It could be a superstition, of which there were many, and while Fanshaw was of the opinion that the efficacy of superstitions was in direct proportion to one’s belief in their efficacy, there was no denying that many superstitions were useful and never failed. In the course of time he imparted several of these to Jacob Ingledew. The root of the buckeye tree, crushed and dropped into a pool of the creek, is a quick way to catch fish, by poisoning them. In time of famine, when other meat is scarce, do not disdain the ordinary mud turtle; his flesh consists of seven tastes of meat: pork, beef, mutton, venison, chicken, duck and fish. Fanshaw taught him many natural herbal remedies for the thousand ills that flesh is heir to, although most of these happened to be identical with ones that Jacob Ingledew already knew, learned from his ancestors. They discovered also that they had in common their beliefs in the importance of doing certain things, such as planting, by the dark of the moon or the light of the moon.
One of their few disagreements, which provided much fuel for their debates, was over the existence of God, or Wahkontah, as Fanshaw called him (it translates as “Mysterious Spirit” rather than the more common “Great Spirit” of other tribes). Jacob Ingledew felt that there was no such thing as God, or, if there were, he was a senile loafer who had created the world during his energetic youth but was now too old to care for it or take care of it. This notion greatly incensed Fanshaw, and in the intensity of their debates they almost came to blows. But they never fought, physically; I have always been curious as to which of them would have won if they had; it would have been a very even match.
But Fanshaw was a man of prayer. The door of his house, that is, the door of his half of the house, faced the east, whence, his people believed, all good things came (a peculiarly harsh irony in view of the fact that the displacing white settlers came from that direction). Each morning, at dawn, he would rise and perform his matinals, facing east. Our illustration attempts to show his house as illuminated by the long light of this early moment; imagination must visualize Fanshaw standing outside his door facing east. The first morning Jacob Ingledew spent in Stay More, sleeping on the ground by his mule tethered half a mile up the creek from Fanshaw’s, he woke to the sound of Fanshaw’s morning prayer, and, having never in his life heard anything like it, went to investigate, hiding in the woods near Fanshaw’s camp and watching him. The closest sound it resembled was that of a screaming panther, which Jacob had heard on many occasions, the most recent being just before Noah had rammed his fist down one’s throat. Jacob was astonished to discover that the sound was being produced by the vocal apparatus of his new friend Fanshaw (and possibly, in the back of his mind, after listening to Fanshaw’s Dawn Chant to its conclusion, he felt that Fanshaw was crazy, and this may have been the real reason, rather than fatigue, why he did not soon return to Fanshaw’s house). Long afterward, Jacob Ingledew could do a reasonable imitation of the Dawn Chant, to awe his descendants, frightening the younger ones, and from one of his descendants in turn I have heard it; it lies beyond my power of words to reproduce; I can only say that it began on the highest pitched note that the voice could reach, and after traveling up and down the scale in a nonmusical but nonverbal manner for several long minutes that evoked abstractly supplications and petitions of all manner, ended abruptly on a note that can only be called a sob of frustration. It was this last that most puzzled Jacob Ingledew, but it was a long time before he could get up his nerve to ask Fanshaw what it meant. Jacob returned to his cabin site to find his brother Noah saddling one of the mules. “Shitfire,” Noah said, “I’m a-gorn back to Tennessee, Jake.” Jacob explained that it was only the aborigine singing some kind of morningsong, but it was only with much conciliation that Jacob persuaded his brother to stay.
It was at the height of one of their arguments about God, much later, that Jacob said to Fanshaw, “If you believe in him so durn much, how come when you git to the ‘amen’ part of yore prayers, you make this here noise that sounds like you feel it aint nary bitty use nohow to be prayin?” Fanshaw stared at him for a long moment before saying, “Oh? You listen to my ‘prayers’?” Jacob said, “Hell’s bells, a body caint help listenin to ’em.” “Be glad then,” Fanshaw retorted, “that there is only me. If my tribesmen were here, we would deafen you.” But he relented, and explained to Jacob that the sob of frustration did not mean that he thought his praying was futile but rather that he was, at that point, given to understand that Wahkontah had chosen, for reasons of His own, to deny Fanshaw’s requests. We all want. We must always continue to want, to desire, even if our wants are not gratified. What did Fanshaw want? He could not tell Jacob; to tell another mortal what one wants greatly decreases one’s chances of getting it—no, it is a guarantee that one will not get it.
But Jacob Ingledew, for all his rough frontiersman demeanor, was a man of good mind, and he could guess the source of Fanshaw’s frustration: surely it had to do with the rest of his tribe not returning. He felt sorry for Fanshaw, but of course if the rest of the tribe did return, which he doubted, he himself would have to move on. He had been told before leaving Tennessee that within a few short years, now that Arkansas had achieved statehood and was no longer a territory, every Indian would have to leave the state.
In the fall, when they were sampling the first run of Jacob’s Arkansas sour mash whiskey (Fanshaw had helped him harvest the corn, and had shown him how to grind it, Indian-fashion, by placing it in a hollowed-out rock—of which there are many in the Ozark streams—and pounding it with a stone pestle), Fanshaw happened to pop a question:
“Why do we drink this stuff?”
“You don’t lak it?” Jacob said. “I ’low as how it aint near as good as that I brung from Tennessee, but…”
“Oh, it is fine. Ripping stuff, old boy. I simply raise the philosophical question: why do we drink it?”
Jacob pondered. “Wal, I kinder relish the taste, myself.”
“Yo. But do we not more relish that which it does to us?”
“I don’t feature drunkenness. I know when to stop.”
“Yo. But in between? Between drunkenness and sobriety there is a wide country, and what is the Name of that Country?”
“Joy?”
“No. Not if, by joy, you mean that kind which, although you have never felt it and thus cannot understand it, comes to the gentleman when with the lady in one-on-top-together-fastened-between. Not a bit of it, old fellow.”
“Wal, what do you call the Country, then?”
“Importance,” Fanshaw uttered, and let the word hover in the air between them like a hummingbird before continuing. “We know that we are nothing, you and I. And it is true, we are as nothing in the sight of Wahkontah. We are but flies he swats in sport. But the pe-tsa-ni—firewater—permits us for a while to forget this. The fire burns away our personal insignificance, and leaves us for a while a great sense of importance.”
“But aint that joy?”
“Not like—” Fanshaw began, but stopped and contemplated Jacob for a moment before declaring, “My friend, some day you must experience the one-on-top-together-fastened-between.”
Jacob kicked a small rock around on the ground for a while and then drew some doodles in the dirt with a stick, and at length said, “Aw, shoot,” and, changing the subject, proposed their topic for debate that day: Which enjoys life more, a short-tailed dog or a long-tailed dog? (Both Fanshaw and Jacob Ingledew had dogs. Fanshaw’s dog was short-tailed, Ingledew’s was a long-tailed hound bitch; these animals had fought one another at first but later seemed to be on amicable terms.) Fanshaw agreed to this topic of debate, and for the next hour the two men matched oratory, but, since there was no referee, the victor could not be decided and each man felt that himself had won.
These debates between Fanshaw and Ingledew were both a sport and a diversion: they gave the two men something to talk about, because often there would be nothing to talk about after exhausting the usual run of topics: weather, crops and the existence of God. A few years later
, every little settlement in the Ozarks had its debating society, and it is thought that their repertoire of topics for debate originated with Jacob Ingledew and Fanshaw. Which is worse, a cold or a hangover? Which is the superior tree, the oak or the pine? Which is worse, blindness or deafness? Which makes better whiskey, springwater or rainwater? Is the earth round or flat? And so on. It was the last named topic which, next to their debates about the existence of God, provided the liveliest disputation.
Fanshaw’s people had long believed that the earth was round and revolved slowly around the sun. This notion struck Jacob as fantastic and incredible. “If thet were so, everbody would git throwed offen it!” was his first reaction to this preposterous concept. Jacob began to believe that such a crackpot concept was the result of living in a round house, and he said so to Fanshaw. But Fanshaw proceeded by skillful argument to state his case, and Jacob lost ground, inch by inch, until he was left with only one line of defense: “Wal, if the earth is round, then we must be on the top side of it, and all them pore devils on the bottom has fell off.”
To this, Fanshaw propounded an original explanation of gravity which I would like to dignify with the title Fanshaw’s Law of Gravity, for, if it is correct, he goes far beyond Newton in explaining that mysterious force, namely, that all objects, all matter, actually weigh twice their apparent weight; the other half of their actual weight creates a counteracting “pull” which is the gravity for the objects on the opposite side of the round globe. Thus, all matter is exerting an even outward pull from the center of the earth which is matched by the inward pull that we ordinarily think of as gravity. This concept was almost beyond Jacob’s power of comprehension, but Fanshaw made it clear and simple by saying, “In other words, everything is holding everything else together.”
After Fanshaw had left that day, and Jacob’s brother Noah came back from where he was hiding in the woods during the Indian’s visit, Jacob told him that the Indian thought the earth was round.
“Shitfire, why don’t ye quit wastin yore time with him?” Noah said. Jacob repeated in detail Fanshaw’s arguments for the earth being round, including his theory of gravity. Noah, however, remained unconvinced. Everybody of any sense knew that the earth was flat. (And indeed, the debating societies of every little settlement in the Ozarks would continue year by year to have this topic in their repertoire, until finally, years later, somebody brought in from St. Louis one of those disturbing volumes known as a “textbook.”)
Early winter found the two friends hunting together, Jacob with his flintlock, Fanshaw with his bow. Again, it would be difficult to decide which of the two was the better marksman; they were both deadly accurate. Jacob’s weapon seemed more effective in killing a bear rather than merely wounding it, but on at least one occasion Jacob’s life was saved when, charged by a wounded bear or panther who still had enough life to bite and scratch, he fell and would have been mangled save for the speedy and accurate arrows of Fanshaw.
Fanshaw’s bow was a large one, made of well-seasoned wood from the bois d’arc, coincidentally the same tree that his house was made of. A small but illuminating digression on language is necessary at this point, to help us get all our arks together. Bois d’arc is of course French and may be translated as Bow Wood, which is one of its names, the others being ironwood, yellowwood, hedge, mock orange, and Osage-orange, the last two referring to the fruit, which is a large yellow ball vaguely resembling an orange but which, as any schoolboy who has ever bitten into one has discovered, is quite bitter. “Osage-orange” is so called because the Osages used it to make their bows with, also their houses.
Arc, and also ark, comes from an Indo-European word root, arkw, which means bow or arrow (it is uncertain which; perhaps both together as a unit, since one is no good without the other). The Old Norse arw supplies our word for arrow. In almost all Indo-European languages, arkw is the root of such words as arc, arcade, arch, architecture, archer (shooter of arrow), arciform, arcuate, etc. Arc is also an obsolete form of ark, which meant originally a chest, box, coffer and hence a place of refuge, as in the Biblical Noah’s vessel and as in all over this present book. Both Chaucer and Milton were wont to spell an arc as curve or arch as ark. The name of our state, Arkansas, is thought to mean in Indian the smoky, bow-shaped river, since Kansas means smoky river and ark means bow (although we should all know that Arkansas does not rhyme with Kansas and is accented on the first syllable). The name of our region, the Ozarks, is said by one early authority (Schoolcraft, who should know) to be compounded from “Osage” (our Indian again) and “Arkansas,” which makes just as much sense as the usual idea that it comes from the French, Aux Arc. Therefore, when we speak of “the bois d’arc in the arciform architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks,” every unit in this sentence can be traced to the same root.
What does it feel like to live inside Fanshaw’s house? To settle this question once and for all, I propose that an enterprising group of students reconstruct an example of it, out in the hilly woods, and spend a night in it. And record their dreams the next morning. Many other tribes of Indians lived in the Ozarks down through history, and many of them lived in recesses under bluffs, caverns if you will, and these were rounded and curvilinear too. It is probably difficult to adapt rectilinear furniture to a curvilinear dwelling, but Fanshaw didn’t have any.
One more round thing, and then we must search for the end of this chapter. In Fanshaw’s garden there had grown a plant which Jacob Ingledew had not seen before. Luxuriant green bushes produced a rounded green fruit which, when ripened, turned red, but had a taste that was not sweet like other fruit but tangy, almost acrid, and produced a feeling of voluptuousness. Upon inquiry from Jacob, Fanshaw said this plant was called Tah May Toh, which could be translated as “love apple.” Even now in early winter Fanshaw had a supply of green ones which were still turning ripe. But he failed in his attempts to get Jacob to sample one. Jacob, perhaps out of a growing sense that all round things, all concepts of roundness, and the supposedly round earth itself, were somehow alien to him, was suspicious that the Tah May Toh was poisonous, and he never ate them. (Later generations of Ingledews would learn to love them, and in fact the only “industry” that ever came to Stay More, unless you want to call Vernon Ingledew’s Ham Processing Plant an industry, was a factory for canning these love apples.)
“It don’t matter to me whether the earth is round or flat,” Jacob said to Fanshaw one evening in the late winter. “I aint gonna git to the other side nohow.”
“Where are you going to get to, old chap?”
“Huh? I’ve done got there.”
“The time has come, now, when we must at last cultivate a topic of discussion which, hitherto, we have avoided: why did you come here and build upon this land?”
“Hit was gittin jist too durn crowded back in Tennessee,” Jacob said. “I purt nigh couldn’t lift my elbow ’thout hittin somebody and the preachers was so thick a feller couldn’t say ‘heck’ without gittin a sermon fer it.”
“But you have never even asked for permission to build here. Stay More is the land of my grandfathers.”
“‘Stay More’?”
Fanshaw chuckled. “Yo. That is what I have come to call it.”
Jacob Ingledew repeated the name a couple of times, and himself chuckled. “I reckon that’ll do as well as ary other name.”
“But you cannot,” Fanshaw said.
“Cannot what?”
“Stay more.”
“Says who?” Jacob demanded. “You fixin to try to run me off?”
“My grandfathers are buried here.”
“My grandchildren will be buried here.”
“Ho. Where is their grandmother?”
“I’ll find one, by and by.”
“Ho.”
Then Fanshaw told him the story of the origin of his people. Once upon a time a snail was washed far down the river by floods. He was a good snail but he was alone. Wahkontah, in appreciation of his goodness and in pity for his
loneliness, caused the snail to sleep for a long, long time. During the sleep, the snail’s entire body was changed. When he awoke he started back into his shell, but it was far too small. Then he looked at himself, and, seeing that he had long legs, he stood up and walked about. As he walked he kept growing. Hair grew on his head, and from his shoulders long, powerful arms grew. This new creature remembered his former home, and walked far back up the river to the home of the snails, but he could not live with them, and he went in search of some place he could call home. When he grew hungry, Wahkontah gave him a bow and arrow and taught him how to get food. Day by day he went out in search of a home. At last the man, for such he had become, came to the hut of a beaver. The old beaver came out, and said, “Who are you and what do you want?” The man told his story and said he was seeking a home. The young man and the beaver were about to fight, when the beaver’s daughter came out and said she would teach the man to build a house, so that he would not have to trespass on others. To this arrangement the old beaver finally agreed. So the beaver’s daughter and the young man went away together, and she taught him how to build a house of bent bois d’arc poles and to thatch it. Because of her kindness, Wahkontah changed the beaver’s daughter into a maiden, and she became the squaw wife of the man. These two were the first of the people, and that is why they wear the beaver skin ornament.
“What is the origin of your people?” Fanshaw then asked him. Jacob, although an ungodly man, knew the story of Adam and Eve. He told this to Fanshaw, who listened attentively. When he had finished, Fanshaw said, “I now propose the topic for our next debate: Which is greater, the story of the snail and the beaver or the story of Adam and Eve?”
The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks Page 2
