The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  Isaac nodded.

  “Then take it,” the stranger requested, and Isaac took it. Thus, in the beginning of the Decade of Light, in, coincidentally, the same year postcards were invented, Stay More became a post office.

  The stranger turned his horse and prepared to ride off, but paused. He stared at Isaac for a moment and then asked, “Jist out of curiosity, what war you a-laying thar on the ground fer, when I rid up?”

  Isaac studied the postcard, which he could not read, then gave the stranger a look that was not exactly hostile, but not cordial either. “Layin low fer moles,” he answered, and the rider stared at him for only an instant longer before spurring his horse and riding off. Isaac decided to deliver the postcard to his father, who could read it. His father’s house was only half as far as it used to be, and Isaac reached it in half the time. His father too, he discovered, was shrunk to half his size, sitting in his tiny office pretending to write his half-baked memoirs. Isaac gave him the little card. Jacob took the card and read both sides of it, was at first puzzled, then chuckled.

  “It’s from ole Eli Willard,” Jacob told his son. “He must’ve got so all-fired rich sellin his whale oil that he’s done took off for a tour of the world. Sent this’un here from some’ers called ‘Stone-hinge,’ in Old England, clear across the sea. Says, ‘Having marvelous time. Wish you were here. Onward to London t’morrow. My fondest regards to all of you. Eli Willard.’” Jacob chuckled again, and observed, “Right thoughty of him, weren’t it?” He poked the postcard into a pigeonhole of his desk, and resumed pretending to write his memoirs, not noticing, or not commenting upon, the fact that his son Isaac positively reeked of Seth Chism’s aqua vitae. Isaac left, vaguely troubled with the thought that Eli Willard was expanding the world that Isaac was trying to contract. For several years following, throughout the Decade of Light, postcards kept coming from Eli Willard in Paris, Geneva, Venice, Rome, Naples, Athens, Istanbul, Sevastopol, Tehran, Bombay, Rangoon, Singapore, Shanghai, Osaka, Honolulu, and, the last one, San Francisco.

  Every day, Isaac drank half a jug of corn whiskey to keep the world to half its size, but nobody seemed to notice that he was constantly half seas o’er, not even his better half, Salina, who, however, continued not to climb him. Seth Chism raised his price to half a dollar a jug, but this did not strain Isaac’s finances, because he continued to run his mill, half for corn, half for wheat, troubled only by having to double each measure to get it right, and vaguely troubled by postcards that came from halfway around the world. Stay More was officially declared a United States Post Office, and the postmastership was appointed to Isaac’s younger brother, Christopher Columbus “Lum” Ingledew, who, however, like everybody else except Jacob and his ladyfriend, could neither read nor write, a considerable handicap for a postmaster. It was decided to start a school, the first since Jacob’s little academy of many years previous, and everybody pitched in to build the schoolhouse, which we shall examine in the next chapter. Jacob declined the schoolmastership on the grounds of being past the retirement age. A subscription was got up, and a young man from Harrison up in neighboring Boone County, by the name of Boone Harrison, was hired, at $75 per term plus room and board, to teach the school. Boone Harrison was just barely literate himself, but he could, and did, teach people how to read and write, and thus it was that during the Decade of Light the people of Stay More acquired not only a post office but a means of patronizing both ends of it, sending and receiving, and once they became literate they spent all their spare time writing letters, a worthless enterprise.

  The post office in its early years was not a separate structure, but occupied one small corner of Isaac’s mill, where, twice weekly, Lum Ingledew would sort and distribute mail, what little there was of it, until the people discovered how to write off for catalogs and to circulate chain letters. One of the first catalogs to arrive in Stay More was a seed catalog, and the recipients discovered to their amazement that the Tah May Toh, which grew wild on fifteen-foot vines all over Stay More, and which they had always thought poisonous, was considered edible, so immediately everybody began harvesting and eating ’maters, as they called them, and suffering no effects other than the heady (and body) sense of voluptuousness that gave the ’mater its nickname, “love apple.” It is not exactly an aphrodisiac, because no frigid woman nor impotent man has ever been cured by eating one, but in the case of persons already healthily disposed toward sex, it enriches the disposition. Hence, the numbers of people who comprised Stay More’s maximum population during the last part of that century were conceived and born during the Decade of Light. But Isaac’s wife Salina, even though she acquired just as fond a taste for ’maters as anybody else, still would not climb Isaac during the Decade of Light. After eating a ’mater, she might remark to him, “I’d like to climb a tree,” but she wouldn’t climb him. In time, she spoke of “climbing the walls,” but she never again climbed Isaac until the Decade of Light was over. And he went on drinking, so that she looked to him too small, less than three feet high, to climb him anyway.

  Oddly enough, all of the energy or voluptuousness or libido or lubricity generated by the love apple cannot be discharged through sex alone. There is a generous residue that seeks other outlets, so during the peak of ’mater-pickin time the women commenced frenzies of quilting bees, and the men devoted all their spare time to the game they called Base Ball, originated by Jacob Ingledew years before. The equipment remained unrefined: a hickory stake for a bat, a round chunk of sandstone for a ball, gunnysacks for bases; but the men spent so much time playing it during ’mater-pickin time that they perfected it in many ways: some players were so strong they could knock the rock clear out of the field, which constituted a “free run home,” while the pitchers, in order to thwart this type of batter, learned how to make the rock actually “curve” instead of going in a straight line, and some pitchers, by applying their tobacco juice to the rock, could really confuse and harass the batter. Isaac Ingledew, once the greatest batter and pitcher of all, was still in his thirties, and tried to play, but could not: he would swing at the rock before it was halfway to him.

  Every five years during the Decade of Light, that is, twice, Stay More hosted a gala reunion of the G.A.R., the veterans who had fought with Jacob and Isaac during the War. These men would come, with their families, from all over Newton and adjoining counties, and hundreds of primitive tents would be pitched in the Field of Clover, and a great time would be had by all. The women of Stay More would spend days in their kitchens preparing banquets. The menfolk kept the stills running night and day, and shot all the game out of all the woods. The reunion began on a Second Tuesday of the Month and lasted only three days, but that was long enough to eat up all the food and drink all the liquor and listen to a speech by Jacob Ingledew. The first reunion was such a big success that when time came five years later for the second one, even some of John Cecil’s Rebels tried to sneak in with their families, but they were spotted and driven away. The second reunion happened by accident to occur during the peak of ’mater-pickin time. The womenfolk not only served loads of fresh whole ’maters cooled in springwater, but also they prepared and served baked stuffed ’mater, fried ’mater, broiled ’mater, sautéed crumbed ’mater, as well as ’mater juice, ’mater gazpacho, ’mater compote, ’mater aspic, ketchup, puree, relish, ’mater salad, ’mater jam and ’mater pie, this last, however, being made with green ’maters, which do not have the potency of red ones. Most of the out-of-town reunionists were skeptical of ’maters, until the Stay Morons assured them that they had been eating them for several years now without being p’izened, whereupon they, and everybody, tucked their napkins in their collars and did their duty.

  The banquet was again scheduled to run three days, but nobody slept the first night, either making sounds or listening to them. The tent camp in the Field of Clover was a ruckus of amatory sounds, and the various residences of town were not exactly silent, either, except for Isaac Ingledew’s. Isaac got out of bed, al
lowing as how he had better go and see what could be done to quieten things down. On the dark road to the Field of Clover, he was climbed eight times, so when he arrived at the tent camp he was grateful to accept the drink that somebody offered him and to rest awhile. Returning home, he was only climbed twice, so he figured that things were beginning to quieten down. Once asleep, in deep, deep sleep, he did not notice the noises going on through the night. In the morning it was absolutely silent, until the creak of the first wagonwheel as, one by one, the out-of-town reunionists began returning homeward. By noon the tent camp was abandoned, and the people of Stay More did not come out of their houses for all that day. There would be another G.A.R. reunion in five more years, but it would be scheduled at a time of year other than ’mater-pickin. And that year would be beyond the Decade of Light.

  The Decade of Light, like most decades, lasted only ten years. And then it was over. The barrels of whale oil went dry, were empty. The Second Spell of Darkness was ushered in. By daylight, people sat on their porches watching the road for the reappearance of Eli Willard. By night, untired, they went to bed and lay awake with insomnia. The chamberpots were hauled out from under the beds and dusted off, and a new generation of children was warned that the pots would stick to their fingers if they emptied them into a path. Realizing their insomnia was hopeless, the people sat up in the dark, telling to one another terrifying ghost stories, which did nothing for their insomnia but gave them something to do in the dark. Women and children were more suggestible, and both more susceptible to, and addicted to, the shivers brought on by these tales of “boogers” and “haints.” One enterprising group of women, in an effort to kick the habit, attempted to have a quilting bee in the dark, but the product, which somebody referred to as a “crazy quilt,” was a source of mirth to everybody else. The men tried to whittle in the dark, and a number of fingers were lost before this practice was abandoned. When all the ghost stories that everybody knew had been told and retold several times, the more imaginative (and more insomniac) Stay Morons began to create new stories, fantastic tales that stretched credulity beyond bounds. But having nothing else to do, the people began to believe these stories, and the Second Period of Darkness that followed the Decade of Light was not real, that is, it was mostly fictitious or illusory, all in the mind. Isaac Ingledew sobered up, because now that it was dark again Salina was climbing him all the time, every time she caught him standing, and sometimes even when he was sitting, but, being sober, he believed that he was only imagining it, that it was not real. The world was full-sized again for him, nothing was halved, but the full-sized world was dark and fanciful.

  In time, among all the other dark chimeras and phantasms that were conceived in this world, there appeared the unmistakable specter of Eli Willard, driving another large wagon laden with barrels. He was older, and his trip around the world had broadened him about the middle, but, no doubt about it, he was Eli Willard. The barrels he had this time, he said, contained a fuel which did not smell fishy. It smelled powerful strong, all right, but it did not smell fishy. It was made from coal, a kind of rock, a pitch black rock deep in the earth. It was called kerosine, he said. There were grown people in Stay More who had been too young during Eli Willard’s previous visit to remember him, although they had heard his name many times, but this feller trying to hoax them into believing that oil could be squeezed out of a rock could not possibly be Eli Willard, but an imposter. Everybody knows that rocks are the driest things that are. No, whale oil was good enough for them, any time. But this person pretending to be Eli Willard claimed that all the whales had been killed; there was no more whale oil. Nothing but kerosine. The Stay Morons, especially the younger ones, were suspicious of him. The sun went down, darkness fell, Eli Willard lighted one of his kerosine lamps as a demonstration. His patience was ebbing. “Take it or leave it,” he said. So they left it. Whether or not they believed that oil could be squeezed out of a black rock, they equated such an artificial product with PROG RESS, and wanted none of it.

  PROG RESS is always at the expense of pain and sacrifice and expense, and even if the Stay Morons did not know of the men who had toiled and died to mine the coal and make the oil, they guessed rightly that kerosine is the product of pain and sacrifice and expense. Darkness might tend to obscure and even confuse the world, but in darkness there was little pain or sacrifice or expense. Eli Willard sold not a drop of kerosine in the Ozarks, not that year anyway, and lost his shirt. Now, at Stay More, he was more dispirited than he had been years earlier when he had failed to sell raincoats and umbrellas during the drought. He turned off his demonstration lamp and sat with his head in his hands in the darkness. He hoped somebody would offer him a bed for the night, but nobody did, because with their insomnia they no longer went to bed but stayed up telling wild and fanciful stories.

  Eli Willard listened to these stories, and was amazed. He had thought he understood the Ozark mind and heart as well as any outsider could, but these stories dumbfounded him. They were either incredibly fabulous or impossibly inconceivable. At any rate, he was captivated, so that when daylight came and the people stopped telling stories and went to work, he decided to stay for another night to hear more stories. But throughout the long day, with nothing to do because nobody was buying kerosine, he felt a growing ennui that left him utterly weary and miserable by late afternoon. Salina Ingledew found him in this condition and asked what was ailing him. He replied simply, “I’m bored.”

  Now, to any Stay Moron, any Ozarker, the word “bored” had nothing to do with boredom, but meant humiliated or chagrined. Salina spread the word to her neighbors, and everyone assumed that Eli Willard was humiliated because of his failure to sell kerosine, but this did not change their attitude toward purchasing coal oil. Had they known what he really meant by being “bored,” they would have been puzzled, for at that time nobody in the Ozarks had ever been bored in the sense that Eli Willard meant. “Boredom” was a word, and an emotion, like “nostalgia,” that had to be learned and acquired, and fortunately Eli Willard’s boredom was not yet contagious, although he was severely afflicted with it. Anyone who has contracted acute boredom knows that it doesn’t easily go away; hence, when the people began telling their stories again after darkness, Eli Willard listened to them but was no longer amazed. He was bored. What had seemed fabulous and fanciful in the stories now struck him merely as long-windedness. What had seemed clever and imaginative now seemed only silly. In the middle of an exceptionally long and silly story, he left town, using his kerosine lamps to light his way.

  Both the post office and the school remained closed during the Second Spell of Darkness, but nobody seemed to miss either one of them. Most of what came through the post office had been what we would today refer to as “junk mail” and it was a relief not to get any. As for the school, the people began to realize that Jacob Ingledew had had a good reason for excluding reading and writing from his old academy. The more one read or wrote, the less one talked. At any rate, Boone Harrison the schoolmaster returned home to the county and town he was named after, and the schoolhouse was converted, as we shall soon see, to other purposes. When everybody told, or had heard, every possible tale and fiction that could be told or heard, and the most inventive of the yarn spinners had exhausted their imaginations, the Stay Morons turned for diversion to the singing of songs. Modern folklorists have tabulated and recorded 2,349 distinct “folk songs” heard in the Ozarks, all but 847 of which have been traced to ancient England, Scotland, Wales, or Ireland; 176 of the latter were invented and composed in Stay More at one time or another, but all 2,349 of the songs were known by heart to one or more Stay Morons, so the dark and starless nights were filled with song, and Isaac Ingledew would furnish accompaniment with his fiddle, at least after the children had gone to bed.

  Song is poetry, of a kind, and the night is the most poetic of times, so the people of Stay More were no longer oppressed by the darkness, and most all of them were able to sleep again after a night of s
inging. Most all of them, that is, except Isaac Ingledew, who had discovered during his months of insomnia that sleep is an extravagant and useless pastime, and who never slept again, to the end of his days. We do not know, and can scarcely imagine, how he passed the many hours of life that others give over to slumber, but he was never idle, except when Salina was climbing him, which she continued to do, every chance she got, until…. But that is another story, another chapter, another edifice.

  Chapter nine

  It was built as a schoolhouse, and so it remained during the Decade of Light, Boone Harrison holding sway as literacy-giver to the young and old of Stay More, many of whom would walk three or four miles in all kinds of weather just to “git a little schoolin.” The schoolhouse was both a house of learning and the community center. Its bigeminality (we have hinted unsubtly and often that architectural bigeminality is sexual) was definitely and overtly sexist: the left door was for females, the right door for males, without exception (although an occasional “tomboy” among the girls would boldly use the right door…but no boy ever used the left door, because there was never the equivalent of a “queen,” “nancy,” “molly,” or “betty” anywhere in the Ozarks). Since both doors led to the same one-room interior, we may assume that the reason for two of them was to facilitate egress at recess, lunch and dismissal, which, when indicated by Boone Harrison, cleared the room in 3.6 seconds. Any door, of course, is for both entering and leaving. Some doors are more pleasurable to enter, while others are more pleasurable to exit, but in any case one must usually always enter before exiting. The study of architecture is a fine thing.

  Boone Harrison never discussed the doors with his pupils; tacitly they understood what the doors were for, and which to use, according to sex. The signal to enter was the ringing of the bell, housed in the small cupola atop the ridgepole; the signal to exit was Boone Harrison sitting down. When he sat down, he would take out his pocketknife and whittle goose-feathers into quill pens for his pupils to write with. He manufactured his own ink from the “ink balls” that grow on oak trees, boiling them in a little water and setting the liquid with copperas. The pupils always licked their pens as an aid to concentration before commencing to write, and this caused their lips to turn the blue-green color of the ink. It was easy to distinguish the literate from the illiterate Stay Morons: the latter did not have blue-green lips. During the Decade of Light, there arose almost a caste system based upon lip color, with those of deep blue-green lips at the upper caste, and those with natural lips at the bottom. It was possible to cross caste lines by kissing, and kissing became very popular, until in time the color of one’s lips was meaningless, and the caste system fell apart, and the Decade of Light came to an end, and Boone Harrison sat down for the last time, then stood up and went home to the county and town he was named after, and those who could read and write forgot how.