The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [209]
We don’t change much, Vernon will reflect, and will be further amazed to discover that the person of Vernealos will be himself and that the book will predict everything that will happen to him for the rest of his life. When he will realize this, he will stop reading, just at the page describing one of his epic marathon love-makings with Jelena, and he will close the book and wrap it up and mail it off to the Library of Congress with a covering letter saying the book is theirs on condition that they never let him see it. Vernon will never know what is going to happen to him in the end. He will know only that he will be the last of the Ingledews, that there will be no more, until in some distant future century this whole cycle will be repeated once again.
Being the last of the Ingledews, he will want to stay, for as more as he can. He will not want to end. On his trip around the world, he will have discovered, and been appalled at, how very little the sciences really do understand, all by and by. He will have been struck with wonder at the way mankind is using—and misusing—the resources of this earth, sucking it dry and gouging it bare of its fossil fuels while letting the energy of the sun go to waste, the energy of the wind go to waste, the energy of the tides go to waste. In the obscure illustration of this final chapter, we will at least be able to discern what seems to be a windmill, and conjecture that part of the energy for Vernon’s last domicile is furnished by wind, and we will further assume that the roofs or domes of this domicile will be wired or rigged for solar energy. In fact, Vernon will work so hard just in planning this house that the very planning itself will give him a bad case of the frakes, which will be the last case of the frakes in Newton County. No one, ever again, will have to work hard enough to get the frakes. Frakes, like the plague and smallpox and typhoid fever, will become obsolete. But Vernon will have the last case, from his labors in planning his house. Trying to cure it, he will search again all through this book for the many cases of it, and will discover that not a single one of them was ever cured. Fighting against the terrible itching and the despair that he knows will follow it, Vernon will suddenly discover the cure for the frakes.
To Jelena he will announce, “I do not have the frakes.” “But you do,” she will point out. “Yeah, but I choose to ignore them,” Vernon will say. And, ignoring them, they will go away. They will be no more. Never again will man be punished for his efforts to accomplish something.
And Vernon will accomplish something: ignoring his frakes, he will build this house. Although it will be smudged and obscure to us, it will be very real to him and to Jelena, who will live in it and love in it, for the rest of their days. Although they will enjoy their privacy, they will not be exactly recluses, for they will invite their friends, Day Whittacker and his wife or girlfriend (whose name, we will now know, is Diana Stoving) to visit them. Vernon’s sisters and their husbands will never visit, because his sisters will be ashamed that Vernon will be “living with” and “running around with” his own cousin, and because, in fact, all but one of his sisters will leave Stay More and move to California and St. Louis and Kansas City and Eureka Springs, respectively. (The population of Stay More will be only nine.) The one sister who will stay more will be Patricia, who will be Jelena’s age and will have been her best friend in childhood and who will at least speak to Jelena whenever she sees her, but who will not visit her at home. Vernon’s father will visit occasionally, because, as Hank will remark, “If a feller is crazy enough to build a house like this, I reckon I’m crazy enough to come and see it now and again.” Also Vernon’s great-uncle Tearle, the last survivor of his generation of the Ingledews, will visit occasionally, complaining, “It aint got no porch. Nobody builds a porch to set on no more.” But Jelena will have a beautiful garden bordering the cool spring