Word: abner
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...endurable. Lamon Coe knew that Heaven was his father's farm in Zerbetta, Ohio, and therefore tolerated an exile cluttered with boxing in Los Angeles, acting in cinema, selling sporting goods in Boston, and finally life in the big city with his refined Cousin Abner. New York's smells, noises, intellectuals, palled on Lamon until he discovered Frankie de Lima (she had adopted the name of her Ohio home-town). Lamon basked in the glow of her vivacity, until sudden catastrophe brought him home to Zerbetta with the girl who "understood...
...Story* jolts off down the clay ruts of Lane County, Tennessee - stretches of crowded, stumbling action; bursts of mulish power. Abner Teeftallow, a brawny illiterate of 18, leaves the poor-farm where his mother died insane, to labor as a teamster on a traction project of Lanesburg's genius and potentate, Railroad Jones. From his fellow teamsters he learns the technique of hillbilly manhood- gulping moonshine, shooting craps Saturday nights in a wood, toting an automatic pistol for protection on "rambling" (courting) nights and for display at prayer-meetings. He reveres the four local gods- public opinion, money...
Over in Irontown ("Arntown") where the teamsters are working, the villagers have their annual religious debauch - a revival. Following local custom, Abner and his mates engage female partners for the whole series of meetings. One night, during a lull in the hysteria, one Tug Beavers temporizes about going to the mourners' bench. That same night he gets a backful of buckshot from Peck Bradley, a murderer out on bail. Religion picks up. Bloodhounds bay for three days and nights in the back hills and Bradley is brought in to jail, crusted with mud but full of bravado. Sharing...
...chief local henchmen of the Lord are Perry Northcutt, thin-lipped banker, and Roxie Biggers, merciless chariteer. Northcutt has it in for young Teeftallow, having failed to mulct him of some intricately inherited timberlands. So Abner learns more about humanity when he and Nessie Sutton come up for public judgment. Nessie is the milliner's assistant- tall, honey-haired, pious, nourished on novels. She and Abner live in the same lodging house, where laws of proximity and physiology grope through a natural course. Roxie Biggers sees their farewell embrace when Abner's work-gang moves away...
...story stumbles and lurches back to Lanesburg. Matured by his flaying at Irontown and believed to be a man of property, Abner becomes involved in the operations of Railroad Jones. The latter, obese, unlettered but wily beyond compare, plays an elusive role, now angel, now devil, but always a hero for the ingenuity of his countless victories at law and his unrivaled wealth. Possessed of an astonishing "rickollection" and pioneer shrewdness, he harps on the folly of tainting man's natural intelligence with education. He has a daughter, Adelaide, highly modernized by upstate schooling, with whom Abner...