Chapter five
It was an anomaly, a freak of the Ozarks, as it were, but so was Noah Ingledew, as it were. And yet, who are we to take the measure of that man and pronounce him abnormal? There is in each of us the child who yearns to build treehouses, to return to primordial man’s arboreal aerie. We don’t know Noah, and never will; a man whose vocabulary of oaths was limited to a single illogical combination of feces and flame might seem to lack the imagination to design and build the original penthouse shown in our illustration; and yet not only did he build it, but also he made a couple of innovations in architecture, to wit: it is the first split level dwelling in the Ozarks (and bigeminal, by Jiminy!) and, perhaps owing in part to the difficulty of building up a chimney of stone to that height (two hats, or over thirty feet above the ground), it was the first dwelling in the Ozarks heated by a metal stove with tin flue—although where Noah obtained the metal and how he fashioned it into a stove, and what the stove actually looked like, I cannot say.
Noah’s house and its massive sycamore tree (not the same tree he was stuck in a few pages back) were located not far from the center of Stay More, on the banks of Swains Creek, around a sharp bend of the creek as it meanders its tortuous course through the valley. The house remained stubbornly clinging to the sycamore tree for years and years after Noah’s death—unoccupied even during times of housing shortage, not necessarily through reverence for Noah’s memory but rather out of superstition—until well into the twentieth century, when a mixed crowd of “modern” youths, to whom the name “Noah Ingledew” meant merely the faceless cofounder of Stay More, climbed up into it for the purpose of sexual sport (a purpose to which Noah himself had put the treehouse on only one fleeting occasion), and through a combination of the ardor of their sport and the weight of their numbers (there were four boys and four girls) caused the tree house, both pens of it, to detach itself from the tree and crash to the ground. All eight of the youths were injured, none seriously, but their biggest problem was explaining to their elders the nature of the accident—the truth got out, and some of the older elders claimed they could see the ghost of Noah Ingledew nightly surveying the ruins of the treehouse.
Initial public reaction to Noah’s construction of the treehouse was mixed; half of the Stay Morons declared that it confirmed their suspicion that Noah was “not over-bright,” while the other half countered by saying Well as I live and breathe! and What do you know about that! and If thet aint the beatinest thang ever I seed! These people coaxed out of Noah an invitation to climb up and view the interior(s); he could admit them only one at a time; the others queued up at the base of the tree, and even some of those who had deemed Noah “not over-bright” joined the line and waited their turns to climb up and look inside his treehouse. Word quickly spread, and soon people from Parthenon and even Jasper were joining the queue, which grew longer and longer. An itinerant evangelist, or wandering “saddlebag preacher,” happened by the end of the queue, which at that point was stretched out of sight of the treehouse around a bend in Swains Creek.
There was some profane cursing going on at the end of the queue, with imprecations of “Quit shovin!” and “Git in line!” and “Keep off my toes!” and the profanity, more than the queue itself, drew the preacher’s attention. “Brethern and sistern,” he addressed them, “how come you’uns take the Lord’s Name in vain?” The people just stared at him, until one of them said, “Light down often yore goddamn horse, and take yore place in line like everybody else.” This incensed the preacher, but he got down and tethered his horse to a tree, and took his place in line. The line moved slowly, and by and by the preacher tapped the shoulder of the man ahead of him and asked, “What air we a-waitin fer, anyhow?” The man, who happened to be Jacob Ingledew, looked at him. Jacob judged from the preacher’s clothing, and from his remark about taking the Lord’s name in vain, that he might be an ignorant preacher who had just stumbled by, and he asked him, “Air ye a preacher, Reverend?”
“Some has been known to say so,” the preacher replied.
“Wal, Reverend,” Jacob said, “you’re jist in time. It’s the Jedgment Day, and up yonder God has set Hisself a booth up in a tree, and we’re all a-waitin to be jedged.”
The preacher began to sweat, and while he continued to wait patiently in the queue, he gave himself over to silent prayer. After a while his place in line had moved around the bend of Swains Creek, and he came in view of the big sycamore tree with Noah’s treehouse thirty feet off the ground, and people climbing up the ladder to it. His knees trembled and he stumbled against Jacob, who said, “Quit shovin, Reverend. God has got all day.” Jacob meanwhile had quietly passed along to the others the news of the joke that was being played on the poor preacher, and the others gave him amused looks and tried hard not to laugh. One woman said to the preacher, “You aint skairt, air ye, Reverend? Don’t the Lord place the preachers on His right hand?” “Yeah,” the preacher replied, “but there was a few sins in my past that air still a-troublin me.”
By the time the preacher reached the head of the queue at the base of the big sycamore tree, he was lathered with sweat and trembling as if with the palsy. Jacob took his turn climbing up to view the interior(s) of his brother’s treehouse, but decided against telling Noah that his next visitor would be a dumb preacher expecting to meet God. When Jacob climbed down, he had to assist the preacher in climbing the rude rungs up the tree, and to give him a final shove to propel him through the door of the treehouse, where the preacher fell down on his knees before the astonished Noah, crying, “LORD, I REPENT EVER BIT OF IT!” Noah, who had been sitting in his chair welcoming each visitor with the same mild words: “Howdy. Make yerself pleasant” (that is, “Make yourself at home”), and had repeated this so many times by now that it was automatic, now said to the prostrate preacher, “Howdy. Make yerself pleasant.” The preacher looked around him and saw that there was an empty chair in the room, and managed to hoist himself into it, where he sat with clenched hands between his knees and gazed in awe at Noah. Noah at that time was about thirty-four years old, and he sure didn’t look like anybody’s conventional conception of God, but the preacher had never seen God before, and you couldn’t never tell. Maybe he was just Saint Peter, the preacher thought, but either way the preacher was in for a hot time of it, on account of his past sins. “Fergive us our trespasses,” he beseeched, “as we fergive them that trespass against us.”
Noah, for his part, was more than a little discomfited. Although he had said to each visitor, “Howdy. Make yerself pleasant,” this had been a mere formality, and not one of the people had taken him at his word and sat down in the other chair, until this feller came along. The feller seemed tetched in the head someway. He was dressed kind of funny, too, in a black suit and hat and necktie. And now he was asking to be forgiven for trespassing. “Aint no trespass,” Noah reassured him. “If all them other folks could come up here, reckon ye got as much right as any.”
God—or Saint Peter—talked kind of funny, the preacher thought. He talked just like he looked: just plain folks. Well, sure, the preacher realized, God would want to make Himself appear like one of His people. “You fergive me, then?” he timidly asked.
“Why, shore,” Noah declared. “Come again sometime.”
“You mean that’s all?” the preacher asked. “That’s all there is to it? I kin git to go to heaven, now?”
Noah was a little annoyed by this feller’s silliness, but he wanted to make light of it. “Shitfire,” he remarked, “you kin git to go to hell, fer all I care.”
The preacher fainted. When he came to, he was no longer in God’s treehouse, but flat out on a sandbar by a riverbank surrounded by a vast mob of howling fiends who were pointing their fingers at him and cackling fit to bust. He fainted again at the sight of these denizens of hell, and when he revived the second time there were not so many of them and they were not cackling but just chuckling, and a woman among them who felt sorry for him took the trouble to explain the
trick that had been played upon him.
He grew exceedingly angry, as well as mortified. Strangely enough, the brunt of his anger became focused upon Noah, as if Noah had been responsible for the trick, and the preacher became determined to “git even, someway.” He began to preach against men living in trees. His gatherings were small, because most people were still laughing at him too much to be able to sit and listen to him seriously. But to whatever gathering he could assemble, in the name of God, in brush arbors constructed in Stay More, Parthenon and Jasper, he ranted against the unnaturalness of men living in trees.
By purest coincidence only, this was just two years after Darwin had published the findings of his voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle, and we may be sure that the preacher had never heard of Darwin, and in any case the conflict between religion and the theory of evolution was still years in the future, but the preacher accused Noah Ingledew of being a monkey. “What other reason would a creature have fer livin up in a tree?” he would demand of his audiences, and quote Scripture to prove that man was meant to walk on the ground and dwell on the ground, and a man living up in a tree was bound to bring the wrath of God upon all the people.
Little by little, the preacher converted a few of the people to his position against Noah, but he could persuade none of them to join him in his plan, which was to take an axe and chop down the sycamore, so in the end he had to go it all alone. But as soon as he began swinging the axe against the tree, in the light of the moon one night, Noah stepped to the edge of his dogtrot (or rather birdtrot, because no dogs ever got up there) and urinated down upon the preacher’s head. The preacher retreated, yelling, “I’ll git ye, yet!” and he went away and preached to the people for several more days and nights, without succeeding in persuading any of them to help him chop down the tree. He went again with his axe late at night, when he was sure Noah would be asleep, but at the first THOCK of the axe Noah woke up, and squatted backwards at the edge of his birdtrot. Enraged, the preacher hurled his axe at Noah. The axe missed Noah, but imbedded itself in the side of the treehouse, where Noah allowed it to remain as an ornament, and where it may be minutely detected in our illustration. His brother Jacob, visiting the next day, noticed it and asked Noah about it and then declared, “Wal, that preacher has done went too far.” So Jacob assembled the menfolk of Stay More and they took a split rail off a fence and carried it to the preacher and Jacob said, “Climb up. Or do you need a saddle?” and, to use the expression that would be employed whenever this ceremony was duplicated in the future, they “rode him out of town on a rail.” He protested, “If it weren’t fer the honor, I’d jist as soon walk.” He was never seen again. Nor, for that matter, were any other preachers, saddlebag or otherwise, seen in Stay More for years thereafter.
Except for one instance, to be scrutinized in moderate detail later, Noah lived the life of a celibate bachelor. But he was not a recluse. Over the years people visited him in his treehouse, not just out of curiosity, and he was especially popular with his nephews and nieces; it was said that each of Jacob Ingledew’s five children had “come of age” when he or she was old enough to climb unassisted up the ladder into Noah’s treehouse. Little Benjamin made the first ascent at the age of four, Isaac bested him by going up at three-and-a-half, Rachel was nearly five before she got up, and neither Lum nor Lucinda could do much better than Benjamin. Noah cultivated a knack for making candy apples (he had his own orchard, established with the help of a passing “furriner” named John Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed), and these candy apples were the reward for the ascent to his treehouse of his nephews and nieces. But that was not the reason they climbed up to visit him; they climbed because they liked him.
We do not know exactly why. We know so pitifully little about the true workings of Noah’s mind and heart. The one clue we have, if such it be, was that Noah had a wide-eyed sense of wonder which was perhaps childlike or with which the children empathized. Everything either fascinated him or (like Indians) terrified him. He felt constantly confronted with the unknown. Sometimes he would sit idly in his treehouse, just listening to the beating of his heart or to the slow wafting of air in and out of his nostrils, and these things, circulation, respiration, would captivate him with wonder. He never took anything for granted. The sun might so easily choose not to come up some morning, and Noah would not be surprised, he would be just as fascinated as he was with the fact that the sun came up and went down every day.
Noah understood nothing; he only witnessed it. The intricate growth and tasseling and pollination of a stalk of corn was endlessly absorbing to him, but he did not comprehend the sexuality of plants any better than he did the sexuality of animals. Like any rural person, he was exposed daily to the varied spectacle of one animal affixing itself to another animal for the purpose of perpetuating its species and experiencing pleasure into the bargain. Noah watched these spectacles entranced. We cannot know to what extent he felt excluded from Nature’s grand saturnalia, nor are we going to learn how much or how little appetite he personally possessed, much less how, if ever, he gratified it, but we can discern this much: that Noah, knowing nothing and understanding less, knew at least the fundamental difference between man and the other animals in regard to the ritual of mating: that for all animals it required merely a casual exchange of glances or of scents, or perhaps a little posturing, preening and circling, whereas for man it is a protracted business of gallantry, courting and coaxing and caressing, proposing and promoting and preparing, that costs literally millions of words, of which animals are not capable. Nor was Noah.
Why, then, was his treehouse bigeminal? Merely in emulation of his brother’s dogtrot? If, as we have conclusively demonstrated, bigeminality is symbolic of the division of the sexes, was the second half of Noah’s house merely wishful thinking or subconscious yearning? A symbol of his absent “better half”? Perhaps. It could well be that he never gave up hope that some girl would again bring him a piece of cornbread which he could accept without clumsiness. But if any visitor to his treehouse remarked upon its bigeminality, Noah would simply point out that one half was where he slept and the other half was where he cooked and ate and sat, not necessarily in that order. It is only purest coincidence, of no significance whatever, that Noah’s first two years in his tree-house were the same two years that Thoreau lived at Walden, but like Thoreau, Noah had one chair for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society—although that society usually consisted only of his nephews and nieces.
In our pitiful ignorance of the man, we do not even know how he managed to entertain them, apart from presenting them with candy apples. Did he tell them stories, or did they just sit and munch their apples in silence? Little Benjamin, at least, must have been silent, for it is told about him that he was eight years old before uttering his first words, which were, “Watch it, Paw!” at the moment the latter was about to be charged from behind by a bull while in the pasture, whereupon Jacob, after jumping out of the bull’s path, exclaimed to Benjamin, “How come you never said nary a word afore now?” to which Benjamin replied, “I never had nothin ’portant to say.”
If this legend is true (and I have no reason to doubt it), then Benjamin must have sat silently munching his candy apple while Noah talked, but what did Noah say? He does not seem the storytelling type, even less the joke-cracking type. Did he verbalize his wonder at the mystery of the pollination of corn, or of the sun’s diurnal appearance? Quite possibly he did not talk at all, but it is disquieting to visualize the two of them sitting there silently, eerie in that aerie, for over four years, until Noah remarked, “Yore pap tells me ye kin talk right easy,” and Benjamin allowed, “Yep,” and Noah shook his head in commiseration and said, “A durn shame.” Thereafter, Benjamin felt obliged to say something, so he began, from the age of nine onwards, to ask Noah questions. It never mattered that Noah was unable to answer a single one of Benjamin’s questions, or at least to answer one accurately; Benjamin went on asking them, and Noah went on trying and
failing to answer them. There were things Benjamin could not discuss with his parents. We know that he slept, until his twelfth year, in a “truckle,” or trundle bed, at the foot of his parents’ own bed, and that in that proximity he was suffered to eavesdrop upon their occasional (infrequent; once a month, on the average, usually the night of the Second Tuesday of the Month) exchanges of words that meant nothing to him. (Could it be that he had never talked because he associated words with nothingness, or, worse, dark unfathomable deeds connected with the words his father and mother spoke to each other in their bed at night?)
“How’s that?” Benjamin would hear one of them say to the other in the dark in their bed.
“Wal, I reckon,” he would hear the other reply. He could not tell their voices apart; his mother’s voice at such times was low and husky. Benjamin could not tell if these were his father or his mother:
“Yore nose is cold.”
“There.”
“Move down.”
“Yore knee is in my monkey.”
“Seems lak we caint git it through.”
“Here I go.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“I said.”
“Now.”
“Where?”
“Holy hop-toads!”
“Done?”
“Um.”
His parents never talked like this during the daytime, and it puzzled Benjamin to the extent that, when he was nine years old and began to ask Noah questions, he would repeat what his parents had said in bed to Noah and ask Noah what it meant. Even assuming Noah actually knew the meaning of the various utterances, doubtless he would not have been able to discuss it with a mere lad of nine. So his “answers” were inaccurate. He would, for example, interpret “Seems lak we caint git it through” as meaning that Sarah was trying to help Jacob put his pants on and couldn’t get one leg into them. “Monkey,” he would define, is the base of the spine, where a monkey’s tail would go, so “Yore knee is in my monkey”…Benjamin seemed satisfied with these explanations, but by the time he was twelve years old and pubescent himself, and had witnessed sufficient numbers of animals wild and domestic pairing themselves together with a strange mixture both of apparent pain and intense pleasure, it dawned on him that the voices he heard in the night once a month on the average had some connection with this business of one animal having a hole which another animal would wish to probe with his dood, and although Benjamin would not have wished to suspect that his very own dear mother ever did that sort of thing with his father, at length he persuaded himself that it was inevitable, so that the time came when in the night he heard one of his parents saying to the other:
The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks Page 12
