The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [183]
It was almost noon when he woke, and found that his daughters had tried to prepare a breakfast for him, but had burned the coffee and overcooked the eggs. “Girls! Girls! Girls! Girls! Girls! Girls!” he said, and the smaller ones began to cry. “Aw, cut it out, and let’s all go out to Howard Johnson’s for breakfast,” he suggested. They told him that they had had their breakfast at breakfasttime and it was almost lunchtime. So he took them out to eat their lunch while he had his breakfast, and then, because children aren’t allowed in maternity wards, he had them stay in the car reading comic books while he went into the hospital. He kissed Sonora on her forehead, and she took his hand and held it and said “Poor Hank,” then looked at him apologetically.
“Wal,” he observed philosophically, “it don’t look like there’s going to be any more Ingledews.”
“This one’s the prettiest of them all,” Sonora declared. “Wait till you see her.”
They named the fifth daughter Sharon and she did indeed grow up to be the prettiest of them all, although they were all pretty. John Henry decided that he had better go back to repairing television sets on the side, and save his money in order to be able to pay for five fancy weddings eventually. When he met the secretary at the cocktail lounge after work on Monday, he remarked, not facetiously, “Maybe if I was married to you, I’d have a boy.” The secretary shook her head, telling him that she didn’t want to have any children. That struck John Henry as peculiar; he had never heard of a woman who didn’t want to have children. “How come?” he asked. She explained that she liked sex so much that she didn’t want to spoil it by having children. That struck John Henry as ironic: to refrain from procreation for the sake of enjoying the procreative process. The secretary asked, “Do you want to marry me?” He said he had given it a thought or two. She laughed and held his hand and told him to hurry and finish his drink so they could drive up into the hills, but he said not this evening, because he had decided to return to the nocturnal repairing of television sets as an extra source of income, to finance his many daughters’ eventual weddings. “I didn’t know you could fix TV’s,” she said. “Come and fix ours. You can meet my husband.” So that night, on his rounds, he stopped by the secretary’s house in the guise of repairman, and met her husband. He was a tall fellow, but not as tall as John Henry. Sure enough, the television set needed a new tube.
The husband didn’t pay much attention while John Henry replaced the tube, and when it was finished the husband just took out his wallet and said “How much?” The secretary said, “I think that other one up in the bedroom has something wrong with the channel selector. Come on, I’ll show you.” She took him up to the bedroom and closed the door and giggled and unzipped his pants and knelt before him. Soon they were doing a sixty-nine on the bed, with John Henry on the bottom, when the door opened and the husband came in and said, “Well, well, this is interesting. But don’t let me interrupt you.” John Henry tried to get up, but he was on the bottom, and the secretary whispered to him “I think he means it,” and she went on doing him until she had finished him off. John Henry wasn’t worrying about getting beaten up afterwards, not by that guy, but maybe the fellow had a pistol somewhere. When the secretary had finished him, the husband remarked, “Lovely. Doesn’t she give wonderful head?” and then went out and back downstairs.
John Henry asked the secretary if her husband had a gun, and she said not that she knew of. He checked the bedroom’s