The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [195]
His first great achievement, however, was almost accidental, and occurred at the age of sixteen. On one of his many solitary walks in the fastnesses of Ingledew Mountain, he discovered a razorback boar. It had been thought that the razorback, if it ever existed at all outside of legend, was long extinct in the Ozarks, but to Vernon, who had seen pictures of them, there was no mistaking that this was indeed a razorback boar. In the end of the following, penultimate chapter, we will have to witness Vernon’s struggle to capture the boar. And in the final chapter we will learn what he did with it.
Chapter nineteen
Jackson Ingledew was a janitor in the Harrison public school system. He got the job in the same year that Jelena, who had become his ward, was old enough to start to school. During the summer months, when school was not in session, he was unemployed, and the two of them returned to Stay More for the entire summer. That is part of the reason why he bought the “mobile home,” shown here; the other part of the reason was that he thought the mobile home looked “modern.” The Ozarks were filling up with mobile homes, and Jackson got the latest model. Stay More was full of abandoned houses that were his for the asking, but he opted for the modernity and the convenience of a mobile home. For nine months of the year, while school was in session, Jackson’s mobile home was parked in a “trailer camp” in the small city of Harrison; for the other three months it was parked beside Swains Creek in Stay More, halfway between the old canning factory and the sycamore tree which had held Noah Ingledew’s treehouse.
In many ways Jackson Ingledew resembled Noah Ingledew, or at least Noah is the only other Ingledew to whom Jackson is comparable in any respect. Jackson’s favorite (but not exclusive) oath was also “shitfire” but he always pronounced it as a drawn-out “sheeeut far,” and he never uttered it in the presence of his niece and ward Jelena. He was extremely conscientious about his responsibilities as substitute father; the position did not rest lightly on his shoulders, but he tried his best: for instance, when Jelena grew up and became a beautiful and highly desirable girl, Jackson highly desired her, and it required the highest exercise of self-control to keep him from seducing her, but he never seduced her, which more than any other fact tells us what kind of man he was. When she was only one year old she climbed into his lap and uttered her first word, “Da da.” He put her down, perhaps literally as well as figuratively, and said, “Not Dada. Uncle.” She looked at him strangely and tried to pronounce “uncle,” but it came out “ugla” and he is still Ugla Jackson to her to this day.
Although he was unable to give her the affection of fatherhood, he was at least attentive to her; whenever she requested, he would read her storybooks to her, so often that she already knew how to read by herself even before she started school. When school was over, each day, Jackson had to sweep the halls and rooms for a couple of hours, so during those two hours he would leave her in the school’s library, where she read and reread every book over the years. She loved reading, but it was a dull way to grow up, and she always eagerly looked forward to the summers, when Jackson would hitch the mobile home to his pickup truck and haul it back to Stay More. It was even more fun for Jelena when Hank and Sonora Ingledew came back from California with their five daughters and Jelena discovered that she had a first cousin, Patricia, who was the same age as she. Jelena never read a book in the summertime.
One summer when Jelena was eight, she arrived in Stay More to discover that she had another cousin, recently born, and that this cousin had a tail, or rather a tail that was on backwards, or rather frontwards, a tail on the front of him, just an inch or less long. When she looked at his face, she fell in love with