Fanshaw frowned. “Say yes or no, please.”
“Yeah,” Jacob said.
“Good,” Fanshaw said. “I said you would. Now we can debate topics which previously excluded you. I propose our first: Which would you choose, if forced to abandon the other: whiskey or woman?”
This was an interesting topic which kept them busy for another hour. Curiously enough, Jacob took the side of woman and Fanshaw took the side of whiskey. The former argued that woman was a more effective panacea, somnifacient, emollient, palliative, embrocative, demulcent and diaphoretic. The latter argued that it is better to feel importance than joy. At the end of their debate, which, again, lacking a referee, neither man won, Fanshaw intimated that Jacob was welcome to repeat this night his experience of the night previous, and Jacob was much obliged and beholden. He took another bath-in-three-waters and went again to feel the lightningbolts and thunderclaps atop the long soft but taut arc.
In the spring, early spring, Noah did all of the plowing because Jacob was just too blamed enervated to help. One day Jacob and Fanshaw were watching Noah plow, when Fanshaw asked, “What manner of animal is that which pulls the plow?”
“That’s a mule,” Jacob explained.
“What is a mule?”
“If a jackass serves a mare, the foal is a mule and is sterile.”
“Tell me,” requested Fanshaw. “What is the purpose of the mule?”
“Wal,” Jacob pointed out, “a mule works harder than a horse and he don’t tire out as easy.”
“Because he is sterile?”
“Maybe. I never thought of it that way, but maybe you’re right.”
Not long afterward, still in the spring, Jacob noticed an oddity: Fanshaw’s language was beginning to deteriorate. Right in the middle of one of their debates (Which is better, a round-topped door or a flat-topped door?) and apropos of nothing that Jacob could figure out, Fanshaw said, “Ho! Toward what shall my people direct their footsteps? it has been said in the house. It is toward a little valley they shall direct their footsteps. Verily, it is not a little valley that is spoken of. It is toward the bend of a river they shall direct their footsteps. Verily, it is not the bend of a river that is spoken of. It is toward a little house that they shall direct their footsteps.” Jacob wondered if it was some kind of riddle or conundrum but decided it was just jibberish and maybe the Indian was losing his marbles. Yet from that day on, Fanshaw never talked good clear English anymore. “White man garden plenty big,” is the way he began to talk. “Indian garden little lazy.” Jacob never asked him what was happening to his speech; perhaps Jacob was afraid to.
One day in early summer Fanshaw came and simply said “Come” and led Jacob back to Fanshaw’s paraboloid house. His woman was standing in front of it. It was the first time that Jacob had ever got a good look at her in the daylight, and he was embarrassed. He found it hard to keep looking at her, but he did, and saw that she was very pretty. Also he saw that her belly was bulging. Fanshaw pointed at the bulge, and then at himself. “Me mule,” he declared. “Sterile. You, jackass. She mare. Jackass serve mare, make more mule.”
Jacob didn’t know what to say. “Wal, I’m sorry. You tole me to.”
“Yo. Good? Not good?”
“It ’pends on how ye look at it,” Jacob suggested.
“Yo. Good? Not good?”
Jacob meditated, and at length replied, “Good. Ever womarn orter have the right to have a baby.”
“Yo. She happy.” Fanshaw spoke a word to his squaw and she smiled. “I tell her smile, she smile. Now we go.” Fanshaw elevated his palm above his head in the Indian “how” fashion. Jacob didn’t know what else to do, so he raised his hand in the same way. When he did so, Fanshaw clasped his elevated hand and held it up there in a long tight grip which made Jacob think maybe he was trying to Indian-wrestle. Jacob was ready to break his arm off if he was, but the Indian merely held their hands together above their heads and said to him, “Farewell.”
“Aw, you don’t have to leave,” Jacob protested. “Stay more, and we’ll have us some real fine deebates.”
But the Indian merely said, in his own custom, “Fuck off,” and then he and his squaw, with their few possessions rolled in a blanket, began walking west. Jacob never saw them again. Sometime later, as we shall see, he removed their domicile to his backyard, where he converted it into a corncrib. Noah burned the other Indian homes in the clearing, and converted the clearing into a corn patch.
If this has been a quiet, lonely chapter, I think I must have intended it so: the moon sometimes hanging in the night sky for hour upon hour, the wind timidly on occasion rustling a few leaves, in summer the lightning bugs (even then) going off and on lazily as they had all night, or in winter morning wisps of woodsmoke rising and drifting with the morning mist. Things will pick up, as we go along.
“Funny,” Jacob remarked one day to his brother Noah. “I never even learned that injun’s name.”
“Which?” Noah said. “Him or her?”
“Neither blessit one of ’em.”
Chapter two
Let us first consider the points of resemblance between Fanshaw’s domicile and the first Ingledew house, dissimilar though they may seem. Both had no windows. Both had but an earthen floor. And although the Ingledew place is foursquare, it is built of rounded logs. Later houses in Stay More would be built of logs hewed flat, but in their haste to clear a bit of land and put a roof over their heads, the Ingledew brothers did not take the time to hew the logs. (One early authority makes a distinction between the rounded-log dwelling and the hewed-log dwelling by referring to the former as “cabin,” the latter as “house,” and we shall do likewise.) Fanshaw and Jacob Ingledew were both over six feet tall, but Jacob did not have to stoop, even slightly, to go through his door, which cleared his head by several inches.
There were (the past tense is deliberate; Jacob’s cabin, like Fanshaw’s domicile, is gone now; it was washed away in a flood) no windows for several reasons. First, the difficulty of cutting openings in the large, heavy hardwood logs; second, the impossibility of obtaining glass for panes; third, the need to provide maximum insulation in winter and summer; and fourth, perhaps most important, what was a kind of psychological insulation against the wilderness, the possibly hostile new world, the Indians if ever they returned, etc. Just as at Deerfield, Massachusetts, and in garrison houses all over colonial New England, the first cabins and houses in the Arkansas Ozarks were a physical manifestation of the settler’s desire to protect himself from unknown dangers. We can think, therefore, of the Ingledew place as a “shy” dwelling. And it is medieval; yet all of the best Ozark architecture remains essentially medieval, in the tradition of the vernacular architecture in England and Presbyterian Ireland, whence the settlers’ forebears came; the classicizing tendencies of the Renaissance, baroque and rococo periods never affected the humbler architecture of those areas, and would never affect, or only slightly affect, the architecture of the Ozark highlands.
Watch this cabin leave the ground! In three upward stages, first the base: the base is of fieldstone, mostly sandstone, but rocks, of the earth, of the ground, clinging to it. The next part up is of logs, their interstices chinked with mud, not so much of the earth as rocks, but still, particularly because the logs are not hewed but left round, and because the mud was wet dirt, still of the earth. And finally the roof, rived thick boards, not shingles actually, farthest from earth, last in the ascending transition from earth to sky, split from oak logs with a frow, worked: most of the brothers’ labor went into the roof, which they laid in the dark of the moon so the boards would not warp or crack—a superstition, but one that works. Notice how the brothers’ labor increases as the house rises, except in the chimney (“chimbly” is how they say it, all of them) whose inward taper is itself a part of the ascending transition from earth to sky, rock to air.
Axe, adz, and auger were all it took. And sweat. The reasons they don’t make ’em that way anymore are two:
good virgin hardwood is hard to come by, and good lathering sweat seems unnecessary in an age of power machinery. If, as Jacob suspected, laziness may be correlated with sexual activity, then the Ingledew cabin was the product of years of stored-up energy. The two brothers built it, as we have seen, in a fortnight of sunup to sundown sweating. They killed two birds with one stone, however: the trees they cut to build the house cleared a field to plant in.
There is one other thing the cabin has in common with Fanshaw’s place: there is not a bit of metal in it. Astonishing. No nails: the roof boards are tied to the rafters. The door hinges are made of wood. There is no iron. Where would the Ingledews find iron? Even the works of their clock were all wood.
The first “visitor” to Stay More was a young clock peddler from Connecticut, named Eli Willard. He showed up at the Ingledew cabin one evening not long after Fanshaw had permanently departed, and the Ingledew dog barked at him. This dog, whom we had little reason to notice in the previous chapter, was a hound bitch named, despite her sex, Tige or Tyge. One of the main functions of a dog was to bark at strangers and thus alert the house. But so far Tige had not barked, and Jacob wondered if she still knew how. Sometimes he would bark at her in an effort to stimulate her barking but she had simply stared at him with what might be called doggy disconcertion. So now, when the clock peddler showed up and Tige began barking, the brothers, who were inside the cabin eating their supper, were at first puzzled.
“Is that ole Tige?” Noah wondered aloud.
“Caint be,” Jacob allowed, but he went to investigate, and saw the clock peddler, Eli Willard, sitting on his horse. Strapped to the saddlebag was one (1) shelf clock.
“Good evening, sir,” said Eli Willard to Jacob.
“Howdy, stranger,” Jacob replied. “Light down and hitch.” As there was no hitching post at the Ingledew cabin this invitation must have been merely a formality, like “stay more.” Nevertheless Eli Willard dismounted and found a large rock with which to weight down the ends of his horse’s reins. Then he observed, “The road seems to end here.”
“What road?” Jacob was curious to know.
The man pointed north. “Why, the road that I came here on. All the way from Connecticut.”
Jacob had never heard of Connecticut. It sounded like some kind of Indian name, so he figured maybe it was over in Indian Territory. It was news to him that a road led from Stay More all the way over there. Jacob looked the other way, south, beyond his house, and observed, “Wal, I reckon it don’t go no farther.”
“A coincidence, and a good one,” Eli Willard declared, “because I have only one clock left.” He unstrapped the lone shelf clock from his saddlebag, and held it up for Jacob’s inspection, turning it slowly around for him to admire the woodwork, and then winding it (even the key was wood) and showing Jacob that it ran properly. Since all the parts were wood, there could be no chime or gong, but this clock had a sort of rattling mechanism, so that it could “strike” the hour by making a noise that sounded like a woodpecker close up. Jacob was very impressed with this. “My last clock,” Eli Willard reiterated. “I was going to keep it, out of sentimental reasons. But to honor your status as my last and final contact, I can bear to let you have it. Here.” And he gave the clock into Jacob’s hands.
“Wal, gosh dawg, thet’s awful good of ye,” Jacob said. “Caint I give ye ary thang in return?”
“Twenty dollars,” Eli Willard said.
“Huh? Why, that’s money!” Jacob exclaimed.
“Legal tender, cash, currency, coin of the realm, oil of palm,” Eli Willard said. “Two sawbucks on the barrelhead.”
Jacob turned the pockets on his buckskins inside out. “I aint got a cent to my name,” he declared. “And neither has he”—indicating Noah, who had emerged from the cabin to witness the transaction. Noah also turned the pockets of his buckskins inside out.
Eli Willard looked from one brother to the other, and shook his head in sympathy. “Yes, it’s hard to wrest a living from this rocky soil, isn’t it? Be that as it may, allow me to present this clock to your wife regardless.” He moved toward the door of the cabin.
“Uh, we aint got ary,” Jacob pointed out.
“Allow me to place it upon your mantel then,” Eli Willard said, and continued entering the cabin. Actually, this was a ruse that he, and dozens of other Connecticut clock peddlers swarming through the Ozarks, used to gain admission to the interior of the dwelling, to see if there was anything of value inside that might be traded for the clock. Eli Willard discovered there was no mantel-shelf over the fireplace. No nails in the house, he found a peg on the wall and hung the clock on it. “There!” he said. “A handsome addition to your humble home.” Then he began to look around at the contents of the room.
The Ingledew cabin was, of course, only one room, unlike so many other buildings in our study. Here are the objects that Eli Willard saw: two beds “built-in,” the corners of the cabin forming two of their four sides, mattresses of ticking brought from Tennessee stuffed with cornshucks grown in Arkansas, resting upon rude slats and covered with patchwork quilts (heirlooms brought from Tennessee); two ladder-back chairs which Noah carved from maple and seated with woven hickory splints; a simple table he also carved from maple; two lamps, the fuel of which was bear’s oil; miscellaneous cooking utensils (which, come to think of it, were made of iron and seem to contradict what I said earlier about there being no metal in the house); Noah’s Bible (which he could not read; upon his departure from Tennessee his mother had forced it upon him, having given up all hope for Jacob); on the walls things hanging: their two flintlock rifles and powder horns propped up on racks of deer antlers; two large deerskins sewed up to become vessels, one for bear’s oil, the other for wild honey (these, incidentally, were the only things Eli Willard saw that interested him, but they were too large to pack off on his horse); a water bucket homefashioned of red cedar with a gourd dipper in it; from the joists of the ceiling were strung dried things, tobacco, sliced pumpkin, red pepper; and, finally, several demijohns of Arkansas sour mash (but Eli Willard was a teetotaler).
“Well,” Eli Willard concluded, “I am not above accepting a note of credit.” Then he explained that he would return in six months and, if the gentlemen were satisfied with their clock, they could pay him at that time. If not satisfied, they could return their clock, or, better, Eli Willard would replace it with one more satisfactory. So he got Jacob’s signature on an I.O.U. for twenty dollars, shook hands with both men, and began to disappear.
“Stay more!” Jacob invited. “You caint go rushin off this time of evenin. It’ll be pitch dark soon. Stay the night.”
“Busy, busy,” was all Eli Willard replied, and rode his horse off into the dusk. The brothers wondered where he would spend the night. Maybe he didn’t spend the night. Maybe he just went to sleep on his horse and kept on going. At any rate, the brothers would not see him again for six months, when he would return for his money, and they knew they had better get to work and do something to earn twenty dollars in cash money. So they got to work.
Now that the redskin squaw was no longer there to tempt him, Jacob found that he had a lot of energy again. Both brothers rose at dawn, and after a quick breakfast (there was no coffee, not even green coffee; instead a rather palatable substitute was made from roasted corn meal and molasses) they would plunge into their work: clearing land and more land, felling trees and burning them and digging up the stumps by hitching the mule (there was only one now; a panther got the other) to the stump to pull it out: it took weeks of such labor to clear a mere acre. Each night right after supper the brothers fell into their beds, exhausted but satisfied.
Although the Ingledew cabin was medieval, we may note a few features it has in common with classical colonial buildings: the saddle-notched ends of the logs overlap one another exactly in the same manner as quoins, but whereas the quoins on most American colonial houses were false quoins made of flat boards, the quoins of the log cabin are true quoins h
olding not just one log to the other, but one wall to the other: they hold the whole house together. In classical Greek architecture, it is thought that the grooves in the triglyph of the frieze are a translation into marble of the grooves scored into the wooden ceiling joists of the original temples, which were made of wood instead of marble. This doesn’t have anything to do, directly, with the Ingledew cabin, except to indicate that even the most elaborate classical detail has its origins in such humble structures as a log cabin’s quoins.
The dimensions of the Ingledew cabin, and of space in general at Stay More, may be measured in “hats”—one hat being the distance that Jacob Ingledew could toss his coonskin headgear: approximately 16.5 feet. The Ingledew cabin is almost exactly one hat long by one hat wide, or, simply, one hat square, and also one hat in elevation, from base to gable-peak. When the brothers measured the size of a tree they had felled, or a piece of the acreage they had cleared, or the distance from their backyard to their spring, Jacob would put his coonskin cap to good use. It was a satisfying life for both of them, building and felling and clearing and pacing off, hat after hat.
Lest we get too pastoral a picture of their life and work, however, brief mention should be made of their afflictions, plagues and pests. In addition to the abovementioned panther who in the dark of night screamed at their mules, petrifying them, then attacked and killed one of them and dragged it off into the woods and devoured it, the Ingledews were constantly assailed by natural enemies, both vegetable and animal: poison ivy, poison oak, poison sumac, stinging nettles, rattlesnakes, copperheads, cottonmouths, leeches, stinging scorpions, deadly spiders, wasps, bees, yellow-jackets, hornets. One would almost believe that Nature did not want the Ingledews. Maybe She didn’t.
What was worse in terms of pure torment were the ticks, the chiggers, and the frakes. Because these afflictions are not universally known but are particularly severe in the Ozarks, a word of description may be in order. Everybody gets mosquitoes, cockroaches, lice, fleas, houseflies, ants, gnats, moths, etc., and the Ingledews had more than their share of these too, but they were particularly plagued by ticks, chiggers, and frakes. Ticks (order Acarina, suborder Mesostigmata) are medium-sized to minute arachnids, coming in many shapes and colors; under a magnifying glass they are hideous, especially their mouths, with which they attach themselves to the body and suck blood until engorged and sometimes thereafter; some of them are also carriers of dreadful fevers. Chiggers (suborder Prostigmata, family Thrombidiidae) are tiny red mites, almost invisible to the naked eye, which also attach themselves to the body with a hideous mouth, and produce swelling and intense itching. Frakes (it is always plural; while a man might say he has a chigger or a tick, he always has the frakes), like many viruses, are not fully understood by medical science; most medical experts consider it a usually benign fungus, but others are convinced it is a variant form of herpes; all it has in common with ticks and chiggers is a predilection for the genital area; in fact, whereas ticks and chiggers may afflict any part of the body, the frakes is confined to the genital area, where it produces a rash of small blisters that eventually erupt with a discharge. Unlike ticks and chiggers too, which only come in warm weather, the frakes may strike at any time of the year. Experts are agreed that the only known predisposing cause of the frakes is hard work. It used to be thought that overwork was the cause, but now it is known that any long, sustained task, any hard and fruitful labor, is liable to bring on the frakes, as if Nature were punishing man for his puny efforts to accomplish something. This is borne out by the fact that while ticks and chiggers afflict many animals other than man, the only animals that get the frakes are horses, mules, sled dogs, beasts of burden, etc., that is, working animals. The itching is not quite as severe as that produced by chiggers and ticks, but the worst effect is the aftermath: that for weeks, months, possibly years after the condition has cleared up, the sufferer is left feeling that there is nothing worth doing, that all labor is vain, that life is a bad and pointless joke. The Ingledew brothers were destined to get the frakes on several occasions. The pity is, there was never anybody to tell them what caused it.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 82
