The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  The schoolhouse was empty during the first years of the Second Spell of Darkness. Vandals broke its windows one by one, and someone stole the picture of George Washington that was its sole interior decoration. The pages of the McGuffey’s Readers, Ray’s Arithmetics and the Blue Back Spellers were employed as “asswipes” until they were used up. Bats and owls roosted in the ceiling of the schoolhouse, and were noctural. Everything was nocturnal. It was dark and often starless and even the moon was missing as often as not. Because all women are beautiful in the dark, all the girls and women of Stay More were ravishing, and were ravished. And because the darkness makes one invisible to one’s enemies, nobody had any enemies. It was a dark and peaceful and licentious time.

  Then, one day (or night), for the first time since the coming of the “saddlebag preacher” who had pestered Noah Ingledew because of his treehouse and had been ridden out of town on a rail, an itinerant evangelist showed up in town. He discovered the schoolhouse empty and unused, and decided to convert it to a church. The hour of his first service was norated around the village, but when the hour came nobody showed up, except old Elijah Duckworth, who took a seat on the front bench, and waited. The preacher waited too, and when nobody else showed up, he asked Lige if he thought he should go ahead with the service. “Wal, Reverend,” Lige observed, “if I put some hay in the wagon and take it down to the pasture to feed the cows and only one cow shows up, I feed her.” So the preacher went ahead and gave his service, with a rousing full-length sermon. Afterwards he asked Lige what he had thought of it. “Wal, Reverend, I’ll tell ye,” said Lige. “If I put some hay in the wagon and go down to the pasture to feed the cows and only one cow shows up, I don’t give her the whole damn load.”

  Later Lige spread word to the other Stay Morons that the preacher was a “Presbyterian.” The old-timers had a vague memory of the saddlebag preacher of Noah’s time, and they had vague associations of unpleasantness with him. The new-timers had never heard of a preacher, and this “Presbyterian” seemed very suspicious. So they stayed away from his services. Failing to get any further audiences, he began pastoring them individually, door to door. Presbyterians, he explained to them, were strong believers in predestination, but the Stay Morons couldn’t understand predestination any better than Presbyterianism. Trying to simplify it, the minister would shout, “What is to be, will be!” “Why, shore,” his listeners were apt to respond, “any durn fool knows that.”

  The Presbyterian began to claim that, as evidence of his message, the world was predestined to be plunged into darkness during the daylight on a certain day soon approaching. Nobody believed him; nobody wanted to believe him, because the world was dark enough already. But on the day appointed (which the Presbyterian had previously learned about from astronomers in the East) there occurred a total eclipse of the sun which darkened the earth for a while, long enough for the preacher to convert everybody except the Ingledews to Presbyterianism. Thereafter he managed to fill the schoolhouse (now churchhouse) every Sunday morning, until one day, when another preacher, who called himself a “Methodist,” came into the churchhouse and challenged the Presbyterian to a debate on the subject of predestination, which the Methodist was against. The debate lasted for three days, then the Methodist challenged the Presbyterian to prove predestination, which the Presbyterian could not do, there being no other eclipses scheduled for the immediate future. The congregation was allowed to put the matter to a vote, and since the majority of them liked the idea of free salvation better than predestination, they gave the pastorate to the Methodist, who conducted services for some time thereafter, until the day another preacher, calling himself a “Baptist,” came and challenged the Methodist to a debate over the issue of baptism by sprinkling or immersion.

  Most Stay Morons readily agreed that immersion is certainly a lot more fun and probably cleaner than sprinkling, and they became Baptists in denomination until a “Campbellite” minister appeared and argued against denominationalism, pointing out that there is nothing in the Bible authorizing anybody to call themselves Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians or anything else. If, he said, there had to be a name over the door of the church, then let it be simply “Church of Christ.” This made eminent sense to everybody, and they dismissed the Baptist preacher and installed the Campbellite, but he was not a very interesting, let alone exciting, personality. The Dinsmores, who gave him a place to sleep his first Saturday in town, said he wouldn’t eat his supper. They said he had remarked, “You folks sure do set a good table, but I don’t never eat much when I’m a-fixin to give a sarmon.” Then on Sunday morning the Dinsmores set out a fine breakfast of ham and eggs, but the preacher wouldn’t touch it. “Earthly food seems to hinder a true feast of the spirit,” he said. “My finest sarmons has all been preached on a empty stomach.” So he had just one cup of coffee and went off to the churchhouse. After listening to his sermon, one of the Dinsmores remarked, “Why, that there preacher might just as well have et.”

  The Campbellite was supplanted by a colorful preacher of the “Holiness” faith, who amazed the Stay Morons by handling poisonous snakes without being bitten and running his hand through fire without being burned. For several months the Stay More church was a Holiness church, until the novelty of the snakes and fire wore off. Subsequently, other ministers converted the church to Assembly of God, Gospel Tabernacle, Seventh-Day Adventist and Pentecostal. One Sunday, even a Roman Catholic priest wandered into Stay More and was permitted to celebrate a mass at the church, but afterwards the stares that he received from the Stay Morons unnerved him, and he wandered on out of town. Stay More had run the gamut of gentile religions without deciding upon any one of them.

  Then Eli Willard returned. His hair was nearly all white now, and he was wearing a different kind of suit. He had no whale oil or kerosine; he had nothing. Each person who saw him noticed this, and asked him, “What’re ye sellin this time?” but Eli Willard just smiled. He tethered his horse to a post at Isaac’s mill, then sat in a chair on the porch. Isaac, being taciturn, didn’t ask him any questions. After most of the population of Stay More had assembled around the porch, Eli Willard stood up and cleared his throat and said, “Friends and Good People. I hawk no goods, vend no wares. A higher calling brings me to you, and I offer you free of charge this wonderful message. Others will tell you that God is divided into three: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. I do not hold with that. I believe that there is, at most, one God. Hence I am now pleased to call myself a Unitarian. Unitarians do not believe in heaven or hell, except in the spirit, in the now rather than the hereafter. Unitarians believe—”

  He was interrupted and drowned out by a chorus of protests. No heaven? No hell? Fiddle-faddle! If there is no hereafter, why live? If there had been one thing that all the other preachers had agreed upon, it was that we must conduct our lives in such a way as to be rewarded after death and avoid punishment in the hereafter. The men began shaking their fists at Eli Willard, the women spat at him, and the younger people began throwing rocks at him. He had to duck inside the mill for protection. He stayed there until everyone had left, except Isaac. He said to Isaac, in parting, “Well, I tried.” Isaac, who did not believe in the hereafter but had no use for Unitarianism either, did not comment.

  None of the Ingledew males were ever converted to any religion, perhaps a heritage from Jacob, who had originally left Tennessee because, as he had told Fanshaw, “the preachers was so thick a feller couldn’t say ‘heck’ without gittin a sermon fer it.” Isaac, if anything, was even less of a believer than his father had been, and his sons would be less than he, and their sons less than they, and so on, until the last Ingledew, who…but he is the last chapter, and we are only halfway there. What little light there was during the Second Spell of Darkness came in the form of lightning; Isaac would shake his fist at the lightning and silently dare God to strike him down. God never did. God killed many an animal with lightning, and blasted many a tree, and from time to time destroyed a human
being or two, but God never hit Isaac.

  Isaac’s wife Salina “caught religion” when the Presbyterian produced an eclipse of the sun, and although she was most partial to the Baptist, she attended all the church services in Stay More, and Isaac sometimes accompanied her out of curiosity, which is the bottom rung on the ladder of motives for going to church, the other rungs being, in ascending hierarchy: 2, being too timid to refuse, 3, a sense of duty, 4, a desire to mingle with others, 5, a desire to learn the means of salvation, 6, a desire to be saved, 7, lust for paradise in the hereafter, 8, schizophrenic need to need, 9, insanity, and 10, sainthood. There were very few Stay Morons who ascended to the top of this ladder. Isaac remained on the bottom rung, and Salina got about as far as the sixth. As far as anybody could tell, she never asked him what he thought of the sermons, or never asked him anything about religion, although she talked to him freely, for hours on end, expressing her own views and opinions. One of the preachers had gone so far as to hint that sexual intercourse, even between lawfully wed husband and wife, was not in the best interests of attaining heaven, and once again Salina ceased climbing Isaac, even though it was dark and no one could see them, and once again Isaac turned to strong beverages for solace.

  Nearly all the preachers, in particular the Methodist, abhorred alcohol, and preached frequently against it, and consequently Seth Chism had “caught religion” and given up the making of his superior sour mash, so Isaac was required to patronize Caleb Duckworth’s inferior brand of rotgut. This stuff was just as capable of reducing the world to half its size, but it also reduced time to half its length, which was terribly confusing to Isaac, who in compensation for it began to double everything: each day was forty-eight hours in length, or rather Monday came twice a week, and the Second Tuesday of the Month was also the Third; spring and summer came twice a year, and so did autumn, which wasn’t so bad, but two winters in one year was awful.

  Actually, the Year that Winter Came Twice was perceived not alone by Isaac but also by everyone in Stay More. It was the coldest and longest winter that anyone had ever known. Isaac could have warned them of its coming, because he knew that the first frost always occurred six weeks after the first chirp of a katydid, and he had heard the first katydid’s chirp twelve weeks before, which, even by his double reckoning, meant that a heavy frost was coming any minute now, but, being taciturn, he didn’t warn anybody, and sure enough the terrible winter came and caught them by surprise. All the birds flew south, but a large flock of mallards flying over was caught in freak currents of frozen air, and, frozen solid as stones, plummeted to the earth, breaking through roofs all over Stay More, or landing upon a random farm animal, dog, or cat, who were killed. The people gathered up all the frozen ducks and stacked them in a pile, where they remained frozen throughout the winter. Whenever anybody had a hankering for duckmeat, they would just grab one off the pile and throw it into the fire.

  But it was so cold that winter that keeping the fires going night and day was a major effort. The youngsters were required to keep the fires going at night, and, as one of the survivors of that winter expressed it to me in his old age, “We had to put wood on the fire all night with one hand, and sleep with the other!” This might be an exaggeration, but we may imagine what he meant. In order to obtain enough wood for the fires, the Stay Morons practically denuded the forests during the course of the Winter that Came Twice, cutting all the second-growth timber that had started growing after the great fire which had occurred during the great drought. Before Christmas, it began to snow heavily in Stay More; snow rarely fell in the Ozarks, and never before Christmas, but now there were blizzards. By Christmas, as my informant quoted above expressed it, “the snow was so all-fired deep we had to shit standing up!” Again he might be exaggerating, but we may picture the practice.

  The barns of that era were rather ramshackle, and offered little protection to the livestock, who froze; chickens saved themselves by roosting on the chimney shoulders and absorbing some warmth from the stones. The leather belts and pulleys in Isaac’s mill would not run because they were frozen, and even if he thawed them out he couldn’t make a fire hot enough to boil the frozen water in his boiler. It was too blamed cold to work in the mill anyway, and his helpers and fireman had already quit on him, so halfway through the winter, or rather between the two winters that came that year, he quit and went home to sit by the fire, which was what everybody else was already doing. With not even the chore of milking to do, since the cows were frozen, there was no work for anybody except women, except chopping wood for the fires. Everybody had runny noses, and some people had runny eyes, and some coughed badly, and several developed chest complaints, and a few, despite herbal remedies, died, but could not be buried until the ground thawed in the spring, so were left frozen in Isaac’s unused mill. Isaac’s family was more fortunate than most; the son John had a bad cough, but only Salina was sick enough to go to bed, and the girls Perlina and Drussie were old enough to assume their mother’s duties.

  Although, architecturally speaking, the houses of that time were built well, the fireplaces were not of optimum efficiency: most of the heat went up the chimney. And simply sitting beside the fire was not sufficient to keep warm on the coldest days of that winter. But there was nothing else to do, and consequently the Stay Morons discovered by accident that condition which we call boredom, which had been unknown to them before. Since the word “bored” meant “humiliated” to them, they would have a problem finding a name for their condition. It was Denton Ingledew, Isaac’s oldest boy, who first identified and attempted to name the condition. He was past marryin’ age, and so was the second oldest boy, Monroe, but they, like so many Ingledews, were too shy to approach women with romance or even matrimony in mind, so they still lived at home in Isaac’s dogtrot house. One day in the coldest part of the winter, all the Ingledews of Isaac’s household were crowded together around the fire, trying to keep warm. They had been sitting there for five hours, not moving much except to throw another log on the fire. Denton yawned, and said, “I feel so kinda like…” but no word would come to him. He could not name his condition. Half an hour later Monroe yawned too, and said, “Yeah, I know what ye mean.” But he couldn’t name it either. Some time later, John, the third boy, yawned, and remarked, “Me, too,” but was unable to expand upon that. After a while, Willis, the last son, remarked, “Same here,” but he too was at a loss for names.

  The condition, whatever it was, had affected the girls too by this time; although they weren’t yawning, tears were trickling slowly down their cheeks. “I’ve got the wearies,” remarked Perlina, and Drussie, some time later, put in, “It’s jist so teejus,” but neither of these words would quite do. After further reflection, Denton observed of his condition, “I aint interested in a damn thing. It’s sorter like after I had the frakes.” Monroe, who had also had the frakes, said, “Yeah, that’s sorter it,” and John, veteran of the frakes too, added, “I reckon.” The girls, who like all females had not had the frakes, did not quite understand. Isaac, their father, did not know what his children were talking about, because he wasn’t bored and never would be. A man who can stay awake all night long without ever going to sleep for the rest of his life is the least likely person to get bored. Willis, who had also had the frakes, remarked, “Naw, when a feller’s a-gittin over the frakes, he jist don’t give a damn about nothin, but this here that we’uns have caught, it’s somethin else. I feel like I’d like to give a damn about somethin, but there jist aint nothin around right at the moment to latch onto.” “Yeah,” his sisters chimed in. “That’s more like it.” Some time later, Denton observed, “But we still aint got a word fer it.” As the hours drifted by, one or the other of them would make a suggestion. Again Perlina offered “wearies.” They debated it, concluding it wasn’t quite right. “Teejusments,” suggested Drussie. “Mopes,” offered Willis. “Ho-hums,” suggested John. Monroe came up with “timesick.” They liked that one, but thought it was kind of highfallutin.r />
  Finally Denton snapped his fingers and said, “sour hours.” The way he pronounced it was almost identical to the way they pronounce “sorrows,” which means not grief but regrets, and the resemblance, with the suggestion that sour hours produce sorrows, won the votes of his brothers and sisters. They were so excited over finding a word for their condition that their condition no longer obtained, and they couldn’t wait to spread the word through the village, which they promptly did, finding dozens of people sitting beside their fireplaces afflicted with the sourhours. As soon as they were told this new word for their condition, they rapidly grew interested in it, and before long nobody had the sourhours anymore, at least not for another hour or two. Pronunciation of the noun, sourhour, and of the passive verb, sourhoured, if vociferous enough, also resembles the barking of a certain breed of dog, and for the next hour or two everybody in Stay More went around barking at one another, and their dogs tilted their heads to one side and gave their masters puzzled looks. But after an hour or two, the people grew sourhoured of barking at one another, and gave it up, and resumed passing the sour hours by the fire, day after day, shivering with cold, yawning, rubbing their arms, thinking no thoughts, none at all.