Walton Wouldhave, Sr.

What does one call an unemployed ne’er-do-well twenty-seven-year-old man who gets a girl pregnant who is a month short of her fifteenth birthday? If you guessed Walton Wouldhave, Sr., you are correct! Walton Wouldhave, Sr. never actually shows up in the books, but he is talked about and several of his children and his wife are seen directly. Wouldhave married West’s second daughter, Athena Aphrodite, probably with a shotgun at his back as she was already two months pregnant at the time.

As scientific studies have confirmed, when ovulating, women prefer one sort of male, although that is not the sort of male who will stick around to raise the child without strong and dire encouragement. These men tend to have stronger, more masculine features and throw off testosterone into their environments like the misters one finds at outdoor cafes in Arizona. Walton Wouldhave, Sr. was definitely one of these sorts. He went on to have seventeen children with Athena, and died in his early fifties, although he had managed to behave well enough not to have his cause of death be his father-in-law. The phrase “strong features” is usually code within the series for a Wouldhave descendent.

The name Wouldhave is a real one. There was a William Wouldhave in the Nineteenth Century who participated in a contest for a better lifeboat. Whether any of his predecessors who owned the family name were ne’er-do-wells or had strong features or came to America is unknown to the author. Real Wouldhaves should not take offense over the fictional one, especially since his progeny become upstanding citizens in the series.