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By Root 1354 0

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 the 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