But we should know this much, about all of those early houses in Stay More, in contrast to all of the houses that we live in today: the very architecture of “garrison”-type houses, hermetic as it was, insulating and isolating the inhabitants from extremes of hot and cold, the possibly hostile wilderness, etc., fostered because of this an atmosphere of family “togetherness” more intense than any that has ever existed since. By closing the family in on itself, the architecture forced the people of these families into a happy intimacy which we cannot comprehend because we have never known it. There were few or no secrets in these families.
In the case of the Swains, the atmosphere of togetherness was so intense that they thought of themselves not as individuals but as parts of one person. We have already seen an example in the way they cooperated as a team to propel Sarah along the route to Jacob’s cabin and heart. But that was nothing. To observe the degree of their absorption one in another we would have to join them at the table, where there was never any need for anybody to ask to have something passed because everybody knew who wanted what and when and how much. They knew, the Swains, all of them, and nobody ever had to ask to have anything passed. When one of them was supremely happy, they were all supremely happy, and when one of them was sad, they were all sad. The only exception to this, strangely, was Murray’s frakes, which seems to be the one condition whose mood is not contagious, the one condition that must be suffered alone, without empathy from those so close around one. Whatever it was, it was not empathy that caused Sarah to climb up to Murray’s bed.
But Murray did not improve. In addition to his usual feeling of worthlessness, he developed a strange sensation that can only be called a kind of stationary acrophobia. The boys’ sleeping loft was not all that high; just about nine feet above the floor; and indeed it was not the loft that he was afraid of falling out of. Nor his bed, which was a scant two feet high. He was simply afraid of falling out of…of…well, he was simply afraid of falling. In his dreams, when he managed to sleep, he was always falling. Not from anything nor to anything, but falling. He would wake with a cry from these dreams, and, because there were no secrets in those families, in those houses, he would tell his dream to his brothers, and they to his mother and sisters, so that when in the deep of night thereafter anyone was wakened from their sleep by Murray’s cries, they would simply realize, “Murray is fallin,” and turn over and go back to sleep.
Lizzie consulted Noah Ingledew, who enjoyed some esteem as the first person to catch and suffer and endure and survive the frakes, but Noah could not remember having had any sensation of falling, and thus was not able to offer any advice. Lizzie then consulted with Jacob, who, although he had not yet experienced the frakes, was looked upon as the village sage. Jacob agreed to study the problem. He got a stick and sat with it and whittled at it with his new pocketknife. He studied and studied, whittling stick after stick. He wished Fanshaw were still around; Fanshaw might know some answers to what might help acrophobia (although Jacob, of course, did not know or use that word); whatever the condition was, it had to be related to gravity, and Fanshaw was an expert on gravity.
Jacob whittled his sticks and meditated upon how and why objects fall. At length he formulated two important premises: (1) an object must fall from somewhere, and (2) an object must stop falling when it gets to somewhere. He demonstrated and proved these concepts by throwing a rock straight up into the air as hard as he could. The rock rose and rose, but by and by Jacob heard it coming down, crashing through the trees and then making a dull thud as it hit the ground. Now the question was: where did the rock fall from? From the hand of Jacob who had thrown it, or from some unspecified point at which the rock could no longer rise? The latter, he believed, and suddenly realized, Murray Swain is falling from the place at which he knows he caint rise any farther.
He understood that much about the frakes. The next question was: when would he stop falling? When would he hit the ground? Or could somebody catch him? How? Jacob tried another experiment: he went out into his open pasture where there were no trees, and threw another rock straight up into the air and searched for it as it was coming down and ran over beneath it and cupped his hands and tried to catch it. The first few times he tried this, he missed, and the rock either hit the ground or struck him painfully on his head or shoulders. Soon Sarah and Noah and all of the Swains except Murray gathered around to watch Jacob trying to catch rocks. “S—tfire,” Noah remarked to Sarah. “You ortent to have let him out of the house, Sarey.” But finally Jacob succeeded in catching a rock, and then another, and still yet another—and by indirection commenced the legendary Ingledew prowess at that sport which, by fabulous coincidence, was being invented on that same day, at that same moment, by Abner Doubleday in Coopers-town, N.Y.
No element of sport, however, entered Jacob’s mind; he was dead serious, and after he had succeeded in catching several rocks in succession, he stopped throwing them and came and said to the others, “I think I got it.” Then he told Lizzie that they should keep a watch on Murray when he was sleeping, and if he started tossing and turning and acting like he was about to cry out, they should hold him and whisper in his ear, “I’ve caught ye!” That very night Lizzie took one of the lamps made from a sycamore ball floating in a saucer of bear’s grease and she lit it and left it beside Murray’s bed, and then in shifts she and her children kept watch on Murray until, sure enough, he began tossing and turning and acting like he was getting ready to cry out, when Orville, who was on the shift at that moment, leaned down and clutched him and whispered in his ear, “I’ve caught ye!” whereupon Murray smiled in his sleep and stopped tossing, stopped falling apparently, stopped having any but pleasant dreams: of tall wheat waving in the field, of the creek tumbling over shoals, of a cool dipper of spring water on a hot day, of fried chicken, of his sister Sarah’s warmth and depth and damp. The Swains repeated this magic incantation whenever Murray had dreams of falling, until, eventually, he seemed to be cured. Then Lizzie Swain went to Jacob and announced, “We’uns done had a ’lection, and all voted to proclaim ye mayor of Stay More,” a title that Jacob would retain for the rest of his life, even concurrently with, years later, the far grander title of governor of the whole State of Arkansas.
But Murray was not cured. Cured of dreaming dreams of falling, yes, but not of the core of his acrophobia, which festered until it erupted: one day he left his bed and dressed and went out of the house and climbed the mountain behind it until he came to a lofty projection of bluff that jutted out from the side of the mountaintop some three hundred feet (or more accurately, nineteen hats) above the mountainslope below. Young Gilbert, the Swain’s least-un, had followed Murray to see where he was going, and it was he who ran home to report it to his mother, who in turn summoned Jacob, who assured her, “I’ll catch him,” and ran up the mountainslope, fully determined to attempt to break Murray’s fall with his own arms or body, a rash resolution which, had he been able to carry it out, would have killed himself or crippled himself for life. But when he got to that area of the mountainslope directly beneath the bluff jutting out from the mountaintop, Murray was already falling, falling, and though Jacob cried out “I’ll catch ye!” and “I’ve caught ye!” he could not, would not. Limbs of trees deflected the plummet of the body away from his grasp but did not soften the descent enough to keep Murray from slamming into that which awaits the fall of all. Jacob would never forget the sound, all of the parts of the sound: of flesh violently bruised, of lungs expelled, of bones snapping, of blood spurting. Some months later, when he himself would lie abed with the frakes and the fear of, not of falling but of getting the fear of falling, he would load his rifle and instruct Sarah to use it upon him if ever he left the house except to relieve himself out back.
Murray Swain was the founder of the Stay More cemetery. There’s an old story that when the next wave of settlers came into Stay More, six families from various parts of eastern Tennessee and northern Georgia, the men were gathered at the Mayor
’s—Jacob’s—house for the formality of requesting his permission to settle. One man declared that he would like to start a blacksmith shop. Another said that he intended to start a sheep ranch. Another declared his intention to start a trading post. Still another was going to start a gristmill. Each of the men had some intention to contribute to the establishment of the village, except for one very old man who had suffered the long trip from Georgia and was ill. “What about him?” Jacob asked the others, and they replied, “Oh. Him. Reckon he aims to start the cemetery.” Jacob thought maybe they were trying to be funny, but he didn’t laugh. He just stared them down and informed them, “We done got one.” And in fact, when the old man died within a few days, and was given a proper burial, there was already another headstone in a clearing down Swains Creek a ways, a headstone quarried from slate and inscribed with the name and the too-brief dates, the last of which was the earliest in Stay More, and the inscription, “Falling no more.” It was Lizzie Swain herself who, without irony or approbation or sorrow so much as plain observation, named the lofty jag of bluff “Leapin Rock,” and defied all her descendants to go near it. Throughout the history of Stay More, it was always difficult for anyone to avoid seeing that landmark, looming up to the west of the village as a silent reminder that there is a place to fall from, a silent temptation to those who want to stop falling.
The six families were the Plowrights, the Coes, the Dinsmores, the Chisms, the Duckworths, and the Whitters. Collectively they increased the population of Stay More by thirty-three, as if to compensate for the decrease by one. They built cabins or houses very similar to, but carefully not identical to, those of the Ingledews and the Swains. Zachariah Dinsmore did indeed construct a primitive gristmill on Swains Creek, and Levi Whitter erected an even more primitive building which became the village’s first general store or trading post, much to the disdain of Eli Willard the next time he came.
Willard’s current merchandise, the knives and scissors and razors, it must be noted, performed just a little more satisfactorily than his clocks: the jackknives could be opened only with a pair of pliers and closed only with a hammer; the screws fell out of Lizzie’s scissors and Sarah’s too (although they discovered that they each had two knives as a result) and Jacob’s razor gave him many mornings of pure agony and bloodshed until he discovered that it worked much better if he first lathered his jowls with soap. But even beardless and fresh-shaven he found that Sarah did not appreciate him any better than she had before, at least not in bed. Once, inspired by drink, he tried again the bath-in-three-waters: rain, creek, spring, hoping it might produce some magic response in Sarah, but this had only the effect of erasing his olfactory identity. “It aint you,” Sarah said, in the dark, refusing to let him into the bed. “Whoever ye air, you aint you.” He slept with his dogs, whose keen noses could recognize at least a trace of whatever remained of him.
Jacob perceived eventually that the only times he had had any luck with Sarah had been after immoderate consumption of his Arkansas sour mash, but naturally this realization did nothing to curb his use of the beverage, rather the reverse. Both Sarah and her mother began to nag Jacob about his use of distilled corn. He invited them to offer one good reason why there was anything wrong with it. They could not; they could only reply that everybody knows it’s “wrong,” but they could not explain why anyone knows it is wrong, they could only nag him for it.
Another example, not unlike the matter of liquor, involved religion. It was no secret to Sarah or to Lizzie Swain that Jacob Ingledew felt that religion was a useless expenditure of time and thought. He was not exactly blasphemous, and took the Lord’s name in vain only under severe duress, as when for example he discovered razorback shoats nursing off his cow’s teats, but he did not believe, as nearly everybody else did, that our words and deeds on this earth will determine our standard of living in the hereafter. In fact, he did not believe in any sort of hereafter. For well over a hundred years, down to the present day, Ozark women would nag their men on these two subjects: whiskey and religion, instilling God knows what a fabric of guilt and evasion; and few of these men would have the solace of the knowledge that Jacob had, that since there is no logical earthly reason for not drinking, and no logical earthly reason for being religious, the nagging was invalid and therefore would be disregarded.
…But not quite. Try as he would, Jacob could not quite disregard the nagging of Sarah and her mother. He knew there was nothing he could say to turn it off. If he went outside, they would follow him. So he did more than just go outside: he left town. The nagging of Sarah and her mother may be credited for Jacob’s discovery that there was indeed a people to the north.
He went north from Stay More less than six miles, down the Little Buffalo River, before coming upon a settlement that was even larger than Stay More. Larger, at least, by one house, for there were nine of them, ranging from porchless, windowless cabins more primitive than the Ingledew place to square-hewed log houses more advanced than the Swain place. Jacob approached the most elaborate of these latter, was hailed by its dogs and then greeted by its owner, John Bellah, who, Jacob learned, had come to the Ozarks even before himself. The name of the settlement was Mount Parthenon, given to it by a neighbor, Thomas K. May, “the Bible man,” and for the time being the small log trading post operated by John Bellah was also the “courthouse” for the county.
“County?” said Jacob Ingledew to John Bellah.
“Yeah, we’ve done been declared a county,” declared John Bellah. “They cut off the whole southeast part of Carroll County and let us have it.”
“What’s the name of this here county?” Jacob wanted to know.
“Newton,” Bellah informed him. Jacob knew that this was a shortened form of “new town,” and he was sorry that the new town apparently wasn’t his own. But Bellah explained that it was named after, or in honor of, Thomas Willoughby Newton, who was the United States Marshal for Arkansas.
“Never heared of ’im,” Jacob said.
“Whar ye from, stranger?” John Bellah wanted to know.
Jacob Ingledew was sore distressed and perplexed and aggerpervoked. To find that he lived in a county, in the first place, and then, in the second place, to be called “stranger” not six miles from his own dooryard, was a demeaning affront. His first impulse was to strike John Bellah down on the spot, but then he reflected that a wiser course of action might be to secede Stay More from the rest of the county, or perhaps, better yet, if more settlers came in and made Stay More larger than Mount Parthenon, to declare Stay More the county seat.
“I’m Mayor of Stay More,” he informed John Bellah.
“Never heared of it,” Bellah declared.
“Second largest town in Newton County and you aint heared of it?” Jacob demanded. A thought suddenly occurred to him: maybe there were more houses, by one, in Mount Parthenon than in Stay More, but that didn’t necessarily mean that there were more human beings inside those houses. “What’s the population of this here town, would ye kindly tell me?” he asked.
John Bellah figured, “Wal, there’s me and Barbary and our four, and the Rolands with their three, and the Seabolts, no childring, but Isaac Archer and Louisa has got five, and Jim Archer and Mary Ann has got two, the Boens has got two, and Jesse Casey the blacksmith has got ten of ’em, Seburn McPherson and Bess has got three, Bill Bowin and Nancy has got four, and the Coopers, all told, Ike and Sarah Ann and his mother Nancy and their childring, six of ’em. That makes fifty-seven.”
“Hah!” Jacob exclaimed and silently thanked Lizzie Swain for having been so multiparous. “Stay More has got fifty-nine!”
John Bellah stared woefully at him. “Whar is this city of yourn?” he asked.
Jacob pointed south.
John Bellah took a hunter’s horn and blew on it three times. Soon, from all directions, fifty-six other men, women and children had assembled in Bellah’s yard, standing in a circle around John Bellah and Jacob Ingledew.
“Folks,”
said John Bellah to the assembly, “this here feller claims they’s a town up the creek a little ways has got more people in it than we’uns do.”
“My stars and body!” a woman screeched.
“I’ll be jimjohned!” a man roared.
“Golly Moses fishhooks!” a boy bellowed.
“It beats my grandmother!” a girl squealed.
John Bellah asked, “Air we’uns gonna take this a-layin down?”
“No sirree bob!” a woman shrieked.
“Not by a damned sight!” a man barked.
“I’ll be hanged if!” a boy snarled.
“Not for the world!” a girl bleated.
“Nope, nohow,” a child wailed.
John Bellah raised his arm and suggested, “Then let’s go!”
“Skedaddle!” a woman yipped.
“Pull foot!” a boy snapped.
“High-tail!” a girl howled.
“Hoof it!” a child mewed.
The entire population of Mount Parthenon began moving at a brisk clip up the trail in the direction of Stay More. Jacob Ingledew could only follow along, worried and puzzled. None of these people were armed, so if they meant to fight, they would fight bare-handed.
At the northernmost end of the valley of Stay More, there was a field which had been cleared by Levi Whitter for a cow pasture, and now this field was heavy with sweet clover. It would always be called the Field of Clover after the confrontation which took place there between the people of Stay More and the people of Mount Parthenon.
The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks Page 8
