The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  Except for one instance, to be scrutinized in moderate detail later, Noah lived the life of a celibate bachelor. But he was not a recluse. Over the years people visited him in his treehouse, not just out of curiosity, and he was especially popular with his nephews and nieces; it was said that each of Jacob Ingledew’s five children had “come of age” when he or she was old enough to climb unassisted up the ladder into Noah’s treehouse. Little Benjamin made the first ascent at the age of four, Isaac bested him by going up at three-and-a-half, Rachel was nearly five before she got up, and neither Lum nor Lucinda could do much better than Benjamin. Noah cultivated a knack for making candy apples (he had his own orchard, established with the help of a passing “furriner” named John Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed), and these candy apples were the reward for the ascent to his treehouse of his nephews and nieces. But that was not the reason they climbed up to visit him; they climbed because they liked him.

  We do not know exactly why. We know so pitifully little about the true workings of Noah’s mind and heart. The one clue we have, if such it be, was that Noah had a wide-eyed sense of wonder which was perhaps childlike or with which the children empathized. Everything either fascinated him or (like Indians) terrified him. He felt constantly confronted with the unknown. Sometimes he would sit idly in his treehouse, just listening to the beating of his heart or to the slow wafting of air in and out of his nostrils, and these things, circulation, respiration, would captivate him with wonder. He never took anything for granted. The sun might so easily choose not to come up some morning, and Noah would not be surprised, he would be just as fascinated as he was with the fact that the sun came up and went down every day.

  Noah understood nothing; he only witnessed it. The intricate growth and tasseling and pollination of a stalk of corn was endlessly absorbing to him, but he did not comprehend the sexuality of plants any better than he did the sexuality of animals. Like any rural person, he was exposed daily to the varied spectacle of one animal affixing itself to another animal for the purpose of perpetuating its species and experiencing pleasure into the bargain. Noah watched these spectacles entranced. We cannot know to what extent he felt excluded from Nature’s grand saturnalia, nor are we going to learn how much or how little appetite he personally possessed, much less how, if ever, he gratified it, but we can discern this much: that Noah, knowing nothing and understanding less, knew at least the fundamental difference between man and the other animals in regard to the ritual of mating: that for all animals it required merely a casual exchange of glances or of scents, or perhaps a little posturing, preening and circling, whereas for man it is a protracted business of gallantry, courting and coaxing and caressing, proposing and promoting and preparing, that costs literally millions of words, of which animals are not capable. Nor was Noah.

  Why, then, was his treehouse bigeminal? Merely in emulation of his brother’s dogtrot? If, as we have conclusively demonstrated, bigeminality is symbolic of the division of the sexes, was the second half of Noah’s house merely wishful thinking or subconscious yearning? A symbol of his absent “better half”? Perhaps. It could well be that he never gave up hope that some girl would again bring him a piece of cornbread which he could accept without clumsiness. But if any visitor to his treehouse remarked upon its bigeminality, Noah would simply point out that one half was where he slept and the other half was where he cooked and ate and sat, not necessarily in that order. It is only purest coincidence, of no significance whatever, that Noah’s first two years in his tree-house were the same two years that Thoreau lived at Walden, but like Thoreau, Noah had one chair for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society—although that society usually consisted only of his nephews and nieces.

  In our pitiful ignorance of the man, we do not even know how he managed to entertain them, apart from presenting them with candy apples. Did he tell them stories, or did they just sit and munch their apples in silence? Little Benjamin, at least, must have been silent, for it is told about him that he was eight years old before uttering his first words, which were, “Watch it, Paw!” at the moment the latter was about to be charged from behind by a bull while in the pasture, whereupon Jacob, after jumping out of the bull’s path, exclaimed to Benjamin, “How come you never said nary a word afore now?” to which Benjamin replied, “I never had nothin ’portant to say.”

  If this legend is true (and I have no reason to doubt it), then Benjamin must have sat silently munching his candy apple while Noah talked, but what did Noah say? He does not seem the storytelling type, even less the joke-cracking type. Did he verbalize his wonder at the mystery of the pollination of corn, or of the sun’s diurnal appearance? Quite possibly he did not talk at all, but it is disquieting to visualize the two of them sitting there silently, eerie in that aerie, for over four years, until Noah remarked, “Yore pap tells me ye kin talk right easy,” and Benjamin allowed, “Yep,” and Noah shook his head in commiseration and said, “A durn shame.” Thereafter, Benjamin felt obliged to say something, so he began, from the age of nine onwards, to ask Noah questions. It never mattered that Noah was unable to answer a single one of Benjamin’s questions, or at least to answer one accurately; Benjamin went on asking them, and Noah went on trying and failing to answer them. There were things Benjamin could not discuss with his parents. We know that he slept, until his twelfth year, in a “truckle,” or trundle bed, at the foot of his parents’ own bed, and that in that proximity he was suffered to eavesdrop upon their occasional (infrequent; once a month, on the average, usually the night of the Second Tuesday of the Month) exchanges of words that meant nothing to him. (Could it be that he had never talked because he associated words with nothingness, or, worse, dark unfathomable deeds connected with the words his father and mother spoke to each other in their bed at night?)

  “How’s that?” Benjamin would hear one of them say to the other in the dark in their bed.

  “Wal, I reckon,” he would hear the other reply. He could not tell their voices apart; his mother’s voice at such times was low and husky. Benjamin could not tell if these were his father or his mother:

  “Yore nose is cold.”

  “There.”

  “Move down.”

  “Yore knee is in my monkey.”

  “Seems lak we caint git it through.”

  “Here I go.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “I said.”

  “Now.”

  “Where?”

  “Holy hop-toads!”

  “Done?”

  “Um.”

  His parents never talked like this during the daytime, and it puzzled Benjamin to the extent that, when he was nine years old and began to ask Noah questions, he would repeat what his parents had said in bed to Noah and ask Noah what it meant. Even assuming Noah actually knew the meaning of the various utterances, doubtless he would not have been able to discuss it with a mere lad of nine. So his “answers” were inaccurate. He would, for example, interpret “Seems lak we caint git it through” as meaning that Sarah was trying to help Jacob put his pants on and couldn’t get one leg into them. “Monkey,” he would define, is the base of the spine, where a monkey’s tail would go, so “Yore knee is in my monkey”…Benjamin seemed satisfied with these explanations, but by the time he was twelve years old and pubescent himself, and had witnessed sufficient numbers of animals wild and domestic pairing themselves together with a strange mixture both of apparent pain and intense pleasure, it dawned on him that the voices he heard in the night once a month on the average had some connection with this business of one animal having a hole which another animal would wish to probe with his dood, and although Benjamin would not have wished to suspect that his very own dear mother ever did that sort of thing with his father, at length he persuaded himself that it was inevitable, so that the time came when in the night he heard one of his parents saying to the other:

  “Seems as ’ough we caint fasten our thangs together no mo
re.”

  Benjamin was moved to suggest, audibly, “Try a rope.”

  Whereupon his father trundled the trundle bed out of the door, across the breezeway into the other wing, where Benjamin slept thereafter until he was fifteen, when he left home.

  Noah has been accused, unjustly I think, of being partly responsible for Benjamin’s leaving home. Benjamin, like any resident of Stay More, male or female, had been obliged, from the age of seven onward, to work as hard as he possibly could, starting at sunrise and keeping on until sunset, the year around, Sundays not excepted. Since Benjamin was Jacob’s oldest son, and since at the age of fifteen he was full-grown, he was obliged to do a man’s work somewhat prematurely, with the predictable result that he came down with the frakes, which kept him in bed for most of his fifteenth year, and left him with, not so much a sense of futility or the vainness of labor, but rather with a conviction that if a man (or boy) had to work, there ought to be some kind of work somewhere that wasn’t so goshdarned hard. But when he asked his father about this, when he asked his father if there weren’t places in the world somewhere where people didn’t have to toil from sunup to sundown, his father merely gave him a lecture on how Stay More was the center of the universe, as it were, and of the necessity for a man (or boy) to do the most labor of which he was capable, to “do his damnedest,” as Jacob put it. So Benjamin went to Noah. “Uncle Noah,” he inquired, “I been wonderin: aint there anyplace out yonder in the world where a body’d not have to slave the livelong day jist to do what was ’spected of him?”

  Noah could not tell him of cities, having never seen one himself, unless you count Memphis, which at the time Noah had briefly passed through it on his way to the Ozarks was scarcely more than a large town. Noah could tell him of certain shiftless persons who managed to eke out a subsistence with a modicum of effort, but Noah chose wisely not to tell him of these types. All Noah could tell him was what little he himself had heard rumored about a distant Promised Land way off in the west, which was called in the Spanish “Hot Oven,” or Californy, where gold had recently been discovered, and where, it was said, a man could spend a few hours searching for gold and then take the rest of the week off. Benjamin asked Noah to explain what “gold” was, and why it was so valuable, and Noah did the best he could.

  “How come you never wanted to go there?” Benjamin asked him. Noah explained that it was a long ways off and besides you had to pass through a lot of Indian country to get there and Noah would be just as happy if he never saw another Indian in his life. But Benjamin, having never seen an Indian and having none of his uncle’s irrational fear of them, began to consider, increasingly and seriously, the idea of going to California to, if not make his fortune, avoid a life of hard labor. He kept his intention a secret from no one, but no one took him seriously. A person never left Stay More except to go to the county seat or to go to rest in the Stay More cemetery.

  One summer Saturday afternoon, when all the Ingledews were enjoying one of their annual shopping or swapping trips into Jasper, Benjamin saw a little crowd assembled on a corner of the courthouse square, and, joining them, saw them clustered around a man whom we might refer to as Newton County’s first and only itinerant “travel agent.” This man, Charlie Fancher, was offering, for the rather lavish sum of $50, to “book passage” on a wagon train that was departing soon for Californy. He painted a more glowing picture of Californy than Uncle Noah had, extolling its excellent climate and its picturesque mountains and its view of the ocean. No one in Newton County had ever seen an ocean or could even imagine seeing that much water in one place. They listened in awe to the travel agent, but when he got around to mentioning the price, $50, they began, one by one, to drift away, until only Benjamin was left standing with the travel agent.

  “Shitepoke town,” the agent grumbled, not necessarily to Benjamin. “I shoulda knowed better than git lost way back up here in these hills.” Then he noticed Benjamin and said, “Kid, you aint happenin to have fifty dollars layin around loose, have ye?”

  “Nossir,” Benjamin declared. “Fifteen, twenty, is the most I could ever hope to lay hands on. But I’d be right glad to work it off. I could drive a wagon and help tend the teams.”

  “Hmmm,” the agent said, and sized him up. “You any good with a rifle?”

  “I kin knock a squirrel off a tree limb from ten hats off.”

  “Hats?” the agent said.

  Benjamin explained that unit of measure to the agent, who calculated it and then said, “Well, okay, kid. You’re on. Let’s go. Let’s git out of this shitepoke town.”

  “Let me say goodbye to my folks,” Benjamin requested.

  “Cut it short,” the agent said.

  Benjamin’s folks were scattered around the village. He had to hunt them up individually, and explain to each of them what he was going to do, and deafen himself to their protests and tears. His younger brother Isaac begged to go with him, but Benjamin told him he would send for him in a couple of years when Isaac was older. His little sisters Rachel and Lucinda grabbed his arms and said they wouldn’t let him go, and he had to tear his shirt getting loose from them. His mother reminded him that his sixteenth birthday was coming up soon, and she had wanted to make it special for him. He said he was powerful sorry. His father Jacob said, “What if I was to say you caint go?” “You’d have to tie me up,” Benjamin averred. Jacob drew back his fist as if to smite Benjamin, but Benjamin did not cower nor flinch. Jacob dropped his arm. “Paw,” Benjamin protested, “I’ll come home soon as I git rich.” Jacob snorted and said, “There aint no place for a rich man in this country.” But when Jacob saw that he could not dissuade Benjamin, he gave Benjamin his horse and then shook hands with him and wished him luck.

  Noah was the last of his folks that Benjamin could find, and when Benjamin told him what he was doing, Noah moaned and faulted himself for having mentioned Californy to him in the first place. Benjamin pointed out that even if Noah hadn’t mentioned it, he would still have heard about it from this man Charlie Fancher that he was going with. “Shitfire, let Fancher show hisself,” Noah declared. “I’ll shred him up with my bare hands.” But Benjamin clapped his uncle on the shoulder and said, “Goodbye, Uncle Noey. And thanks fer all them candy apples,” and then he mounted the horse his father had given him and went to rejoin Charlie Fancher. They rode north to the town of Harrison, and from there west to the town of Berryville, where the wagon train was assembled, and the people that Fancher had “recruited” from all over the Ozarks, over 140 of them, got into the wagons. Charlie Fancher started the wagon train moving west, Benjamin driving one of the lead wagons with eight people in it, westward out of Arkansas and across the national boundary line into Indian territory, where occasionally they saw parties or even camps of Indians, but had no conflicts with any of them, until, weeks later, in a valley called Mountain Meadows, in a place called Utah, they were suddenly surrounded by a large band of mounted Indians in war paint who began shooting at them, not with bows and arrows but with rifles.

  Charlie Fancher ordered the wagons to form into a circle and everybody got behind the wagons and Benjamin and all the other men who could handle a rifle returned the fire of the Indians, killing many of them, and keeping them at bay for hours into the night, then all of the following day, and the one after that, three days in all, until a white flag appeared among the enemy, a flag of truce under which approached a group of men. These were not Indians but white men, whose leader introduced himself as John D. Lee and told Charlie Fancher that his wagon train must turn back and that he and his fellow white men would protect their retreat from the Indians as far back as Cedar City. But the man insisted that Fancher and all his party must go on foot and unarmed in order to allay the suspicions of the Indians, a condition which Fancher was reluctant to accept, yet a condition which had no alternative except to stay and fight, which few of the Fancher party wanted to do, among those few Benjamin, who smelled something suspicious in the whole business, but had no liberty
to disobey his leader, Fancher. At length Fancher ordered his party to yield to the retreat order, to leave their wagons and weapons and begin the march toward Cedar City. They never reached it, because as soon as they were out of sight of their wagons the Indians came again, along with those treacherous white men, and slaughtered every last single one of them, sparing only the youngest children.

  Benjamin, as he felt the searing bullet tearing life out of his breast, was sorry that he had ever left home.

  There was no survivor to return the news to Arkansas, but sometime later Eli Willard from Connecticut, hawking musical instruments this time, happened to bring with him a copy of a New York newspaper, to leave with Lizzie Swain and her family, who had such a hankering for occasional news from the outside world, although they could not read, and nobody could read except Jacob, who didn’t mind reading to Lizzie and her brood the newspaper Eli Willard had dropped off (and his business was pretty good this time around; to the populace of Stay More he sold three banjos, a piano, a parlor organ, and other instruments, including a fiddle that Jacob bought for his son Isaac, and a Jew’s harp that Noah bought for himself). Lizzie and her children assembled in Jacob’s dogtrot and he began reading them the newspaper. He hadn’t read very far, however, before he came to a big headline, “MOUNTAIN MEADOWS MASSACRE” with a sub-headline “140 Arkansans Slain in Utah Valley” and a sub-headline “Suspect Mormon Plot.” Jacob’s voice quavered as he read the text of the item, and his voice broke when he came to the name of Charles Fancher, because that was the name of the man Benjamin had told him he was going with. Jacob stopped altogether when he came to the words, “…not one single survivor, except a few children under the age of seven who have been discovered to be in the custody of the Mormons in Salt Lake City.” He read the rest of the item silently to himself, as Lizzie and her children stared at him. It had been charged that Mormons had incited and directed the attack, to keep the Fancher party out of Utah, although the wagon train was merely passing through Utah on its way to California. The investigation was continuing (but it would not be, we know, until exactly ten years later that John D. Lee, a fanatical Mormon settler, would be tried, found guilty, excommunicated by his Church, and put to death on the site of the massacre).