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By Root 1398 0

bored Jelena, but there was nothing else to do, and she soon discovered that she really liked the things that she and Mark could do with their bodies. When he proposed marriage to her, she turned him down, telling him that she was waiting for Vernon Ingledew to grow up. He laughed at that, and went on proposing, pointing out that his chicken ranch was just about the best chicken ranch in Newton County and that he intended to make it even bigger. (While we have Jelena and Mark in his car at the drive-in movies, we might notice that the car too is bigeminal, usually having two doors, his side, her side, and that cars have traditionally been used for “making out,” which in essence is what bigeminality is all about.)

Mark was a good-looking chicken farmer, twenty-two years old; Jelena was a beautiful brunette close to nineteen. We have not yet reached the point where we could tap her on the shoulder, as it were, and point out to her that she could never have a happy marriage with Mark Duckworth because of the discrepancy between their respective intelligences. He was no dumbbell, by any means, but Jelena Ingledew was just about the most intelligent female in the history of Stay More. If she had been willing to leave Stay More, she could have found boundless opportunities elsewhere, and boundlessly more attractive prospects for husbands, but she was not willing to leave Stay More. So she married Mark Duckworth. The old abandoned school/churchhouse was given a good dusting, a minister was imported from Jasper, and everybody (there were only twenty-nine Stay Morons that year) came to the wedding. Jelena was even surprised to find Vernon there, dressed in his first suit and his first necktie. As Uncle Jackson was leading her down the aisle, she paused and bent down and whispered in Vernon’s ear, “I was going to wait and marry you when you grew up. Will you marry me when you grow up? If you say ‘yes,’ I’ll call off this wedding.” Vernon looked into her eyes to understand if she were teasing him, and, understanding that she was serious, shook his head and declared, “I will never marry.” And he was right. He never will. He is the last of all the Ingledews. There will be no more.

We are so close to the end of this epic that if it were a snake it would bite us, as folks used to say in Stay More, but don’t anymore, because there are so few folks remaining. Yet endings make me nervous, not because I don’t know what to expect but simply because they are endings, and there is nothing beyond them, as there is nothing beyond death and nothing beyond the universe. There will be something beyond this ending, but not for now. We do not have time to accompany Vernon on one of his numerous solitary walks in the woods, when he studied nature as intently as possible, trying to understand it. We do not have time to listen to one of the heated quarrels between Jelena and her husband Mark, who discovered very quickly that marriage takes something out of romance. Jelena bore Mark two children, both sons, and with his permission had herself sterilized after the birth of the second son. She was a good mother, but eventually decided that she could not stand her husband; it was a loveless marriage, and the chores of a chicken farmer’s wife were endlessly boring. She had fantasies, sometimes, of taking her life, and once she even walked up the mountain to Leapin Rock and stood on the edge of it, looking down. Vernon, on one of his woods walks, spotted her. He was fourteen then, and as big as she, and he sneaked up behind her and threw his arms around her and pulled her away from the precipice. “I was just enjoying the view,” she told him. “Oh,” he said, hangdog, “I thought ye were fixin to jump.” “Why should I jump?” she said. He studied her eyes, trying to understand whether or not she had intended to jump, and understood that she had, and told her, “You’re unhappy.” “Why should I be unhappy?” she demanded, but then she broke down, not weeping but just losing control of herself, and told him all her problems. He was embarrassed, not only because she