The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [186]
Sonora began beating at him with her fists, yelling “Get out! Get out of here! Get out of here and don’t ever come back!” He resisted, but her fists drove him out of the bedroom and down the hall and down the stairs and out the front door and down the steps. He spent the night in a motel, and returned to his house the following day. She wouldn’t let him in. He protested that all his clothes and things were in the house. She began dumping his clothes and things out the window. “Sonora, for crying out loud!” he complained, but she continued throwing his effects out of the house, until there was nothing of his remaining in the house and the front yard was littered and the neighbors were standing on their porches watching and whispering as John Henry loaded all his effects into his van and drove to the motel.
After a week he returned to his house and rang the doorbell and then pounded on the door and hollered, “Sonora, at least let me say goodbye to the girls!” But she would not open the door. He lived in the motel for another two weeks, and called her every day on the telephone, but as soon as she recognized his voice she would hang up. He tried to write her a letter, but got as far as “Dear Sonora,” which caused him to remember the first letter he had ever sent her, and made him sad, but he mailed these two words to her anyway, with the return address of his motel; there was no reply.
Of course, he went to no more parties, and when the secretary came into his electronics shop to find out why he was avoiding her, before she could get a word out of her mouth he said, “Just skip it. Just git the hell out of here and don’t bother me anymore,” and the tone with which he said these words was such that she left him alone and he never saw her again. After work Friday he drew his paycheck and got it cashed and checked out of the motel, and wrote Sonora one more note: “Dear Sonora: I’m going home. Going home. Love, Hank.” He mailed this, and pointed his van eastward and drove all night across the desert and up into the mountains and beyond. He parked and napped beside the road a couple of brief times, and kept moving; on the morning of the third day he reached Fort Smith, Arkansas, and turned northeastward toward home.
On the road from Jasper to Stay More he noticed an abandoned house. And then another one. Parthenon was all run down. At the church/schoolhouse outside Stay More he stopped and got out and walked for a while among the headstones in the cemetery: a dozen Ingledews, many Swains and Plowrights and Coes and Dinsmores and Chisms and Duckworths and Stapletons. He drove on into the village. There was no village. His mother-in-law’s small general store seemed to be still in operation; at least its front door was open, but he did not stop to speak to her. The bank was a shell of stone. The dentists’ and doctors’ offices were empty or gone. The mill was rotting and seemed as if it would collapse any moment. Aunt Lola’s big general store was boarded up, its gasoline pump immobile with rust. The canning factory was stuffed with bales of hay. Someone seemed to be still living in the old hotel, but he did not stop. He drove on to his folks’ house and was almost surprised to find it lived in. His mother and father stared at his van as if it had come from the moon, and read the lettering on the door: “Ingledew Television Service, Anaheim, Calif. 433-8991.” To his father and mother, he said simply that Sonora had kicked him out of the house and it was purely his own fault because he had been fooling around, but he was awful glad to come back to Stay More because he never cared much for California anyway.
After his mother fed him dinner, he left his van at their house and went for a long walk, to start getting rid of his