The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  After Fanshaw had left that day, and Jacob’s brother Noah came back from where he was hiding in the woods during the Indian’s visit, Jacob told him that the Indian thought the earth was round.

  “Shitfire, why don’t ye quit wastin yore time with him?” Noah said. Jacob repeated in detail Fanshaw’s arguments for the earth being round, including his theory of gravity. Noah, however, remained unconvinced. Everybody of any sense knew that the earth was flat. (And indeed, the debating societies of every little settlement in the Ozarks would continue year by year to have this topic in their repertoire, until finally, years later, somebody brought in from St. Louis one of those disturbing volumes known as a “textbook.”)

  Early winter found the two friends hunting together, Jacob with his flintlock, Fanshaw with his bow. Again, it would be difficult to decide which of the two was the better marksman; they were both deadly accurate. Jacob’s weapon seemed more effective in killing a bear rather than merely wounding it, but on at least one occasion Jacob’s life was saved when, charged by a wounded bear or panther who still had enough life to bite and scratch, he fell and would have been mangled save for the speedy and accurate arrows of Fanshaw.

  Fanshaw’s bow was a large one, made of well-seasoned wood from the bois d’arc, coincidentally the same tree that his house was made of. A small but illuminating digression on language is necessary at this point, to help us get all our arks together. Bois d’arc is of course French and may be translated as Bow Wood, which is one of its names, the others being ironwood, yellowwood, hedge, mock orange, and Osage-orange, the last two referring to the fruit, which is a large yellow ball vaguely resembling an orange but which, as any schoolboy who has ever bitten into one has discovered, is quite bitter. “Osage-orange” is so called because the Osages used it to make their bows with, also their houses.

  Arc, and also ark, comes from an Indo-European word root, arkw, which means bow or arrow (it is uncertain which; perhaps both together as a unit, since one is no good without the other). The Old Norse arw supplies our word for arrow. In almost all Indo-European languages, arkw is the root of such words as arc, arcade, arch, architecture, archer (shooter of arrow), arciform, arcuate, etc. Arc is also an obsolete form of ark, which meant originally a chest, box, coffer and hence a place of refuge, as in the Biblical Noah’s vessel and as in all over this present book. Both Chaucer and Milton were wont to spell an arc as curve or arch as ark. The name of our state, Arkansas, is thought to mean in Indian the smoky, bow-shaped river, since Kansas means smoky river and ark means bow (although we should all know that Arkansas does not rhyme with Kansas and is accented on the first syllable). The name of our region, the Ozarks, is said by one early authority (Schoolcraft, who should know) to be compounded from “Osage” (our Indian again) and “Arkansas,” which makes just as much sense as the usual idea that it comes from the French, Aux Arc. Therefore, when we speak of “the bois d’arc in the arciform architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks,” every unit in this sentence can be traced to the same root.

  What does it feel like to live inside Fanshaw’s house? To settle this question once and for all, I propose that an enterprising group of students reconstruct an example of it, out in the hilly woods, and spend a night in it. And record their dreams the next morning. Many other tribes of Indians lived in the Ozarks down through history, and many of them lived in recesses under bluffs, caverns if you will, and these were rounded and curvilinear too. It is probably difficult to adapt rectilinear furniture to a curvilinear dwelling, but Fanshaw didn’t have any.

  One more round thing, and then we must search for the end of this chapter. In Fanshaw’s garden there had grown a plant which Jacob Ingledew had not seen before. Luxuriant green bushes produced a rounded green fruit which, when ripened, turned red, but had a taste that was not sweet like other fruit but tangy, almost acrid, and produced a feeling of voluptuousness. Upon inquiry from Jacob, Fanshaw said this plant was called Tah May Toh, which could be translated as “love apple.” Even now in early winter Fanshaw had a supply of green ones which were still turning ripe. But he failed in his attempts to get Jacob to sample one. Jacob, perhaps out of a growing sense that all round things, all concepts of roundness, and the supposedly round earth itself, were somehow alien to him, was suspicious that the Tah May Toh was poisonous, and he never ate them. (Later generations of Ingledews would learn to love them, and in fact the only “industry” that ever came to Stay More, unless you want to call Vernon Ingledew’s Ham Processing Plant an industry, was a factory for canning these love apples.)

  “It don’t matter to me whether the earth is round or flat,” Jacob said to Fanshaw one evening in the late winter. “I aint gonna git to the other side nohow.”

  “Where are you going to get to, old chap?”

  “Huh? I’ve done got there.”

  “The time has come, now, when we must at last cultivate a topic of discussion which, hitherto, we have avoided: why did you come here and build upon this land?”

  “Hit was gittin jist too durn crowded back in Tennessee,” Jacob said. “I purt nigh couldn’t lift my elbow ’thout hittin somebody and the preachers was so thick a feller couldn’t say ‘heck’ without gittin a sermon fer it.”

  “But you have never even asked for permission to build here. Stay More is the land of my grandfathers.”

  “‘Stay More’?”

  Fanshaw chuckled. “Yo. That is what I have come to call it.”

  Jacob Ingledew repeated the name a couple of times, and himself chuckled. “I reckon that’ll do as well as ary other name.”

  “But you cannot,” Fanshaw said.

  “Cannot what?”

  “Stay more.”

  “Says who?” Jacob demanded. “You fixin to try to run me off?”

  “My grandfathers are buried here.”

  “My grandchildren will be buried here.”

  “Ho. Where is their grandmother?”

  “I’ll find one, by and by.”

  “Ho.”

  Then Fanshaw told him the story of the origin of his people. Once upon a time a snail was washed far down the river by floods. He was a good snail but he was alone. Wahkontah, in appreciation of his goodness and in pity for his loneliness, caused the snail to sleep for a long, long time. During the sleep, the snail’s entire body was changed. When he awoke he started back into his shell, but it was far too small. Then he looked at himself, and, seeing that he had long legs, he stood up and walked about. As he walked he kept growing. Hair grew on his head, and from his shoulders long, powerful arms grew. This new creature remembered his former home, and walked far back up the river to the home of the snails, but he could not live with them, and he went in search of some place he could call home. When he grew hungry, Wahkontah gave him a bow and arrow and taught him how to get food. Day by day he went out in search of a home. At last the man, for such he had become, came to the hut of a beaver. The old beaver came out, and said, “Who are you and what do you want?” The man told his story and said he was seeking a home. The young man and the beaver were about to fight, when the beaver’s daughter came out and said she would teach the man to build a house, so that he would not have to trespass on others. To this arrangement the old beaver finally agreed. So the beaver’s daughter and the young man went away together, and she taught him how to build a house of bent bois d’arc poles and to thatch it. Because of her kindness, Wahkontah changed the beaver’s daughter into a maiden, and she became the squaw wife of the man. These two were the first of the people, and that is why they wear the beaver skin ornament.

  “What is the origin of your people?” Fanshaw then asked him. Jacob, although an ungodly man, knew the story of Adam and Eve. He told this to Fanshaw, who listened attentively. When he had finished, Fanshaw said, “I now propose the topic for our next debate: Which is greater, the story of the snail and the beaver or the story of Adam and Eve?”

  The two men debated this topic at length. Fanshaw pointed out that while there is a distinct re
ference to the paraboloid house of the man and woman who were snail and beaver, there is no reference to any sort of house for Adam and Eve, neither before nor after their Fall. What did they live in? Jacob went and fetched his brother Noah’s Bible, and read second and third Genesis, but couldn’t find any mention of a house, so he had to concede that point to Fanshaw. His own chief point was that God created Adam in his own image, whereas snails are pretty slow and slimy, and beavers are fat and bucktoothed. They argued that point back and forth until Fanshaw conceded.

  So went their debate, and both men realized that what they were actually debating was the beginning of their Great Debate: Who has the right to Stay More, the Indian or the white man? although they did not ever say so in other than metaphorical terms. When it came the usual time for Fanshaw to go back to his lady, and Jacob uttered his ritual “Stay more,” Fanshaw replied, “Thank you, I believe I shall,” and he stayed a long time. Jacob gave him a big hunk of stewed venison and took one for himself, and both men washed their meat down with great gulps of the Arkansas sour mash and began for the first time to get drunk together, but kept on with their Great Debate until neither man was sober enough to reason logically, at which point Fanshaw expressed an idea, a peculiar notion the exact motive of which I have never quite been able to determine:

  “It is time, old lad, that you experience the one-on-top-together-fastened-between.”

  “Huh? How? Who?” stammered Jacob, who if sober would not have been able to utter a sound in response to such a suggestion.

  “My lady,” Fanshaw replied.

  Jacob was still sober enough to blush, and say, “Aw, shoot. That’d be adultery.”

  “What is ‘adultery’?”

  “That’s when a feller does the one-on-top business with another feller’s wife.”

  “Your people forbid it?”

  “Wal, the Bible’s agin it. God punishes adulterers.”

  “But you do not believe in God.”

  “Yeah, but I dasn’t ask yore woman.”

  “No need to ask. Often she has mentioned the thought. I have but to tell her you will.”

  Jacob began trembling. “But if she was even to look at me, I dasn’t.”

  “If she looks at you, you will not see her. It will be very dark.”

  Jacob was in a quandary. He realized that to refuse might be taken by the Indian as an insult. But to do for the first time something he had never done before, even with the nerve of much drink, might require talent which he did not possess.

  Fanshaw prompted, “There is much joy in it.”

  “I reckon,” Jacob allowed, but he was afraid that if there was so much joy in it he might develop a hankering for it and want to do it again sometime. He remembered the first time he had taken a drink of whiskey. On the other hand, this might be the only opportunity in his life to have a woman without going through all the long bother of courting her and playing games and being embarrassed and finally working up enough nerve to ask her and then even more nerve to keep pursuing her if she turned you down the first time and then the final uncertainty of whether she would even like it or not. “Okay,” Jacob whispered hoarsely.

  Fanshaw clapped him on the shoulder. “Good. I will go tell her. She will be much pleased. You will enter our domicile by the west door, her door, and she will be there. There is but one consideration. A delicate matter. I apologize in advance. It must be revealed to you that, to our people, especially to the women, the body of white man has an odor which is…not altogether agreeable. Here is what I suggest. You should first wash in three waters. Wash in rainwater, then in creekwater, then in springwater. After, do not replace your buckskins, which carry the same odor. Come unadorned. She will be waiting.” Fanshaw stood up then and left.

  Jacob had one more drink while he built up the fire in his fireplace and hung the kettle there filled with water from his rain-barrel. He found a piece of lye soap. He took off his buckskin jacket and trousers and moccasins, and when the water was hot he finished his drink and wetted the soap and began scrubbing himself with it. While he was doing this Noah returned to the cabin.

  “Shitfire,” Noah said. “I thought you’d never git rid of him. He shore stayed longer than usual, and I was a-gittin powerful cold out yonder in the dark.”

  “You ortent to be so afeared of him. He’s a good injun.”

  “The only good injun is a dead injun,” Noah replied. Then he asked, “What you takin a bath this time of night fer?”

  But Jacob just grinned and finished his bath, splashing all the soap off with hot rainwater. Then he opened the door and went naked across his fields to the creek. He tested the creekwater with his toe. It was icy cold, in this time of late winter, but he took a deep breath and plunged in. He rubbed himself all over with the creekwater, then his teeth began chattering, and he climbed out and ran up the hill toward his spring. Even the exertion of running did not keep him from being covered with gooseflesh big as small-pox. But the springwater, he discovered, was of a much higher temperature than the creekwater, and seemed almost warm by comparison. Again he washed himself all over, top to toes. The effect of all the cold and cool water was sobering him up, so after his last bath he had to return to the cabin for one more drink. Noah was asleep. Jacob drank straight from the jug, several lusty swallows, said “Ah!” and smacked his lips, then started out for the Indian’s house.

  It was pitch dark, there was no moon, and he couldn’t find out which of the dwellings in the camp was Fanshaw’s. He tried the west doors of several, groping around on his hands and knees inside without finding any woman. He began to think that Fanshaw was just playing a joke on him. But he tried one more west door, and there she was. His hand touched her fur coverlet and then her bare leg. She was lying on her back. She didn’t say anything and of course he didn’t either. He just climbed on top of her. She embraced him, with her arms and legs alike. Soon, soon they became fastened between. Fanshaw was right: there was much joy. The woman made murmurs and sighs of joy, and Jacob realized he was being pretty noisy himself. He wished this joy could go on all night, but there is an end to everything, and finally the woman’s legs unclasped their embrace of his back and straightened out, and then the woman’s whole body arched itself into a long quivering arc: an ark: a bow: a soft but taut arch that held him suspended up from the earth for a long moment until he fired: burst: was a lightningbolt and its thunderclap and the afterclaps rattling slowly away.

  When he woke up it was daylight and he was still there, but the woman was gone.

  “Shitfire, whar in tarnation have you been, and mothernaked to boot?” his brother Noah demanded, when, at long last, Jacob returned to his own bed.

  Jacob decided not to hide it. “I laid with that injun’s squaw last night.”

  “What je do thet fer?” Noah asked innocently.

  “Huh? I mean, I done went and entered her.”

  “Entered her?”

  “You eejit. We fucked.”

  “Oh,” Noah said. “What’d it feel like?”

  “Lightnin and thunder.”

  “Gee,” Noah said.

  “You orter try it sometime,” Jacob suggested.

  “Me? Shitfire, I wouldn’t go near a injun even to fuck it.”

  All that day, Jacob noticed an irregularity in himself, perhaps an afterclap of his afterclaps: he didn’t feel like doing anything. This was the first white man’s “energy shortage” in the Ozarks. Jacob spent the whole day sitting by his fire. This is the origin of the quite erroneous concept of the “shiftless hillbilly.” Usually Jacob was industrious, for the hard life of the frontiersman admits of no indolence. He couldn’t quite understand why he didn’t feel like doing any work today, unless it had something to do with last night, although it really wasn’t all that much effort to do the one-on-top-together-fastened-between, and he’d had a good night’s sleep in the meantime. But suddenly Jacob realized that Fanshaw was terribly lazy, even for an Indian. He never seemed to do much: back in the sum
mer he had puttered in his garden for maybe half an hour each day, and that was it. Even on hunts, he always took his time, and never worked up a sweat, and was ready to quit as soon as one animal had been bagged. It dawned on Jacob that there must be some direct correlation between Fanshaw’s laziness and the amount of time he spent doing the one-on-top-together-fastened-between. Up until this moment, Jacob had never really felt superior to the Indian, but now he did. And it also dawned on Jacob that herein lay the real difference between their dwellings. Fanshaw’s house, for all its complexity, looked like something that a bunch of people had thrown together in one afternoon, whereas Jacob’s house looked like something that two men had worked from sunup to sundown for a fortnight to build.

  When Fanshaw came at his usual hour that afternoon, Jacob after pouring the drinks suggested this difference as a topic of debate, probably to divert their attention from the event of the night previous. So they harangued one another for an hour on the subject: Which looks more industrious, the red man’s or the white man’s domicile? “Compare a bird’s nest to an anthill,” Fanshaw suggested. They both avoided mentioning the event of the night previous until they had had several drinks and finished (or at least grew tired of) debating whose house looked more industrious, and the importance or unimportance of industry, but finally Fanshaw broached the event of the night previous by asking, “Well. How was it?”

  “It?” said Jacob, although he knew what Fanshaw meant. “Yeah. It was hunky-dory.”

  “Hunky-dory?” Fanshaw said.

  “Scrumdoodle,” Jacob elaborated. “Galuptious. Splendiferous. Humdinger. Slopergobtious. Bardacious. Yum-yum. Swelleroo. Gumptious. Danderoo. Superbangnamious.”

  “But did you like it?” Fanshaw persisted.

  “Betcha boots,” Jacob said. “Shore thang. What I mean. I aint kiddin. ’Pon my word. Take it from me. I hope to tell ye. Indeedy. You’re darn tootin.”