The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks

by Harington, Donald

  He was interrupted and drowned out by a chorus of protests. No heaven? No hell? Fiddle-faddle! If there is no hereafter, why live? If there had been one thing that all the other preachers had agreed upon, it was that we must conduct our lives in such a way as to be rewarded after death and avoid punishment in the hereafter. The men began shaking their fists at Eli Willard, the women spat at him, and the younger people began throwing rocks at him. He had to duck inside the mill for protection. He stayed there until everyone had left, except Isaac. He said to Isaac, in parting, “Well, I tried.” Isaac, who did not believe in the hereafter but had no use for Unitarianism either, did not comment.

  None of the Ingledew males were ever converted to any religion, perhaps a heritage from Jacob, who had originally left Tennessee because, as he had told Fanshaw, “the preachers was so thick a feller couldn’t say ‘heck’ without gittin a sermon fer it.” Isaac, if anything, was even less of a believer than his father had been, and his sons would be less than he, and their sons less than they, and so on, until the last Ingledew, who…but he is the last chapter, and we are only halfway there. What little light there was during the Second Spell of Darkness came in the form of lightning; Isaac would shake his fist at the lightning and silently dare God to strike him down. God never did. God killed many an animal with lightning, and blasted many a tree, and from time to time destroyed a human being or two, but God never hit Isaac.

  Isaac’s wife Salina “caught religion” when the Presbyterian produced an eclipse of the sun, and although she was most partial to the Baptist, she attended all the church services in Stay More, and Isaac sometimes accompanied her out of curiosity, which is the bottom rung on the ladder of motives for going to church, the other rungs being, in ascending hierarchy: 2, being too timid to refuse, 3, a sense of duty, 4, a desire to mingle with others, 5, a desire to learn the means of salvation, 6, a desire to be saved, 7, lust for paradise in the hereafter, 8, schizophrenic need to need, 9, insanity, and 10, sainthood. There were very few Stay Morons who ascended to the top of this ladder. Isaac remained on the bottom rung, and Salina got about as far as the sixth. As far as anybody could tell, she never asked him what he thought of the sermons, or never asked him anything about religion, although she talked to him freely, for hours on end, expressing her own views and opinions. One of the preachers had gone so far as to hint that sexual intercourse, even between lawfully wed husband and wife, was not in the best interests of attaining heaven, and once again Salina ceased climbing Isaac, even though it was dark and no one could see them, and once again Isaac turned to strong beverages for solace.

  Nearly all the preachers, in particular the Methodist, abhorred alcohol, and preached frequently against it, and consequently Seth Chism had “caught religion” and given up the making of his superior sour mash, so Isaac was required to patronize Caleb Duckworth’s inferior brand of rotgut. This stuff was just as capable of reducing the world to half its size, but it also reduced time to half its length, which was terribly confusing to Isaac, who in compensation for it began to double everything: each day was forty-eight hours in length, or rather Monday came twice a week, and the Second Tuesday of the Month was also the Third; spring and summer came twice a year, and so did autumn, which wasn’t so bad, but two winters in one year was awful.

  Actually, the Year that Winter Came Twice was perceived not alone by Isaac but also by everyone in Stay More. It was the coldest and longest winter that anyone had ever known. Isaac could have warned them of its coming, because he knew that the first frost always occurred six weeks after the first chirp of a katydid, and he had heard the first katydid’s chirp twelve weeks before, which, even by his double reckoning, meant that a heavy frost was coming any minute now, but, being taciturn, he didn’t warn anybody, and sure enough the terrible winter came and caught them by surprise. All the birds flew south, but a large flock of mallards flying over was caught in freak currents of frozen air, and, frozen solid as stones, plummeted to the earth, breaking through roofs all over Stay More, or landing upon a random farm animal, dog, or cat, who were killed. The people gathered up all the frozen ducks and stacked them in a pile, where they remained frozen throughout the winter. Whenever anybody had a hankering for duckmeat, they would just grab one off the pile and throw it into the fire.

  But it was so cold that winter that keeping the fires going night and day was a major effort. The youngsters were required to keep the fires going at night, and, as one of the survivors of that winter expressed it to me in his old age, “We had to put wood on the fire all night with one hand, and sleep with the other!” This might be an exaggeration, but we may imagine what he meant. In order to obtain enough wood for the fires, the Stay Morons practically denuded the forests during the course of the Winter that Came Twice, cutting all the second-growth timber that had started growing after the great fire which had occurred during the great drought. Before Christmas, it began to snow heavily in Stay More; snow rarely fell in the Ozarks, and never before Christmas, but now there were blizzards. By Christmas, as my informant quoted above expressed it, “the snow was so all-fired deep we had to shit standing up!” Again he might be exaggerating, but we may picture the practice.

  The barns of that era were rather ramshackle, and offered little protection to the livestock, who froze; chickens saved themselves by roosting on the chimney shoulders and absorbing some warmth from the stones. The leather belts and pulleys in Isaac’s mill would not run because they were frozen, and even if he thawed them out he couldn’t make a fire hot enough to boil the frozen water in his boiler. It was too blamed cold to work in the mill anyway, and his helpers and fireman had already quit on him, so halfway through the winter, or rather between the two winters that came that year, he quit and went home to sit by the fire, which was what everybody else was already doing. With not even the chore of milking to do, since the cows were frozen, there was no work for anybody except women, except chopping wood for the fires. Everybody had runny noses, and some people had runny eyes, and some coughed badly, and several developed chest complaints, and a few, despite herbal remedies, died, but could not be buried until the ground thawed in the spring, so were left frozen in Isaac’s unused mill. Isaac’s family was more fortunate than most; the son John had a bad cough, but only Salina was sick enough to go to bed, and the girls Perlina and Drussie were old enough to assume their mother’s duties.

  Although, architecturally speaking, the houses of that time were built well, the fireplaces were not of optimum efficiency: most of the heat went up the chimney. And simply sitting beside the fire was not sufficient to keep warm on the coldest days of that winter. But there was nothing else to do, and consequently the Stay Morons discovered by accident that condition which we call boredom, which had been unknown to them before. Since the word “bored” meant “humiliated” to them, they would have a problem finding a name for their condition. It was Denton Ingledew, Isaac’s oldest boy, who first identified and attempted to name the condition. He was past marryin’ age, and so was the second oldest boy, Monroe, but they, like so many Ingledews, were too shy to approach women with romance or even matrimony in mind, so they still lived at home in Isaac’s dogtrot house. One day in the coldest part of the winter, all the Ingledews of Isaac’s household were crowded together around the fire, trying to keep warm. They had been sitting there for five hours, not moving much except to throw another log on the fire. Denton yawned, and said, “I feel so kinda like…” but no word would come to him. He could not name his condition. Half an hour later Monroe yawned too, and said, “Yeah, I know what ye mean.” But he couldn’t name it either. Some time later, John, the third boy, yawned, and remarked, “Me, too,” but was unable to expand upon that. After a while, Willis, the last son, remarked, “Same here,” but he too was at a loss for names.

  The condition, whatever it was, had affected the girls too by this time; although they weren’t yawning, tears were trickling slowly down their cheeks. “I’ve got the wearies,” remarked Perlina, and Dr
ussie, some time later, put in, “It’s jist so teejus,” but neither of these words would quite do. After further reflection, Denton observed of his condition, “I aint interested in a damn thing. It’s sorter like after I had the frakes.” Monroe, who had also had the frakes, said, “Yeah, that’s sorter it,” and John, veteran of the frakes too, added, “I reckon.” The girls, who like all females had not had the frakes, did not quite understand. Isaac, their father, did not know what his children were talking about, because he wasn’t bored and never would be. A man who can stay awake all night long without ever going to sleep for the rest of his life is the least likely person to get bored. Willis, who had also had the frakes, remarked, “Naw, when a feller’s a-gittin over the frakes, he jist don’t give a damn about nothin, but this here that we’uns have caught, it’s somethin else. I feel like I’d like to give a damn about somethin, but there jist aint nothin around right at the moment to latch onto.” “Yeah,” his sisters chimed in. “That’s more like it.” Some time later, Denton observed, “But we still aint got a word fer it.” As the hours drifted by, one or the other of them would make a suggestion. Again Perlina offered “wearies.” They debated it, concluding it wasn’t quite right. “Teejusments,” suggested Drussie. “Mopes,” offered Willis. “Ho-hums,” suggested John. Monroe came up with “timesick.” They liked that one, but thought it was kind of highfallutin.

  Finally Denton snapped his fingers and said, “sour hours.” The way he pronounced it was almost identical to the way they pronounce “sorrows,” which means not grief but regrets, and the resemblance, with the suggestion that sour hours produce sorrows, won the votes of his brothers and sisters. They were so excited over finding a word for their condition that their condition no longer obtained, and they couldn’t wait to spread the word through the village, which they promptly did, finding dozens of people sitting beside their fireplaces afflicted with the sourhours. As soon as they were told this new word for their condition, they rapidly grew interested in it, and before long nobody had the sourhours anymore, at least not for another hour or two. Pronunciation of the noun, sourhour, and of the passive verb, sourhoured, if vociferous enough, also resembles the barking of a certain breed of dog, and for the next hour or two everybody in Stay More went around barking at one another, and their dogs tilted their heads to one side and gave their masters puzzled looks. But after an hour or two, the people grew sourhoured of barking at one another, and gave it up, and resumed passing the sour hours by the fire, day after day, shivering with cold, yawning, rubbing their arms, thinking no thoughts, none at all.

  They were discovered there thus, late in the winter, by the first preacher to come to Stay More since the winter began. Most preachers seemed to have such a fondness for hellfire that cold weather was abominable to them, and not one had been seen since summer, until this one came. This one was a big man, almost as tall as Isaac Ingledew, and he was dressed up in furs, bearskins and coonskins and beaver skins, which made him look even bigger, positively mammoth, and the horse he was riding on was the biggest horse anyone had ever seen, big enough to support not only the mammoth preacher but also the girl, or young woman, riding behind him, also dressed all over in animal skins. The very sight of this couple and their horse was enough to banish the sourhours for the rest of the day. Beneath the preacher’s otterskin hat protruded bushy tufts of red hair surrounding a pink freckled face reddened by the cold, a large red mustache dripping with icicles: it was a surpassingly gentle face, not jolly, but capable of compassion and animation. He seemed to be close to forty, but not beyond it, while his companion was only a teenager. Her hair was the same color as his, which made people surmise that she was his daughter. He went from door to door in the village, speaking in a soft, almost inaudible voice, inviting everyone to join him at the meeting house on the following morning, which was Sunday. He and the girl, or young woman, were given beds for the night at the Dinsmores, who had boarded the unhungry Campbellite, and they noted that he, in contrast to the former, had a prodigious appetite. They offered him a second helping, and then a third, a fourth, and a fifth; they believed he would have accepted a sixth, if they had offered it, which they could not. His name, they learned, was Long Jack Stapleton. Brother Long Jack Stapleton, he said, although nobody ever learned which denomination, if any, he belonged to. No, the young woman was not his daughter; she was his “baby sister,” name of Sirena.

  After supper the Dinsmores were treated to a preview of his powers of narration, when he told them the story of Samson and Delilah, creating such powerful word pictures that his audience could actually “see” the whole dramatic love story unfolding before their eyes. If the modern mobile home may be traced back to Viridiana Boatright’s “cat wagon,” if the monthly luncheon of Lions and Rotarians may be traced to Jacob and Noah Ingledew’s ceremony of the clock on the Second Tuesday of the Month, if the oral tradition may be traced to Jacob’s entertaining Lizzie Swain and her large brood with stories about Indians, then surely it would be no exaggeration to trace the motion picture, and by extension television, to Brother Long Jack Stapleton. Before his service on Sunday morning, the Dinsmores had spread word of his powers throughout the village, and all the men and boys crowded through the right door and all the women and girls through the left door, and the meeting house was packed to the rafters, so that body heat alone was sufficient to warm the room, which had been below freezing moments earlier. Brother Stapleton mounted the pulpit; without all his furs he did not look quite so imposing, but still he was the most striking figure ever to stand on that platform. He surveyed the “amen corner,” where the most prominent men of the church were sitting, spotted his host Clyde Dinsmore among them, and asked, “Brother Dinsmore, ‘sposin ye could lead us sing a hymn or two?”

  Brother Dinsmore rose from his bench, shifted his cud of tobacco from one cheek to the other, and faced the congregation. “Brethern and sistern, let’s us sing one of them old’uns that we’uns all know—‘Warshed in the Blood.’” Then he cleared his throat loudly and gave out the key: “DO MI SOL DO! DO SOL MI DO!” and began swinging his arms vigorously as every voice sang at its top…every voice, that is, except Brother Long Jack Stapleton’s. Maybe he didn’t know the words. Then Brother Dinsmore requested that they sing “Lead, Kindly Light,” followed by “Abide with Me.” After that, Brother Stapleton asked for a volunteer to lead them in prayer, and Seth Chism stood up and thanked God for sending them a parson in the coldest winter ever known to man and beast, and asked God to grant the parson power to banish their sourhours and save their souls, in the Name of Jesus Christ, Amen. Then he sat down and Brother Stapleton began his sermon.

  “Brethering and sistering,” he addressed them in his gentle voice that could barely be heard in the back of the room, “I take as my text this mornin the eleventh and twelfth verses of the second chapter of Solomon’s song, ‘For lo, the winter is past, the snow is over and gone, the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singin of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heared in our land.’”

  “Hold on, Parson!” said Brother Chism, rising to his feet. “Turtles aint got no voices!”

  “It means turtledove,” Brother Stapleton explained, and described one, and held out his hand, and a real, or seemingly real turtledove flew down and alighted upon his hand, and everyone’s mouth gaped open…everyone’s but his sister Sirena, who had seen him do this trick many times before. Then the preacher’s gentle voice lifted and quickened, and he pounded his Bible and said, “That’s what it says here, friends, ‘For lo,’ it says, ‘the winter is past,’ it says, ‘the snow is over and gone,’ it says!” And the rhythms of his voice lulled his audience, hypnotized them, their eyes glazed over as he painted pictures of springtime and bloom and the renewal of the verdant earth.

  The chief difference between Brother Stapleton’s magic and that of the motion picture and television is that while the latter are only visual, the former was not only visual but also tactile, olfactory, and gustatory
. His audience could feel the spring breeze blowing through their hair, smell the blossom of dogwood, taste the first-harvested sprout of sparrowgrass. For the length of his sermon, which lasted two and one-half hours, the winter actually was over and gone. The main body of his sermon he devoted to the story of Solomon, dwelling upon the legendary love between the wise King and the Dark Girl of the Song. He did not use the word “love,” which was an embarrassment, but everybody knew exactly what he was talking about, and everybody could see vividly depicted on the “screen” of the mind the exact lineaments of the dazzling Solomon in all his glory and the exquisite exotic beauty of the girl, and they could see as clearly as if they were there the nut orchards and fruit orchards and shepherds’ tents where the lovers met. We may appreciate the suitability of Stapleton’s selection of the subject matter, for Solomon himself (or whoever wrote his Song) was a master of description who gave us a vivid image of his beloved, step by step from her eyes to her toes. Brother Stapleton’s “projection” or “showing” or “screening” concluded after two-and-a-half hours with the words, “And so, my friends, we may think that God keers fer each of us jist like King Solomon keered fer that purty gal, and we air comforted by it.” Then he ceased.