The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [194]
No, Sonora wasn’t buying that. For one thing, she knew that the boy would eventually grow to be bigger than his father, and therefore the Little Hank designation would be as absurd as “Li’l Abner.” For another thing, she had been thinking that names ought to mean something. Her own name, Sonora, had been given to her by her mother because it meant “little song” and her newborn cries had been like little songs. “John Henry” didn’t mean anything. Taken literally, it meant “God is gracious and is the ruler of an enclosure, or private property,” which, even apart from the fact that the Ingledews didn’t even believe in God, was contradictory: a gracious John cannot be a tightfisted Henry. Sonora wanted a meaningful name. It was springtime; things were growing; she wanted her baby to grow and flourish. So she named him Vernon. Hank didn’t much like that, but there wasn’t much he could do. He hoped that before the ink was dry on the birth certificate the name of the Connecticut peddler might suddenly return to him, but it never did. Vernon Ingledew it was, and remained.
We come now to a difficult matter. What psychological effect would it have upon a growing boy to have five older sisters? Wouldn’t he be dreadfully spoiled? Would he become effeminate? Or wouldn’t his congenital Ingledew woman-shyness be magnified a hundredfold? It was true his sisters doted on him—and during the summers there were not five but six of them, in a sense: his first cousin Jelena, raised by his Uncle Jackson in Harrison during the school year, spent all her summers, every summer, in Stay More and was such a close friend of his sisters, especially of Patricia, who was the same age, that as far as Vernon was concerned she was one more sister. She and Patricia were eight years old when Vernon was born, and that is an age for being particularly interested in watching Sonora change Vernon’s diapers. Soon Patricia and Jelena were volunteering to change Vernon’s diapers.
Jelena was to claim, years afterward, that she fell in love with him the first time she laid eyes on him. Was he aware of her in infancy? Dubitable; to him, her face was just one of seven female faces that came constantly in and out of his field of vision. But he was four years old before he understood that he was in any way different from these seven persons. By the age of four he had begun to misbehave, and his father, in order to induce good behavior, threatened to cut off his tallywhacker unless he behaved himself. He could not help but notice that the other seven persons did not possess tallywhackers, and assumed that they had all flagrantly misbehaved, and were doomed to go through life tallywhackerless and wearing dresses and sitting down to pee.
He did not want to wear a dress, nor did he want to have to sit down to pee, so he tried his best to behave. In the years of his growing up, Vernon was preoccupied with behaving himself. He felt sorry for the seven persons who had lost their tallywhackers, but he tried to avoid all of them except the one who was his mother, for whom he felt an emotion that was not pity or compassion or wonder but a deep feeling that he could not understand, and which frightened him in its intensity, causing him to do his best to suppress the feeling, lest it lead him into misbehavior and the loss of his tallywhacker.
There are two things that can happen to a boy who has five (or six) older sisters and a mother with whom he is unknowingly deeply in love: on the one hand he can lose all of his courage and self-confidence and be a pampered emotional cripple for the rest of his life, or, conversely on the other hand, growing up masculine in a feminine household, fiercely determined