The revenuer asked if Waymon would loan him a Mason jar to pour half of it in; Waymon didn’t have any Mason jars but he poured half of the gourd into a stone jug stoppered with a corncob and gave it to the revenuer, who drank the other half and went off swinging the jug in his hand. He found that taking a small nip from the jug just before raiding a still gave him energy, and he went on busting up stills all over the Ozarks and returning periodically to Stay More to refill his jug with Chism’s tea, and he would have lived happily ever after, but he was a bachelor with no dependents and because of that fact he was drafted into the army and shipped overseas, where he died at Verdun.
Bachelors with no dependents made up the entire United States Army, and almost all the Ingledews were bachelors without dependents, but none of them were drafted, and if they had been they would not have served, because they couldn’t see any sense in going across the sea to fight some other countries’ battles for them. When the Jasper Disaster ran a banner headline, AMERICA ENTERS WAR, the people of Stay More assembled at Isaac’s mill and discussed the situation for three-and-a-half minutes, then put it out of their minds. They had nothing personal against the Germans. Stay Morons were not isolationists because of their isolation but because of their patriotism, which they thought of as loving and protecting their country, and they couldn’t see any way that fighting in France had to do with their country. There were only two Stay Morons who fought in France during that war, and they were not drafted but volunteered. One was Raymond Ingledew, whom we met in the previous chapter, he of the libidinous urges, which were not gratified at the age of fifteen, nor at any time by the city women. At the age of sixteen, however, following a square dance at which much of Chism’s Dew was consumed, he successfully enticed a somewhat homely Dinsmore girl off into the bushes, and removed both their virginities. At seventeen, he attended a pie supper, and was the highest bidder on a pie that had been baked by one of the Whitter girls, not as homely as the Dinsmore girl but still not a “looker”; she yielded easily to his debauchment. At eighteen, he graduated to a Duckworth girl who was almost pretty. At twenty, he succeeded in seducing a Coe girl who actually had certain attractions. At twenty-one, he achieved his majority and sowed his wild oats between a couple of Swain and Chism girls who were quite pretty. He felt ready to take on a beautiful girl.
There was only one girl in Stay More who, without any reservation, met that standard, and I cannot utter her name here, because the utterance of her name fills me with longing and sadness, but I have uttered it elsewhere. The town fathers of Jasper erected a high school, and this Beautiful Girl, although from a very humble family, was the first graduate of Stay More grade school to qualify for admission to the high school, and just to be near her Raymond Ingledew volunteered to serve as school bus driver, or rather school wagon driver, hitching a one-horse chaise five mornings a week and driving her into Jasper, where, since he had nothing better to do while waiting to drive her home, he enrolled at the high school himself, a twenty-one-year-old freshman among fifteen-year-old freshmen. Raymond, commendably, made no attempt to seduce the Beautiful Girl when she was a fifteen-year-old freshman. He waited until she was a sixteen-year-old sophomore.
But she repulsed him, claiming she already had a boyfriend. She did; his name was…but I have a habit of uttering his name only as a magic incantation to ward off mindlessness; I can use here only his initials, which were E.D. E.D. had been the Beautiful Girl’s boyfriend since she was eleven years old, but this stood as an extra challenge to Raymond, who knew that he was much more handsome than E.D. and was certainly from a much better family. He continued, during their junior and senior years, trying to seduce her, and, because her own mother continually reminded her that Raymond was a banker’s son while E.D. was only a wagonmaker’s son who couldn’t go to high school, Raymond at last, with a promise of marriage, seduced her, discovering that her ardor in the act was a match for her beauty. But the conquest did not satisfy him. Although they were officially engaged, he continued to dissipate his oats among all his previous conquests, and he could not for long keep this a secret from the Beautiful Girl, who, when she found out that he had been keeping company with Wanda Dinsmore, gave herself again to E.D. and later boasted of it to Raymond, whose strict double standard tore at his heart and compelled him to the rash act of picking a fight with E.D., whose fists drubbed him senseless.
When Raymond recovered, he committed the rasher act of running off to Jasper and enlisting in the army. Raymond’s older brothers, all five of them, ganged up on E.D. and threatened to kill him unless he went and joined the army too. So those were the only two men of Stay More to fight in France, where they wound up in the same platoon, and even became friends, or at least friendly rivals, or at least comrades-in-arms. E.D. was promoted to sergeant, and won the Croix de Guerre; Raymond was promoted to corporal, and was captured by the Germans in the Argonne forest, tied to a tree and left there as a decoy to lure other Yanks into the line of machine gun fire, but the squadron’s lieutenant sensed the trap and forbade his men to rescue Raymond. E.D. disobeyed the command; the lieutenant tried to stop him; he knocked the lieutenant cold, and crawled on his belly fifty feet to the tree where Raymond was tied and began untying him; Raymond urged him to get away because it was a trap, but E.D. continued untying him, until the machine guns opened fire: both of E.D.’s legs were hit and he crumpled to the ground and would have perished had not his men opened massive fire on the machine gun nest and managed to drag E.D. out of there. Raymond wasn’t hit, but he must have died in a German prison camp, or else, when liberated, he must have met some voluptuous French girl and married her and stayed over there, because he never came back to Stay More. E.D. was court-martialed for disobeying orders and striking the lieutenant, and was sent to Fort Leavenworth prison.
John Ingledew gave the Beautiful Girl a job as a teller in the Swains Creek Bank and Trust Co. and kept reassuring her that Raymond would be coming home any day now, but he never did. Raymond’s older brother Bevis, he of the sanguine humor, managed to stumble into marriage and perpetuate the Ingledew name, as we shall see; he was the only one of the six brothers to marry.
The same year the war began and ended, the same year that Bevis married, the same year that Raymond did not come home, old Isaac Ingledew gave up working in his mill. He did not tell anyone why he was quitting, but it was assumed that he was retiring on the grounds of old age, being seventy-five years old. He turned the management of the mill over to Denton and Monroe, but he continued to sit in his captain’s chair on the porch of the mill, listening to the people chatting and gossiping while their meal and flour were ground. He continued as he had for many years going without sleep. A bright young reporter on the Jasper Disaster, freshly graduated from what was called a “journalism school,” heard that there was an old man living in Stay More who never slept, and he came down t
o Stay More and tried to interview Isaac, without success, because among all the other things that Isaac was continuing was his taciturnity. Isaac never revealed the secret, if there was one, of why and how he never slept, but the reporter secluded himself in the bushes for at least three nights in a row to spy on Isaac and make sure he never slept; unfortunately it was too dark for the reporter to be able to see whether Isaac’s eyes were open or shut, but everyone else whom the reporter interviewed said that nobody had found Isaac asleep since the beginning of the Second Spell of Darkness, which was a fairly long time ago.
The reporter finally interviewed Isaac’s wife Salina, who was more than willing to talk; the reporter’s major problem was to get away from her; she kept him for fourteen hours and told him the story of her own life, the story of Isaac’s whole life, the stories of her children’s lives, and she admitted that she had never known her husband to go to bed since the beginning of the Second Spell of Darkness, but she didn’t know why, or how, or what. The reporter wanted to ask her what effect that circumstance had had on their sex lives, but he didn’t know how to phrase the question, and let it go. Even if he had asked, he could not very well have printed the information that Salina still climbed Isaac with regularity in their seventies. Even if he had printed it, people wouldn’t have wanted to know that such old people even had a sex life anymore. Even if people had wanted to know that, they wouldn’t have wanted to picture Isaac and Salina in that particular position or posture. The reporter’s article in the Disaster was a long one, but it didn’t tell anybody anything that wasn’t already commonly known.
Because Isaac sat on the mill porch, never speaking, listening to the people gossip and chatter, the people gradually began to forget that he was among them. Just as their parents and grandparents had done once upon a time, they began to talk about Isaac as if he were not there, nay, they began to talk about him as if he were no longer living, as if he had passed already into legend, and they began to reminisce about his deeds and exploits, blowing them up out of all proportion: it was almost as if they were trying to outdo one another in making a mythical hero out of him.
He sat there unnoticed, listening with what amazement we can only imagine, as The Incredible Epic of Colonel Coon Ingledew was embellished and heightened and embroidered. Perhaps he realized that there could never again be a life like that, and perhaps this saddened him, and perhaps out of sadness he quietly died. Or perhaps, as some suggested later, he had waited only long enough to be sure that at least one of his many grandsons would marry and continue the Ingledew name, and now that Bevis had married he could pass on. Whatever the case, he yielded his breath. Because no one noticed him, no one noticed this, and they went on talking, telling of his fabulous feats and heroic adventures. Although they did not notice him, they could not help but notice, in time, the smell. Denton was the first to sniff the necrosis, and he glanced at his father and declared, “I think Paw has done guv out.” “How can you tell?” asked Monroe. “Shake him and see,” said Denton. “Heck, you shake him,” said Monroe. “You’re closer to him,” Denton pointed out. “You’re older’n me,” Monroe countered. After further argument, the brothers agreed to shake him simultaneously, which they did, warily. Their father did not respond. Rigor mortis was so advanced that they had to bury him still sitting in his captain’s chair with his hands gripping the arms of it, and even though they used silver dollars to try to close his eyelids, they could not get them closed, and had to leave them open. The entire population of Newton County, over ten thousand people, attended the funeral and stood in the rain at the Stay More cemetery to watch entranced as Brother Stapleton delivered the eulogy, a four-hour show, “The Incredible Epic of Colonel Coon Ingledew,” and then the ten thousand voices were lifted in funereal song:
Tempted and tried we’re oft made to wonder
Why it should be thus all the day long
While there are others living about us
Never molested though in the wrong.
and the resplendent, mournful chorus:
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 members of the family, instead of sprinkling handfuls of dirt into the grave, substituted flour and corn meal. The headstone bore the inscription, “Now he sleeps,” but some folks weren’t at all too sure of that. Salina Ingledew, well aware of the fact that Jacob’s wife Sarah had followed him out of existence on the day after his death, felt beholden to continue the tradition, and took to her bed, trying hard to give up the ghost, but the ghost would not give. She felt disgraced by this failure, and remained in seclusion for the rest of her life, which lasted and lasted.
The Beautiful Girl was working as a teller in the bank one day when E.D. returned to Stay More, having broken out of the military jail. He tried to persuade her to run away with him, but she did not want to leave Stay More. He tried to stay more and persuade her to marry him, but Raymond’s five brothers ganged up on him and ran him out of town a second time.
The Jasper Disaster announced that an amendment had been added to the United States Constitution prohibiting the manufacture, sale or possession of alcoholic beverages. The Stay More Lodge of T.G.A.O.T.U. vowed to resist unto death. But Waymon Chism, just to be safe, moved his operation off up the mountain, to a remote cave concealed by a waterfall.
Time passed. The Beautiful Girl was feeding her hogs one evening after supper, when E.D. appeared once again, having once again broken out of Fort Leavenworth. Once again he tried to persuade her to run away with him: once again she protested that Stay More was her home. The argument was futile; out of futility he raped her. Then out of further futility, the following day, while she was working alone at the bank during John Ingledew’s lunch hour, he appeared in disguise and pointed a revolver at her, and robbed the bank of eight thousand dollars, and was not seen again for eighteen years.
The decline of Stay More had begun.
Chapter thirteen
Bevis Ingledew was lucky. Although his father had refused to permit him to withdraw his savings in order to build a house for his new bride, Bevis had gone to the bank one day when it was being attended only by the Beautiful Girl, had made out a withdrawal slip, and had said to her, “Goldang it, I’m thirty years old and I got a right to git my own money if I wanter.” The Beautiful Girl had not argued, but had given him the money, although she had later been tongue-lashed for it by John Ingledew. The Beautiful Girl could not possibly have known it then, but she was helping Bevis get the money to build a house wherein Bevis’s firstborn, John Henry, would be delivered, and that that same John Henry would grow up and marry the Beautiful Girl’s own daughter, conceived when E.D. raped her. We all have a way of doing things that turn out to matter, somehow. So when the father of that daughter robbed the bank, all the Ingledews lost their money, except Bevis, who had converted his money into building materials and erected the somewhat modest bungalow illustrated above. If it is not nearly as interesting as most of our earlier structures, perhaps Bevis was not as interesting as most of our earlier Ingledews. Some would argue that his house is a symbol of the beginning of Stay More’s decline.
Bevis’s bride’s name was Emelda Duckworth; she was a great granddaughter of Elijah Duckworth, one of Stay More’s early settlers, and niece of attorney Jim Tom Duckworth. She had lost her virginity to Bevis’s brother Raymond, and when Raymond became engaged to the Beautiful Girl, Emelda Duckworth turned her attentions to Raymond’s five brothers, but soon discovered that all of them were too woman-shy even to look at her, much less to speak to her or listen to her. Bevis, even though because of his excess of blood he was high-spirited, lighthearted, even frolicsome, was just as woman-shy as his brothers. He was also perhaps the most talkative of all the Ingledews, but he could not talk to girls. He had known Emelda Duckworth all of her life, but he had never spoken to her until th
e Unforgettable Picnic, and in fact he did not even speak to her there.
The Unforgettable Picnic got its name from the fact that people still talked about it for years afterward (although nobody remembers it today), and younger generations were always pestering their elders to hold another Unforgettable Picnic, which their elders had to patiently explain to them would be impossible, and so the Unforgettable Picnic acquired even more legendary memorability as one of those things of the past that would never come again. The Unforgettable Picnic was held during the last year of the War, not necessarily as a diversion, because so very few of the participants were even concerned with the War, but because that was the only year in which the Fourth of July happened to occur on the Second Tuesday of the Month, a special coincidence made even more memorable by coinciding with the peak of ’mater-pickin time and the Golden (50th) Reunion of the G.A.R. When the news of the picnic was norated around the county by the Jasper Disaster, everybody made plans to come, but the Stay More T.G.A.O.T.U., sponsors of the picnic, declared in a subsequent issue of the Disaster that the picnic was limited only to residents of Stay More and veterans of the G.A.R. Even so, this was quite a crowd. The Field of Clover was again chosen as the site; dozens of tables, hundreds of chairs were carried into the field. The older women remembered the deplorably lascivious picnic that had occurred in ’mater-pickin time during the Decade of Light, and they cautioned their daughters to go easy on the ’maters preparing dishes for the feast.
The daughters had not been born during the Decade of Light, and they ignored this caution, but the ’mater somehow wasn’t as potent as it used to be; it made a body feel pretty good but not necessarily lustful. A good clean time was had by all. There was a lot of square dancing, shootin matches, games of Base Ball, as well as several booths and rides. At the most popular of the booths, a canvas wagon cover was hung up with a hole slit in it; people took turns sticking their heads through the hole from one side while from the other side, at a distance of four hats, other people threw rotten (or at least unfresh) eggs, at three eggs for ten cents or to the highest bidder; people would gladly pay more for the privilege of throwing eggs at people they didn’t like, and it was understood that every person had to take his or her turn sticking his or her head through the canvas hole. When John Ingledew’s turn came, a man bid five dollars for three eggs, and hit John’s head with all three of them. When the old woman Whom We Cannot Name was required to take her turn, nobody would pay even ten cents for three eggs, or even accept them free, so none were thrown. When the Beautiful Girl’s turn came, Tearle Ingledew bought the eggs but deliberately missed. When Bevis Ingledew’s turn came, he took it cheerfully, because he was always carefree, although he hoped he had no enemies with good aim. He put his head through the hole and looked up in surprise to see Emelda Duckworth buying the eggs. Why was she mad at him? Because he had been too shy to return her attentions? But he hadn’t been any more shy than E.H., Odell, Tearle and Stanfield, and they hadn’t returned her attentions either. Why didn’t she throw at them? Why pick on me? he silently demanded.
The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks Page 31