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By Root 1499 0

the foundation was laid, he wrote a letter to Sonora, telling her what he was doing. She did reply, but he wished she hadn’t: it was a very cool letter mentioning the fact that she had run into the secretary’s husband at a supermarket and gone with him to his car in broad daylight and knelt on the floorboards and blown him. Pure spite. Hank was tempted to modify his plan for the house, eliminating all of the extra bedrooms for his daughters, but he was convinced that even if Sonora never came back to Stay More, his daughters would come, at least to visit. So he went ahead and built five bedrooms in the house, one for himself (and Sonora if she ever came back), three for his daughters to share, and one, finally, for the son that he never gave up hoping to have.

Chapter eighteen

John Henry “Hank” Ingledew worked so hard on his house that, expectedly (although he had forgotten to expect it), he came down with the frakes when he was finished with it. It is of course quite possible to get the frakes more than once; having them does not produce immunity as in the case of so many other dread diseases. His second attack of the frakes was, however, not quite as uncomfortable as the first, because the experience of the first had taught him that the itching would be terrible and that afterwards he would sink into irrevocable despair, and there was nothing he could do about it, so he resigned himself to it, and his resignation kept him from suffering quite so much. Still, he was bedfast, and would have starved to death, had not his mother, taking him a pie she had baked, discovered he needed far more than pie. After she had cooked a meal and forced him to eat it, she told Sonora’s mother of his condition, and his mother-in-law had his father-in-law drive her into Jasper, where there was a telephone. She put in a long distance call to California, and told Sonora that Hank had the frakes, and Sonora immediately booked airplane passage for herself and her five daughters, and was picked up by her father at the Fort Smith airport and driven to Stay More, where she burst into Hank’s bedroom hollering “Why didn’t you tell me?” He replied, “Who cares?”

She threw herself upon him, weeping, and the five daughters crowded timidly into the doorway, staring at their father. “Is he dead?” one of the younger asked the oldest. “No,” the oldest assured her, “he just wishes he was.” Then the girls wandered off for a tour of their new home, and fought over whose bedroom was whose, and who would get a room all to herself. It was decided that the oldest would have that privilege. There was no furniture in any of the rooms, except the bed in Hank’s bedroom, so the girls spent the night at their grandparents’. Sonora slept with Hank and even tried to interest him in intercourse, but he wasn’t interested. She apologized for the nasty letter she had sent and the awful thing she had done with the secretary’s husband, but Hank honestly felt no animosity, nor, for that matter, anything. Wasn’t he the least bit glad that she had come home? Sonora persisted. Well, he observed, it would be convenient because he wasn’t able to cook for himself, provided he was interested in eating, but since he didn’t give a shit about eating, it wasn’t convenient, so she might as well go back to California. No, she said, it was too late: before she left she had placed their house on the market and instructed a mover to pack up all their furniture and stuff and transport it to Stay More. So see? she said. Hank shrugged. She sighed and went to sleep. Hank knew that the purpose of sleep is to restore the mind and body for the challenge of the coming day, and since the coming day held no challenges for him he didn’t care whether he slept or not, but Nature, who runs this show, put him to sleep anyway.

Because there was no longer a school at Stay More, the daughters of school age were driven into Jasper each day by Sonora’s father, who worked as a mechanic in the Jasper Ford agency. The daughters came home each day complaining of the school’s shortcomings compared with the