They lived happily ever after.
Chapter ten
The first general merchandise store in Stay More was the work and the business of Isaac’s younger brother, Christopher Columbus “Lum” Ingledew. We have caught only glimpses of him—his refusing to go with his mother to Little Rock, his helping Isaac build the mill and then handling the concession during the ceremony of the engine-firing, his serving as postmaster during the Decade of Light—he has not been conspicuous, perhaps because he was not marked with any specific characteristic comparable to Isaac’s taciturnity; Lum was not very talkative, but neither was he reticent: he said what had to be said, and did what had to be done, and one thing that had to be done was to build and operate a general merchandise store, because the population of Stay More was exploding. During the Second Spell of Darkness, fondness for ’maters and the concealing dark were a potent combination of factors fostering conception. Old Jacob Ingledew decreed that no more settlers would be allowed to immigrate into Stay More because it was so crowded already, and his decree remained the law, but even without further immigration the population went on exploding. A high incidence of inbreeding naturally resulted in the birth of a more than common number of defectives, usually idiots. The people of Stay More did not know that the origin of the word idiot, pronounced “idjit” or “eejit,” is the Greek idios, meaning private. The idiots of Stay More were not private; they were very public; they were allowed to come and go as they pleased.
Lum Ingledew’s general merchandise store was erected on the main road, near the mill, in front of the mill (shown in the rear of our illustration), but even after he finished it the people continued to use the mill as their communal gathering place, out of habit and out of respect for Isaac, although the porch and yard of the mill were now so crowded that a person couldn’t sit down. So, because idiots usually prefer to sit, or squat, or kneel, or recline in various postures, and because there was no room for them at the mill, they began to use the porch of Lum’s store. Our illustration does not show them there, but that is where they were. Lum didn’t mind, so long as they did not wander into the store and tamper with the merchandise. They were speechless and made no talk to distract him while he was waiting on customers. Although they were speechless and lacked full control of their faces and limbs, they nevertheless possessed curiosity, and liked to loll on the store porch watching the world go by. Lum had a barrel of black walnuts, and when he wasn’t busy waiting on customers, he would crack the walnuts, pick their meats, and distribute them among the idiots, because it was popularly believed that the black walnut, whose shell resembles the human skull and whose meat resembles the human brain, is a good cure for mental deficiency. For years Lum fed black walnuts to the idiots who frequented his store porch, but it never seemed to do any good.
Sportsmen from the cities, St. Louis and Kansas City and even Chicago, began coming to Stay More to hunt and fish (nobody knows who betrayed to the cities the secret that the waters of Stay More were teeming with easy-to-catch fish, and that the air was full of fine game birds, but at any rate the sportsmen came) and they patronized Lum Ingledew’s store, buying their tackle and ammunition from him, and buying tins of sardines and Vienna sausages to eat on crackers for their lunch; he also sold them whiskey. The sportsmen could not help noticing the idiots on the porch, and, unaware that the normal population was congregating at the mill behind the store, they mistakenly assumed that the idiots were typical, and they carried back to their cities a gross misrepresentation of the Ozark people, which is undoubtedly the origin of all of the spurious humor, not to mention the ridicule, that has been perpetuated ever since. In fact the idiots represented only a very small percentage of the populace. The sportsmen also depleted the reserves of fish and game, but nobody protested, either because they didn’t know what was happening or because, like Lum, they needed the money that the sportsmen brought with them and spent. An occasional sportsman would invite one or two of the idiots to accompany him fishing or hunting, although he would soon discover that idiots are useless for practically anything.
The idiots of Stay More never got the sourhours; they sometimes attended, but could not understand, Brother Stapleton’s Magic Bible Shows; but they were never afflicted with the sourhours, nor, indeed, any emotion or feeling: they neither grieved over deaths nor exulted over pleasures. If they especially enjoyed eating, it was not possible to tell. They slept because it came natural to them. The only thing that they apparently wanted to do, and which they did all the time, was to loll and squat on the porch of Lum’s store. They were loitering there thus one afternoon when Eli Willard next returned to Stay More.
Eli Willard was distressed, on two accounts: 1, he was sorry to see that Stay More now had a full-fledged general store, to compete with his peddling; and 2, he was sorry to see that the younger generation of Stay Morons were such sorry specimens; some of them looked like the Mongolians he had seen on his trip around the world. Maybe, he thought, these were the same uncouth youngsters who had thrown rocks at him when he had brought his rejected message of Unitarianism. He was not now carrying that message; he had returned to traffic in material goods, particularly, this time around, grooming aids, which these youths on the store porch could obviously put to good use. In addition to a line of toothbrushes, ear cleaners, hair tonics, body braces and trusses and other grooming aids, he had rebottled (and perfumed) his unsold kerosine and was now marketing it as “Willard’s Miracle All-Purpose Hand Cleaner and Lubricant.”
He began with a demonstration of this latter. He dipped his hands into the dust of the road and covered his hands thoroughly with dirt, rubbing and smearing the dirt all over his hands. The idiots watched him closely. Then from a container in his wagon, he took out handfuls of soot and blacked his hands. “Now, watch,” he said, needlessly, since all eyes hung on his every move. He uncapped a bottle of his miracle all-purpose hand cleaner, poured some into one palm, and rubbed his hands together. Presto! All the dirt and soot were loosened and he wiped it off on a towel. “Two bits a bottle,” he said, and held three bottles in each hand, offering them, but there were no takers. Perhaps, he reflected, there was no future whatever in kerosine, as far as Stay More was concerned.
Then he demonstrated the toothbrush. The idiots stared at him. He next demonstrated the ear cleaner, which had a tiny scoop at one end and a sponge at the other end of an ornate ivory handle. The idiots not only stared at him but also at one another. He next demonstrated the hair tonic. Since his own hair was mostly gone, he selected a bushy-headed boy from his audience. As he sprinkled the tonic on the boy’s hair the boy began whimpering and kicking.
“But doesn’t it instantly make your scalp feel better?” Eli Willard asked. The boy continued whimpering; the others began edging away from him; they all scuttled hurriedly into the store. Lum Ingledew looked up from his account book and was puzzled to see all of the idiots rushing into his store. He went out to investigate.
“What’s a-gorn on?” he demanded of Eli Willard, but then recognized him and exclaimed, “Why, if it aint ole Eli Willard!” He noticed the items of merchandise and said, “Preachin didn’t make ye no money, did it?”
“I’m afraid it didn’t,” Eli Willard admitted.
“Reckon me and you is sorta rivals, then,” Lum observed. “I’m the propriorater of this here store. What-all you got thar?” Eli Willard showed him the various grooming aids. “I don’t carry none a them,” Lum observed, “so maybe we aint rivals atter all.”
“My luck hasn’t turned,” Eli Willard observed. “Even though all of these are cheaply priced, I failed to sell a single one of them to those young people.”
Lum Ingledew laughed. “Them young people is idjits. Put all their brains in one pile, you’d have maybe a cupful.”
Eli Willard meditated upon that curious circumstance. “In all of the rest of the world,” he declared, “idiots are placed in institutions.”
“Is that a fack? Wal, I reckon folks hereabouts couldn�
��t afford it.”
“The government pays for it. I’m sure the good state of Arkansas has an asylum somewhere that would take them in, free of charge.”
“Wal, heck, they aint done no harm,” Lum said in their defense. “We jist let ’em alone and they keep to theirself and don’t bother a soul. If you want to hug one, it’ll hug ye right back.”
Eli Willard shuddered at the thought. The idiots were crowded into the doorway of the store, peering out at him.
We may note that although the Ingledew General Store was not bigeminal in the strictest sense of having two separate parts or doors, it had three double doors, which almost amounts to the same thing, except that there was no distinction as to which side of the double door was used by which sex: male and female alike used either side. Huddled close together, all of the idiots of Stay More could crowd into the center doorway and peer out at Eli Willard. Since he was no longer rubbing dirt on his hands or sticking things in his ear or threatening to pour liquid on their heads, they lost their fear of him and gradually returned to the porch, where they resumed sitting or squatting or kneeling or reclining, and continued staring at him. He was disconcerted, and drove his wagon on over to the mill, where people with minds were, and sold them toothbrushes, liquid and powder dentifrices, ear cleaners, trusses, and other grooming aids, including many, many bottles of his Miracle All-purpose Hand Cleaner. A year later, Sirena Ingledew, happening to light her cob pipe right after using the hand cleaner, discovered that the liquid was inflammable, and, after chanting a secret saying to draw the fire out of her burns, she poured some of the hand cleaner into an old lamp and made the further discovery that it could serve as a fuel. The Second Spell of Darkness was over.
But while the Spell of Darkness came to an end, and the school and post office were restored, the population explosion went on. The forests on the steepest hillsides were girdled and turned into pasture, and large quantities of Willard’s Miracle All-purpose Hand Cleaner were deliberately poured onto the forest floor to ignite it and burn the forest and create more pastures and fields. Any piece of ground that could be cultivated was plowed up. The farmed plots became progressively steeper, up the sheer mountainsides, until the farmers began falling out of their fields, but that did not stop them; their sons carried on. Isaac’s mill ran twenty-four hours a day; since he never slept, he worked always, stopping only to eat. Lum Ingledew hired both John and Willis to clerk full time in his store, but still business was so brisk that another general merchandise store was opened at the other end of what had now become Main Street, and in between there were established offices of physicians and dentists.
Until that point, all illnesses had been treated with herbal cures or incantations, and all toothaches were simply cured by extraction, but now ambitious young men among the families of Plowright, Swain, Chism and Whitter, who had been taught by Boone Harrison in their childhood to read and still remembered how, sent off to St. Louis for correspondence courses in medicine and dentistry, studied their lessons diligently, practiced on the idiots until they had ironed out the kinks in their practice, then hung out their shingles on small new white-painted buildings up and down Main Street. The idiots’ other problem was that because of the population explosion they were crowded off of Lum’s store porch and lost their favorite gathering place. Restless, they wandered, and discovered an orchard, and ate green apples, and had to be taken back to the doctors.
There were so many people in Stay More that nobody could keep track of them all. A few got lost, and nobody noticed. John Ingledew, if pressed, could not tell how many brothers and sisters he had, nor, in fact, how many children he had. (He had ten, all told, each conceived in his sleep, except for one, who was, as we will learn, conceived in the sleep of his brother Willis.) There were times when he could not even find his wife, Sirena. He would hear her, in some other room, humming to herself, or sneezing, or just breathing, but he could not find her. This contributed to his constant expression of foreboding, which people associated with the childhood nickname he had never outgrown, “Doomy.” As his sister Perlina expressed it to her husband, Brother Stapleton, “Doomy allus looks like the world’s comin to a end any minute now.” This air made him the less effective of the two brothers who clerked at their Uncle Lum’s store; in fact, anybody coming to the store would always rather have Willis wait upon them, and would turn to John only if Willis and Lum were both very busy. John was sensitive about this, and it further affected his facial expression. No doubt John had a good heart and was a good husband (when he could find her) and a reasonably good father, but in appearance, although he was just as handsome as any other Ingledew, he was the most disagreeable of them all, and for this reason I am, and always have been, prejudiced against him.
When Lum Ingledew died, he willed his store to Willis, not even mentioning John, and this further affected John’s mien. Lum Ingledew died during an epidemic of typhoid fever, the first corrective measure that Nature took against the overpopulation. This is not to suggest that Nature singled out Lum Ingledew, but that he was haplessly one of many random persons who were put beneath the earth in order to make more room on top of it. Before Stay More got its doctors, the worst afflictions that anyone got were pneumonia and the frakes, neither of which is contagious, and nobody ever died of the latter. But after the doctors hung their shingles, there were epidemics of, successively: typhoid fever, shingles, tuberculosis, influenza, meningitis, poliomyelitis, and yellow fever. The doctors were able to identify each one of these, but they were not able to cure any of them. They prescribed and sold an esoteric pharmacopoeia that was of no earthly use. The lucky persons were those whose grandmothers insisted on administering the old remedies: slippery-elm bark tonic, chicken blood and cat blood, ground roots and herbs. The unlucky ones, or those who did not have grandmothers, like Lum Ingledew, perished. Even some who had grandmothers perished. John and Sirena Ingledew lost two of their children. Perlina and Long Jack Stapleton lost three of theirs. Denton and Monroe Ingledew gave up farming and turned to gravedigging and were employed so steadily they both got the frakes. The doctors too were working so hard they both got the frakes, and treated one another, without success. One by one the idiots died and could not grieve for each other, until there was only one left, and he, in his last hours, seemed suddenly to realize that all of his companions had preceded him out of this life, but, instead of weeping, he laughed and cheered.
And then the Century died. The whole Century itself, which had lasted for an even hundred years, was dead. It would be no more. Those who had been born during it, as all of them had, grieved for its passing. Old Jacob Ingledew especially, who had lived through more of it than anybody else, mourned its irrevocable demise, and took to his bed, never to rise again. It was some small consolation to him that during the first year of the new Century the people of Arkansas elected another Ozarks mountaineer, Jeff Davis, as their governor, but even that good news was not enough to give him something to live for, and he expired. He said to his wife, seated at his bedside, “Sarey, feel my pulse.” She felt for it, could find none, and told him so: “You aint got ary pulse, Jake.” He then said, “That’s what I figgered. Wal, afore I go, Sarey, promise to tell me somethin.” She promised. “Tell me, Sarey, how come, all our life long since you and me was hitched, we never…did…get our things together more often than once a month at the mostest.” Sarah blushed, swallowed, and, because she had promised, but because her “friend” who was also Jacob’s ladyfriend was present in the room, she bent down and whispered the somewhat lengthy answer into Jacob’s ear, and he smiled and closed his eyes and died. While he was lying in state, the next day, Sarah lay down beside him and followed him out of existence.
Everybody else who had not died came to their joint funeral, which was the grandest funeral ever given in Stay More, despite a constant rainstorm. Brother Long Jack Stapleton gave the eulogy: a five-hour show of Jacob’s entire life condensed, and considerably censored. Everyone present realized that th
ere could never be another life like that, and because they already realized that there could never be another Century like the one late lamented, they were inconsolable and lachrymose. For weeks after the funeral no one was able to do anything. It was as if everybody was temporarily recovering from the frakes. John Ingledew in particular, who already had such a doomy air, was plunged into gloom over the loss of his grandparents and the loss of the Century. We too should pause here for a minute of silent meditation.
Death cheapens the value of life. As dying becomes commonplace, grieving is rarer, shallower. So many people had died in Stay More that nobody cared anymore who was living or not. Death was a fact of life. Some people did not get sick at all, and felt guilty, and committed suicide, leapt from Leapin Rock. There were incidents of poisoning, arson, shooting, lynching, all unheard-of before. More unheard-of were the incidents of rampant ruffianism. Nearly all Stay Morons had been noted for their simple gentleness, but now several of them turned mean and rowdy. If there had been one distinguishing difference between the mountaineer of the Ozarks and his kinsmen the mountaineers of Kentucky and Tennessee, it was that the latter were noted for bloody feuding while the former, even if just as impulsive, was not quarrelsome. But now men began beating and shooting one another in earnest. Take, for example, Ike Whitter, who was possibly the worst rowdy in Stay More. He was a rugged six-footer, barrel-chested, brawny, hard as nails. When sober he was merely ill-humored; when drunk, as he was every Saturday, he became ferocious. Any man bold enough to fight him had to agree to his rule that the taking of eyeballs was permitted. Three men each had an eye gouged out before everyone conceded that Ike Whitter was the toughest customer in the village…next, of course, to Isaac Ingledew, whose strength was so legendary that Ike Whitter never even gave a thought to challenging him, even though Isaac was getting pretty close to sixty. The people always knew that there was one man who could always lick Ike Whitter, so they let Ike have his fun, and even enjoyed the spectacle of his gouging out an eyeball here and there. But nobody wanted to invite Ike Whitter to anything; he was never invited to the house-raisin’s, barn-raisin’s, shootin matches, cornhuskin’s, games of Base Ball, square dances or Brother Staple-ton’s Magic Bible Shows. He was indignant at these slights, but he did not object, until he was not even invited to his own sister’s weddin, and when that happened he showed up anyway, picked a fight with the groom, and killed him. They sent to Jasper for the sheriff. Sheriff Barker came with a sworn warrant, and two revolvers, which he cocked and pointed simultaneously at Ike Whitter.
The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks Page 25
