The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  “Dig,” he answered, at length. “Tell ’em to git their shovels and find the lowest meader in Stay More and git out in the middle of it and start diggin, straight down. Don’t let ’em stop ’till they find water. Class dismissed.”

  School met every day after that, the children bringing their lunches in little cloth sacks their mothers made for them, lunches of corn dodger or pone, frugal but filling, and soon the children came to school clean, unspotted if not immaculate, because their fathers had dug fifty feet down in Levi Whitter’s Field of Clover and struck a vast subterranean pool of pure wonderful water. There was so much of it that when Jacob was told, he ordered it shared with their neighbors the Parthenonians, and for a time at least all rivalry between the two villages ceased as the Parthenonians came gratefully to fetch home water. For a time at least, a very brief time, Stay More was declared the county seat of Newton County, and Jacob’s imposing double-pen dogtrot served for a while as the schoolhouse and courthouse both until Sarah complained that she couldn’t fix dinner without brushing a swarm of lawyers off the table and flushing the bailiff out of the potato bin.

  Jacob took no interest in the court, even though he was offered a high position there. He stayed in his own wing of the building, still bedfast, still hopeless, but determined to give an education to these children who had asked him for one. They loved school; he never had any trouble with them; he never had to get out of his bed to discipline an unruly pupil. If any one of the children, through restlessness or ennui or just pure cussedness, decided to try to disrupt the orderliness of the classroom, the other children would mob him, tie him, gag him, hoist him from the ceiling and leave him suspended there until he signaled, by frantic eyeball movements, that he was ready to behave…this whole proceeding so quick it did not interrupt the lesson that Jacob was giving.

  Jacob never taught his pupils how to read. As we have seen, he was the only literate person in Stay More for a period of many years, and could not help but feel at times that his literacy was a curse upon him, or at least was something he should not infect his charges with. Deliberately then he excluded reading and writing from the curriculum, and the school was none the worse for the omission.

  But what, then, did they study? Arithmetic, of course, and since all of the pupils always came barefoot to school, it was possible to do counting exercises up to and including twenty digits…or even forty, because, as in most other rural schools everywhere from time immemorial, there was a kind of buddy system, a pairing, a conjugation, a bifidity, all of them sitting and working two by two together. The curriculum also included practical matters such as how to control one’s facial muscles in order to assume a “deadpan” in times of stress, challenge, insult, reproach, etc. But in the main, the curriculum was devoted to discussion and debate on purely philosophical concepts in the arts and sciences. Why does the wind blow? What makes the rain? Why must chiggers, ticks and frakes bite? Why do we scratch? Why should we live? A whole day’s program could be built around any one of these questions. For example, a question such as “Why can’t a person tickle himself?” would lead not only into a discussion of the psychological factors involved, but also into the anatomy and physiology of tickling, a comparison of the armpit with the underchin, with excursions even into solipsistic examination: I exist because I think, but you exist because I cannot tickle myself without you. Word got back to the families of the intense intellectual stimulation of Jacob’s schoolroom, and many of the grown-ups petitioned Jacob to be allowed to attend, but this petition was not granted.

  The only grown-up other than Jacob who ever came into his schoolroom was Eli Willard.

  School was in session one day when the Connecticut itinerant reappeared after long absence, bringing Jacob’s window glass and other merchandise. Jacob seized him and presented him to the class. “Boys and girls, this specimen here is a Peddler. You don’t see them very often. They migrate, like the geese flying over. This one comes maybe once a year, like Christmas. But he aint dependable, like Christmas. He’s dependable like rainfall. A Peddler is a feller who has got things you aint got, and he’ll give ’em to ye, and then after you’re glad you got ’em he’ll tell ye how much cash money you owe him fer ’em. If you aint got cash money, he’ll give credit, and collect the next time he comes ’round, and meantime you work hard to git the money someway so’s ye kin pay him off. Look at his eyes. Notice how they are kinder shiftly-like. Now, class, the first question is: why is this feller’s eyes shiftly-like?”

  Several pupils raised their hands. Jacob called on one, who offered the possibility that it was a congenital defect; another suggested that he might have a foreign object in his eye; another wondered if the case might be that he had enemies who were following him, and he was looking out for them. Jacob was required to call upon his star pupil, Octavia Swain, in hopes of the correct answer.

  “He’s jist casing the joint,” Octavia observed, “to see if you got anything he might want to swap ye out of.”

  “Kee-reck,” Jacob complimented her. “Now, these here Peddler fellers is also slick talkers. They say things like—”

  “I beg your pardon…” Eli Willard interrupted.

  “They say things like ‘I beg your pardon,’” Jacob went on, “and ‘Good evening, sir’ and ‘Good morning, madam,’ and ‘Permit me to serve you in any manner I can,’ and ‘This is a most unexpected pleasure,’ and ‘I beg your acceptance of my very hearty thanks for doing me the honor to inquire if I shall have the opportunity to appreciate most cordially your extremely welcome response to my gratitude for your kindness in obliging my hope that you anticipate my wishes for—’”

  “Do you want your confounded window glass, or not?” Eli Willard demanded.

  “Bring it in,” Jacob said to him, and while Eli Willard was outside unloading the glass from his saddlebags, Jacob told his students, “Now directly we’ll git a chance to watch how a real Peddler operates. I want you’uns to watch and listen real careful. He’ll bring in them thar winder panes, which is costin me ever cent I’ve got to my name, and then he’ll say somethin like, ‘It grieves me to have to report that the current quotation on pane glass is even more frightfully dear than I had previously imagined…’ and then he’ll soak me for all I kin raise between now and the next time he shows up, and then he’ll give me the glass, but it will turn out that the glass don’t fit my winders, it’s too big and has to be cut with God knows what, and he’ll git this big smile on his face and whip out this little gizmo from his pocket and hold it up and say, ‘Presto! A magic Acme Damascus Coal Carbon Disc Wheel Glass Cutter! In limited supply and for a short time only, ten dollars each.’ And dodgast me if I don’t pay. Here he comes. Watch careful, class.”

  Eli Willard reentered, bearing a sheaf of random-sized glass sheets packed in excelsior. He cleared his throat and began, “It grieves me to have to report—”

  All seventeen of Jacob’s pupils chimed in, “—THAT THE CURRENT QUOTATION ON PANE GLASS IS EVEN MORE FRIGHTFULLY DEAR THAN I HAD PREVIOUSLY IMAGINED.”

  Eli Willard stared at the boys and girls, then he beseeched Jacob, “Call off your dogs,” and whispered into Jacob’s ear the new revised exorbitant figure, and told him, “Take it or leave it.”

  “I aint got much choice,” Jacob observed. “But look. Them there glass pieces is too big to fit my panes.”

  Eli Willard smiled and reached into his pocket and brought out a little gizmo which he held up. “Presto—” he began.

  “OH LOOK!” chorused the class. “A MAGIC ACME DAMASCUS COAL CARBON DISC WHEEL GLASS CUTTER!”

  “In limited—”

  “—SUPPLY FOR A SHORT TIME ONLY, TEN CENTS EACH!”

  “Ten dollars,” Eli Willard corrected them.

  “TEN CENTS,” they reaffirmed.

  “Dollars.”

  “CENTS.”

  “My compliments to your well-drilled academy,” Eli Willard said to Jacob. “They drive a hard bargain. Very well, it is yours for the triflin
g sum of ten cents. Now could I interest you or any of your scholars in my latest line of merchandise?”

  It turned out that on this particular visit, Eli Willard was hawking silk umbrellas for ladies and gentlemen, parasols for children, and oil slicker raincoats for all, as well as eaves trough hangers and metal spigots for rainbarrels. When neither Jacob nor his pupils expressed any interest whatever in merchandise of this nature, Eli Willard broke down and confessed that he had not been able to sell a single item of this line anywhere in the Ozarks and was now on the edge of penury. Reputable meteorologists back East had assured him that the following spring and summer promised to be very wet, but so far he was totally without luck in pushing his raingear and appurtenances.

  “Buck up, feller,” Jacob tried to comfort him, and then explained to his class, “By and large Peddlers don’t generally cry. This is jist an exception.” Then Jacob got out of bed and conducted Eli Willard across the breezeway into the other wing of his house, and told Sarah to try to scare up something to feed the poor feller. They fed him, and Jacob paid him for the glass and reminded him of how much money he still owed him, which brought some small cheer to Eli Willard as he rode on his luckless way.

  It is idle to speculate whether the Stay Morons erred grievously in failing to patronize Eli Willard in his latest line of merchandise, for the rains that came the following spring and summer would have rendered umbrellas and rainwear practically useless. It was almost as if Nature, in clumsy headlong atonement for her stinginess with moisture the year before, overcompensated, went too far. Deluged. Inundated. It was terrible. If not for the proverbial forty days and nights, it rained steadily nearly every day for over a month, nobody measured or kept track but it must have been more inches than ever fell in any other month in the history of the Ozarks.

  The rains began, ironically enough, on the second Tuesday of a month, right in the middle of a gala bergu that the Parthenonians threw to fete the Stay Morons for the hospitality of their waterwell.

  A bergu is a kind of stew, consisting of five hundred squirrels properly cleaned and boiled to the consistency of soup in a twenty-gallon iron kettle. The Parthenonian’s bergu was almost ready, while the Stay Morons stood around with their napkins tucked into their collars and their knives and spoons gripped in their hands, when the first raindrops fell, and then the cloudburst began, and in their haste to get the bergu indoors the Parthenonians dropped the kettle and spilled the five hundred stewed squirrels into the dry bed of Shop Creek, which soon began to fill with water. The Stay Morons went home hungry, and sat and watched as, day by day, Swains Creek rose higher and higher, left its banks and overflowed into fields, and Banty Creek roared through its gorges, engorging them. If the Stay Morons were angry at the Parthenonians for spilling and spoiling the bergu, the Parthenonians became angry at the Stay Morons because, being downstream from Stay More, they already had more water in the Little Buffalo than they could handle but Stay More kept sending its creeks on down to Parthenon anyway. “You’re stranglin us!” John Bellah of Parthenon protested to Jacob Ingledew. “Send yore creeks somewheres else!” But there was nowhere else to send the creeks.

  The Parthenonians talked about bringing a cease-and-desist action against the Stay Morons in the county court, but all the lawyers had fled to higher ground. Then the Little Buffalo River submerged the hollers along the base of Reynolds Mountain and shut Parthenon off from Stay More for the duration of the deluge, and no more was heard from them.

  Until the flood became really impossible, the Stay Morons managed to keep their good sense of humor and even to make jokes about it. Their favorite jokes involved Noah Ingledew, because of his name. “Keep a watch on him,” they would say, “and when he gits out his saw and hammer, start packin yore duds.” Jokers would catch a pair of snakes, male and female of each, and crate them, and present them to Noah as “voyagers.” Noah couldn’t even indulge his favorite pastime, whittling, without somebody saying to him something like, “Is that there the foremast or the mizzenmast?” and they would ask him things like, “Would you know an olive branch if you saw one?” and nobody ever even passed by his cabin without giving it a good kick and saying “Think she’ll float?” Noah bore all of this badinage in silence, until he decided it had gone far enough, and then one day, when the rain was coming down hard and the fields were nearly all flooded, he stepped outside and yelled, “ANCHORS AWEIGH!” as loud as he could, which seems perhaps a cruel thing to do, like yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater, and as we shall see he will soon be punished for it, but it had its effect: all of the Stay Morons came running, carrying whatever small belongings they could gather, and crowded around his cabin. Inside it, he barred the door, but yelled, from time to time, “HEAVE HO!” or “HIT THE DECK!” or “HAUL THE YARDARM!” or “SAG TO LEEWARD!” until his brother Jacob banged on the door and threatened to keelhaul him if he didn’t avast this foolishness and cut off his jib.

  But nobody bothered Noah after that. In fact, they wouldn’t have had a chance to, even if they wanted to, because that same night, in the middle of the night, all the beaver dams in all the hills around Stay More broke and washed out, and all the ponds spilled into the already flooded streams, and Noah woke to discover that his cabin, which was the lowest dwelling in Stay More, was not floating, but that its bilge was awash. He swam to the door, raised the bar, and a wave of cold water swept the door open and sucked Noah out of it and down the now broad river that had once been gentle Swains Creek. Swept along on the roiling crest, he clutched right and clutched left, for any limb to grab, but he was carried nearly halfway to Parthenon before his fingers finally seized a branch and stopped his course. He got both hands on the limb and hauled himself up. Judging from the feel of the bark, it was a sycamore tree. He sat on the limb and rested awhile, spitting out water and getting his wind back, but the water was still rising; he climbed to a higher limb, and then again to an even higher one, where he lodged himself in the fork between limb and trunk and spent the rest of the night. He began to worry about falling asleep and tumbling into the rising waters.

  Groping around in the dark, he discovered that creeping blackjack vines snaked through the branches of the sycamore. He tore off several of these and used them in lieu of rope to lash himself firmly to the tree so that he would not fall out of it if he went to sleep. In fact, he tied himself so fast that he couldn’t have got loose if he wanted to. And yet he did not fall asleep; the roaring and bubbling of the cataract beneath him kept him awake until dawn. The sun’s early light revealed the whole valley under yellow-brown water. Considering the size of the big sycamore tree he was in, he judged that he must be some thirty feet (or two hats) above the ground, and yet the water was less than ten feet below him, which meant that the ground was covered with twenty feet of water. “AHOY!” he yelled several times, but there was no answer.

  Meanwhile, Jacob’s dogtrot house, which was situated on higher ground than any of the other dwellings, became the ark of refuge for all of the other Stay Morons. They counted heads and discovered Noah missing, and began to grieve for him, and to be sorry that they had teased him, and even to be glad for the little trick he had played on them, because they had assembled their belongings when he had called “Anchors Aweigh!” so their belongings were all ready to go when the real flood came in the middle of the night. The religious ones among them prayed for Noah’s safety. Jacob had the opinion that maybe Noah was sitting on the ridgepole of his cabin, and in the morning they could construct a raft and float it down there and rescue him. As for the rest of the night, everybody was too excited to sleep, even if there were space in the two crowded pens to lie down, so they stayed awake talking and telling jokes in an effort to divert their minds from the rising water and the devastation of their fields and livestock and homes.

  But then the members of the Stay More Debating Society proposed a new topic: Which is worse, a drought or a flood? Sides were drawn, and the oratory and rebuttals kept them busy until dawn. But Jac
ob, the referee, decreed that the match was a draw, even-Stephen, and the jug of whiskey that was to go to the winners was shared, all around. At dawn, the men began constructing a raft, which Jacob piloted, leaving his house and grounds for the first time since the frakes had got him, and beginning his return to normal life.

  With Elijah Duckworth and Levi Whitter as first mate and boatswain, Jacob poled the raft down the broad yellow-brown river to the holler where his first cabin was; but it was no more. Probing with his pole for some sign of the roof or chimney, Jacob reluctantly concluded that the whole cabin must have washed away. “NOEY!” he called, but only the roar of the river answered him. He let the raft drift aimlessly downstream, continuing to call out for his brother, until Duckworth and Whitter suggested that they would like to inspect their homesteads too. These, it turned out, were still standing, although the livestock were drowned, except for a flock of chickens on the ridgepole of Duckworth’s place, and a pair of goats on Whitter’s ridgepole. The other buildings, too, of Stay More had survived, except for the rude trading post, whose roof could be seen floating in an eddy off Banty Creek. What was better, the men noted, the water level seemed to be dropping rapidly, and the rain had stopped and the sun was shining marvelously in a near-cloudless sky. Before the day was over, the people could return to their homes and drag out their wet bedding to hang in the sunshine, and begin scraping mud off their floors and furniture, and start the long hard reconstruction of their lives.

  But even after the floodwaters receded, Noah was still up in that tree. Not by choice; he was helplessly entangled in the blackjack vines that he had used to bind himself to the trunk. He would husband his strength for a while and then tug and tear at the vines, but to no avail. Whenever he did not feel completely exhausted, he would draw breath into his lungs and yell “AHOY!” but if anyone heard him from afar they probably took it as an echo of their own voices calling “NOAH!” or “NOEY!”