“Shitfire,” Noah remarked. “They must be choppin the woods all to hell.”
Jacob went to investigate and discovered that the family had elected to settle less than half a mile from his own place. Four of the older boys and Lizzie Swain were busy chopping at oak trees, the beginning of the structure that we shall examine in the following chapter. Jacob went up to Lizzie Swain and took the axe out of her hands.
When he did, she looked startled, and asked, “Air we too close on ye?” and the boys raised their axes to defend her, but Jacob simply took the axe and began swinging it at the tree that Lizzie Swain had been chopping. He set a pace for the other boys, but his tree was felled long before theirs were. “That’s right neighborly of ye,” Lizzie Swain said to him. He started in on another tree.
Mrs. Elizabeth Hansell Swain was a true courageous pioneer mother—the first white woman in Stay More. Her husband had died the year before back in Cullowhee, North Carolina, and she decided to bring her fourteen children west in order that, as she would later explain to Jacob, “they could grow up with the country.” All of the children threw their hearts into the idea, and although they had suffered a number of troubles and privations on the long journey (they had left North Carolina over two months previously, in the dead of winter), they were not daunted but overjoyed to have reached their new home at last. While the older boys chopped down the virgin oaks, the older girls and their mother busied themselves constructing a campfire and preparing a first supper that would be a feast in celebration of arrival. Jacob was felling his eighth tree when he heard a dinner horn blow, and, looking up, saw Lizzie Swain blowing it and welcoming him to supper. Jacob had the first fried chicken and the first milk that he would eat and drink in Stay More, and this was the origin of the favorite meal of the people. He liked it so much that, after supper, as dusk settled in the woods, it took little urging from the children to get him to open up and tell about his adventures, and they all sat around and listened to him tell about the Indian Fanshaw and his strange beliefs and customs, such as maidens proposing to braves by giving them cornbread, and he gave them a bloodcurdling imitation of the Dawn Chant, and the children listened, awed and entranced. Years afterward they would tell their own children of these things, so that was the origin of the “oral tradition” which was so strong in the Ozarks for over a hundred years, and perhaps even today has not completely died out.
Noah Ingledew did not help the Swains build their cabin. Jacob apologized for his brother, explaining that he had recently had a terrible affliction from which he was still recovering. Lizzie Swain pressed for details of the affliction, because she was an expert in home remedies and herbal cures, but Jacob blushed and said it wasn’t “decent” to describe. Jacob also was considerably embarrassed in his plan to get his heifer serviced by the Swains’ bull. (In the Ozarks a man would rather cut his tongue out than utter the word “bull” in the presence of a female. There were many circumlocutions: “male,” “topcow,” “cow-critter,” “surly,” “gentleman-cow,” “brute,” “cow-brute,” or simply “he-cow,” but Jacob could not employ these euphemisms if his object was to ask Lizzie for her bull’s service. At first he tried to get around the problem by dealing with Lizzie’s oldest son, Murray, but Murray just said, “Ask Maw.”) But Jacob just couldn’t. He kept putting it off, until finally the heifer Jerse came into heat again and set up such a loud bawling that all the Swains could hear her from half a mile off. “Sounds lak somebody’s heifer wants a calf,” Lizzie Swain remarked. Jacob didn’t say anything. “Wonder whose it is,” she went on. He couldn’t tell her. “You said you and yore brother was the only folks around,” Lizzie observed. Jacob could only nod. “Did ye happen to notice, we’uns got a right full-blooded topcow,” Lizzie informed him. Jacob gulped and nodded again. “Considerin all the help you’re a-givin us a-buildin our house, the least we could do is lend ye our topcow.” Jacob tried to find words to thank her, but could find no words. “Murray,” she said to her oldest boy, “you and Orville and Leo take ole Horns up yonder where that heifer’s a-bawlin, and see if he caint git her to hesh up.”
Jacob went with them, helped them, then returned to his work, the work of building their house, and worked with a new vengeance that came both from gratitude and from his inability to express himself. Soon the Swains’ house was finished. The “community effort” of over a dozen people at work on the house-raising (even the youngest children helped with the job of chinking the cracks between the logs with clay and straw) reminded Jacob of Fanshaw’s description of the Indian’s ritual house-raising, and he told the Swain children about it: how after the maiden had proposed to the young brave by offering him a piece of cornbread, the whole community joined together for the festival of lodge-building for the couple. Jacob brought the Swain children to his own place one day and showed them his corncrib, which was made from the two halves of Fanshaw’s house reversed upon one another to form a large egg-shaped structure resting upon a cradle of stone. He explained how the house had looked in its original form. The older children touched it and peered inside, but the younger children were afraid even to touch it.
Our first chapter ended with a leaving; this one ends with a coming—appropriately in the early spring. The Swains’ house is finished in a fortnight, and they can turn their attention to the land: pulling the stumps of the oaks they have cut and plowing the earth and planting it. I think of the smiling faces of the children, and Lizzie pleased with her new home, and the smell of fresh-plowed earth, and the opening of dogwood and redbud blossom, and then somehow the thought of all the pests and plagues and vermin is endurable.
Weeks and weeks were to pass before, one day, Sarah Swain, the oldest girl, past twenty, hair dark as pitch, would show up at the door of Jacob’s cabin with a piece of freshbaked cornbread, which she would offer into his astonished hands.
Chapter three
At first glance it seems similar to the Ingledew cabin, but in the Ozarks, unlike other areas of the country where prepackaged houses come monotonously identical, there were no two dwellings exactly alike. We are impressed with the two most conspicuous differences: the Swain house has a porch, and its timbers are hewed rather than left round. There are other differences, subtle to notice or not visible in our illustration: a puncheon floor inside, whereas the Ingledew cabin had no floor but earth. (Puncheons are simply split logs with their flat side up, very sturdy, and over the years worn smooth and shiny by the bare feet of many children.) The Swain chimney is slightly taller than the Ingledew chimney, reducing the hazard of igniting the roof. The gable ends are shingled in the Swain house, rather fancifully, and the roof covering is true riven shingles, not boards. The chinking in the interstices between the timbers is not simply mud but more durable clay, finished off with a layer of white lime plaster. There is, as it were, a second story, which was the sleeping quarters for the seven Swain boys: a loft under the gables, reached by a ladder through a scuttle-hole. And there is a window! If we look carefully we can find it, just to the side of the chimney. Glass being unavailable, the window was “glazed” with a bobcat skin, boiled in lye and scraped and oiled, nailed over it. The bobcat skin was translucent but not transparent, letting in light but no prying eyes.
Notice that the corners, the ends of the logs, are not saddle-notched but dovetailed. This makes for a tighter fit and a more sturdy building. The hardest job in building this cabin, which fell exclusively to Jacob Ingledew and the older Swain boy, Murray, was the hewing of these logs. A chalk line was stretched the length of the log and snapped, marking it along the rounded edge; then a chopping axe was sunk into this line at intervals, and then a broadaxe (with curved handle so as to avoid hitting one’s ankles) was used to hack off the rounded sides of the log. It was painstaking, grueling work—and Murray Swain, as we shall see, came down with the frakes at the end of it. But the result of this work was a house that not only looks much more “modern” than the Ingledew cabin, but is also more durable. The Swain house is th
e first dwelling in our study which still exists today, although, being unoccupied, its porch has collapsed and most of the shingles have blown off the roof and it is used only by young boys looking for a place to sneak a smoke or older boys with their girls looking for a place to sneak a joy. Until about twenty-five years ago, however, it had been lived in continuously by five generations of Swains.
The similarities between the Swain house and the Ingledew cabin are apparent: both have only one door and both are roughly sixteen feet (or one hat) square. The architect of the Swain house is not easy to establish; the similarities between it and the Ingledew cabin would lead some scholars to attribute it to Jacob Ingledew, but since the Swain house was essentially Lizzie Swain’s house, we may assume that she had a large, if not exclusive, hand in the design of it, particularly the porch, which is like a woman’s sunbonnet shading her face, and which provided extra room in temperate weather for the crowded family. Undoubtedly Jacob Ingledew and Lizzie Swain may have discussed, or even argued, several points in the design and construction of the house, just as, later, after she had become his mother-in-law, he would, as men are always doing with their mothers-in-law, argue: they would argue religion, they would argue folk medicine and superstition, they would argue the use of alcoholic beverages, and above all they would argue the naming of things and places in Stay More. It was Lizzie who named Swains Creek and Bantam (Banty) Creek (after one of her little fowl who drowned there) and Leapin Rock (after one of her children who would leap from it) whereas Jacob named Ingledew Mountain and its benches (“West Banch, North Banch,” etc.) and various individual holes of water in the streams that Lizzie had named, Ole Bottomless in Banty Creek, Ole Beaver, Ole Crappie and Ole Stubtoe in Swains Creek. Lizzie also wanted to name the town itself—Cullowhee after her hometown—but Jacob pointed out to her that it had already been named Stay More and so it would stay.
Did Jacob accept that cornbread? The whole idea was Lizzie’s, to begin with. She knew that Sarah was past marryin’ age, and where else was she going to find a man? Jacob might be ten years older than Sarah, but he was ten years younger than Lizzie and besides Lizzie had already had all the children she wanted. Sarah was hard to sell on the idea, though. Like all the Swain children she idolized Jacob Ingledew and for that very reason the thought of marriage to him frightened her, almost as if it had been suggested that she go off and live with God as His wife. It would be an honor to be Mrs. God, but wouldn’t it also be a terrible responsibility? When none of these arguments dissuaded her mother from trying to persuade her to take some cornbread to Jacob, Sarah argued that a man Jacob’s age who had not married probably didn’t care for women in the first place and would just laugh at her if she gave him some cornbread and then she would just die of mortification.
Still, Lizzie Swain kept pestering Sarah about it, in such a persistent way that Sarah thought she would lose her mind unless she yielded. Yet even after she yielded, she was reluctant. Her mother baked the cornbread and then spaced the twelve other children (Murray was in bed with the frakes) along the route to Jacob’s cabin at strategic intervals in descending order of age. Then she put the cornbread into Sarah’s hands and shoved her out the door with such force that Sarah kept trotting as far as where Aurora was standing, and Aurora gave her a shove that sent her trotting on to Orville, who shoved her to Zenobia, and so on, down the line, down the road to Jacob’s cabin, where little Gilbert was waiting, last in line, last to push. He was only four, and pushing was a difficult feat for his small age, but his mother had patiently explained it to him, how it was necessary in order for him to have a “brother-in-law,” making brother-in-law sound like something wonderful, so when Sarah came trotting up, her black hair streaming behind her, he clenched his little tongue between his teeth and got his hands on her buttocks and shoved for all he was worth, propelling her right up against Jacob’s door, which she banged against, causing Jacob to open it, and her momentum was such that even though her body had stopped moving her hands kept going and thrust the cornbread into Jacob’s hands.
Then she just stood there with her hands behind her and stared down at her feet and began to get very red in the face. Jacob duplicated her posture and color exactly, except that he couldn’t put his hands behind his back because he had cornbread in them. He just stood there and looked down at what was in his hands and got even redder in the face than Sarah. For a long time they just stood there stiff and glowing like a pair of branding irons. Finally Jacob’s brother Noah got up from his bed and came to see what it was all about. He stood there and stared back and forth at the two of them. Probably he didn’t grasp the significance of the cornbread, because, being not just afraid of but uninterested in Indians, he had never been told about the customs of Fanshaw’s people. But he was very concerned to see these two human beings standing in front of one another with downcast but red-hot faces. “S—tfire!” he exclaimed, and snatched the cedar water bucket off the wall and, first removing the cornbread from Jacob’s hands so it wouldn’t get hit, doused the heads of both of them. It is very difficult to blush with a wet head, so, since they could no longer blush, they laughed, which is also a nervous reflex. They laughed until the water on their faces was joined by their tears, and Noah looked at them like they were both crazy, and kept mumbling his favorite expletive, which, however, was somewhat cleaned up for Sarah’s benefit, so that it sounded more like “shoot fair” or “sheet far.”
And that was it. That was all there was to it. Jacob never said “I do,” or “I will” or even “Thanks for the cornbread” or even “Aw, gosh dawg and shucks.” Even today, in some of the big weddings in the Ozarks, people do not shower the bride and groom with rice but with water. At that time, of course, there was no church anywhere near Stay More, nor even a circuit rider or “saddlebag preacher,” and even if there had been, he could not legitimately have married an infidel like Jacob Ingledew. So, hand in hand, Jacob and Sarah simply returned to Lizzie’s house, Jacob gathering sisters-in-law and brothers-in-law right and left along the way. At Lizzie’s house, Sarah announced to her mother, “Maw, we’re spliced.”
The month, come to think of it, was June.
“Already?” Lizzie Swain exclaimed. “What didje do, jist jump over a broomstick together?”
“No. Noah, Noah…he dumped a bucket of water on us.”
“Wal, bless yore hearts, I’m so happy fer yuns,” Lizzie said and embraced and kissed them both, and began sniffling. After she got control of her emotions, she said to Jacob, “But if it wouldn’t be too much bother, could ye read us a little from the Bible fer the occasion?”
Elizabeth Swain, like all of her children, like, in fact, everybody in Stay More for years and years, except Jacob, was unable to read. (One must never say “illiterate” since it is so easily confused with “illegitimate,” a fighting word.) In later years, when he began teaching school, Jacob wondered if his unique peculiarity, his ability to read, was perhaps a curse upon him, and for at least the length of his tenure as schoolmaster, reading was not one of the subjects in the curriculum. Lizzie did, however, have a Bible, an old heirloom, which she often touched, and whose wood-engraving illustrations she often “read,” because she was a very Godfearing person. Jacob, although ungodly, did not mind reading from the Bible on this occasion of their marriage; it was the least he could do as a substitute for going hundreds of miles in search of a preacher, and maybe having to pay the man cash money, at that.
But the trouble was, he didn’t know where to look, in the Bible, for an appropriate passage. He let the book fall open at random, and began reading aloud at random in the Book of Second Kings, “But Rabshakeh said unto them, Hath my master sent me to thy master, and to thee, to speak these words? hath he not sent me to the men which sit on the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you?” Jacob slammed the Bible shut, grumbling, “Blackguardy book. I don’t know how to use it.”
But then he remembered a passage from Genesis that he had
read when debating Fanshaw on the origin of man, having to do with the marriage of Adam and Eve. He read this. “And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him,” and “And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh—” he would have read more, but Lizzie and Sarah, and all the female Swains, were sniveling and boohooing so loudly they drowned him out. He returned the Bible to Lizzie, and took his bride by the hand and led her back to his own place.
With a stick he gouged a groove across the dirt floor of his cabin, right down the middle, dividing the room into two halves. “That’s yourn,” he said to Noah. “This is ourn.” But Noah got busy and built a small loft up under the gables, and moved his bed up there. It was his first activity since he had been stricken with the frakes the year before, and it was the beginning of his return to normal life.
Jacob and Sarah Ingledew did not consummate their marriage on the bridal night. As soon as it got dark, their cabin was surrounded by a horrendous din: rifles firing, drums beating, cats howling, pans banging, cowbells clanging, hands clapping, lips whistling, horns blaring, hounds bugling, it was all hell broke loose and the roof was raised an inch or two. Investigating with his lantern, Jacob discovered that it was the entire human and animal population of Stay More, serenading the newlyweds.
The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks Page 6
