The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [202]
“How? Jobs are pretty scarce hereabouts.”
“Create your own job.”
“Doing what?”
“Growing and selling something.”
“Jelena’s husband Mark Duckworth grows and sells chickens, but he aint gittin rich.”
“Not chickens. Pigs. Vernon, aren’t you awfully fond of ham?”
“That’s right.”
“But haven’t you been constantly suspicious that nobody makes really good ham anymore?”
“Sure. It troubles me.”
“Then do something about it.”
“Okay. Where do I start?”
“Find a razorback.”
“There aren’t any razorbacks anymore.”
“You seem to know an awful lot for a boy your age.”
“Aw, heck. Everbody knows there aren’t any razorbacks.”
“Get up and walk outside of this cave.”
Vernon obeys. Outside the cave, foraging on acorn mast, is a razorback boar. He softly whistles in recognition of it. “Say, thanks,” he says to us, and removes his wristwatch and puts it into his pocket. It is too bad he cannot put us into his pocket too, to spare us the sight of the terrible contest that is about to occur.
Vernon improvises a halter out of black-jack vines, and sneaks up on the boar. Having had no experience in capturing razorbacks, because there have been no razorbacks to capture, he does not realize that razorbacks will fiercely defend themselves. When the boar sees Vernon, it does not run, but stands its ground until Vernon is close to it, then it charges him, toppling his legs out from under him, goring his calves with inch-deep wounds. Razorbacks are not nearly as big as domestic swine, but they are much swifter and meaner for that reason. Vernon can hardly stand up, and as soon as he is on his feet, the boar charges him again, but he sidesteps like a matador and throws the halter over the boar’s head as it charges past, keeping a firm grip on the other end of the line. He is pulled off his feet and dragged along the ground, and the wristwatch in his pocket is broken.
Chapter twenty
Our last illustration, regrettably, is smudged and obscure. Vernon Ingledew refuses our request to view the final dwelling of Stay More. We can just barely determine that it has certain things in common with the first dwelling in our study, which perhaps suggests that time, and architecture, are cyclical: we began with an ending, we end with a beginning. But I have not seen this building myself; Vernon refuses to divulge its exact location in the forest fastnesses of Stay More; our illustration, or what is left of it, is based upon a Polaroid snapshot taken by a young couple who are friends of mine, and the last “outsiders” to immigrate into Stay More. But Vernon will not build this structure until his twenty-second year, and he is still only sixteen.
Yes, he finally succeeds in capturing that razorback boar, tethering him to a tree while he hobbles home to dress his wounds, then borrows his father’s four-wheel-drive truck, which he drives up old logging trails to the place where he has captured the boar. He drops a ramp from the truck-bed, and forces the boar up the ramp and into the truck, and takes it home and pens it up. Word quickly spreads that Vernon Ingledew has captured a real live razorback. This is so fantastic that the editor of the defunct Disaster is tempted to start it up again, but he has already sold his printing press. A Harrison newspaper publishes the story, and the students at the University of Arkansas, whose mascot the razorback is, take up a collection of two thousand dollars for the purpose of buying Vernon’s razorback, but two thousand dollars isn’t enough to pay for the building of the house of this chapter, so he rejects the offer.
Vernon sets about breeding the boar to three Poland China gilts. The boar is disdainful, but a gilt in heat is too much for him. Vernon turns seventeen, and after three-and-a-half months the Poland China sows farrow a total of twenty-six pigs. Instead of black-and-white like Poland China