Still, Lizzie Swain kept pestering Sarah about it, in such a persistent way that Sarah thought she would lose her mind unless she yielded. Yet even after she yielded, she was reluctant. Her mother baked the cornbread and then spaced the twelve other children (Murray was in bed with the frakes) along the route to Jacob’s cabin at strategic intervals in descending order of age. Then she put the cornbread into Sarah’s hands and shoved her out the door with such force that Sarah kept trotting as far as where Aurora was standing, and Aurora gave her a shove that sent her trotting on to Orville, who shoved her to Zenobia, and so on, down the line, down the road to Jacob’s cabin, where little Gilbert was waiting, last in line, last to push. He was only four, and pushing was a difficult feat for his small age, but his mother had patiently explained it to him, how it was necessary in order for him to have a “brother-in-law,” making brother-in-law sound like something wonderful, so when Sarah came trotting up, her black hair streaming behind her, he clenched his little tongue between his teeth and got his hands on her buttocks and shoved for all he was worth, propelling her right up against Jacob’s door, which she banged against, causing Jacob to open it, and her momentum was such that even though her body had stopped moving her hands kept going and thrust the cornbread into Jacob’s hands.
Then she just stood there with her hands behind her and stared down at her feet and began to get very red in the face. Jacob duplicated her posture and color exactly, except that he couldn’t put his hands behind his back because he had cornbread in them. He just stood there and looked down at what was in his hands and got even redder in the face than Sarah. For a long time they just stood there stiff and glowing like a pair of branding irons. Finally Jacob’s brother Noah got up from his bed and came to see what it was all about. He stood there and stared back and forth at the two of them. Probably he didn’t grasp the significance of the cornbread, because, being not just afraid of but uninterested in Indians, he had never been told about the customs of Fanshaw’s people. But he was very concerned to see these two human beings standing in front of one another with downcast but red-hot faces. “S—tfire!” he exclaimed, and snatched the cedar water bucket off the wall and, first removing the cornbread from Jacob’s hands so it wouldn’t get hit, doused the heads of both of them. It is very difficult to blush with a wet head, so, since they could no longer blush, they laughed, which is also a nervous reflex. They laughed until the water on their faces was joined by their tears, and Noah looked at them like they were both crazy, and kept mumbling his favorite expletive, which, however, was somewhat cleaned up for Sarah’s benefit, so that it sounded more like “shoot fair” or “sheet far.”
And that was it. That was all there was to it. Jacob never said “I do,” or “I will” or even “Thanks for the cornbread” or even “Aw, gosh dawg and shucks.” Even today, in some of the big weddings in the Ozarks, people do not shower the bride and groom with rice but with water. At that time, of course, there was no church anywhere near Stay More, nor even a circuit rider or “saddlebag preacher,” and even if there had been, he could not legitimately have married an infidel like Jacob Ingledew. So, hand in hand, Jacob and Sarah simply returned to Lizzie’s house, Jacob gathering sisters-in-law and brothers-in-law right and left along the way. At Lizzie’s house, Sarah announced to her mother, “Maw, we’re spliced.”
The month, come to think of it, was June.
“Already?” Lizzie Swain exclaimed. “What didje do, jist jump over a broomstick together?”
“No. Noah, Noah…he dumped a bucket of water on us.”
“Wal, bless yore hearts, I’m so happy fer yuns,” Lizzie said and embraced and kissed them both, and began sniffling. After she got control of her emotions, she said to Jacob, “But if it wouldn’t be too much bother, could ye read us a little from the Bible fer the occasion?”
Elizabeth Swain, like all of her children, like, in fact, everybody in Stay More for years and years, except Jacob, was unable to read. (One must never say “illiterate” since it is so easily confused with “illegitimate,” a fighting word.) In later years, when he began teaching school, Jacob wondered if his unique peculiarity, his ability to read, was perhaps a curse upon him, and for at least the length of his tenure as schoolmaster, reading was not one of the subjects in the curriculum. Lizzie did, however, have a Bible, an old heirloom, which she often touched, and whose wood-engraving illustrations she often “read,” because she was a very Godfearing person. Jacob, although ungodly, did not mind reading from the Bible on this occasion of their marriage; it was the least he could do as a substitute for going hundreds of miles in search of a preacher, and maybe having to pay the man cash money, at that.
But the trouble was, he didn’t know where to look, in the Bible, for an appropriate passage. He let the book fall open at random, and began reading aloud at random in the Book of Second Kings, “But Rabshakeh said unto them, Hath my master sent me to thy master, and to thee, to speak these words? hath he not sent me to the men which sit on the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you?” Jacob slammed the Bible shut, grumbling, “Blackguardy book. I don’t know how to use it.”
But then he remembered a passage from Genesis that he had read when debating Fanshaw on the origin of man, having to do with the marriage of Adam and Eve. He read this. “And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him,” and “And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh—” he would have read more, but Lizzie and Sarah, and all the female Swains, were sniveling and boohooing so loudly they drowned him out. He returned the Bible to Lizzie, and took his bride by the hand and led her back to his own place.
With a stick he gouged a groove across the dirt floor of his cabin, right down the middle, dividing the room into two halves. “That’s yourn,” he said to Noah. “This is ourn.” But Noah got busy and built a small loft up under the gables, and moved his bed up there. It was his first activity since he had been stricken with the frakes the year before, and it was the beginning of his return to normal life.
Jacob and Sarah Ingledew did not consummate their marriage on the bridal night. As soon as it got dark, their cabin was surrounded by a horrendous din: rifles firing, drums beating, cats howling, pans banging, cowbells clanging, hands clapping, lips whistling, horns blaring, hounds bugling, it was all hell broke loose and the roof was raised an inch or two. Investigating with his lantern, Jacob discovered that it was the entire human and animal population of Stay More, serenading the newlyweds.
This was the first Stay More shivaree, or charivari as the French would call it, from a Latin word meaning “headache.” How did this custom ever get started? What psychological motives do people have for harassing the poor couple on their first night together? If we were to interrupt young Virgil Swain while he was pulling the cat’s tail to make it howl and contribute that part of noise to the racket, and interview him on this subject, he would reply, “Wal, I reckon everbody knows what folkses air really gittin married fer, and so we’re a-teasin ’em on account of that. Hoo lordy!” Perhaps he would be right, that even the youngest among them (and maybe some of the animals too) sensed the real reason that a man and a woman would become “one flesh,” and out of envy as well as out of a sense of that reason being lewd, they lewdly heckle and pester the wedded pair. I cannot help but remark upon the contrast between this behavior and that of Fanshaw’s people on the wedding day: the Osage’s “grunts and whoops of joy” become the white man’s grunts and whoops of lewd mirth. The shivaree ends when the groom “treats”: Jacob invited all of them (except the animals) into his cabin, where he gave them refreshments, sarsparilla for the younger ones, stronger stuff for the older, and Sarah’s cake of cornbread smeared with wild honey and divided all around. The party ran deep into the night, an
d when it was over Jacob was too inebriated to find his bed. He aimed for it but missed, and spent the night sleeping on the floor (or rather the dirt, since there was no floor). The next day all of the guests came back again, for the infare (or “infair” or “enfare,” as most writers misspell it). Lizzie Swain and her girls brought the food, and again it was a big blow-out with fried chicken and everything.
Only Murray Swain wasn’t there, for the shivaree or the infare either. As has been mentioned, being the oldest of the Swain boys, he had worked the hardest in the construction of their house, hewing the logs with his broadaxe and lifting them into place with Jacob lifting the other end of the log, and after three weeks of this hard work he came down with the frakes. His mother tried several of her best home remedies to no avail. Jacob wanted to suggest the poultice made with panther urine, but couldn’t bring himself to broach such a delicate topic to her. Lizzie resorted to a drastic cure of her own, using the warm blood of a black hen. She had Murray lie down on the ground (out back of the house so the other children wouldn’t watch), then she chopped off the hen’s head with an axe and let the blood dribble onto his eruptions and remain on after it had dried. This treatment seemed to be a trifle more effective than Noah’s remedy, but not much, so that now, even though the shivaree and infare were weeks and weeks past and his sores had healed, he still lay abed with great feelings of futility and worthlessness. It was perhaps appropriate that he alone was absent from his sister’s bridal festivities, because it was he, more than anyone else, who was responsible for the fact that Sarah Swain was unencumbered with a maidenhead at her marriage.
But Jacob did not know this, and he never would know it. Ignorant as he was of women and their ways, and having had experience only with an Indian squaw who was no maiden by a long shot, Jacob approached the debut of his bride’s charms with no expectation of difficulty and therefore no disappointment or anger in having encountered none. When the infare was over and all the guests had departed and Jacob was tipsy enough for the nerve, he ran Noah out of the cabin and closed the door, darkening the interior, then he laid Sarah on the bed. That was it, he just laid her, with no more howdy-do or ceremony than the wedding itself. He was surprised, however, that her reactions during the process were not at all comparable to those of the Indian squaw; namely, she did not utter the ghost of a sigh, she did not move, she did not enfold him with arms and legs alike, and, above all, she did not make, at the end, the long taut but smooth arc: ark: bow. She was foursquare, flat; not even her gables peaked. So for him it wasn’t lightning and thunder but maybe just cloudy and windy, chance of showers. Afterward he wanted to ask her if she’d had any joy in it, but he couldn’t ask her things like that. They never would talk about sex…until the very last day of Jacob’s life.
And these were the children of Jacob and Sarah: Benjamin, the firstborn; Isaac, born two years later; Rachel, born two years later; Christopher Columbus, born two years later; and Lucinda, the last, born two years later.
Why was it, Jacob often wondered, that when he really, truly, honest-to-God, sure-enough, straight-up-and-down wanted his woman, she wasn’t much feeling like it, whereas the only times he ever got her was when he wasn’t much feeling like it? That was a hell of a trick for Nature to play on a man…and a woman. Once, when he was upon her, she whispered in his ear, “Jake, if I go to sleep afore you git done, will ye pull down my nightgown?” It must be noted, however, that it was an excess of sexual frustration, no doubt, which caused Jacob single-handedly in a couple of weeks to build the imposing structure which we shall examine in the following chapter, leaving his cabin to Noah. He must have been aware of Noah, up there in the loft, listening, but hearing nothing except a random small grunt of Jacob’s, no sounds whatever from the woman.
If that is cause for pitying Noah, there was a worse one. Sarah’s next-youngest sister, Aurora, encouraged by the success of her older sister’s presentation of the cornbread to Jacob, began to give thought to baking some cornbread for Noah, and her mother approved of this scheme. Noah certainly wasn’t as desirable as Jacob, but Aurora was accustomed to being second to her older sister, getting her hand-me-downs and being next in line for everything. So eventually she baked the cornbread and took it to the Ingledew cabin, but Noah wasn’t there; Jacob said he was out milking the cow. Aurora took the cornbread out to the cowlot and offered it to Noah. By this time Noah understood the significance of the offering and he eagerly reached to take the cornbread, but dropped it, and bending over to pick it up, he tripped and fell to the ground. Aurora couldn’t help giggling. While rising up from the ground, much flustered, he snatched at the cornbread, and it broke in two. Still eager to signify his acceptance of it, he grabbed both pieces and clutched them to his bosom, whereupon they disintegrated into many fragments that showered around his feet. He was so discomposed that he turned and ran off into the woods to hide himself for a long time. Aurora decided she didn’t want a husband who was so clumsy anyway, and would rather wait until the population of Stay More included some other eligible bachelor. Poor Noah was destined to remain unmarried until his death.
Early in their marriage, Jacob’s wife Sarah developed a disconcerting habit which Jacob at first attributed to absent-mindedness: whenever she was outside of the cabin, working in the garden or feeding the chickens or whatever, she would not afterwards return to the cabin but instead wander down the road to her mother’s house and enter it, and stay there, until Jacob came to fetch her home. Undoubtedly a psychiatrist would interpret this as a sign of her dissatisfaction with her marriage, but actually, it seems to me (as in time it dawned on Jacob), that it was a sign of her dissatisfaction with Jacob’s cabin, her perhaps unconscious recognition that her mother’s house was superior to it, more comfortable, less primitive. When Jacob realized this, he began to build his next house, which was as superior to the Swain house as the latter was to his first cabin.
An outsider visiting Jacob’s cabin would have received the impression that Sarah was a slatternly housekeeper, but the fact was that a house with a dirt floor was very difficult to keep clean, and this discouraged Sarah from making the effort. As soon as she became pregnant for the first time, Sarah discontinued further relations with Jacob, until such time as he had completed construction of their new home, which, as we shall see, did not have a dirt floor but a puncheon floor that Jacob took the trouble to shave smooth with a drawing knife, so that Sarah would never get a splinter in her foot.
Lizzie Swain and her brood always joined the Ingledews at noon on the second Tuesday of each month to hear Jacob’s clock say prong, and they began combining the event with the feast of fried chicken; this was the chief social occasion in Stay More for many years. Still, Jacob had never told Lizzie where he got the clock, so one day when Eli Willard showed up at the Swain house, Lizzie did not know who he was. He was just a “furriner” on horseback with bulging saddlebags.
“Ah hah,” observed Mr. Willard. “Another house, and a fair one too. May the lares and penates bless you and your happy home, madam.”
He talked mighty funny, Lizzie thought. “Whar ye from, stranger?” she asked him.
“Connecticut,” he replied. “Willard is the name. Eli Willard. Formerly trafficker in timepieces. Now a purveyor of sundry hard goods.” He patted his saddlebags. “Madam, have I got some nice things for you!”
By this time all of her children (except Murray, abed with the frakes) had gathered ’round, and they watched as Eli Willard dismounted and opened his saddlebags. To each of the boys Eli Willard gave a stick of rosewood studded with small bolts, which, he demonstrated, enclosed a knife that folded out! So that it could be carried in one’s pocket without sticking one, Eli Willard explained. The boys were awed. To each of the girls he gave a pair of knives that were crossed and bolted at the cross and had rings in one end whereby, he demonstrated by inserting his thumb and forefinger through the rings, the knives could be made to move against one another, snipping, so that a straight even cut could
be made through cloth, he using the hem of his own coat for a subject. The girls were lost in amazement, and their mother exclaimed, “I declare! If them aint the beatin’est things ever I saw!” Before their mother could stop them, the girls gathered up all the fabric that was in their house, namely, two muslin dishrags and a bit of linsey-woolsey, and quickly reduced this material to shreds. To Lizzie Swain Eli Willard gave an even larger pair of these scissoring knives which would cut through buckskin, the material in which all of the Swains, as well as the Ingledews, were clothed.
“Bless yore heart,” said Lizzie Swain. “We’uns jist don’t know how to thank you.” Eli Willard explained that there was, in fact, a way that they could thank him. His suggestion puzzled Lizzie but after muddling it over for a while, she understood it, and protested that none of them had any of that monetary stuff, to which he assured her that her credit was good, and he would collect when he came again in a year or so. Then he inquired if the Ingledew cabin was still occupied, and, being told that it was, he remounted his horse and prepared to ride off in that direction, but Lizzie laid her hand on the horse’s bridle and said, “Stranger, afore ye go, could ye tell us if they’s any news out yonder.” With her other hand she gestured to the north, the east, the vaguely oriental points where the world was.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 85
