The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [132]
Raymond decided he would have to commit rape. There was one woman whose cabin was way off up on Ledbetter Mountain, too far for the nearest neighbor to hear her if she hollered. Raymond made a disguise out of a pillowcase with two slits for his eyes, and went to the cabin. The woman hollered. “Won’t do ye no good,” he told her. “Nobody kin hear ye. You know what I’m after, and I aim to git it.” She asked, “Aren’t you that cute Raymond Ingledew boy who shows off at Base Ball and shooting matches?” “Nome, I’m one a his older brothers,” he replied. She reproved him, “I never thought an Ingledew would be a robber.” “I aint a robber, ma’am, I’m a rapist.” The woman broke up with laughter; she couldn’t stop. Raymond tried to hold her still so that he could rape her, but he couldn’t hold her; she went on rocking with laughter. Raymond went home and buried his disguise, and decided he would wait until he was fifteen and see what happened.
Chapter twelve
Willis Ingledew made so much money from the operation of his General Merchandise Store, particularly after the city women became his customers, that he didn’t know what to do with it. He had no family to support, and he was nervous about having so much money, which he kept in a locked drawer of the post office, but he knew that this was a misuse of U.S. government property. He decided he would have to buy something. What was the most expensive article that he could use?
After considerable thought, he decided that a hossless kerridge probably cost a right smart of cash, so he ran off to Springfield, Missouri, where the nearest Ford agency was located, and bought himself a Model T Ford and brought it home, but the people of Stay More, having learned long since not to believe Willis Ingledew, did not believe he had a hossless kerridge, and ignored it. He drove up and down every dry road in the village, tooting his horn and waving, but nobody believed it, and nobody returned his waves. He offered rides to his nephews and his niece Lola who was his secret daughter, but all of them said, “Aw, you’re jist a-funnin us” and “Quit yore kiddin, Uncle Will.”
There was one person in the town, however, who did believe that Willis had acquired a Model T Ford, who could not ignore him, and that was his brother John. As we have seen, it was very important to John to be able to feel superior to Willis. Even though Willis owned the General Store, John was the respected leader of the lynch mob and the Worshipful Master of the Masons, or Top Tippler of T.G.A.O.T.U., but he did not own, and could ill afford to own, a hossless kerridge.
Consumed with envy, he began a systematic campaign to persuade the other Stay Morons that Willis was a villain because hossless kerridges were the worst form of PROG RESS and dangerous and they spooked the livestock and polluted the air and ought to be permanently banished from Stay More, but nobody listened to John because nobody believed that Willis really had one. It was very frustrating to John, trying to convince the people that Willis actually did possess an automobile, in order to persuade them that his possession of the automobile was deleterious. “Don’t carry on so, Doomy,” his older brothers Denton and Monroe said to him. “There’s nothin to worry about. Hit’s all only in yore haid. Fergit it. We aint interested.”
He appealed to Brother Long Jack Stapleton to make a picture show of Willis’s automobile, so that the people could see it, but Long Jack just stared at him and said, “What automobile?”
In time, John’s envy of Willis’s Model T Ford revealed itself to him for what it really was: envy. He came to realize that he would never be content until he had a Model T Ford for his very own, or, better yet, a Model U, V, W, X, Y or Z. Yet he had no money. He asked his father for a loan, but Isaac did not reply. The only other person who had money was Willis, and John couldn’t very well ask Willis for a loan to go out and