The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [172]
Hank returned to the Pacific with the rank of ensign, and his ships began invading islands and atolls all over the place. He himself never fired a gun, nor killed an enemy, but his expertise with radio helped conquer the foe, and by the time of the invasion of Iwo Jima his rank was captain, in charge of all the radio operations of his entire fleet. The officers and enlisted men under his command still referred to him as “Rube” behind his back, and did bad imitations of his country accent, but they respected him and never gave him any trouble. In the invasion of Iwo Jima, another Stay More boy, Gerald Coe, who had been a boyhood friend of Hank’s, made a heroic charge of a machine gun nest that was instrumental in taking the island, but was killed in the process, and posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. There is a bronze plaque in his memory in a hallway of Jasper High School. When the war ended after the surrender of the enemy, Hank was promoted to commodore and offered a stateside desk job, but he wasn’t interested, and came home to Stay More just in time for the birth of his fourth daughter, Patricia.
He didn’t hold it against Sonora, but he somehow felt that it cast aspersions on his manhood that he had been unable to produce a son. It was hard for him to hold his head up in Stay More. Also, there wasn’t much use in Stay More for a highly trained electronics technician. Stay More didn’t even have electricity yet. Also, Swains Creek and Banty Creek put together weren’t much water compared with the ocean. Hank dreamed, nearly every night, of that ocean. Finally he could stand it no longer, and said to Sonora:
“Let’s go to California.”
“Anytime,” she replied, thinking he only meant to show her the place. She did not know the story of Benjamin Ingledew, who had tried to go to California and got as far as Mountain Meadows. Nor did she know of the curse that Jacob Ingledew had placed on any Stay Moron who dared try it again.
When they left for California, Hank had forgotten about the gold chronometer wristwatch. Perhaps he had even forgotten where he had buried it.
Chapter sixteen
During the war there came to maturity, in Stay More, two twin sisters, Jelena and Doris Dinsmore, who were destined to intrude, indirectly, into the Ingledew saga. It was Bevis Ingledew who first referred to them as “the Siamese twins.” Those listening to him didn’t know what that meant, but he could remember being taken as a child to the St. Louis World’s Fair, where he had seen a pair of Siamese twins in a sideshow. So when Bevis started joking in his high-spirited fashion about Jelena and Doris Dinsmore as the Siamese twins, the rest of the Stay Morons picked up the habit.
Jelena and Doris (their full names were Jelena Cloris and Helena Doris, but this confused their mother when she was yelling at them) were inseparable, not physically, but in all other ways. One was never seen without the other. Never. The men loafing and joking on the store porch had a ready mine of mirth in the inseparability of the Dinsmore sisters, speculating, for instance, that the two girls probably “went out back” together too, since it was known that the Dinsmore outhouse, though primitive and airy, was a two-holer. Although they were twins, there was a very slight difference between them, which gave rise to rumors that their fathers had not both been Jake Dinsmore, who, when the sisters were five years old, had gone out to California looking for a job, and had never returned, abandoning a family of fourteen children to a mother who did her poor best to feed them.
The mother’s name was Selena—her father had named her that because he had been an admirer of Salina