The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [141]
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 to 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.