The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks

by Harington, Donald

  After a week he returned to his house and rang the doorbell and then pounded on the door and hollered, “Sonora, at least let me say goodbye to the girls!” But she would not open the door. He lived in the motel for another two weeks, and called her every day on the telephone, but as soon as she recognized his voice she would hang up. He tried to write her a letter, but got as far as “Dear Sonora,” which caused him to remember the first letter he had ever sent her, and made him sad, but he mailed these two words to her anyway, with the return address of his motel; there was no reply.

  Of course, he went to no more parties, and when the secretary came into his electronics shop to find out why he was avoiding her, before she could get a word out of her mouth he said, “Just skip it. Just git the hell out of here and don’t bother me anymore,” and the tone with which he said these words was such that she left him alone and he never saw her again. After work Friday he drew his paycheck and got it cashed and checked out of the motel, and wrote Sonora one more note: “Dear Sonora: I’m going home. Going home. Love, Hank.” He mailed this, and pointed his van eastward and drove all night across the desert and up into the mountains and beyond. He parked and napped beside the road a couple of brief times, and kept moving; on the morning of the third day he reached Fort Smith, Arkansas, and turned northeastward toward home.

  On the road from Jasper to Stay More he noticed an abandoned house. And then another one. Parthenon was all run down. At the church/schoolhouse outside Stay More he stopped and got out and walked for a while among the headstones in the cemetery: a dozen Ingledews, many Swains and Plowrights and Coes and Dinsmores and Chisms and Duckworths and Stapletons. He drove on into the village. There was no village. His mother-in-law’s small general store seemed to be still in operation; at least its front door was open, but he did not stop to speak to her. The bank was a shell of stone. The dentists’ and doctors’ offices were empty or gone. The mill was rotting and seemed as if it would collapse any moment. Aunt Lola’s big general store was boarded up, its gasoline pump immobile with rust. The canning factory was stuffed with bales of hay. Someone seemed to be still living in the old hotel, but he did not stop. He drove on to his folks’ house and was almost surprised to find it lived in. His mother and father stared at his van as if it had come from the moon, and read the lettering on the door: “Ingledew Television Service, Anaheim, Calif. 433-8991.” To his father and mother, he said simply that Sonora had kicked him out of the house and it was purely his own fault because he had been fooling around, but he was awful glad to come back to Stay More because he never cared much for California anyway.

  After his mother fed him dinner, he left his van at their house and went for a long walk, to start getting rid of his potbelly. The walk took him past many more abandoned houses; he tried to remember the names of the people who had lived in them. The ones he could remember all lived, if they still lived, in Anaheim or Fullerton or other California towns. But while the human habitations were abandoned, nature was not, and nature welcomed Hank back to Stay More: the air was nice and had a fragrance that he had never found anywhere out west. The smell of weeds that he had taken for granted all his life was a new perfume for him. A car stopped beside him and its driver said “If it aint ole Hank! Git in, Hank. No sense walkin,” and Hank was obliged to explain that he was walking for exercise and then to offer some reasonable explanation for why he had come back from California.

  During his long walk, which lasted most of the afternoon, seventeen cars stopped and offered him a ride, and each time he had to explain why he had come back from California. One of the drivers said, “I heared that Snory and the gals didn’t come with ye,” and Hank, remembering that news travels fast in the backbrush, said “Naw, but they’ll be along, directly.” “You and Snory busted up?” another driver asked, and Hank replied, “Jist fer a little spell.” His walk took him in a roundabout way almost to Jasper, and walking back from Jasper on the main road he remembered that the last time he had traveled this road on foot he was only ten years old and was accompanied by the World’s Oldest Man, who had died after giving Hank a gold chronometer wristwatch for his son and telling him the whole story of his many visits to Stay More. Hank could still remember most of the story, but damned if he could remember where he had buried that wristwatch. It didn’t matter. He had no son to give it to.

  Hank hoped to avoid explanations to his mother-in-law, but when he walked into Stay More she was sitting in her rocker on the porch of her store, and he couldn’t very well just walk on past her. So he stopped and sat on a porch chair and told her that her daughter had evicted him because he had foolishly “been with” another woman, but he hoped that time would heal all wounds, and that Sonora would bring 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 mother-in-law said she was very glad to hear that, and she hoped that Sonora would forgive him and come home too. They chatted a while longer about other things, and then the subject came up of Hank’s regret over having fathered no son. His mother-in-law laughed, and she, who probably knew more about the old-timey ways than anybody else in Stay More, told him 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, but his mother-in-law named 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 the ranch-style house which is the illustration for this chapter. It is located at a higher elevation of Ingledew Mountain than any of the other Ingledew buildings, and has a fine view of what is left of Stay More, as well as the mountains around. The architecture of it might seem Californian, but while there are many houses similar to it in California, there are also many houses similar to it elsewhere in the Ozarks. Hank didn’t know anything about carpentry, having never done any before, but he was good with his hands, and could learn. Stay More still did not have electricity, so he couldn’t use power tools, but he went to Harrison and persuaded the electric company to run a line from Jasper, and thus it might be said that the building of this house was indirectly responsible for the coming of electricity to Stay More. Hank’s uncles dropped by from time to time to give him advice and to saw a board.

  When the foundation was laid, he wrote a letter to Sonora, telling her what he was doing. She did reply, but he wished she hadn’t: it was a very cool letter mentioning the fact that she had run into the secretary’s husband at a supermarket and gone with him to his car in broad daylight and knelt on the floorboards and blown him. Pure spite. Hank was tempted to modify his plan for the house, eliminating all of the extra bedrooms for his daughters, but he was convinced that even if Sonora never came back to Stay More, his daughters would come, at least to visit. So he went ahead and built five bedrooms in the house, one for himself (and Sonora if she ever came back), three for his daughters to share, and one, finally, for the son that he never gave up hoping to have.

  Chapter eighteen

  John Henry “Hank” Ingledew worked so hard on his house that, expectedly (although he had forgotten to expect it), he came down with the frakes when he was finished with it. It is of course quite possible to get the frakes more than once; having them does not produce immunity as in the case of so many other dread diseases. His second attack of the frakes was, however, not quite as uncomfortable as the first, because the experience of the first had taught him that the itching would be terrible and that afterwards he would sink into irrevocable despair, and there was nothing he could do about it, so he resigned himself to it, and his resignation kept him from suffering quite so much. Still, he was bedfast, and would have starved to death, had not his mother, taking him a pie she had baked, discovered he needed far more than pie. After she had cooked a meal and forced
him to eat it, she told Sonora’s mother of his condition, and his mother-in-law had his father-in-law drive her into Jasper, where there was a telephone. She put in a long distance call to California, and told Sonora that Hank had the frakes, and Sonora immediately booked airplane passage for herself and her five daughters, and was picked up by her father at the Fort Smith airport and driven to Stay More, where she burst into Hank’s bedroom hollering “Why didn’t you tell me?” He replied, “Who cares?”

  She threw herself upon him, weeping, and the five daughters crowded timidly into the doorway, staring at their father. “Is he dead?” one of the younger asked the oldest. “No,” the oldest assured her, “he just wishes he was.” Then the girls wandered off for a tour of their new home, and fought over whose bedroom was whose, and who would get a room all to herself. It was decided that the oldest would have that privilege. There was no furniture in any of the rooms, except the bed in Hank’s bedroom, so the girls spent the night at their grandparents’. Sonora slept with Hank and even tried to interest him in intercourse, but he wasn’t interested. She apologized for the nasty letter she had sent and the awful thing she had done with the secretary’s husband, but Hank honestly felt no animosity, nor, for that matter, anything. Wasn’t he the least bit glad that she had come home? Sonora persisted. Well, he observed, it would be convenient because he wasn’t able to cook for himself, provided he was interested in eating, but since he didn’t give a shit about eating, it wasn’t convenient, so she might as well go back to California. No, she said, it was too late: before she left she had placed their house on the market and instructed a mover to pack up all their furniture and stuff and transport it to Stay More. So see? she said. Hank shrugged. She sighed and went to sleep. Hank knew that the purpose of sleep is to restore the mind and body for the challenge of the coming day, and since the coming day held no challenges for him he didn’t care whether he slept or not, but Nature, who runs this show, put him to sleep anyway.

  Because there was no longer a school at Stay More, the daughters of school age were driven into Jasper each day by Sonora’s father, who worked as a mechanic in the Jasper Ford agency. The daughters came home each day complaining of the school’s shortcomings compared with the schools they had attended in Anaheim. Sonora was sad about this, even though it meant nothing to Hank. She tried to assure the girls that they would get used to it. She tried to instill in them a respect, if not a love, for their native state, reminding them that all of them except the baby had been born in the Ozarks. And in fact, one by one, eventually, they no longer complained of their school but even reported on the more positive aspects of it. They began complaining that their father was indifferent to them. Even though he was no longer bedridden, and could move around just as easy as anyone, he wasn’t interested in anything, and his daughters couldn’t talk to him, although they tried.

  Gradually he regained his interest in eating, if in nothing else, and one evening at supper when Sonora served some heated-up beans out of a can he actually grumbled. “It’s all we can afford,” Sonora retorted. “We’ve used up all our savings building this house and moving our things here and living for weeks and weeks without any income. Do you want me to look for a job? Will you stay home and take care of the baby while I’m working? I intend to start a garden patch next spring, and get some chickens, but what will we do until then?”

  “Aw, heck,” Hank replied, and the next day he painted out the letters “Anaheim, Calif.” on the side of his van, and painted in the letters “Jasper, Ark.” and drove into Jasper and rented one of the vacant buildings on the square, the little brick-painted-white store whose illustration heads this chapter. It is the only building illustrated in this book which is not in Stay More, but there would be no more buildings in Stay More, except one, and that is our last chapter.

  Although Jasper had been wired for electricity it had no television sets, and it dawned on Hank that before he could service television sets there would first have to be television sets, and not only that but they would also have to be around long enough, a week at least, for something to go wrong with them. So he got out his paintbrush again and added “and Sales” after “Service” on the sides of his van and the front of his shop. General Electric generously shipped him a dozen sets on credit, and he put these in his show windows, and waited for customers. Everybody who came into Jasper, especially on Saturdays, would wander around the square to Hank’s shop and look in the windows at his television sets, but no body came into the store.

  It occurred to Hank that if he turned the sets on, the people could see how an actual picture appears. So he plugged the sets in and turned them on, but the reception was terrible. He realized he would need not only a high antenna atop his shop, but also a “booster.” He sent off to Little Rock for these items. When they arrived, Hank was finally in business. Crowds gathered at his windows, and stayed for hours to watch whole games of Base Ball coming from St. Louis and Chicago and Kansas City and everywhere else. The sheriff complained that the crowds were blocking traffic on the street, and requested that Hank bring some of the sets out into the square, but Hank explained that television requires dim light for the picture to be seen clearly. He suggested to the sheriff that the sheriff could help matters by ordering the crowd to go inside and buy one of the damn things so they could watch it in the comfort of their own living room.

  The sheriff went up in front of the crowd and hollered, “OKAY, FOLKS! YOU’RE BLOCKING TRAFFIC! WHY DON’T YOU GO INSIDE AND BUY ONE OF THE DAMN THINGS SO YOU CAN WATCH ’EM IN THE COMFORT OF YOUR OWN LIVING ROOM?” The crowd surged through the door, and Hank was sold out within five minutes, and booked up for a month to install the antennas and boosters at their homes. When he arrived at some of their homes to install the antennas and boosters, he discovered that these homes were so far out in the wilds that they didn’t have electricity; he was instrumental in getting power lines erected in the remotest recesses of Newton County. The desire for television brought with it the means for operating washing machines, dryers, deep freezes, ranges, phonographs, blenders, electric clocks, vacuum cleaners, radial arm saws, toothbrushes, shoe polishers, shavers, typewriters, not to mention lamps and chandeliers and porch lights and every manner of ceiling fixture. Labor was so saved that there never again was a single case of the frakes in Newton County—no, there was one case, but he is our last chapter.

  We may rightly question whether or not Hank Ingledew’s contribution to the way of life was a gross violation of the time-worn strictures against PROG RESS, and there is no denying that the company which manufactured the television sets he sold, as well as all the other aforementioned electrical appliances, had (and still has) as its motto, “PROG RESS is our most important product,” but I seriously doubt that Hank Ingledew ever gave the matter any thought. Selling television was a good way of earning a living, and he grew prosperous. Then too, innumerable sourhours were banished by the tube. There is one school of opinion which would argue that if literacy spoiled the Ozarks by diminishing the oral tradition, television restored something by requiring no literacy—but just what that something is would be hard to pin down.

  When the money began rolling in, Hank decided that the time had come to try, once more, one last time, to have a son. He never forgot the superstition that his mother-in-law had told him about, and although he was totally without belief in superstition he could not deny the evidence of the efficacy of this particular superstition, that so many males born in Stay More had been males because their fathers had sat on the roofs of their houses for seven hours, and when Hank built the house that he now lived in, he had given it a low-pitched roof not only because low-pitched roofs are fashionable for ranch-style houses but also in order to facilitate his eventual ascent to the roof’s ridge. One evening when Hank and Sonora were talking in bed before going to sleep, he asked her,

  “Snory, do you want to have another kid?”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” she replied. “I went to a gynecologis
t up at Harrison and had myself fitted out for a new diaphragm.”

  “I don’t mean that,” he said. “I mean, would you? Could you stand to have one more?”

  She was silent, thinking. Then she said, “It probably wouldn’t be a boy, either. You still want a boy. You won’t ever give up.”

  “Your mother told me something, once,” he said. “I know it sounds silly, but there’s an old, old superstition that if a man sits on his roof for seven hours near the chimney his next child will be a boy.”

  Sonora laughed uproariously. “My mother never told me that.”

  “But it works, she said. Lots of men were born male because their fathers sat on their roofs. Her own father. Your dad’s father. Your dad. And she said me too, although not on purpose: my father was nailing on the shingles of his roof one day, and he was up there seven hours. At least that’s what your mother said.”

  “When did you get so chummy with my mother?”

  “It was the day I came home from California.”

  “Oh? As soon as you got back, you went running to my mother to complain because I won’t give you a son?”

  “Not like that. I was just talking to her and the subject came up.”

  “Are you going to sit on the roof for seven hours?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it.”