The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks

by Harington, Donald

  Eli Willard stared at the boys and girls, then he beseeched Jacob, “Call off your dogs,” and whispered into Jacob’s ear the new revised exorbitant figure, and told him, “Take it or leave it.”

  “I aint got much choice,” Jacob observed. “But look. Them there glass pieces is too big to fit my panes.”

  Eli Willard smiled and reached into his pocket and brought out a little gizmo which he held up. “Presto—” he began.

  “OH LOOK!” chorused the class. “A MAGIC ACME DAMASCUS COAL CARBON DISC WHEEL GLASS CUTTER!”

  “In limited—”

  “—SUPPLY FOR A SHORT TIME ONLY, TEN CENTS EACH!”

  “Ten dollars,” Eli Willard corrected them.

  “TEN CENTS,” they reaffirmed.

  “Dollars.”

  “CENTS.”

  “My compliments to your well-drilled academy,” Eli Willard said to Jacob. “They drive a hard bargain. Very well, it is yours for the trifling sum of ten cents. Now could I interest you or any of your scholars in my latest line of merchandise?”

  It turned out that on this particular visit, Eli Willard was hawking silk umbrellas for ladies and gentlemen, parasols for children, and oil slicker raincoats for all, as well as eaves trough hangers and metal spigots for rainbarrels. When neither Jacob nor his pupils expressed any interest whatever in merchandise of this nature, Eli Willard broke down and confessed that he had not been able to sell a single item of this line anywhere in the Ozarks and was now on the edge of penury. Reputable meteorologists back East had assured him that the following spring and summer promised to be very wet, but so far he was totally without luck in pushing his raingear and appurtenances.

  “Buck up, feller,” Jacob tried to comfort him, and then explained to his class, “By and large Peddlers don’t generally cry. This is jist an exception.” Then Jacob got out of bed and conducted Eli Willard across the breezeway into the other wing of his house, and told Sarah to try to scare up something to feed the poor feller. They fed him, and Jacob paid him for the glass and reminded him of how much money he still owed him, which brought some small cheer to Eli Willard as he rode on his luckless way.

  It is idle to speculate whether the Stay Morons erred grievously in failing to patronize Eli Willard in his latest line of merchandise, for the rains that came the following spring and summer would have rendered umbrellas and rainwear practically useless. It was almost as if Nature, in clumsy headlong atonement for her stinginess with moisture the year before, overcompensated, went too far. Deluged. Inundated. It was terrible. If not for the proverbial forty days and nights, it rained steadily nearly every day for over a month, nobody measured or kept track but it must have been more inches than ever fell in any other month in the history of the Ozarks.

  The rains began, ironically enough, on the second Tuesday of a month, right in the middle of a gala bergu that the Parthenonians threw to fete the Stay Morons for the hospitality of their waterwell.

  A bergu is a kind of stew, consisting of five hundred squirrels properly cleaned and boiled to the consistency of soup in a twenty-gallon iron kettle. The Parthenonian’s bergu was almost ready, while the Stay Morons stood around with their napkins tucked into their collars and their knives and spoons gripped in their hands, when the first raindrops fell, and then the cloudburst began, and in their haste to get the bergu indoors the Parthenonians dropped the kettle and spilled the five hundred stewed squirrels into the dry bed of Shop Creek, which soon began to fill with water. The Stay Morons went home hungry, and sat and watched as, day by day, Swains Creek rose higher and higher, left its banks and overflowed into fields, and Banty Creek roared through its gorges, engorging them. If the Stay Morons were angry at the Parthenonians for spilling and spoiling the bergu, the Parthenonians became angry at the Stay Morons because, being downstream from Stay More, they already had more water in the Little Buffalo than they could handle but Stay More kept sending its creeks on down to Parthenon anyway. “You’re stranglin us!” John Bellah of Parthenon protested to Jacob Ingledew. “Send yore creeks somewheres else!” But there was nowhere else to send the creeks.

  The Parthenonians talked about bringing a cease-and-desist action against the Stay Morons in the county court, but all the lawyers had fled to higher ground. Then the Little Buffalo River submerged the hollers along the base of Reynolds Mountain and shut Parthenon off from Stay More for the duration of the deluge, and no more was heard from them.

  Until the flood became really impossible, the Stay Morons managed to keep their good sense of humor and even to make jokes about it. Their favorite jokes involved Noah Ingledew, because of his name. “Keep a watch on him,” they would say, “and when he gits out his saw and hammer, start packin yore duds.” Jokers would catch a pair of snakes, male and female of each, and crate them, and present them to Noah as “voyagers.” Noah couldn’t even indulge his favorite pastime, whittling, without somebody saying to him something like, “Is that there the foremast or the mizzenmast?” and they would ask him things like, “Would you know an olive branch if you saw one?” and nobody ever even passed by his cabin without giving it a good kick and saying “Think she’ll float?” Noah bore all of this badinage in silence, until he decided it had gone far enough, and then one day, when the rain was coming down hard and the fields were nearly all flooded, he stepped outside and yelled, “ANCHORS AWEIGH!” as loud as he could, which seems perhaps a cruel thing to do, like yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater, and as we shall see he will soon be punished for it, but it had its effect: all of the Stay Morons came running, carrying whatever small belongings they could gather, and crowded around his cabin. Inside it, he barred the door, but yelled, from time to time, “HEAVE HO!” or “HIT THE DECK!” or “HAUL THE YARDARM!” or “SAG TO LEEWARD!” until his brother Jacob banged on the door and threatened to keelhaul him if he didn’t avast this foolishness and cut off his jib.

  But nobody bothered Noah after that. In fact, they wouldn’t have had a chance to, even if they wanted to, because that same night, in the middle of the night, all the beaver dams in all the hills around Stay More broke and washed out, and all the ponds spilled into the already flooded streams, and Noah woke to discover that his cabin, which was the lowest dwelling in Stay More, was not floating, but that its bilge was awash. He swam to the door, raised the bar, and a wave of cold water swept the door open and sucked Noah out of it and down the now broad river that had once been gentle Swains Creek. Swept along on the roiling crest, he clutched right and clutched left, for any limb to grab, but he was carried nearly halfway to Parthenon before his fingers finally seized a branch and stopped his course. He got both hands on the limb and hauled himself up. Judging from the feel of the bark, it was a sycamore tree. He sat on the limb and rested awhile, spitting out water and getting his wind back, but the water was still rising; he climbed to a higher limb, and then again to an even higher one, where he lodged himself in the fork between limb and trunk and spent the rest of the night. He began to worry about falling asleep and tumbling into the rising waters.

  Groping around in the dark, he discovered that creeping blackjack vines snaked through the branches of the sycamore. He tore off several of these and used them in lieu of rope to lash himself firmly to the tree so that he would not fall out of it if he went to sleep. In fact, he tied himself so fast that he couldn’t have got loose if he wanted to. And yet he did not fall asleep; the roaring and bubbling of the cataract beneath him kept him awake until dawn. The sun’s early light revealed the whole valley under yellow-brown water. Considering the size of the big sycamore tree he was in, he judged that he must be some thirty feet (or two hats) above the ground, and yet the water was less than ten feet below him, which meant that the ground was covered with twenty feet of water. “AHOY!” he yelled several times, but there was no answer.

  Meanwhile, Jacob’s dogtrot house, which was situated on higher ground than any of the other dwellings, became the ark of refuge for all of the other Stay Morons. They counted heads
and discovered Noah missing, and began to grieve for him, and to be sorry that they had teased him, and even to be glad for the little trick he had played on them, because they had assembled their belongings when he had called “Anchors Aweigh!” so their belongings were all ready to go when the real flood came in the middle of the night. The religious ones among them prayed for Noah’s safety. Jacob had the opinion that maybe Noah was sitting on the ridgepole of his cabin, and in the morning they could construct a raft and float it down there and rescue him. As for the rest of the night, everybody was too excited to sleep, even if there were space in the two crowded pens to lie down, so they stayed awake talking and telling jokes in an effort to divert their minds from the rising water and the devastation of their fields and livestock and homes.

  But then the members of the Stay More Debating Society proposed a new topic: Which is worse, a drought or a flood? Sides were drawn, and the oratory and rebuttals kept them busy until dawn. But Jacob, the referee, decreed that the match was a draw, even-Stephen, and the jug of whiskey that was to go to the winners was shared, all around. At dawn, the men began constructing a raft, which Jacob piloted, leaving his house and grounds for the first time since the frakes had got him, and beginning his return to normal life.

  With Elijah Duckworth and Levi Whitter as first mate and boatswain, Jacob poled the raft down the broad yellow-brown river to the holler where his first cabin was; but it was no more. Probing with his pole for some sign of the roof or chimney, Jacob reluctantly concluded that the whole cabin must have washed away. “NOEY!” he called, but only the roar of the river answered him. He let the raft drift aimlessly downstream, continuing to call out for his brother, until Duckworth and Whitter suggested that they would like to inspect their homesteads too. These, it turned out, were still standing, although the livestock were drowned, except for a flock of chickens on the ridgepole of Duckworth’s place, and a pair of goats on Whitter’s ridgepole. The other buildings, too, of Stay More had survived, except for the rude trading post, whose roof could be seen floating in an eddy off Banty Creek. What was better, the men noted, the water level seemed to be dropping rapidly, and the rain had stopped and the sun was shining marvelously in a near-cloudless sky. Before the day was over, the people could return to their homes and drag out their wet bedding to hang in the sunshine, and begin scraping mud off their floors and furniture, and start the long hard reconstruction of their lives.

  But even after the floodwaters receded, Noah was still up in that tree. Not by choice; he was helplessly entangled in the blackjack vines that he had used to bind himself to the trunk. He would husband his strength for a while and then tug and tear at the vines, but to no avail. Whenever he did not feel completely exhausted, he would draw breath into his lungs and yell “AHOY!” but if anyone heard him from afar they probably took it as an echo of their own voices calling “NOAH!” or “NOEY!”

  This was true in Jacob’s case; since his own house did not require drying out and cleaning like the others, he could spend all of his time searching for his brother…or his brother’s body…but whenever he went far enough downstream to hear the distant, faint “ahoy” he took it as only an echo of his own voice calling “NOEY!”

  In time, Noah became too weak to yell very loudly. It is a marvel how he survived, but he did. Some of the details of his survival technique are not pleasant to dwell upon, but a few of the less unsavory may be mentioned: the sunshine dried his cold wet buckskins (although also drying, and tightening, the black-jack vines that bound him to the tree); there was a small saucer-shaped depression in a tree limb near his head which contained rainwater, or spunkwater as they call it, and which he, by craning his neck, could dip his tongue into and slake his thirst from time to time; his hands were still free, and he could use these to: (1) tear off leaves from the tree to chew upon; (2) unfasten his trousers in order to relieve himself; (3) seize, and pluck the feathers off of, pigeons, whose uncooked flesh was better than nothing. In this manner he managed to subsist for nearly a week, until he was found. He slept well without fear of falling into the water—or, now that the flood was gone, the ground, thirty feet below him. He was bothered by backaches occasionally, and, for two days, by constipation, but these were minor annoyances. He was troubled by thoughts of what unknown desolation the flood may have wreaked upon Stay More. One day a dove brought him an olive branch, but he did not know what it was, and ate the dove.

  It was Jacob who found him. Jacob, who had nothing better to do than to search, and kept at it. The people of Stay More had begun to feel very sorry for Jacob. Every day they would hear his voice, somewhere up or down the creek, calling “NOEY!” and they would shake their heads and cast sorrowful glances at one another, and remember all over again how cruel they had been to Noah before the flood. One of the more superstitiously religious women, perhaps out of guilt, tried to justify or at least explain the loss of Noah: “Hit’s God’s new sign. In the last flood all perished but Noah. In this flood all survived but Noah.”

  In fact, Jacob himself had given up the search, and what brought him to the vicinity of Noah’s sycamore tree was not the search for Noah, now abandoned, but a desire to go down to Parthenon to see if his neighbors there had survived the flood. This is how he happened to pass beneath Noah’s tree, and would not have noticed Noah if the latter had not noticed him first. At first Noah thought that Jacob was just an apparition, but perhaps as a simple reflex action, he said again, one last time, “Ahoy!” and Jacob looked up and saw him high overhead.

  “Heigh-ho!” Jacob exclaimed. “Whoopee! Yippity-yay! Boy oh boy! Goody gander! Hooraw! Hi-de-ho! Man alive! Hot diggety darn! Tolderollol!” Jacob jumped up and kicked his heels together twice before coming down. Then he became solicitous. “Air ye all right, Brother? You aint drownded? How’s yore heartbeat? Breathin normal? Kin ye see out of both eyes? Hear out of both ears? Bowel movements reg’lar? I’ll bet ye could stand a drop of good corn. Come on down.”

  “I’m all hung up,” Noah pointed out. “This here black-jack vine has got a mighty holt on me.”

  “I’ll git ye loose,” Jacob declared, and prepared to climb the tree, but saw that the first limb was too high for him to reach. “I’ll have to fetch a rope or ladder,” he told Noah. “Keep cool. I’ll be right back. Don’t git narvous. Steady down. Easy does it. Be a man. Stay with it. Chin up.” Jacob turned and ran for home. It was not a short distance, and he wasn’t used to running. Pretty soon he had to stop for breath, and he told himself there wasn’t any real hurry, because if Noah had been up in that tree for seven days and six nights already he could last for another hour or so.

  Jacob returned home to find Sarah yelling that Baby Ben had opened the cow-pasture gate and let all the cows out, and was being chased by the bull. Jacob shooed the bull off of Ben, spanked the latter and sent him to the house, then rounded up his cows and got them back into the pasture. No sooner had he finished this when word came that the Duckworths, in trying to dry their damp belongings, had built up too large a fire in their fireplace, and the roof had caught from sparks and the house was burning. Jacob grabbed up all his empty buckets and pails and took off for the Duckworth house, and spent the next hour helping them put out the fire. Part of the roof was gone but the rest of the place was saved. Then one of the sons of Levi Whitter, who was helping fight the fire, came running to tell Levi that his wife Destiny had fallen into the well, and they didn’t have rope long enough to reach her. Jacob ran home to get more rope and then down to the Field of Clover to help get Destiny out of the well. By the time they got her out and dried her off and revived her with whiskey, everybody was plumb wore out and hungry, so Jacob told Sarah to serve up a big supper for the rescue crews, and since Jacob’s place had escaped the flood and their larder was still undamaged if not exactly brimming, Sarah prepared what might in such lean times be considered a sumptuous feast, and afterwards the menfolk sat around in Jacob’s breezeway picking their teeth and belching in deep satisfaction. Dark came on.
One of the men remarked philosophically, “Wal, boys, I reckon we’ve seen the worst of it.” The other men nodded sagely, and got out their pocketknives and commenced whittling. The jug of corn was circulated freely among them, until, one by one, they got up and expressed their thanks for the fine supper and said they’d best be getting on down home. The last leaver clapped Jacob on the back and said, “Yeah, Jake, I reckon we’ve seen the worst of it. You’ve lost Noah, but—”

  “Great Caesar’s ghost!” Jacob exclaimed. “I plumb fergot all about him! Where’s a ladder? Quick!” Jacob rounded up rope, a ladder, and an axe to cut the black-jack vines, and with a torch of rags soaked in bear’s oil to light his way, went as fast as he could back toward the sycamore where Noah, meanwhile, having convinced himself that it really was just an apparition that he had mistaken for his brother, had supped on raw pigeon, relieved himself, and gone to sleep. Once Jacob got up into the sycamore, he had trouble waking Noah, and the still-sleepy Noah muttered to the effect that he might as well stay here. But Jacob got him down and took him home, or rather, since Noah’s cabin was washed away, into his own house, where he was bedded in the loft of the kitchen.

  We have essayed, in this chapter, to approach an exploration of duality, particularly as manifested in the bipartition or conjugation of Jacob Ingledew’s dogtrot house, which he in his simplistic perspective considered a manifestation of the bipartition or conjugation of the sexes, but which, although he was nearly correct in that limited interpretation, has hints of extension into far larger dualities: of drought and flood, of hot and cold, of day and night, of living and not living, of sowing and reaping, of breaking down and building up. We shape our buildings, and thereafter they shape us.

  “You know somethin?” Noah remarked one day to his brother. “Hit weren’t nearly so bad as you’d think, up there in that tree. Naw. Why, it was kinder fun. Could ye lend me the borry of yore saw and hammer…?”