Axe, adz, and auger were all it took. And sweat. The reasons they don’t make ’em that way anymore are two: good virgin hardwood is hard to come by, and good lathering sweat seems unnecessary in an age of power machinery. If, as Jacob suspected, laziness may be correlated with sexual activity, then the Ingledew cabin was the product of years of stored-up energy. The two brothers built it, as we have seen, in a fortnight of sunup to sundown sweating. They killed two birds with one stone, however: the trees they cut to build the house cleared a field to plant in.
There is one other thing the cabin has in common with Fanshaw’s place: there is not a bit of metal in it. Astonishing. No nails: the roof boards are tied to the rafters. The door hinges are made of wood. There is no iron. Where would the Ingledews find iron? Even the works of their clock were all wood.
The first “visitor” to Stay More was a young clock peddler from Connecticut, named Eli Willard. He showed up at the Ingledew cabin one evening not long after Fanshaw had permanently departed, and the Ingledew dog barked at him. This dog, whom we had little reason to notice in the previous chapter, was a hound bitch named, despite her sex, Tige or Tyge. One of the main functions of a dog was to bark at strangers and thus alert the house. But so far Tige had not barked, and Jacob wondered if she still knew how. Sometimes he would bark at her in an effort to stimulate her barking but she had simply stared at him with what might be called doggy disconcertion. So now, when the clock peddler showed up and Tige began barking, the brothers, who were inside the cabin eating their supper, were at first puzzled.
“Is that ole Tige?” Noah wondered aloud.
“Caint be,” Jacob allowed, but he went to investigate, and saw the clock peddler, Eli Willard, sitting on his horse. Strapped to the saddlebag was one (1) shelf clock.
“Good evening, sir,” said Eli Willard to Jacob.
“Howdy, stranger,” Jacob replied. “Light down and hitch.” As there was no hitching post at the Ingledew cabin this invitation must have been merely a formality, like “stay more.” Nevertheless Eli Willard dismounted and found a large rock with which to weight down the ends of his horse’s reins. Then he observed, “The road seems to end here.”
“What road?” Jacob was curious to know.
The man pointed north. “Why, the road that I came here on. All the way from Connecticut.”
Jacob had never heard of Connecticut. It sounded like some kind of Indian name, so he figured maybe it was over in Indian Territory. It was news to him that a road led from Stay More all the way over there. Jacob looked the other way, south, beyond his house, and observed, “Wal, I reckon it don’t go no farther.”
“A coincidence, and a good one,” Eli Willard declared, “because I have only one clock left.” He unstrapped the lone shelf clock from his saddlebag, and held it up for Jacob’s inspection, turning it slowly around for him to admire the woodwork, and then winding it (even the key was wood) and showing Jacob that it ran properly. Since all the parts were wood, there could be no chime or gong, but this clock had a sort of rattling mechanism, so that it could “strike” the hour by making a noise that sounded like a woodpecker close up. Jacob was very impressed with this. “My last clock,” Eli Willard reiterated. “I was going to keep it, out of sentimental reasons. But to honor your status as my last and final contact, I can bear to let you have it. Here.” And he gave the clock into Jacob’s hands.
“Wal, gosh dawg, thet’s awful good of ye,” Jacob said. “Caint I give ye ary thang in return?”
“Twenty dollars,” Eli Willard said.
“Huh? Why, that’s money!” Jacob exclaimed.
“Legal tender, cash, currency, coin of the realm, oil of palm,” Eli Willard said. “Two sawbucks on the barrelhead.”
Jacob turned the pockets on his buckskins inside out. “I aint got a cent to my name,” he declared. “And neither has he”—indicating Noah, who had emerged from the cabin to witness the transaction. Noah also turned the pockets of his buckskins inside out.
Eli Willard looked from one brother to the other, and shook his head in sympathy. “Yes, it’s hard to wrest a living from this rocky soil, isn’t it? Be that as it may, allow me to present this clock to your wife regardless.” He moved toward the door of the cabin.
“Uh, we aint got ary,” Jacob pointed out.
“Allow me to place it upon your mantel then,” Eli Willard said, and continued entering the cabin. Actually, this was a ruse that he, and dozens of other Connecticut clock peddlers swarming through the Ozarks, used to gain admission to the interior of the dwelling, to see if there was anything of value inside that might be traded for the clock. Eli Willard discovered there was no mantel-shelf over the fireplace. No nails in the house, he found a peg on the wall and hung the clock on it. “There!” he said. “A handsome addition to your humble home.” Then he began to look around at the contents of the room.
The Ingledew cabin was, of course, only one room, unlike so many other buildings in our study. Here are the objects that Eli Willard saw: two beds “built-in,” the corners of the cabin forming two of their four sides, mattresses of ticking brought from Tennessee stuffed with cornshucks grown in Arkansas, resting upon rude slats and covered with patchwork quilts (heirlooms brought from Tennessee); two ladder-back chairs which Noah carved from maple and seated with woven hickory splints; a simple table he also carved from maple; two lamps, the fuel of which was bear’s oil; miscellaneous cooking utensils (which, come to think of it, were made of iron and seem to contradict what I said earlier about there being no metal in the house); Noah’s Bible (which he could not read; upon his departure from Tennessee his mother had forced it upon him, having given up all hope for Jacob); on the walls things hanging: their two flintlock rifles and powder horns propped up on racks of deer antlers; two large deerskins sewed up to become vessels, one for bear’s oil, the other for wild honey (these, incidentally, were the only things Eli Willard saw that interested him, but they were too large to pack off on his horse); a water bucket homefashioned of red cedar with a gourd dipper in it; from the joists of the ceiling were strung dried things, tobacco, sliced pumpkin, red pepper; and, finally, several demijohns of Arkansas sour mash (but Eli Willard was a teetotaler).
“Well,” Eli Willard concluded, “I am not above accepting a note of credit.” Then he explained that he would return in six months and, if the gentlemen were satisfied with their clock, they could pay him at that time. If not satisfied, they could return their clock, or, better, Eli Willard would replace it with one more satisfactory. So he got Jacob’s signature on an I.O.U. for twenty dollars, shook hands with both men, and began to disappear.
“Stay more!” Jacob invited. “You caint go rushin off this time of evenin. It’ll be pitch dark soon. Stay the night.”
“Busy, busy,” was all Eli Willard replied, and rode his horse off into the dusk. The brothers wondered where he would spend the night. Maybe he didn’t spend the night. Maybe he just went to sleep on his horse and kept on going. At any rate, the brothers would not see him again for six months, when he would return for his money, and they knew they had better get to work and do something to earn twenty dollars in cash money. So they got to work.
Now that the redskin squaw was no longer there to tempt him, Jacob found that he had a lot of energy again. Both brothers rose at dawn, and after a quick breakfast (there was no coffee, not even green coffee; instead a rather palatable substitute was made from roasted corn meal and molasses) they would plunge into their work: clearing land and more land, felling trees and burning them and digging up the stumps by hitching the mule (there was only one now; a panther got the other) to the stump to pull it out: it took weeks of such labor to clear a mere acre. Each night right after supper the brothers fell into their beds, exhausted but satisfied.
Although the Ingledew cabin was medieval, we may note a few features it has in common with classical colonial buildings: the saddle-notched ends of the logs overlap one another exactly in the same manner as quoins, but where
as the quoins on most American colonial houses were false quoins made of flat boards, the quoins of the log cabin are true quoins holding not just one log to the other, but one wall to the other: they hold the whole house together. In classical Greek architecture, it is thought that the grooves in the triglyph of the frieze are a translation into marble of the grooves scored into the wooden ceiling joists of the original temples, which were made of wood instead of marble. This doesn’t have anything to do, directly, with the Ingledew cabin, except to indicate that even the most elaborate classical detail has its origins in such humble structures as a log cabin’s quoins.
The dimensions of the Ingledew cabin, and of space in general at Stay More, may be measured in “hats”—one hat being the distance that Jacob Ingledew could toss his coonskin headgear: approximately 16.5 feet. The Ingledew cabin is almost exactly one hat long by one hat wide, or, simply, one hat square, and also one hat in elevation, from base to gable-peak. When the brothers measured the size of a tree they had felled, or a piece of the acreage they had cleared, or the distance from their backyard to their spring, Jacob would put his coonskin cap to good use. It was a satisfying life for both of them, building and felling and clearing and pacing off, hat after hat.
Lest we get too pastoral a picture of their life and work, however, brief mention should be made of their afflictions, plagues and pests. In addition to the abovementioned panther who in the dark of night screamed at their mules, petrifying them, then attacked and killed one of them and dragged it off into the woods and devoured it, the Ingledews were constantly assailed by natural enemies, both vegetable and animal: poison ivy, poison oak, poison sumac, stinging nettles, rattlesnakes, copperheads, cottonmouths, leeches, stinging scorpions, deadly spiders, wasps, bees, yellow-jackets, hornets. One would almost believe that Nature did not want the Ingledews. Maybe She didn’t.
What was worse in terms of pure torment were the ticks, the chiggers, and the frakes. Because these afflictions are not universally known but are particularly severe in the Ozarks, a word of description may be in order. Everybody gets mosquitoes, cockroaches, lice, fleas, houseflies, ants, gnats, moths, etc., and the Ingledews had more than their share of these too, but they were particularly plagued by ticks, chiggers, and frakes. Ticks (order Acarina, suborder Mesostigmata) are medium-sized to minute arachnids, coming in many shapes and colors; under a magnifying glass they are hideous, especially their mouths, with which they attach themselves to the body and suck blood until engorged and sometimes thereafter; some of them are also carriers of dreadful fevers. Chiggers (suborder Prostigmata, family Thrombidiidae) are tiny red mites, almost invisible to the naked eye, which also attach themselves to the body with a hideous mouth, and produce swelling and intense itching. Frakes (it is always plural; while a man might say he has a chigger or a tick, he always has the frakes), like many viruses, are not fully understood by medical science; most medical experts consider it a usually benign fungus, but others are convinced it is a variant form of herpes; all it has in common with ticks and chiggers is a predilection for the genital area; in fact, whereas ticks and chiggers may afflict any part of the body, the frakes is confined to the genital area, where it produces a rash of small blisters that eventually erupt with a discharge. Unlike ticks and chiggers too, which only come in warm weather, the frakes may strike at any time of the year. Experts are agreed that the only known predisposing cause of the frakes is hard work. It used to be thought that overwork was the cause, but now it is known that any long, sustained task, any hard and fruitful labor, is liable to bring on the frakes, as if Nature were punishing man for his puny efforts to accomplish something. This is borne out by the fact that while ticks and chiggers afflict many animals other than man, the only animals that get the frakes are horses, mules, sled dogs, beasts of burden, etc., that is, working animals. The itching is not quite as severe as that produced by chiggers and ticks, but the worst effect is the aftermath: that for weeks, months, possibly years after the condition has cleared up, the sufferer is left feeling that there is nothing worth doing, that all labor is vain, that life is a bad and pointless joke. The Ingledew brothers were destined to get the frakes on several occasions. The pity is, there was never anybody to tell them what caused it.
The clock which came from Connecticut was not, it must be said, a very good one. One night at midnight it struck twenty-six times. “Git up, Jake!” Noah hollered. “Shitfire, it’s later than I’ve ever knowed it to be!” Jacob suspected that something in the inner works was amiss, for at the rate the clock was running, by his calculation, he would be a hundred and forty-three years old when the clock peddler returned. Methuselah and the other longevous old men of the Bible must have got their clocks from Connecticut. Still, Jacob dutifully wound up the clock each night before retiring. “If you got it, use it,” must have been his philosophy. He was, however, required to silence the striking mechanism after the novelty of it wore off and it became annoying. After three weeks of careful investigation, Jacob found a way to open the back of the clock, and he stuffed a wadded-up vacated wasp’s nest into the striking mechanism, silencing it. Jacob continued keeping time by the sun and moon and stars, but it was a diversion to watch the minute hand of his clock running around and around in the still cabin.
Not all of their land was forested; the portion that bordered the creek was flat, rich soil which was “bottom” land. But except for the clearing where the Indian camp had been, it was all covered with a dense growth of cane, bamboo, leatherwood, hazel, grapevines and large saw briars, which had to be grubbed and burned, a job which made clearing the forest seem easy. This good bottom land would be capable of producing fifty bushels of corn to the acre, but getting it cleared was the worst job the brothers had yet done, and after three weeks of clearing bottom land Noah Ingledew was “plumb beat out” and came down with the first attack of the frakes. He didn’t know what it was, and neither did Jacob. Noah took off his buckskins and anointed the frakes with bear’s oil, but that didn’t do any good. He made a salve by boiling mullein leaves in lard, and applied that to his frakes, with negligible results. He resorted then to more drastic remedies, concocting a poultice the essential ingredient of which was panther urine, difficult to obtain. Panthers were easy enough to come by, but persuading one to urinate into a container was entirely a different matter, and since Noah was too weakened by his frakes to do the job, Jacob had to do it for him. Yet even after all the trouble that Jacob went to, the resultant panther-piss poultice had no effect whatever on Noah’s frakes. Jacob offered to hitch the mule to the wagon and drive Noah back east in search of a doctor, but Noah protested that he wasn’t worth it, for already the severe sense of worthlessness that comes after an attack of the frakes was beginning to affect him. He took to his bed and just lay there day after day. In time the frakes erupted and then began to heal over, but more and more did Noah feel that work is senseless, toil vain, life pointless, and he would not get up from his bed. In a way, he was unintentionally evening the score with Jacob, whose work Noah had done back during the time when Jacob didn’t feel like working on account of fooling around with that Indian squaw. Now Jacob had to do all the work, but Noah mocked him.
“Hit aint no use,” Noah would say. “Shitfire, yo’re jist workin yore butt off fer nuthin. Earworms or worse will git all yore corn, wait and see if they or worse don’t.”
And yet, for all his sense of futility, Noah felt one redeeming emotion, which can only be called a sense of snugness. Lying there day after day, thinking few thoughts, having no daydreams or aspirations of any kind, he was aware only of the walls and roof of his cabin, and aware of how he was sheltered, of how his ark was a refuge, snug, cozy, restful. It was home. Our illustration cannot depict the site of the Ingledews’ cabin, but the site contributed to the feeling of snugness, because the cabin was in a holler—by local definition, “a little hollered out place at the foot of a mountain.” While the land that the cabin was on was level enough for a garden and one of their cornpa
tches, the land on both sides of the cabin rose abruptly up the mountainside, while behind the cabin the holler extended some three hundred feet to the Ingledews’ spring, where it began an abrupt ascent of the mountain. So in his snug cabin in this snug hollow Noah aestivated. Winter came and he hibernated. Jacob never scolded him for his inactivity. He knew it could happen to himself at any time…and it would.
In the autumn Jacob went off to look for a town where he could sell his pelts. He knew nothing of the geography of the region. He knew only a few rough basics: that civilization lay mostly toward the east, that Indian Territory was mostly in the west, that in the north it got colder and in the south it got warmer. He had no idea in which direction he would most likely find a town. His agricultural labors had produced no cash crop this season, but his spare-time trapping, for beaver, ’coon, otter and mink, had produced a few dozen pelts that ought to bring enough to pay off the clock peddler with enough left over to indulge one of Jacob’s dreams: buying a cow. Next to whiskey, milk was Jacob’s favorite beverage, but a year and a half had passed since he’d last had a drop of milk. Also, getting a cow was the first step toward starting a herd of beef.
But Jacob didn’t know where any towns were. The last one they had passed, coming from Tennessee, must have been a hundred miles back on the White River. Still, if he could just find a small settlement where he could unload his pelts and buy a cow, he would be satisfied. He took an egg-sized rock and threw it as hard as he could, straight up into the air. Whichever direction it fell, that way Jacob would go. The rock stayed up in the air a long time, but by and by Jacob heard it coming down. He couldn’t see it for all the woods, but he could hear it crashing through the trees, and the noise was coming from the south. There wasn’t any road or trail at all that went south, so Jacob couldn’t take the mule. He strapped as many pelts as he could carry on his back, and with his long rifle he set out on foot.
The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks Page 4
