The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  But it was a long time before Jacob Ingledew visited again and that was after Fanshaw had come to him. “Jist too blamed tard to ’sociate,” Jacob explained, pointing at the work that he and his brother were doing, the construction of their cabin (see our illustration to the following chapter). There had been some argument between the brothers over settling here. Noah Ingledew did not want to build in the vicinity of Indians. Jacob Ingledew liked the landscape, and besides, these Indians were friendly, and besides that, there were only two of them, Fanshaw having told him that the other members of the tribe had gone off on a hunting trip over a year previously and had not returned. As a result of having imbibed Featherstonehaugh’s firewater too freely, Fanshaw had broken his leg in a fall from his horse at the outset of the hunting trip, and was required to remain behind. He was skeptical that the others would return. He hoped they would, of course, but it had been such a long time since they had gone hunting, and he had had plenty of spare time to imagine the worst: they had met their enemies the Cherokees and been defeated, or met the blue-coat government men who forced them westward into reservations. He did not know. He still walked with a limp.

  Jacob and Noah Ingledew worked from sunup to sundown for a fortnight building their cabin. For a discussion of their methods, we must await the next chapter, but suffice it to say here that this work was drudgery, although it lasted only a fortnight. At the end of that time, Fanshaw sought Jacob out (Noah scampered off into the woods as the aborigine approached and wouldn’t come back until he had left, a couple of hours later). Jacob Ingledew passed his jug to Fanshaw, realizing that now his cabin was nearly finished he could get his corn planted but even so it was going to be a dry summer, “dry” before he could get a new run of whiskey made. He told Fanshaw that he was just too tired at the end of each day building his cabin to visit him again.

  Fanshaw studied the Ingledew cabin, scratching his chin. He just looked at it for a long time, walking all the way around it like a bird studying some other bird’s strange nest. Not portable, he observed. But worse, to his point of view, it was all square, foursquare, quadriform, there was not a curved edge to it, not one. After passing the jug back and forth between them for a while, they got into a long argument about architecture. I will repeat here only the end of the argument, the point at which it stopped. Although we may be sure that Fanshaw did not have the word “organic” in his vocabulary, let alone understand what is meant by organic architecture, he had a sense of a dwelling’s belonging to the landscape and fitting in with it, and he was trying to boast of how his own dwelling expressed this feeling in a way that the Ingledew cabin did not. He looked out across the rolling hills and pointed toward the gently rounded double-top of what later would be locally called Big Tits Mountain. “My house,” he boasted, “is of the same shape.”

  “Yeah?” said Jacob Ingledew, and pointed toward the peak of what later would be called Ingledew Mountain. “Wal, how about that un?” The top of Ingledew Mountain forms a triangular peak of almost the same geometric angles as the gable roof of the Ingledew cabin. Fanshaw just looked at him and grinned.

  Fanshaw changed the subject by inquiring whether or not Jacob’s “lady” was “at home.” Jacob Ingledew blushed and hemmed and hawed and said he aint never had ary, for the fact was that an Ingledew man brave enough to approach a savage Indian would never, could never have approached a female, at least not one above the age of, say, eleven. Jacob Ingledew changed the subject by saying that there wasn’t nobody here but him and his brother, and his brother wasn’t here right now because he was scared shitless of Indians, although in most other respects his brother was brave and fearless and had recently killed a panther by ramming his fist down its throat, although he had a few ugly scars on his arm to show for it.

  After a couple of hours of drink and talk, Fanshaw got up to go. “Stay more,” Jacob invited him. “Hell, you jist got here.” But Fanshaw politely explained that his lady would be unhappy if he tarried further, and he must return to her. The pattern of this parting would be duplicated on a number of subsequent occasions, always with Jacob inviting him to “stay more”—this was not necessarily because Jacob Ingledew craved his company, although he did in fact very much enjoy Fanshaw’s visits, but a matter of formality, a custom let us say, of his people. One always urges a departing guest to remain. Yet Fanshaw could not help but remark upon this custom to his wife because among his own people the exact reverse is the case: when a guest has stayed as long as he wants to, his host senses it and sends him packing with an Indian expression which, if translated into modern idiom, would most literally be “Haul ass” or perhaps even “Fuck off.” Fanshaw’s wife was amused by the term “stay more” in the Indian equivalent into which he translated it for her. In time, it got to where whenever Fanshaw was leaving his house to go visit Jacob Ingledew, he would tell his wife that he was going to Stay More. Some folks even today think that it was Jacob and/or Noah Ingledew who gave the town its name, when in fact it was an aborigine, and the significance of the name, in its rustic ambivalence, is going to have, we will find, many ramifications, some of them poignant. We must not allow ourselves to feel that this is entirely a happy story.

  But it is of Fanshaw’s house that I should speak. Why was it bigeminal, that is, a duple? Not visible in our illustration is the other door, on the other side—the west door to the other unit. There may or may not have been an interior connecting door as well; unfortunately, information on this point has been impossible to obtain. One would logically think that there was an interior connecting door, one would want to believe so, at any rate, but Jacob Ingledew, who was, on at least several occasions, inside the dwelling, simply neglected ever to mention whether or not there was an interior connecting door. The first time he asked Fanshaw why his house was bigeminal (which wasn’t the word he used; he said “divided” although that is not accurate, for, as one can see, the two units of the building are not divided at all, but very strongly conjoined), Fanshaw simply replied that it was “traditional.” Later on, when Jacob Ingledew raised the matter again, Fanshaw could only explain: “That is hers, this is mine.” Naturally Jacob Ingledew would have been too embarrassed to ask Fanshaw whether this meant that they slept separately.

  It was learned that Fanshaw himself had not built his house. He had helped to build a number of others, but he had not built this one. He explained. Among his people, the most desirable and eligible young gentlemen are actively sought out by the maidens for the purpose of—he could not remember the English word for it, but it is the state of being man and squaw. The maiden expresses her wish for the young gentleman of her choice by giving him a piece of bread made of maize. Of course the young gentleman has the right to reject her proposal by returning the maize-bread to her. But if he wants her, he keeps the bread. Together they plan a public festival at which they will announce their wish to enter the state of man and squaw. The whole village, then, as a token of joy, build the dwellingplace for the couple in one afternoon. That is the entire ceremony.

  “It is simple,” Fanshaw observed. “No words need be spoken, other than many exclamations of joy by the people as they build the domicile. A lodge-raising is a most noisy festival, but it is not in words. Much meat is eaten. The blessed couple afterward are too full of meat to do the—I did not ever learn what you call it in English—the, when in darkness, one-on-top-together-fastened-between. Do you know it? No? Pity. It is with much joy.” There was a legend among his people that this frolic was responsible for the girl’s production of an infant after nine moons. But Fanshaw’s lady had never produced an infant, although, with little else to do but tend their garden patch and hunt an occasional wild turkey, they spent most of their time in one-on-top-together-fastened-between.

  It could be a superstition, of which there were many, and while Fanshaw was of the opinion that the efficacy of superstitions was in direct proportion to one’s belief in their efficacy, there was no denying that many superstitions were useful and neve
r failed. In the course of time he imparted several of these to Jacob Ingledew. The root of the buckeye tree, crushed and dropped into a pool of the creek, is a quick way to catch fish, by poisoning them. In time of famine, when other meat is scarce, do not disdain the ordinary mud turtle; his flesh consists of seven tastes of meat: pork, beef, mutton, venison, chicken, duck and fish. Fanshaw taught him many natural herbal remedies for the thousand ills that flesh is heir to, although most of these happened to be identical with ones that Jacob Ingledew already knew, learned from his ancestors. They discovered also that they had in common their beliefs in the importance of doing certain things, such as planting, by the dark of the moon or the light of the moon.

  One of their few disagreements, which provided much fuel for their debates, was over the existence of God, or Wahkontah, as Fanshaw called him (it translates as “Mysterious Spirit” rather than the more common “Great Spirit” of other tribes). Jacob Ingledew felt that there was no such thing as God, or, if there were, he was a senile loafer who had created the world during his energetic youth but was now too old to care for it or take care of it. This notion greatly incensed Fanshaw, and in the intensity of their debates they almost came to blows. But they never fought, physically; I have always been curious as to which of them would have won if they had; it would have been a very even match.

  But Fanshaw was a man of prayer. The door of his house, that is, the door of his half of the house, faced the east, whence, his people believed, all good things came (a peculiarly harsh irony in view of the fact that the displacing white settlers came from that direction). Each morning, at dawn, he would rise and perform his matinals, facing east. Our illustration attempts to show his house as illuminated by the long light of this early moment; imagination must visualize Fanshaw standing outside his door facing east. The first morning Jacob Ingledew spent in Stay More, sleeping on the ground by his mule tethered half a mile up the creek from Fanshaw’s, he woke to the sound of Fanshaw’s morning prayer, and, having never in his life heard anything like it, went to investigate, hiding in the woods near Fanshaw’s camp and watching him. The closest sound it resembled was that of a screaming panther, which Jacob had heard on many occasions, the most recent being just before Noah had rammed his fist down one’s throat. Jacob was astonished to discover that the sound was being produced by the vocal apparatus of his new friend Fanshaw (and possibly, in the back of his mind, after listening to Fanshaw’s Dawn Chant to its conclusion, he felt that Fanshaw was crazy, and this may have been the real reason, rather than fatigue, why he did not soon return to Fanshaw’s house). Long afterward, Jacob Ingledew could do a reasonable imitation of the Dawn Chant, to awe his descendants, frightening the younger ones, and from one of his descendants in turn I have heard it; it lies beyond my power of words to reproduce; I can only say that it began on the highest pitched note that the voice could reach, and after traveling up and down the scale in a nonmusical but nonverbal manner for several long minutes that evoked abstractly supplications and petitions of all manner, ended abruptly on a note that can only be called a sob of frustration. It was this last that most puzzled Jacob Ingledew, but it was a long time before he could get up his nerve to ask Fanshaw what it meant. Jacob returned to his cabin site to find his brother Noah saddling one of the mules. “Shitfire,” Noah said, “I’m a-gorn back to Tennessee, Jake.” Jacob explained that it was only the aborigine singing some kind of morningsong, but it was only with much conciliation that Jacob persuaded his brother to stay.

  It was at the height of one of their arguments about God, much later, that Jacob said to Fanshaw, “If you believe in him so durn much, how come when you git to the ‘amen’ part of yore prayers, you make this here noise that sounds like you feel it aint nary bitty use nohow to be prayin?” Fanshaw stared at him for a long moment before saying, “Oh? You listen to my ‘prayers’?” Jacob said, “Hell’s bells, a body caint help listenin to ’em.” “Be glad then,” Fanshaw retorted, “that there is only me. If my tribesmen were here, we would deafen you.” But he relented, and explained to Jacob that the sob of frustration did not mean that he thought his praying was futile but rather that he was, at that point, given to understand that Wahkontah had chosen, for reasons of His own, to deny Fanshaw’s requests. We all want. We must always continue to want, to desire, even if our wants are not gratified. What did Fanshaw want? He could not tell Jacob; to tell another mortal what one wants greatly decreases one’s chances of getting it—no, it is a guarantee that one will not get it.

  But Jacob Ingledew, for all his rough frontiersman demeanor, was a man of good mind, and he could guess the source of Fanshaw’s frustration: surely it had to do with the rest of his tribe not returning. He felt sorry for Fanshaw, but of course if the rest of the tribe did return, which he doubted, he himself would have to move on. He had been told before leaving Tennessee that within a few short years, now that Arkansas had achieved statehood and was no longer a territory, every Indian would have to leave the state.

  In the fall, when they were sampling the first run of Jacob’s Arkansas sour mash whiskey (Fanshaw had helped him harvest the corn, and had shown him how to grind it, Indian-fashion, by placing it in a hollowed-out rock—of which there are many in the Ozark streams—and pounding it with a stone pestle), Fanshaw happened to pop a question:

  “Why do we drink this stuff?”

  “You don’t lak it?” Jacob said. “I ’low as how it aint near as good as that I brung from Tennessee, but…”

  “Oh, it is fine. Ripping stuff, old boy. I simply raise the philosophical question: why do we drink it?”

  Jacob pondered. “Wal, I kinder relish the taste, myself.”

  “Yo. But do we not more relish that which it does to us?”

  “I don’t feature drunkenness. I know when to stop.”

  “Yo. But in between? Between drunkenness and sobriety there is a wide country, and what is the Name of that Country?”

  “Joy?”

  “No. Not if, by joy, you mean that kind which, although you have never felt it and thus cannot understand it, comes to the gentleman when with the lady in one-on-top-together-fastened-between. Not a bit of it, old fellow.”

  “Wal, what do you call the Country, then?”

  “Importance,” Fanshaw uttered, and let the word hover in the air between them like a hummingbird before continuing. “We know that we are nothing, you and I. And it is true, we are as nothing in the sight of Wahkontah. We are but flies he swats in sport. But the pe-tsa-ni—firewater—permits us for a while to forget this. The fire burns away our personal insignificance, and leaves us for a while a great sense of importance.”

  “But aint that joy?”

  “Not like—” Fanshaw began, but stopped and contemplated Jacob for a moment before declaring, “My friend, some day you must experience the one-on-top-together-fastened-between.”

  Jacob kicked a small rock around on the ground for a while and then drew some doodles in the dirt with a stick, and at length said, “Aw, shoot,” and, changing the subject, proposed their topic for debate that day: Which enjoys life more, a short-tailed dog or a long-tailed dog? (Both Fanshaw and Jacob Ingledew had dogs. Fanshaw’s dog was short-tailed, Ingledew’s was a long-tailed hound bitch; these animals had fought one another at first but later seemed to be on amicable terms.) Fanshaw agreed to this topic of debate, and for the next hour the two men matched oratory, but, since there was no referee, the victor could not be decided and each man felt that himself had won.

  These debates between Fanshaw and Ingledew were both a sport and a diversion: they gave the two men something to talk about, because often there would be nothing to talk about after exhausting the usual run of topics: weather, crops and the existence of God. A few years later, every little settlement in the Ozarks had its debating society, and it is thought that their repertoire of topics for debate originated with Jacob Ingledew and Fanshaw. Which is worse, a cold or a hangover? Which is the superior tree, the oak or the pine? Which is worse,
blindness or deafness? Which makes better whiskey, springwater or rainwater? Is the earth round or flat? And so on. It was the last named topic which, next to their debates about the existence of God, provided the liveliest disputation.

  Fanshaw’s people had long believed that the earth was round and revolved slowly around the sun. This notion struck Jacob as fantastic and incredible. “If thet were so, everbody would git throwed offen it!” was his first reaction to this preposterous concept. Jacob began to believe that such a crackpot concept was the result of living in a round house, and he said so to Fanshaw. But Fanshaw proceeded by skillful argument to state his case, and Jacob lost ground, inch by inch, until he was left with only one line of defense: “Wal, if the earth is round, then we must be on the top side of it, and all them pore devils on the bottom has fell off.”

  To this, Fanshaw propounded an original explanation of gravity which I would like to dignify with the title Fanshaw’s Law of Gravity, for, if it is correct, he goes far beyond Newton in explaining that mysterious force, namely, that all objects, all matter, actually weigh twice their apparent weight; the other half of their actual weight creates a counteracting “pull” which is the gravity for the objects on the opposite side of the round globe. Thus, all matter is exerting an even outward pull from the center of the earth which is matched by the inward pull that we ordinarily think of as gravity. This concept was almost beyond Jacob’s power of comprehension, but Fanshaw made it clear and simple by saying, “In other words, everything is holding everything else together.”