The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [162]
Willis was totally forgiven for whatever errors of credulity he had made long ago; people began to believe him; they believed anything he said; they even believed, all of a sudden one day, that he actually possessed an automobile. On the day they believed he possessed an automobile he was driving it into Jasper for repairs when he lost control on a sharp curve and plunged down a steep embankment, totally wrecking the car. He died instantly and they buried him, singing “Farther Along” over his grave. He was the last male of his line.
His niece Lola, whom nobody realized was secretly his daughter, inherited the general store, and her first act as proprietress was to insist that the other Ingledews kindly remove the glass showcase with the body of Eli Willard in it. She said she would not set foot in the store until they did. So she did not set foot in the store, which was all right with just about anybody, because nobody had any money to spend there, although unfortunately the post office was also inside the store. But Lola did not inherit the postmastership, because U.S. government positions are not inheritable. When Willis Ingledew died, the Beautiful Girl, who had returned to Stay More after a long and mysterious absence and had purchased Bob Cluley’s little general store up at the other end of Main Street, purchased it with money that nobody knew how or where or why she had obtained, now applied to the U.S. government for the post of postmistress, and was granted it, much to the chagrin of Lola, who could only watch helplessly as Tearle Ingledew loaded the cabinet of post office boxes into a wagon and hauled it up Main Street to the Beautiful Girl’s general store. Lola and the Beautiful Girl had in common that they were spinsters and that they were general store proprietresses, but they had absolutely nothing else in common.
The Jasper Disaster ran a feature story on the corpse of Eli Willard under the title, “Connecticut Itinerant Has No Final Resting Place, Even in Death.” One of the national wire services picked up the story, and soon it was running in papers all over the country. A family of Willards in Rhode Island wrote to the Newton County coroner, claiming that Eli Willard was their longlost great-grandfather, but the coroner replied that Eli Willard was a lifelong bachelor who had no kin or descendants. The students of Yale University took up a collection for the purpose of having the showcase shipped to Yale’s Dwight Chapel, but the university administration vetoed the idea. The Governor of Connecticut wrote the Governor of Arkansas suggesting that something ought to be done, and the latter replied that his staff was investigating, with the main problem being to locate Newton County in general and Stay More in particular. Meanwhile a man drove up to Lola’s store and introduced himself as Philip Foogle and asked to be allowed to view the remains. Lola said she wouldn’t set foot inside the store, but she would unlock it for him, and did, and the man went in and later came back out and said that the deceased had been, when last seen, wearing an extremely expensive gold chronometer wristwatch which was not now on the deceased’s person. Foogle claimed that he had loaned a considerable sum of money to the deceased, who had spent it on the wristwatch. In short, he, Foogle, wanted the wristwatch. Lola said she didn’t know nothing about no wristwatch. Foogle asked who had been with the deceased at the time of his deceasement, and Lola told him Hank Ingledew, and gave him directions to Hank’s house, and Foogle went there and was mildly surprised to discover that Hank Ingledew was a grown-up version of the same ten-year-old kid whom he had almost converted into a permanent clown several years before.
“Aha!” said Foogle, and then, “Okay, kid, come clean. What did you do with the wristwatch?