The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [147]
Brother Stapleton brought the show to a dramatic conclusion, perhaps even overdoing it somewhat by having twelve pipe organs playing together as the bride and groom departed. The shivaree they gave that night for Bevis and Emelda was not imaginary; it was, as one participant remarked, the “shivareest shivaree ever shivered,” with an incredible amount of noise and harassment of the newlyweds, who were given not a moment to themselves to think any thoughts or read each other’s or even pretend to transmit a word into the other’s head. It was just as well that they were given no opportunity for sleep that night, because Bevis would have been much too shy to share a bed with his bride. The second night of their marriage, they slept in separate beds, although before falling asleep they enjoyed a lusty copulation in their minds, and when they fell asleep their dreams were all mixed together and exchanged; in the morning he was awakened by the “sound” of Emelda doing a perfect imitation of a rooster’s matinal crow. It required several more weeks of sleep to sort out the dreams and properly apportion them so that each had their fair share of nightmares. After a year of marriage, Emelda silently declared that although she had enormously enjoyed 365 incidents of imaginary albeit almost exhaustingly true-to-life intercourse, it was obvious that she would never conceive anything other than an imaginary baby in that fashion. Biology is biology, after all, and has nothing to do with make-believe.
The year of imaginary intimacy had made Bevis not quite so shy with his bride, so it was not too difficult for him to permit her to slip into his bed one night. Yet both afterwards agreed that actuality is a weak stepsister of imagination, although it was successful in begetting their firstborn, John Henry. As soon as Emelda was got with him, she and Bevis reverted gladly to their old way of intercourses, sexual and verbal, and when Bevis withdrew his savings from the bank and built his house, its bigeminality was intended literally to make separate rooms for the two of them, where they went on sleeping apart and coming together in their minds, and mixing their dreams and nightmares in fair proportion. There must have been at least three occasions thereafter when one of them physically crossed through the interior door that joined the rooms, because they had three additional sons: Jackson, William Robert (“Billy Bob”) and Tracy. Along with John Henry, these four boys each noticed, in growing up, that their mother and father slept in separate rooms and never spoke to one another; since the only times the boys would not speak to one another was when they were angry, they assumed that their mother and father were always angry at one another, and therefore never on speaking terms. The boys had playmates whose parents were often heard to speak to one another, and some of the playmates claimed that their mothers and fathers actually slept in the same bed, and a few of the playmates went so far as to tell what their mothers and fathers did with one another when they were in bed.
The Ingledew boys disbelieved this, but they still felt isolated; they felt that their own parents were eccentric; they knew their father was full of blood and always cheerful and animated; they couldn’t understand why their mother didn’t like him enough even to say “howdy” to him. On the other hand, their mother was sweet-natured herself, and a good cook besides; they couldn’t understand why their father didn’t like her enough even to say, “Them shore was good biscuit, Maw.” Their father talked freely and cheerfully to everybody else, but never to their mother.
One by one each of the sons grew old enough to understand