One of the Swain children had seen the Parthenonians coming and had run to alert the rest of the village. All of the Stay Morons (and kindly believe me that my use of this name is meant to be neither pejorative nor facetious; if you wish to split hairs, it should be borne in mind that strictly speaking a moron is in the mental age group between seven and twelve, a time of life which, as anyone who has lived through it can tell you, is simply wonderful) left their homes and came to halt the Parthenonians’ advance at Levi Whitter’s clover pasture. The two communities faced one another across this field, keeping a distance of some hundred feet (or six hats) between themselves.
“Is that all of ’em, neighbor?” John Bellah asked Jacob Ingledew.
“Yeah, neighbor, I reckon,” Jacob replied.
John Bellah began with his bent finger to count the Stay Morons. When he finished, he said, “Fifty-eight.” Then he counted the Parthenonians and declared, “Fifty-eight.”
“Huh?” Jacob said. “Here, neighbor, let me try.” Also using his finger as a counter, Jacob totaled up the number of people standing over there across the field, and sure enough, it came to fifty-eight. Then he counted the number on this side of the field, and it was also fifty-eight. Something was wrong, that Stay More had lost, and Mount Parthenon gained, a person.
Soon all of the Parthenonians who knew how to count were also counting the Stay Morons, and the latter, with nothing better to do, began counting the former. Everybody who could count agreed that the two groups contained the same number of people.
“Wal, neighbor,” said John Bellah to Jacob Ingledew, “seeing as how we’re even…” Then he asked, “How many dwellings in your village?”
“Eight,” Jacob replied.
“Seeing as how we’re equal in population, neighbor,” John Bellah observed, “I reckon we win, on account of we got nine dwellings.” To the other Parthenonians, he announced, “We win!” and they all gave cheers of hoo raw and huzzah and then went on back home.
Jacob was left to explain to his people that Mount Parthenon had become the county seat of this here county, and that while he had contested it on the grounds of Stay More’s numerical superiority, it turned out that he must have miscalculated.
Forever afterward, the rivalry between Stay More and Mount Parthenon (or simply Parthenon, as it would later be shortened to) would be intense and sensitive, if never violent. The competition between them was perhaps a factor in their growth and development, and if today Stay More is practically a ghost town then Parthenon is not much better off.
We perceive, then, one more motive that Jacob Ingledew had for building the imposing home of our next chapter: he wanted to equal the number of Parthenon’s buildings. That is as good a reason as any for building a house, for sweat, for toil, for going on.
Some time later, it was Noah Ingledew, not exactly anybody’s fool, who first realized and understood the error in census-taking that Jacob had made. “Shitfire!” he exclaimed to his brother. “You was countin yoreself on the wrong side!”
Chapter four
He built it all by himself, almost in secret. He meant to surprise Sarah with it, was possibly the reason, or maybe he just wanted the satisfaction of being solely responsible for it. We know what the real reason was, though he did not, could not have guessed, would have blushed and scoffed if we were to tell him. But it takes an awful lot of pent-up passion to build on this scale, alone and in just slightly over two weeks. Jacob’s second home is his erection. Although that is not why, like spermaries, it is bigeminal. Consciously he may have been remembering Fanshaw’s dwelling; unconsciously no doubt he was remembering one of several dreams he had the first night he slept with Fanshaw’s squaw: a dream in which he saw this very structure almost exactly as he has rendered it here: two-pens-and-a-passage, a double house divided (or conjoined) by an open breezeway.
The house was (and still is) in another holler south up Ingledew Mountain from his first dwelling. He discovered it was a better holler, had a stronger spring, and was only two whoops and a holler (which is not hollow but halloo) away from his first place. Still nobody knew exactly where it was except him and his pack of dogs. Undoubtedly the neighbors, especially the Swains, would have been glad to join him and help in a speedy house-raisin’, but he chose to go it alone, working from first light to last light and sometimes past light day after day for over two weeks. His pack of dogs went with him and sat around and watched; it was not until he was almost finished that they perked up and took a particular interest in the breezeway, discovering that it was a place where they could loll out of the rain and trot in the shade and breeze, a kind of doghouse almost, or at least a “dogtrot,” which is what Jacob called it and which, by extension, is the most common generic name for this type of house as a whole, although there are variants: possum trot, dog run, breezeway, two-wing, open entry, etc.
Jacob Ingledew was by no means the inventor of the type, which scholars have traced all the way back to medieval Sweden, where it was called “pair-cottage,” nor was Jacob’s dogtrot the first in the Ozarks: there is a magnificent two-story dogtrot at Norfork which was built by Indian agent Jacob Wolfe in the first years of the century. But the Ingledew dogtrot was the first bigeminal white man’s dwelling in Newton County, the first bipartition, the first conjugation, the first bifidity, the first duple.
Jacob hoped to install the glass in the windows before showing the house to pretty Sarah, but Eli Willard had not again returned, and everything else was finished, and Jacob was exhausted from his labors (and already, though he did not know it yet, infested with the frakes). So one afternoon he drove the last nail into the last shingle on the roof (the nails were the first product of Absalom Coe’s blacksmith shop in Stay More) and then went back to his first place and said, “Sarey, I got a little susprise fer ye. Come on.” And he led her through the woods to the clearing in the holler where their new home was erected.
She clapped her hands and oohed and ahhed and hugged his neck and carried on like that for a long time, exclaiming Did you ever! and As I live and breathe! and Fancy that! and Well hush my mouth! Jacob just blushed and said Aw shucks, but it was plain that he was very proud of himself. Then Sarah was puzzled somewhat by their new home’s bifidity, that is, she wondered why there were two of them. She asked Jacob, “Is that un there fer Noah?”
“No,” he explained, “it’s fer you.”
“Me?” She stared at him with puzzlement, and then asked anxiously, “Air we a-fixin to split up?”
He laughed. “Aw naw, darlin. That there half is fer the kitchen and fer eatin. So it’s yourn. Th’other half is whar the beds will go, so it’s mine.”
“I caint sleep in there too?” she asked.
“Aw, shore ye kin,” he said. “But don’t you see? It’s like if, wal, like the Bible said about a man and a woman become one flesh but they’re still two people. This here is jist one house, but it’s got two parts, and one part is you and th’other part is me.”
Sarah still did not quite seem to grasp the philosophy of it, but she took note of the open breezeway in between, where Jacob’s nine dogs were lolling about, drooling and thumping the floor with their tails. “And that part,” she asked, “is it fer the dogs?”
“I didn’t mean it so,” he said. “It’s meant fer whar we kin set in our cheers and rest, of an evenin, or maybe eat when it’s hot, or whar ye kin set to shell peas and snap beans and churn the butter and such.” He added: “It’s our porch, sorta like. It aint you, and it aint me. It’s us, both together.”
Sarah thought that her man was a little crazy, but she was awful proud of him for building this house, which was over twice as large as any other dwelling in Stay More. Wouldn’t Perilla Duckworth and Destiny Whitter, not to mention that snooty Malinda Plowright, just perish of envy when they came a-visiting? “And look at them winders!” Sarah exclaimed, taking note for the first time of the large windows in each wing of the building, even if the sash did not yet have its glass installe
d. She climbed the few steps to the breezeway and opened the door to “her” wing and went into it to see how bright the interior was because of the window. Only when she was inside did she notice that there was no furniture. The room was empty! There was nothing in it except a fireplace. It made her very uncomfortable, and she quickly came back out, saying to Jacob, “If that one is me, I’m all bare and holler.”
“We’ll fill ye up, quick,” he assured her, and returned with her to their first house, where he said to Noah, “Wal, Brother, it’s all yourn now,” and then made a deal with Noah whereby Jacob and Sarah got over half of whatever furniture was portable (Noah hated to see the clock go), and also Noah’s agreement to make, in the near future, a specified number of chairs, tables and bedsteads in return for Jacob’s half-interest in the cabin. Noah also helped Jacob and Sarah carry their possessions and items of furniture up to the new house, where Noah too let loose with many exclamations of surprise and admiration, concluding, “Shetfare, it’s the masterest house ever I seed!”
That night Jacob and Sarah spread their mattress on the puncheon floor, having no bedstead yet, in the wing of the house which was Jacob’s, where he lay on his back and stared at the ceiling of his room, pleased as Punch with the work he had done, but exhausted from it, too tired to sleep. Sarah was not sleeping either. “Hit’s so purty,” she was sighing. “Hit’s shore a fine place. Smells so clean and new. Yo’re a good man, Jake.” She went on admiring the house and him for a while, and then suddenly she turned to him, turned into him, turned on him, saying, “Here, Jake, let me see if I caint make that thing go fer ye.” And then—it was too dark for him to see her, he had covered the window with a bearskin to keep out insects, so not even the moonlight came in to illuminate her—though she had not had any relations with him for eight months and her pregnancy was so near term that she would not now anyway—she employed one or several of her various soft clefts or clasps or crevices, or slews or furcula or nooks, to simulate hers, and stimulate his, until, sure enough, the old clouds gathered and clashed, making lightningbolt and thunderclap and afterclap rattling away.
He went into a deep and most restful sleep then. Sarah slept too, and dreamed, knowing and believing the ages-old tradition that the dream dreamt on the first night in a new house will come true. She was as excited as her great-granddaughter would be on her first visit to a motion picture theater…but she was as puzzled by the dream as her great-granddaughter would have been if she had unwittingly stumbled upon a film by Luis Buñuel.
She (Sarah) was in a large room, much larger than any she had ever been in before, where there were many people, the women dressed in fantastic silken dresses with skirts as big as haymows, the men in black woolen coats with tails like a swallow’s, and Sarah was ashamed of her dusty buckskin frock, until she looked down at herself and saw that she too was dressed in a silken gown with skirt big as a haymow, the air circulating freely around her legs and loins. She saw Jacob, who was dressed in the finest of the black woolen swallowtail coats and was smoking a very large cigar, surrounded by other men who were listening to him talk and talk. He caught sight of her and blew her a kiss. Then he motioned for her to come over. She did, and he told her the names of each of the gentlemen around him, and then told them her name, and one by one they took her hand and bent sharply at the waist and placed their mouths on the back of her hand. She did not say anything. She did not know what to say. The other men then ignored her and resumed talking to Jacob. Each of them called him “Your Excellency.” Some of the women came and tried to talk to Sarah, but she did not know what to say, and was not sure that she understood what the women were saying, whether they were asking questions or just making statements. She was very embarrassed.
But then the women stopped talking, because there was loud music coming from outside. Jacob came and took her hand and led her out onto the porch, and this porch was very high, there must be another house underneath it, and from this porch she could see that the yard and the road were filled with people, some of them in uniforms beating on drums and blowing bugles and fifes and all kinds of strange brass tooters and horns. Jacob waved to all the people, and they cheered “Huzzah!” He nudged her, so she waved too, and again they cheered “Huzzah!” The music-makers played louder, and the crowd cheered louder, and then, loudest of all, somebody fired off a battery of cannon, and the noise made Sarah start shaking.
When she woke up, in the early morning, she discovered that she had both hands clamped tightly over her ears. She remembered the dream and tried to puzzle it out, but all she could get from it, if it were going to come true, was that someday she and Jacob were going to be of the better sort. Quality folks. She rose and took the bearskin off the window, to let in the morning light. Jacob was still sleeping. The quilt was off him. His buckskins were piled on the floor beside the mattress. Sarah’s cheeks waxed hot, seeing his bare prides, but then she noticed that his prides seemed mighty hot too, and, stooping for a closer look, saw that they, and the skin of his groin all around them, were covered with a red rash, thousands of tiny scarlet blisters, almost like chicken pox, but worse. At first she wondered if what she had done the night before might have caused it. She knew that what she had done was unnatural, not right, maybe a sin in the eyes of God. But then she remembered her brother Murray, and knew that her husband had the same terrible affliction.
She shook him awake. “Frake, look, you’ve got the jakes!” she exclaimed, but corrected herself, “Jake, look, you’ve got the frakes!” He yawned and raised himself enough to take one look, then fell back to his original position, where he would remain for months on end.
Jake’s frakes became the concern of the whole community; farfetched remedies were suggested and tried, but with no effect. Lizzie Swain recommended that Sarah try the blood of a black hen, but it worked no better for Jacob than it had for Murray. Noah appeared, clawed and scratched and bloody, with a quantity of panther urine that he made into a poultice, but it worked no better for Jacob than it had for Noah. Perilla Duckworth recommended a purgative from a decoction of white walnut bark peeled downward, and then an emetic from a decoction of white walnut bark peeled upward, but these only aggravated Jacob’s disposition. Destiny Whitter was certain that the frakes was just a form of erypsipelas, or “St. Anthony’s Fire,” which everybody knew could be easily cured with the blood of a black cat. All of the black cats of Stay More were rounded up, a total of nine, and, since it is terrible bad luck to kill a cat, particularly a black one, none were killed, but each had an ear snipped off and an inch removed from its tail, and enough black cat gore was collected to cover Jacob’s frakes in three coats after first washing off all the other stuff that had been applied and caked and dried.
This bold treatment, needless to say, had absolutely no effect, and in time Jacob’s frakes erupted and healed over, but he remained abed with feelings of utter worthlessness, so melancholy that not even the birth of his firstborn, Benjamin, which happened then, could rouse him from his Slough of Despond. Nor did he receive any comfort from the confines of his new house, which lacked the certain snugness of the first Ingledew cabin and the Swain house, and was a constant reminder to him of the futility of human endeavor. He could no longer understand nor remember what had motivated him to build the house. Gradually it filled up with furniture, made by Noah; and Sarah, who in the last months of her pregnancy had taken up flax-spinning and weaving, made linen curtains for the windows and other cloth decorations, so that it was indeed the most elegant home in Stay More or all of Newton County, but this brought no cheer whatever to despairing Jacob.
Almost as if Nature herself agreed with his forlorn mood, Stay More began to suffer its first severe drought. In early July, before any of the crops had been harvested except peas and spinach, the sixtieth day without rainfall occurred, and from then on it did not rain a drop for the rest of the summer. The creeks began to dry up, first Banty Creek and then Swains Creek itself, the deep holes of water remaining until last as dim
inishing puddles engorged with fish. If Jacob had cared, if he had not lost all sense of any purpose to life, he would have urged the people to harvest these fish and dry them as insurance against the famine ahead, but he did not, and the puddles dried until they were only mounds of dead fish. The springs from the mountainsides kept on trickling enough water for man and livestock, a few weeks after the creeks were bone dry, but then the springs began to fail, until there was no water, no trace of water of any kind, at all. By this time, the cornstalks were twisted freaks, and none of the other crops, not even the heat-loving Tah May Toh, were bearing any fruit. Great swarms of grasshoppers and locusts, apparently needing no water to survive, flew in on the hot wind and devoured all the remaining vegetation. The livestock began to die. The cows managed to find a few small tufts of brown grass and convert it into a liquid that vaguely resembled milk, which was rationed: one-half saucer of this per person per day. But soon that ration was reduced to one-quarter saucer, and then one-eighth, and then measured in drops: ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, none, none.
The cows knelt and died. The people who felt like it (and by this time Jacob was not the only person feeling useless and helpless) loaded their oak-stave barrels and tubs and buckets and pails into their wagons, and drove off down the dry creek in search of water. Days later they returned with some murky river water. They reported that the people of Mount Parthenon were dry and suffering too; the Little Buffalo River was dry all along its length; they had followed it into the Big Buffalo, which was also dry, and followed that into the White River, which still had puddles remaining here and there, but each of these puddles was guarded day and night by fierce men with shotguns; they followed the White for miles before finding a puddle that was not guarded, and there they filled their oak-stave containers with this murky swill. They hauled it back to Stay More, strained it, and discovered that after removing all of the fish, minnows, tadpoles, crawdads, turtles, water moccasins, and a few beaver, they had only half as much water as they had started with, and then this water had to be boiled for so long to purify it that half again evaporated, so they were left with only a quarter of what they had found, and this had to be strictly rationed: a half-saucer per day per person. And then a quarter-saucer, an eighth, and so on, down, down.
The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks Page 9
