Most biographers of Jesse James refrain from mentioning the Stay More episode, and in others it is reduced to a mere footnote or the trailing edge of a paragraph. But the James gang itself was made up largely of Ozarkers, albeit Ozark desperadoes who were clearly determined, tonight, to part Isaac from his small fortune. So these Ozarkers in the James gang must have understood part of what Isaac’s fiddle was saying to them, and they knew for the most part that it was cussing them to high heaven and daring them to enter his mill at their own peril. We may even suppose that if Frank James was there that night, which he was, he tried his best to dissuade Jesse from proceeding. Unquestionably, one or more of the James gang must have remarked to their leader that a back woods gristmill was hardly in the same class with a bank or a train, and undoubtedly Jesse himself could not shake loose his impression of what a giant of a man Isaac was. But the James gang never backed away from an enterprise, so they didn’t. Jesse himself mounted the mill porch and banged on the door, hollering, “Open up! Cut out that goddumb fiddlin and open the godburn door!” But Isaac went on fiddling, if anything, faster, louder, more obscene. Some of the gang began heaving their shoulders against the door, trying to break it down.
As we have seen, the bigeminality of Isaac’s mill was because one door was for entering, the other for leaving, to create traffic flow and avoid confusion. Now these gangsters in their ignorance were trying to enter the exit door, and this incensed Isaac all the more, and his fiddle music became really animated and profane. But the gangsters succeeded in busting the door loose from its hinges and entered, whereupon the fiddle music abruptly stopped. “You, Luke,” the ringleader ordered one of his men, “guard this here door. Bob and Cole guard the other doors.” Then he hollered into the dark interior, “Okay, mister millerman, give up, or die!”
Now Isaac’s mill, being three-and-a-half stories in height, was a labyrinth of nooks and crannies, passages, stairs, catwalks, traps, hoppers, cribs, coves, lofts, galleries and stoops. Isaac could have been in, or on, any of these; he knew them all by heart, in the pitch dark. One advantage of dark times, even though they bring desperadoes bent on crime, is that they make seeing difficult for the desperadoes. “Strike a light,” the gangleader ordered, and one of the men lighted a torch. Huddling close together, with their revolvers cocked and pointed in every direction, the men prowled the mill, searching for Isaac. They probed all over the first level, then ascended to the second, and then to the third. On the third-and-a-half level, they were inching along a catwalk when suddenly two of them tripped—or were pushed—and plummeted all the way back to the first level, where they broke several bones and began howling in pain. The remaining four men decided that Isaac was not to be found in the ceiling of the mill, and began to descend; by the time they got to the first level they discovered that they were not four but two: Jesse and Frank alone. They called for their comrades but received no answer. “Luke? Bob? Cole?” Jesse called to the men he had left posted at the doors, but he received no answer.
One may imagine that at this point the intrepid Jesse James felt an involuntary shudder; none of the biographies mention it, although an unfavorable biography of Frank James declares that at this point Frank “spontaneously defecated into one leg of his trousers.” “Let’s get out of here,” Frank suggested to his brother, and his brother wisely agreed. The two men quickly left the mill, remounted their horses and rode off. They had not ridden far, however, when Jesse said, “Frank, I wonder if we should jist ride off and leave ’em behind like that. Frank? FRANK??” He discovered the horse beside him was riderless, and he spurred his own horse as hard as he could, and did not even slow down until he was outside of Newton County. It would be weeks later before all of his gang would rejoin him; none of them killed, but each with various bones broken, and it would be years before the James gang went back into criminal action…never again in the state of Arkansas. Working in the mill the next day, one of Isaac’s helpers asked him, “Have any trouble last night, Colonel?” “Some,” Isaac replied, but, being taciturn, did not elaborate.
There really wasn’t much need for light after dark during the First Spell of Darkness, since no one could read, except Jacob (and, now, his ladyfriend—and they used candles). The only need for light after dark was to find one’s way to “go out.” That was a problem on a dark night. But the problem was solved when Eli Willard, making his usual timely reappearance, brought a wagon-load of chamberpots, which he facetiously called “thundermugs” and which the people of Stay More eventually referred to as “slop jars.” Ownership of a chamberpot, they felt, was not “puttin on airs” like the construction of a privy, nor was it necessarily PROG RESS; it was merely a convenient way to remain in while going out, or to go out without going out. Children were given the task of emptying and cleaning the chamberpots each morning, and were warned not to empty them into a path, lest the pots become permanently stuck to the child’s fingers. Nobody ever knew of any child whose pot stuck to his fingers, but no child was ever known to empty a pot into a path, so the superstition was just as efficacious as all their other superstitions.
Eli Willard, while selling the chamberpots to every house, happened to hear of the shortage of bear’s oil which had caused a shortage of light which had caused the boom in chamberpots, and, having sold his last chamberpot, he promised to bring relief for the fuel shortage on his next trip. True to his word, when he came again, a year later, he was driving a large wagon filled with barrels. The barrels, he said, contained “whale” oil. Since no one in Stay More had ever seen the ocean or could even imagine it, Eli Willard had to explain to them that a “whale” is a kind of big fish that lived in the ocean. Had they never read about Jonah in the Bible? Apparently not, because they did not read. They were suspicious of fish oil; they thought it would smell fishy. It did, but not like any of the fish of Stay More. Eli Willard used his pitchmanship to promote his product, and made a killing. He was also offering a line of special new lamps to burn the whale oil in, and made a further killing with these. Verily, Eli Willard made so much money selling whale oil and lamps that he retired from the game, and was not seen in Stay More again for ten years.
Those ten years were called the Decade of Light. There would be another Spell of Darkness after them, but for ten years there was a plenty of light. The last of Isaac’s children, Perlina and Drussie, had been conceived when Salina climbed him in the dark of the First Spell of Darkness. During the Decade of Light, she no longer climbed him, for, as we may have noticed, she was over-fastidious about not being seen by her children, and it was at the beginning of the Decade of Light when John, her third son, happened to spot his mother climbing his father by the light of whale oil. He was about five years old at the time. Far from suffering any “primal scene” trauma from the experience, he thought it looked like some wonderful game, and as soon as his mother was finished, he climbed his father and said, “Do me.” Salina was shocked, and never again climbed Isaac during the Decade of Light. But little John frequently climbed Isaac and said, “Do me,” to which Isaac, being taciturn, could only reply “Not now, son,” which did not deter John from later climbing his father and saying “Do me” again. This was how John got his nickname, “Doomy,” which he had so much trouble outliving in later life. Most people always thought that the nickname derived from the air of doom that seemed to surround John throughout his adult life, but that is not the fact of the case.
Because Salina would not climb Isaac during the Decade of Light, he became restless. One day he spoke to himself. Being taciturn, Isaac did not like to talk, even to himself. But now he announced to himself, “I’m gonna git me a new jug, and drink till the goddamn world looks little.” Isaac, like many silent men, was a connoisseur of fine liquor. His father Jacob had once spoken of “whiskey so good you kin smell the feet of the boys who plowed the corn.” Isaac not only could smell their feet but also could identify them and tell what they had had for breakfast. He could distinguish corn whiskey by regions as ably a
s any French wine taster could distinguish the vineyards of France. Abler. And in the case of metheglin—variously pronounced “mathiglum” or “mothiglum”—which is a spiced variety of mead, he could not only distinguish between that made from honey and that made from sorghum, but also identify each of the spices. So, having determined to drink until the world looked little, he was determined to do it in style, and after reflection he selected Seth Chism’s sour mash, which was, perhaps, one might say, the Château Lafitte Rothschild of Newton County.
Seth Chism had ground his grain at Isaac’s mill, and Isaac had ground it with especial care because he knew the care with which Seth Chism would distill it. Being taciturn, Isaac could not very well ask Seth Chism for a jug of it, but Seth understood the only possible meaning of a palm full of coins, and wordlessly made the sale. Isaac took his jug into his mill, barred the door, and began to diminish the size of the world. Because he was such a big man, it required half of the jug to reduce the world to half its size. He wanted to continue, but realized that if he drank all the jug the world would be reduced to nothing, so he stopped, and began to test the half-world. There was a barrel of flour in the mill which he knew weighed two hundred pounds; he hoisted it and then held it overhead, convinced it weighed only one hundred pounds. Then he went outside on the porch of his mill and looked around. The trees were half as high, the creek half as full and wide, the blue dome of heaven half as far away. He started down from the high porch, but the top step seemed half as far as it was, and, stepping only halfway, he went over into a somersault and landed flat on his back on the hard ground below. The fall would have killed a man half his size, or broken half his bones, but all it did to Isaac was knock half his breath out of him. He lay there for a while, getting that half back, and while he was lying there a rider rode up, a stranger, a man not three foot tall on a stallion not eight hands high. The little man on the tiny stallion did not know that Isaac was taciturn, and asked him a question:
“Howdy. Whar at is yore post office?”
The only office Isaac had ever heard tell on was his father Jacob’s office, where the ex-governor claimed he was writing his memoirs, but was not. Isaac remained silent, but at length got up from the ground, dusted himself off, and looked down at the little rider. “What’s a post office?” he said.
“Whar at do you’uns git yore mail?”
Near ’bout ever farmer in Stay More valley had one or more males around the place, if this feller was referrin to topcows, but since he was ridin a stallion there weren’t no sense in his lookin fer a cow-critter male. Isaac remained silent.
The stranger turned to his saddlebags, opened them, and drew out a small card, which he offered to Isaac. “This here postcard is addressed to ‘The Good People of Stay More, Arkansas.’ I reckon this here is Stay More, aint it?”
Isaac nodded.
“Then take it,” the stranger requested, and Isaac took it. Thus, in the beginning of the Decade of Light, in, coincidentally, the same year postcards were invented, Stay More became a post office.
The stranger turned his horse and prepared to ride off, but paused. He stared at Isaac for a moment and then asked, “Jist out of curiosity, what war you a-laying thar on the ground fer, when I rid up?”
Isaac studied the postcard, which he could not read, then gave the stranger a look that was not exactly hostile, but not cordial either. “Layin low fer moles,” he answered, and the rider stared at him for only an instant longer before spurring his horse and riding off. Isaac decided to deliver the postcard to his father, who could read it. His father’s house was only half as far as it used to be, and Isaac reached it in half the time. His father too, he discovered, was shrunk to half his size, sitting in his tiny office pretending to write his half-baked memoirs. Isaac gave him the little card. Jacob took the card and read both sides of it, was at first puzzled, then chuckled.
“It’s from ole Eli Willard,” Jacob told his son. “He must’ve got so all-fired rich sellin his whale oil that he’s done took off for a tour of the world. Sent this’un here from some’ers called ‘Stone-hinge,’ in Old England, clear across the sea. Says, ‘Having marvelous time. Wish you were here. Onward to London t’morrow. My fondest regards to all of you. Eli Willard.’” Jacob chuckled again, and observed, “Right thoughty of him, weren’t it?” He poked the postcard into a pigeonhole of his desk, and resumed pretending to write his memoirs, not noticing, or not commenting upon, the fact that his son Isaac positively reeked of Seth Chism’s aqua vitae. Isaac left, vaguely troubled with the thought that Eli Willard was expanding the world that Isaac was trying to contract. For several years following, throughout the Decade of Light, postcards kept coming from Eli Willard in Paris, Geneva, Venice, Rome, Naples, Athens, Istanbul, Sevastopol, Tehran, Bombay, Rangoon, Singapore, Shanghai, Osaka, Honolulu, and, the last one, San Francisco.
Every day, Isaac drank half a jug of corn whiskey to keep the world to half its size, but nobody seemed to notice that he was constantly half seas o’er, not even his better half, Salina, who, however, continued not to climb him. Seth Chism raised his price to half a dollar a jug, but this did not strain Isaac’s finances, because he continued to run his mill, half for corn, half for wheat, troubled only by having to double each measure to get it right, and vaguely troubled by postcards that came from halfway around the world. Stay More was officially declared a United States Post Office, and the postmastership was appointed to Isaac’s younger brother, Christopher Columbus “Lum” Ingledew, who, however, like everybody else except Jacob and his ladyfriend, could neither read nor write, a considerable handicap for a postmaster. It was decided to start a school, the first since Jacob’s little academy of many years previous, and everybody pitched in to build the schoolhouse, which we shall examine in the next chapter. Jacob declined the schoolmastership on the grounds of being past the retirement age. A subscription was got up, and a young man from Harrison up in neighboring Boone County, by the name of Boone Harrison, was hired, at $75 per term plus room and board, to teach the school. Boone Harrison was just barely literate himself, but he could, and did, teach people how to read and write, and thus it was that during the Decade of Light the people of Stay More acquired not only a post office but a means of patronizing both ends of it, sending and receiving, and once they became literate they spent all their spare time writing letters, a worthless enterprise.
The post office in its early years was not a separate structure, but occupied one small corner of Isaac’s mill, where, twice weekly, Lum Ingledew would sort and distribute mail, what little there was of it, until the people discovered how to write off for catalogs and to circulate chain letters. One of the first catalogs to arrive in Stay More was a seed catalog, and the recipients discovered to their amazement that the Tah May Toh, which grew wild on fifteen-foot vines all over Stay More, and which they had always thought poisonous, was considered edible, so immediately everybody began harvesting and eating ’maters, as they called them, and suffering no effects other than the heady (and body) sense of voluptuousness that gave the ’mater its nickname, “love apple.” It is not exactly an aphrodisiac, because no frigid woman nor impotent man has ever been cured by eating one, but in the case of persons already healthily disposed toward sex, it enriches the disposition. Hence, the numbers of people who comprised Stay More’s maximum population during the last part of that century were conceived and born during the Decade of Light. But Isaac’s wife Salina, even though she acquired just as fond a taste for ’maters as anybody else, still would not climb Isaac during the Decade of Light. After eating a ’mater, she might remark to him, “I’d like to climb a tree,” but she wouldn’t climb him. In time, she spoke of “climbing the walls,” but she never again climbed Isaac until the Decade of Light was over. And he went on drinking, so that she looked to him too small, less than three feet high, to climb him anyway.
Oddly enough, all of the energy or voluptuousness or libido or lubricity generated by the love apple cannot be discharged through s
ex alone. There is a generous residue that seeks other outlets, so during the peak of ’mater-pickin time the women commenced frenzies of quilting bees, and the men devoted all their spare time to the game they called Base Ball, originated by Jacob Ingledew years before. The equipment remained unrefined: a hickory stake for a bat, a round chunk of sandstone for a ball, gunnysacks for bases; but the men spent so much time playing it during ’mater-pickin time that they perfected it in many ways: some players were so strong they could knock the rock clear out of the field, which constituted a “free run home,” while the pitchers, in order to thwart this type of batter, learned how to make the rock actually “curve” instead of going in a straight line, and some pitchers, by applying their tobacco juice to the rock, could really confuse and harass the batter. Isaac Ingledew, once the greatest batter and pitcher of all, was still in his thirties, and tried to play, but could not: he would swing at the rock before it was halfway to him.
Every five years during the Decade of Light, that is, twice, Stay More hosted a gala reunion of the G.A.R., the veterans who had fought with Jacob and Isaac during the War. These men would come, with their families, from all over Newton and adjoining counties, and hundreds of primitive tents would be pitched in the Field of Clover, and a great time would be had by all. The women of Stay More would spend days in their kitchens preparing banquets. The menfolk kept the stills running night and day, and shot all the game out of all the woods. The reunion began on a Second Tuesday of the Month and lasted only three days, but that was long enough to eat up all the food and drink all the liquor and listen to a speech by Jacob Ingledew. The first reunion was such a big success that when time came five years later for the second one, even some of John Cecil’s Rebels tried to sneak in with their families, but they were spotted and driven away. The second reunion happened by accident to occur during the peak of ’mater-pickin time. The womenfolk not only served loads of fresh whole ’maters cooled in springwater, but also they prepared and served baked stuffed ’mater, fried ’mater, broiled ’mater, sautéed crumbed ’mater, as well as ’mater juice, ’mater gazpacho, ’mater compote, ’mater aspic, ketchup, puree, relish, ’mater salad, ’mater jam and ’mater pie, this last, however, being made with green ’maters, which do not have the potency of red ones. Most of the out-of-town reunionists were skeptical of ’maters, until the Stay Morons assured them that they had been eating them for several years now without being p’izened, whereupon they, and everybody, tucked their napkins in their collars and did their duty.
The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks Page 21
