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By Root 1304 0

potbelly. The walk took him past many more abandoned houses; he tried to remember the names of the people who had lived in them. The ones he could remember all lived, if they still lived, in Anaheim or Fullerton or other California towns. But while the human habitations were abandoned, nature was not, and nature welcomed Hank back to Stay More: the air was nice and had a fragrance that he had never found anywhere out west. The smell of weeds that he had taken for granted all his life was a new perfume for him. A car stopped beside him and its driver said “If it aint ole Hank! Git in, Hank. No sense walkin,” and Hank was obliged to explain that he was walking for exercise and then to offer some reasonable explanation for why he had come back from California.

During his long walk, which lasted most of the afternoon, seventeen cars stopped and offered him a ride, and each time he had to explain why he had come back from California. One of the drivers said, “I heared that Snory and the gals didn’t come with ye,” and Hank, remembering that news travels fast in the backbrush, said “Naw, but they’ll be along, directly.” “You and Snory busted up?” another driver asked, and Hank replied, “Jist fer a little spell.” His walk took him in a roundabout way almost to Jasper, and walking back from Jasper on the main road he remembered that the last time he had traveled this road on foot he was only ten years old and was accompanied by the World’s Oldest Man, who had died after giving Hank a gold chronometer wristwatch for his son and telling him the whole story of his many visits to Stay More. Hank could still remember most of the story, but damned if he could remember where he had buried that wristwatch. It didn’t matter. He had no son to give it to.

Hank hoped to avoid explanations to his mother-in-law, but when he walked into Stay More she was sitting in her rocker on the porch of her store, and he couldn’t very well just walk on past her. So he stopped and sat on a porch chair and told her that her daughter had evicted him because he had foolishly “been with” another woman, but he hoped that time would heal all wounds, and that Sonora would bring the girls and come back to Stay More to live, because as far as he was concerned he wasn’t ever going to leave Stay More again. His mother-in-law said she was very glad to hear that, and she hoped that Sonora would forgive him and come home too. They chatted a while longer about other things, and then the subject came up of Hank’s regret over having fathered no son. His mother-in-law laughed, and she, who probably knew more about the old-timey ways than anybody else in Stay More, told him of an old tried-and-true superstition that had never been known to fail: if a husband sits on the roof of his house near the chimney for seven hours his next child will be a boy. Hank scoffed, but his mother-in-law named all of the men of Stay More who had been born males as a result of their fathers sitting on the roofs of their houses for seven hours. Hank was impressed, but he observed, “Heck, I aint even got a roof to set on.”

That set him to thinking, and the following day he began construction of the ranch-style house which is the illustration for this chapter. It is located at a higher elevation of Ingledew Mountain than any of the other Ingledew buildings, and has a fine view of what is left of Stay More, as well as the mountains around. The architecture of it might seem Californian, but while there are many houses similar to it in California, there are also many houses similar to it elsewhere in the Ozarks. Hank didn’t know anything about carpentry, having never done any before, but he was good with his hands, and could learn. Stay More still did not have electricity, so he couldn’t use power tools, but he went to Harrison and persuaded the electric company to run a line from Jasper, and thus it might be said that the building of this house was indirectly responsible for the coming of electricity to Stay More. Hank’s uncles dropped by from time to time to give him advice and to saw a board.

When