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By Root 1487 0

not only Banty Creek in flood but also Oren Duckworth cursing and moaning, and who told the Stay Morons that not only could he do something about it but also would he do something about it, and did: he brought in an engineer who not only surveyed Banty Creek and drew up plans for a cement bridge over it but also hired some of the local boys to assist in the labor of constructing the bridge, which took all summer. Oren Duckworth was all in favor of the bridge, and so were the local boys given jobs by the W.P.A., but, nobody else was, because a bridge was the worst form of PROG RESS and was against all tradition.

The W.P.A. bridge is not illustrated here, partly for that reason. No architectural history of the United States is complete without an illustration of the Brooklyn Bridge, and it should follow that our history should not omit the W.P.A. bridge, but it is scarcely comparable, being only three hats long, about three feet above the natural water level of the creek, and consisting of poured cement with the sides formed of a row of crenelated piers, fifteen to the side. Year by year the floods of Banty Creek would wash logs and other debris against those crenelated piers, where it would jam up, and to break the jam the Stay Morons would sledgehammer those crenellations away, until eventually only the roadway of the bridge itself remained, with one pier of the crenellation embossed like a tombstone with the legend “Built by W.P.A.” Bevis Ingledew often remarked that he would just as soon get aholt of some dynamite and obliterate the whole bridge, but for one reason or another he never got around to it, and what is left of it is still there.

Most of John Henry “Hank” Ingledew’s children do not even know what “W.P.A.” stands for, and they have had some fun conjecturing the possibilities: Well Plastered Alcoholics, Washout Prevention Association, Way Past Absurdity, What Possible Accident, Wet Persons Anonymous, etc. The fact that the “P” in W.P.A. actually did stand for PROG RESS was not lost upon the Stay Morons of the time, who helplessly watched the bridge being poured, and wondered what the world was coming to.

After work, the W.P.A. gang got into fights with local boys, but they were fighting not out of ideological controversy so much as for recreation and for the purpose of showing off in front of a very pretty teenage redhead girl named Sonora Twichell who was presumed to be the niece of the Beautiful Girl and was spending the summer with her, as she had been doing for several summers, going back home each August to her presumed mother in Little Rock. John Henry “Hank” Ingledew was one of the local boys who fought with the W.P.A. gang for the purpose of showing off in front of Sonora, although he didn’t need to, because she had eyes only for him, although he didn’t know it; because he was just as shy of females as any Ingledew had ever been, although he never forgot about Eli Willard’s chronometer wristwatch which he had buried; because he knew that some day he would have a son to give the watch to, although he couldn’t conceive of how he would ever approach a girl and get up his nerve to ask her to marry him so that they could have a son; because that was something well beyond the powers of an Ingledew, although he knew that in order for him to exist his own father somehow had to have approached his mother. The very pretty redhead Sonora thought that Hank Ingledew was the best-looking boy she had ever seen, and from the age of thirteen onward, when she first started spending summers with the woman she thought was her aunt but guessed was her mother, she decided that she would marry Hank someday. But every time she even looked at him, let alone spoke to him, he would get red in the face and turn away. Her mother, whom she presumed to be her aunt, told her about the legendary woman-shyness of all the Ingledews extending back into history. The Beautiful Girl knew the whole history of Stay More and told Sonora about the cornbread that Sarah had baked for Jacob Ingledew, so Sonora baked some corn-bread for Hank