The banquet was again scheduled to run three days, but nobody slept the first night, either making sounds or listening to them. The tent camp in the Field of Clover was a ruckus of amatory sounds, and the various residences of town were not exactly silent, either, except for Isaac Ingledew’s. Isaac got out of bed, allowing as how he had better go and see what could be done to quieten things down. On the dark road to the Field of Clover, he was climbed eight times, so when he arrived at the tent camp he was grateful to accept the drink that somebody offered him and to rest awhile. Returning home, he was only climbed twice, so he figured that things were beginning to quieten down. Once asleep, in deep, deep sleep, he did not notice the noises going on through the night. In the morning it was absolutely silent, until the creak of the first wagonwheel as, one by one, the out-of-town reunionists began returning homeward. By noon the tent camp was abandoned, and the people of Stay More did not come out of their houses for all that day. There would be another G.A.R. reunion in five more years, but it would be scheduled at a time of year other than ’mater-pickin. And that year would be beyond the Decade of Light.
The Decade of Light, like most decades, lasted only ten years. And then it was over. The barrels of whale oil went dry, were empty. The Second Spell of Darkness was ushered in. By daylight, people sat on their porches watching the road for the reappearance of Eli Willard. By night, untired, they went to bed and lay awake with insomnia. The chamberpots were hauled out from under the beds and dusted off, and a new generation of children was warned that the pots would stick to their fingers if they emptied them into a path. Realizing their insomnia was hopeless, the people sat up in the dark, telling to one another terrifying ghost stories, which did nothing for their insomnia but gave them something to do in the dark. Women and children were more suggestible, and both more susceptible to, and addicted to, the shivers brought on by these tales of “boogers” and “haints.” One enterprising group of women, in an effort to kick the habit, attempted to have a quilting bee in the dark, but the product, which somebody referred to as a “crazy quilt,” was a source of mirth to everybody else. The men tried to whittle in the dark, and a number of fingers were lost before this practice was abandoned. When all the ghost stories that everybody knew had been told and retold several times, the more imaginative (and more insomniac) Stay Morons began to create new stories, fantastic tales that stretched credulity beyond bounds. But having nothing else to do, the people began to believe these stories, and the Second Period of Darkness that followed the Decade of Light was not real, that is, it was mostly fictitious or illusory, all in the mind. Isaac Ingledew sobered up, because now that it was dark again Salina was climbing him all the time, every time she caught him standing, and sometimes even when he was sitting, but, being sober, he believed that he was only imagining it, that it was not real. The world was full-sized again for him, nothing was halved, but the full-sized world was dark and fanciful.
In time, among all the other dark chimeras and phantasms that were conceived in this world, there appeared the unmistakable specter of Eli Willard, driving another large wagon laden with barrels. He was older, and his trip around the world had broadened him about the middle, but, no doubt about it, he was Eli Willard. The barrels he had this time, he said, contained a fuel which did not smell fishy. It smelled powerful strong, all right, but it did not smell fishy. It was made from coal, a kind of rock, a pitch black rock deep in the earth. It was called kerosine, he said. There were grown people in Stay More who had been too young during Eli Willard’s previous visit to remember him, although they had heard his name many times, but this feller trying to hoax them into believing that oil could be squeezed out of a rock could not possibly be Eli Willard, but an imposter. Everybody knows that rocks are the driest things that are. No, whale oil was good enough for them, any time. But this person pretending to be Eli Willard claimed that all the whales had been killed; there was no more whale oil. Nothing but kerosine. The Stay Morons, especially the younger ones, were suspicious of him. The sun went down, darkness fell, Eli Willard lighted one of his kerosine lamps as a demonstration. His patience was ebbing. “Take it or leave it,” he said. So they left it. Whether or not they believed that oil could be squeezed out of a black rock, they equated such an artificial product with PROG RESS, and wanted none of it.
PROG RESS is always at the expense of pain and sacrifice and expense, and even if the Stay Morons did not know of the men who had toiled and died to mine the coal and make the oil, they guessed rightly that kerosine is the product of pain and sacrifice and expense. Darkness might tend to obscure and even confuse the world, but in darkness there was little pain or sacrifice or expense. Eli Willard sold not a drop of kerosine in the Ozarks, not that year anyway, and lost his shirt. Now, at Stay More, he was more dispirited than he had been years earlier when he had failed to sell raincoats and umbrellas during the drought. He turned off his demonstration lamp and sat with his head in his hands in the darkness. He hoped somebody would offer him a bed for the night, but nobody did, because with their insomnia they no longer went to bed but stayed up telling wild and fanciful stories.
Eli Willard listened to these stories, and was amazed. He had thought he understood the Ozark mind and heart as well as any outsider could, but these stories dumbfounded him. They were either incredibly fabulous or impossibly inconceivable. At any rate, he was captivated, so that when daylight came and the people stopped telling stories and went to work, he decided to stay for another night to hear more stories. But throughout the long day, with nothing to do because nobody was buying kerosine, he felt a growing ennui that left him utterly weary and miserable by late afternoon. Salina Ingledew found him in this condition and asked what was ailing him. He replied simply, “I’m bored.”
Now, to any Stay Moron, any Ozarker, the word “bored” had nothing to do with boredom, but meant humiliated or chagrined. Salina spread the word to her neighbors, and everyone assumed that Eli Willard was humiliated because of his failure to sell kerosine, but this did not change their attitude toward purchasing coal oil. Had they known what he really meant by being “bored,” they would have been puzzled, for at that time nobody in the Ozarks had ever been bored in the sense that Eli Willard meant. “Boredom” was a word, and an emotion, like “nostalgia,” that had to be learned and acquired, and fortunately Eli Willard’s boredom was not yet contagious, although he was severely afflicted with it. Anyone who has contracted acute boredom knows that it doesn’t easily go away; hence, when the people began telling their stories again after darkness, Eli Willard listened to them but was no longer amazed. He was bored. What had seemed fabulous and fanciful in the stories now struck him merely as long-windedness. What had seemed clever and imaginative now seemed only silly. In the middle of an exceptionally long and silly story, he left town, using his kerosine lamps to light his way.
Both the post office and the school remained closed during the Second Spell of Darkness, but nobody seemed to miss either one of them. Most of what came through the post office had been what we would today refer to as “junk mail” and it was a relief not to get any. As for the school, the people began to realize that Jacob Ingledew had had a good reason for excluding reading and writing from his old academy. The more one read or wrote, the less one talked. At any rate, Boone Harrison the schoolmaster returned home to the county and town he was named after, and the schoolhouse was converted, as we shall soon see, to other purposes. When everybody told, or had heard, every possible tale and fiction that could be told or heard, and the most inventive of the yarn spinners had exhausted their imaginations, the Stay Morons turned for diversion to the singing of songs. Modern folklorists have tabulated and recorded 2,349 distinct “folk songs” heard in the Ozarks, all but 847 of which have been traced to ancient England, Scotland, Wales, or Ireland; 176 of the latter were invented and composed in Stay More at one time or another, but all 2,349 of the songs were known by heart to one or more Stay Morons, so the dark and starless nights were filled wi
th song, and Isaac Ingledew would furnish accompaniment with his fiddle, at least after the children had gone to bed.
Song is poetry, of a kind, and the night is the most poetic of times, so the people of Stay More were no longer oppressed by the darkness, and most all of them were able to sleep again after a night of singing. Most all of them, that is, except Isaac Ingledew, who had discovered during his months of insomnia that sleep is an extravagant and useless pastime, and who never slept again, to the end of his days. We do not know, and can scarcely imagine, how he passed the many hours of life that others give over to slumber, but he was never idle, except when Salina was climbing him, which she continued to do, every chance she got, until…. But that is another story, another chapter, another edifice.
Chapter nine
It was built as a schoolhouse, and so it remained during the Decade of Light, Boone Harrison holding sway as literacy-giver to the young and old of Stay More, many of whom would walk three or four miles in all kinds of weather just to “git a little schoolin.” The schoolhouse was both a house of learning and the community center. Its bigeminality (we have hinted unsubtly and often that architectural bigeminality is sexual) was definitely and overtly sexist: the left door was for females, the right door for males, without exception (although an occasional “tomboy” among the girls would boldly use the right door…but no boy ever used the left door, because there was never the equivalent of a “queen,” “nancy,” “molly,” or “betty” anywhere in the Ozarks). Since both doors led to the same one-room interior, we may assume that the reason for two of them was to facilitate egress at recess, lunch and dismissal, which, when indicated by Boone Harrison, cleared the room in 3.6 seconds. Any door, of course, is for both entering and leaving. Some doors are more pleasurable to enter, while others are more pleasurable to exit, but in any case one must usually always enter before exiting. The study of architecture is a fine thing.
Boone Harrison never discussed the doors with his pupils; tacitly they understood what the doors were for, and which to use, according to sex. The signal to enter was the ringing of the bell, housed in the small cupola atop the ridgepole; the signal to exit was Boone Harrison sitting down. When he sat down, he would take out his pocketknife and whittle goose-feathers into quill pens for his pupils to write with. He manufactured his own ink from the “ink balls” that grow on oak trees, boiling them in a little water and setting the liquid with copperas. The pupils always licked their pens as an aid to concentration before commencing to write, and this caused their lips to turn the blue-green color of the ink. It was easy to distinguish the literate from the illiterate Stay Morons: the latter did not have blue-green lips. During the Decade of Light, there arose almost a caste system based upon lip color, with those of deep blue-green lips at the upper caste, and those with natural lips at the bottom. It was possible to cross caste lines by kissing, and kissing became very popular, until in time the color of one’s lips was meaningless, and the caste system fell apart, and the Decade of Light came to an end, and Boone Harrison sat down for the last time, then stood up and went home to the county and town he was named after, and those who could read and write forgot how.
The schoolhouse was empty during the first years of the Second Spell of Darkness. Vandals broke its windows one by one, and someone stole the picture of George Washington that was its sole interior decoration. The pages of the McGuffey’s Readers, Ray’s Arithmetics and the Blue Back Spellers were employed as “asswipes” until they were used up. Bats and owls roosted in the ceiling of the schoolhouse, and were noctural. Everything was nocturnal. It was dark and often starless and even the moon was missing as often as not. Because all women are beautiful in the dark, all the girls and women of Stay More were ravishing, and were ravished. And because the darkness makes one invisible to one’s enemies, nobody had any enemies. It was a dark and peaceful and licentious time.
Then, one day (or night), for the first time since the coming of the “saddlebag preacher” who had pestered Noah Ingledew because of his treehouse and had been ridden out of town on a rail, an itinerant evangelist showed up in town. He discovered the schoolhouse empty and unused, and decided to convert it to a church. The hour of his first service was norated around the village, but when the hour came nobody showed up, except old Elijah Duckworth, who took a seat on the front bench, and waited. The preacher waited too, and when nobody else showed up, he asked Lige if he thought he should go ahead with the service. “Wal, Reverend,” Lige observed, “if I put some hay in the wagon and take it down to the pasture to feed the cows and only one cow shows up, I feed her.” So the preacher went ahead and gave his service, with a rousing full-length sermon. Afterwards he asked Lige what he had thought of it. “Wal, Reverend, I’ll tell ye,” said Lige. “If I put some hay in the wagon and go down to the pasture to feed the cows and only one cow shows up, I don’t give her the whole damn load.”
Later Lige spread word to the other Stay Morons that the preacher was a “Presbyterian.” The old-timers had a vague memory of the saddlebag preacher of Noah’s time, and they had vague associations of unpleasantness with him. The new-timers had never heard of a preacher, and this “Presbyterian” seemed very suspicious. So they stayed away from his services. Failing to get any further audiences, he began pastoring them individually, door to door. Presbyterians, he explained to them, were strong believers in predestination, but the Stay Morons couldn’t understand predestination any better than Presbyterianism. Trying to simplify it, the minister would shout, “What is to be, will be!” “Why, shore,” his listeners were apt to respond, “any durn fool knows that.”
The Presbyterian began to claim that, as evidence of his message, the world was predestined to be plunged into darkness during the daylight on a certain day soon approaching. Nobody believed him; nobody wanted to believe him, because the world was dark enough already. But on the day appointed (which the Presbyterian had previously learned about from astronomers in the East) there occurred a total eclipse of the sun which darkened the earth for a while, long enough for the preacher to convert everybody except the Ingledews to Presbyterianism. Thereafter he managed to fill the schoolhouse (now churchhouse) every Sunday morning, until one day, when another preacher, who called himself a “Methodist,” came into the churchhouse and challenged the Presbyterian to a debate on the subject of predestination, which the Methodist was against. The debate lasted for three days, then the Methodist challenged the Presbyterian to prove predestination, which the Presbyterian could not do, there being no other eclipses scheduled for the immediate future. The congregation was allowed to put the matter to a vote, and since the majority of them liked the idea of free salvation better than predestination, they gave the pastorate to the Methodist, who conducted services for some time thereafter, until the day another preacher, calling himself a “Baptist,” came and challenged the Methodist to a debate over the issue of baptism by sprinkling or immersion.
Most Stay Morons readily agreed that immersion is certainly a lot more fun and probably cleaner than sprinkling, and they became Baptists in denomination until a “Campbellite” minister appeared and argued against denominationalism, pointing out that there is nothing in the Bible authorizing anybody to call themselves Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians or anything else. If, he said, there had to be a name over the door of the church, then let it be simply “Church of Christ.” This made eminent sense to everybody, and they dismissed the Baptist preacher and installed the Campbellite, but he was not a very interesting, let alone exciting, personality. The Dinsmores, who gave him a place to sleep his first Saturday in town, said he wouldn’t eat his supper. They said he had remarked, “You folks sure do set a good table, but I don’t never eat much when I’m a-fixin to give a sarmon.” Then on Sunday morning the Dinsmores set out a fine breakfast of ham and eggs, but the preacher wouldn’t touch it. “Earthly food seems to hinder a true feast of the spirit,” he said. “My finest sarmons has all been preached on a empty stomach.” So he had just one cu
p of coffee and went off to the churchhouse. After listening to his sermon, one of the Dinsmores remarked, “Why, that there preacher might just as well have et.”
The Campbellite was supplanted by a colorful preacher of the “Holiness” faith, who amazed the Stay Morons by handling poisonous snakes without being bitten and running his hand through fire without being burned. For several months the Stay More church was a Holiness church, until the novelty of the snakes and fire wore off. Subsequently, other ministers converted the church to Assembly of God, Gospel Tabernacle, Seventh-Day Adventist and Pentecostal. One Sunday, even a Roman Catholic priest wandered into Stay More and was permitted to celebrate a mass at the church, but afterwards the stares that he received from the Stay Morons unnerved him, and he wandered on out of town. Stay More had run the gamut of gentile religions without deciding upon any one of them.
Then Eli Willard returned. His hair was nearly all white now, and he was wearing a different kind of suit. He had no whale oil or kerosine; he had nothing. Each person who saw him noticed this, and asked him, “What’re ye sellin this time?” but Eli Willard just smiled. He tethered his horse to a post at Isaac’s mill, then sat in a chair on the porch. Isaac, being taciturn, didn’t ask him any questions. After most of the population of Stay More had assembled around the porch, Eli Willard stood up and cleared his throat and said, “Friends and Good People. I hawk no goods, vend no wares. A higher calling brings me to you, and I offer you free of charge this wonderful message. Others will tell you that God is divided into three: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. I do not hold with that. I believe that there is, at most, one God. Hence I am now pleased to call myself a Unitarian. Unitarians do not believe in heaven or hell, except in the spirit, in the now rather than the hereafter. Unitarians believe—”
The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks Page 22
