The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks

by Harington, Donald

  These people of Stay More had come originally from eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, and northern Georgia, an area of the country which has more consistent annual rainfall than any other, and not one of these persons, even the oldest, had ever known a drought before. Since the drought had coincided so closely with the onslaught of Jacob’s frakes, the people began to wonder, naturally, if there was any connection. If Jacob Ingledew, who was their much-respected steward, shepherd, chieftain, or at least official mayor, had no hope, and couldn’t care less whether it rained or not, then that might well be the reason it didn’t. Many of the Stay Morons who had been performing superstitious acts to make it rain, with no luck, or praying to God for rain, with less luck, began to wonder if they had not better and more profitably direct their attentions to Jacob Ingledew instead of to God. A delegation of the menfolk was appointed, and they appeared, hats in hands, beside Jacob’s bed.

  Elijah Duckworth, their spokesman, spoke: “Squire Ingledew, sir, we’uns is powerful pervoked by the lack of rain, and seein as how yore affliction come smack dab at the same time, we’uns has got to wonderin if they might be tied up some way, one with th’other.”

  Jacob stared at Elijah Duckworth for a while and studied the notion. “I hadn’t thought of that, Lige,” he declared. “I don’t do much thinkin, one way or the other, lately.”

  “Do ye want it to rain, or not?” Elijah asked.

  “Tell ye the truth, I don’t honestly keer,” Jacob replied.

  “But you’re shore to starve of thirst along with the rest of us.”

  “I reckon so,” Jacob acknowledged.

  “Do ye want yore womarn and that fine young’un to die too?” Elijah demanded. (Sarah at this time was one of the few living creatures in Stay More still producing liquid, nursing the baby Benjamin, by dint of the efforts of her mother and her many brothers and sisters, who pooled a portion of their daily ration of water for her.)

  “What kin I do?” Jacob lamented morosely and rhetorically. “What kin ary man do? What’s the use, nohow?”

  “Mind if we set down?” Elijah Duckworth asked. Jacob gestured feebly toward the new mule-eared chairs that Noah had made, and the men drew them up beside Jacob’s bed and sat in them.

  Then, one by one, each man told the funniest joke he could remember. Elijah told of an old man trying to trade mules and offering to another feller a strong, lively horse mule, who, however, while being examined, ran head-on into a big tree. “‘Why, that critter must be blind,’ says the feller the old man was trying to trade with. ‘Naw,’ says the old man, ‘he aint blind. He jist don’t give a damn.’”

  All of the men laughed and slapped their thighs and elbowed each other, but Jacob did not stir. They eyed him carefully for any sign of perhaps a twitching at the corner of his mouth or even a slight sparkle in his eye, but there was none. Maybe he had taken it too personal, they decided. So Levi Whitter told one about his oldest boy, Tim, who everybody knew was not over-bright, how Levi was rolling a load of cow manure out to his field when Tim asked him what he was going to do with it, and Levi answered “I’m going to put it on my strawberries,” and Tim give a snort and says, “I put honey and cream on mine, and everybody says I’m a damn fool!”

  Jacob didn’t seem to care much for that one either, so Zachariah Dinsmore thought to play upon Jacob’s disdain for religion by telling one about a preacher who stopped by to look over a farmer’s spread and says, “Well, you and the Lord have sure raised some fine corn.” Then when he seen the hogs, he says, “With God’s help, you have got a lot of good pork.” Finally they was looking at the garden next to the barn, and the preacher says, “You and God have sure growed some fine vegetables.” The farmer was losing his patience, and says, “Listen, Preacher, you ought to have seen this here farm when God was a-runnin it all by Hisself!”

  But this too failed to provoke any glimmer of mirth in Jacob Ingledew. The men started over, and told a round of the second-funniest jokes they could remember, and then a round of the third-funniest, and so on, and by the time they got to their ninth-funniest jokes they weren’t even laughing themselves, so they gave up and went home.

  The drought dragged on, the hot winds parched the flesh, the woods caught fire, and acres of virgin timber burned unchecked, leaving vast black scabs of burnt-out woodland on what had once been the beautiful countryside. Perhaps mercifully, the fires exterminated all of the woods-creatures who were dying of thirst. There would be no game to hunt during the coming famine.

  A delegation of womenfolk came next to Jacob, and they stood around his bed, singing happy and pleasant inspirational songs in soprano-contralto harmony. They sang “Keep on the Sunny Side of Life” and “Home, Sweet Home” and “Burdens Are Blessings” and “Smile All the While” and “Bright Cheer Year by Year” and “Oh Happy Day” and “Juberous Times” and “Ah, Happy Heart, Light the Long Hours Ever So Gaily and Anon.” Yet, even though this last was a brilliant coloratura number, Jacob’s mood remained essentially unaltered. In fact, so steadfast did his mood remain that it infected the women, who began singing sad songs until Sarah shooed them off.

  Then Sarah’s breasts began to dry, and baby Benjamin spent long hours wailing for milk that he could not get. Was Jacob at least stricken by his small son’s cries? If he was, it was hard to tell.

  A delegation of young people came next to Jacob’s bedside, where they performed stunts, antics, headstands, slapsticks and pratfalls, roughhouse and gymnastics, roister and fling and shindig, merrymaking to melt the heart of all but the most hopeless case…which Jacob, unfortunately, was, and remained. The summer passed, and although in September the temperature dropped slightly below 100° for the first time in weeks, there was still no rain. Nobody but the women had anything to do. The women still had to cook, whatever corn and meal remained from the year before, whatever salt pork, whatever reptiles that had not perished. The women tried to find occupation for the men and boys by putting them to work with the carding and spinning of wool shorn from the dead sheep, and scutching and swingling flax to be spun into linen thread, and even with the weaving itself. The making of dry goods, with ironic symbolism, became a busy industry during the drought. Come winter, even if there was no food to eat, everybody would have plenty of clothes and could shed their buckskins. If everybody died, they could at least be buried in fine raiment.

  The next delegation to Jacob’s bedside, the last delegation (for they alone remained to try), were the children. The children came, seventeen of them, and stood around his bed. They had no jokes to tell, nor songs to sing, nor stunts to do. They were indescribably dirty, because nobody had had a bath or a swim in three months and children naturally need washing more often anyway. They were thin too, not starving yet, but close to it. Among these children were the younger sons and daughters of Lizzie Swain, the same children who had worn such big smiles when Jacob first saw them, the same who had been so happy and excited to find a new home in a beautiful, bountiful wilderness. None of them were smiling now. They just stood around with their pinched soiled faces staring at Jacob in his bed. He became, finally, aware of them.

  “What do you little squirts want?” he asked.

  Nine-year-old Octavia Swain, their spokesperson, spoke. “Uncle Jake,” she said, “you aint got nothin to do, and neither has we’uns. So let’s us start us a school, and you be the teacher.”

  “Gosh all hemlock,” Jacob groaned. “What would be the use?”

  “So’s we’uns could git the smarts, like you,” she explained.

  “What’s the use of bein smart?” he demanded. “Class, let me see a hand! Who’s the first to answer? What’s the use of bein smart?”

  And without realizing it, Jacob had already founded the first Stay More elementary school. The pupils sat, two by two, on the floor around Jacob’s bed, and he even sat up in his bed for the first time in months. One little boy timidly raised his hand and Jacob called on him.

  “If yo’re smart, you kin git r
ich easy,” offered the boy.

  “That aint no answer,” Jacob responded. “What’s the use of bein rich? Come on, let’s see if there’s anybody knows the answer. Let me see another hand.”

  None of the children raised their hands, until finally Octavia Swain lifted hers.

  “You, Tavy,” Jacob said.

  “Well, sir,” she offered, standing up, “if I was smart, I could use my brain to answer hard questions like, ‘What’s the use of bein smart?’” She sat down.

  Jacob thought about that for a moment, and then he did something he hadn’t done in a coon’s age: he laughed. Well, it wasn’t exactly an all-out gutbusting hawr-de-hawr horselaugh, but at least it was a respectable straight-up-and-down chortle, and when he did, the students laughed too. “Tavy,” he said, admiringly, “I ’low as how that’s as good a answer as any. Okay. Now it’s your turn. Axe me a question.”

  Octavia stood up again. “Sir, how kin we git water?”

  Jacob frowned. “That’s a tough one,” he said. “Let me study on it a minute.” His first impulse was to tell them that the only way they could get water would be to leave, abandon Stay More, go back where they all came from, where there was always a plenty of water even if an overplenty of people. But he did not suggest this. Instead he meditated on the meaning of rainfall, the circulation of waters, and the certainty of recurrence. A man could be sure of only one thing: a drought is always ended by a rainfall. But where does all the water go during the drought? He knew that the waters ran to the rivers and the rivers ran to the sea but the sea didn’t run anywhere. If Swains Creek and the Buffalo River were empty, was the sea flooded? He remembered Fanshaw’s theory of gravity, and the notion that the earth is round. If all the creeks and rivers were empty on this side of the earth, and the seas weren’t flooded, then all the water must be over on the other side of the earth. But if that were so, and the earth really rolled around the sun as Fanshaw said it did, then it would wobble, and you’d feel it wobbling. No, the water must be someplace else. It couldn’t all be evaporated up into the sky because if it were then the sky would be full of clouds that would soon rain. So if the seas had their share and couldn’t hold any more, and the rivers were empty and the sky was clear, the only other place the water possibly could be was right down inside the earth.

  “Dig,” he answered, at length. “Tell ’em to git their shovels and find the lowest meader in Stay More and git out in the middle of it and start diggin, straight down. Don’t let ’em stop ’till they find water. Class dismissed.”

  School met every day after that, the children bringing their lunches in little cloth sacks their mothers made for them, lunches of corn dodger or pone, frugal but filling, and soon the children came to school clean, unspotted if not immaculate, because their fathers had dug fifty feet down in Levi Whitter’s Field of Clover and struck a vast subterranean pool of pure wonderful water. There was so much of it that when Jacob was told, he ordered it shared with their neighbors the Parthenonians, and for a time at least all rivalry between the two villages ceased as the Parthenonians came gratefully to fetch home water. For a time at least, a very brief time, Stay More was declared the county seat of Newton County, and Jacob’s imposing double-pen dogtrot served for a while as the schoolhouse and courthouse both until Sarah complained that she couldn’t fix dinner without brushing a swarm of lawyers off the table and flushing the bailiff out of the potato bin.

  Jacob took no interest in the court, even though he was offered a high position there. He stayed in his own wing of the building, still bedfast, still hopeless, but determined to give an education to these children who had asked him for one. They loved school; he never had any trouble with them; he never had to get out of his bed to discipline an unruly pupil. If any one of the children, through restlessness or ennui or just pure cussedness, decided to try to disrupt the orderliness of the classroom, the other children would mob him, tie him, gag him, hoist him from the ceiling and leave him suspended there until he signaled, by frantic eyeball movements, that he was ready to behave…this whole proceeding so quick it did not interrupt the lesson that Jacob was giving.

  Jacob never taught his pupils how to read. As we have seen, he was the only literate person in Stay More for a period of many years, and could not help but feel at times that his literacy was a curse upon him, or at least was something he should not infect his charges with. Deliberately then he excluded reading and writing from the curriculum, and the school was none the worse for the omission.

  But what, then, did they study? Arithmetic, of course, and since all of the pupils always came barefoot to school, it was possible to do counting exercises up to and including twenty digits…or even forty, because, as in most other rural schools everywhere from time immemorial, there was a kind of buddy system, a pairing, a conjugation, a bifidity, all of them sitting and working two by two together. The curriculum also included practical matters such as how to control one’s facial muscles in order to assume a “deadpan” in times of stress, challenge, insult, reproach, etc. But in the main, the curriculum was devoted to discussion and debate on purely philosophical concepts in the arts and sciences. Why does the wind blow? What makes the rain? Why must chiggers, ticks and frakes bite? Why do we scratch? Why should we live? A whole day’s program could be built around any one of these questions. For example, a question such as “Why can’t a person tickle himself?” would lead not only into a discussion of the psychological factors involved, but also into the anatomy and physiology of tickling, a comparison of the armpit with the underchin, with excursions even into solipsistic examination: I exist because I think, but you exist because I cannot tickle myself without you. Word got back to the families of the intense intellectual stimulation of Jacob’s schoolroom, and many of the grown-ups petitioned Jacob to be allowed to attend, but this petition was not granted.

  The only grown-up other than Jacob who ever came into his schoolroom was Eli Willard.

  School was in session one day when the Connecticut itinerant reappeared after long absence, bringing Jacob’s window glass and other merchandise. Jacob seized him and presented him to the class. “Boys and girls, this specimen here is a Peddler. You don’t see them very often. They migrate, like the geese flying over. This one comes maybe once a year, like Christmas. But he aint dependable, like Christmas. He’s dependable like rainfall. A Peddler is a feller who has got things you aint got, and he’ll give ’em to ye, and then after you’re glad you got ’em he’ll tell ye how much cash money you owe him fer ’em. If you aint got cash money, he’ll give credit, and collect the next time he comes ’round, and meantime you work hard to git the money someway so’s ye kin pay him off. Look at his eyes. Notice how they are kinder shiftly-like. Now, class, the first question is: why is this feller’s eyes shiftly-like?”

  Several pupils raised their hands. Jacob called on one, who offered the possibility that it was a congenital defect; another suggested that he might have a foreign object in his eye; another wondered if the case might be that he had enemies who were following him, and he was looking out for them. Jacob was required to call upon his star pupil, Octavia Swain, in hopes of the correct answer.

  “He’s jist casing the joint,” Octavia observed, “to see if you got anything he might want to swap ye out of.”

  “Kee-reck,” Jacob complimented her. “Now, these here Peddler fellers is also slick talkers. They say things like—”

  “I beg your pardon…” Eli Willard interrupted.

  “They say things like ‘I beg your pardon,’” Jacob went on, “and ‘Good evening, sir’ and ‘Good morning, madam,’ and ‘Permit me to serve you in any manner I can,’ and ‘This is a most unexpected pleasure,’ and ‘I beg your acceptance of my very hearty thanks for doing me the honor to inquire if I shall have the opportunity to appreciate most cordially your extremely welcome response to my gratitude for your kindness in obliging my hope that you anticipate my wishes for—’”

  “Do you want your confounded windo
w glass, or not?” Eli Willard demanded.

  “Bring it in,” Jacob said to him, and while Eli Willard was outside unloading the glass from his saddlebags, Jacob told his students, “Now directly we’ll git a chance to watch how a real Peddler operates. I want you’uns to watch and listen real careful. He’ll bring in them thar winder panes, which is costin me ever cent I’ve got to my name, and then he’ll say somethin like, ‘It grieves me to have to report that the current quotation on pane glass is even more frightfully dear than I had previously imagined…’ and then he’ll soak me for all I kin raise between now and the next time he shows up, and then he’ll give me the glass, but it will turn out that the glass don’t fit my winders, it’s too big and has to be cut with God knows what, and he’ll git this big smile on his face and whip out this little gizmo from his pocket and hold it up and say, ‘Presto! A magic Acme Damascus Coal Carbon Disc Wheel Glass Cutter! In limited supply and for a short time only, ten dollars each.’ And dodgast me if I don’t pay. Here he comes. Watch careful, class.”

  Eli Willard reentered, bearing a sheaf of random-sized glass sheets packed in excelsior. He cleared his throat and began, “It grieves me to have to report—”

  All seventeen of Jacob’s pupils chimed in, “—THAT THE CURRENT QUOTATION ON PANE GLASS IS EVEN MORE FRIGHTFULLY DEAR THAN I HAD PREVIOUSLY IMAGINED.”