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By Root 1423 0

somebody. If only, Jacob thought, if only he could talk to Sarah and get her to realize that if she would let him have her more often then he would be all right. Better yet, if he could persuade Sarah to talk to the womenfolk of Stay More and convince them to be more yielding to their husbands, then all of the men of Stay More would be all right. But Jacob had never been able to talk to Sarah about sex, and never would, until the last day of his life. He considered, briefly, talking instead to Lizzie Swain, who, now in her sixties, was virtually the matriarch of the village. Lizzie could easily call a meeting of all the womenfolk and perhaps persuade them to open their thighs more often for their husbands.

But Jacob realized that he could no more broach such a topic with Lizzie than he could have asked her, years earlier, to have her bull service his cow. So instead he organized a Public Works Project: all of the men were to take their sledgehammers and smash boulders into gravel, and pave the road from Stay More to Jasper with crushed gravel. This project kept them busy for a while, but when they had graveled the road as far as Jasper they discovered that Virdie Boatright’s wagon was parked off the courthouse square. When they tried to get in, she wouldn’t let them, not even Jacob. There were just too many men in Jasper, she told him. She couldn’t “accommodate” any more.

The Stay Morons cursed and smacked their fists into their palms and went on back to Stay More, where they resumed kicking posts and dogs with a vengeance, and Jacob exercised his brains to think of something else for them to do, but then he got angry with himself for wasting so much of his good thought on those worthless clods, and, being angry with himself, he kicked a post so hard he broke his foot. The foot was slow to heal, and he couldn’t walk at all, but it didn’t matter anyway, because he, along with every last man who had worked so hard crushing rocks for the road to Jasper, suddenly came down with the frakes. The entire able-bodied male population of Stay More (numbering in that year approximately forty-six) came down with the frakes!

Most of them were of the opinion that it was a venereal disease contracted from Virdie Boatright, and in some parts of the Ozarks even today there are people who stubbornly persist in believing that the frakes is a venereal disease, but Noah Ingledew, who had had the frakes before while still a virgin, knew that it was not, and tried to assure his fellows that it was not, but most of them went on believing (or rather lay bedridden convinced) that Virdie Boatright was responsible. It was commonly, even if atrociously, believed in the Ozarks that the only cure for a venereal disease is to transmit it to a person of the opposite sex, and the men of Stay More yearned desperately for this cure, which could not be had for two reasons: (1) no female was willing to lie with a man infested with the frakes, and (2) no male infested with the frakes was potent while he had the frakes.

One would think—one would like to think—that the extreme lassitude and sense of utter futility which come as the aftermath of the frakes would have disencumbered these men of their aggressions, their restless incipient martiality. But it did not happen that way. True, all of the men did feel weak and futile, but they still felt restless and belligerent. A dangerous combination. Since they were all bedridden and could no longer kick posts and dogs (although they could still smash one fist into the palm of the other hand, and frequently did) they were reduced to such acts as tearing their bedcovers and gnashing the bedposts. Naturally the womenfolk were dismayed and, although the frakes had cleared up and the men were potent again, the women all refused to sleep with the men, which made the men rend their bedcovers all the harder and chomp the bedposts all the fiercer, and this vicious cycle continued until there was not one whole quilt or blanket in Stay More, nor one bedpost still standing.

The day came at last when the men could leave their