The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [154]
Then the stock market crashed. It wasn’t John D. Ingledew’s fault any more than it was John D. Rockefeller’s, but the latter survived while the former didn’t. A small headline in the Jasper Disaster noted the fact: “Stay More Stockholders Wiped Out in Panic of Wall Street” and a small editorial said simply “We hope some lesson has been learned from all of this.”
Bevis Ingledew was always cheerful and full of blood, and he took the bad news in good part, but John D. Ingledew took to bed, and stayed there, looking gloomier and doomier than he ever had, if that were possible. Doc Colvin Swain was called in. Doc Swain was not only the best of Stay More’s physicians, but he was also the seventh son of a seventh son (who was Gilbert Swain, Lizzie’s seventh), and a seventh son of a seventh son has the power to cure any sickness known to man except the frakes. But even with this power, Doc Swain could not cure John D. Ingledew, and John D. died. Doc Swain was so puzzled as to the cause of death that he asked for permission to perform an autopsy, expecting to find perhaps a broken heart, but John D.’s heart, when Doc Swain finally succeeded in finding it, was not broken but only atrophied, severely.
At the funeral, Brother Long Jack Stapleton discovered that he was unable to show the eulogy. Something had gone wrong with his power; it wouldn’t work. The show would not go on. He tried and tried to turn it on, but not a single image appeared. So he said a short prayer and they sang several choruses of “Farther along we’ll know all about it” and Brother Stapleton went home, wondering if farther along he ever would understand why he had lost his power to show. He never did, and he never regained it, and some folks said that the loss of his power was the reason he himself died, not long after, leaving Stay More without a resident pastor for the rest of its life.
Chapter fourteen
When John Henry “Hank” Ingledew was ten years old, he ran away from home, to join the circus. The year before, he had grown mighty tired of making cornhusk dolls. Making cornhusk dolls all day long leaves the mind idle to think idle thoughts, and although Hank was pretty good at thinking no thoughts at all, he could not help but continue to speculate upon the fact that he probably did not exist because he could not have been born if his mother and father did not sleep together and were not even on speaking terms with one another although they did seem to cooperate at least in the making of cornhusk dolls. Other boys his age did not have to make cornhusk dolls, and that was one more reason for feeling that he did not really exist but was only imagining things. His reasoning was that if he did not exist he might as well not exist someplace else instead of here in Stay More. The trouble was, he couldn’t conceive of someplace else, until one day in the late summer of his tenth year, when a billposter in a bow tie and a straw boater, driving a Ford truck, came into town and received permission to glue an enormous circus bill to the side of the barn that had been built by Denton and Monroe and was prominently located in the center of town. Hank Ingledew, along with all the other children of Stay More, gazed in awe at the poster, which showed in garish colors pictures of ferocious tropical animals, women in tight clothes standing up on the backs of prancing horses, acrobats leaping through the air, and announced that Foogle Bros. Three-Ring Shows would play at Jasper, Ark, three days only, Aug. 24–27, with a Grand Midway.
It occurred to Hank that a circus was a someplace else that would beat hell out of not existing in Stay More, even though he wasn’t required to make cornhusk dolls anymore since the stock market collapsed and people out in the world were spending their