The photographing session was terminated, late that afternoon, by a sudden heavy shower. The line of customers broke up and ran for shelter on the porches of the store or mill. Old Eli Willard, working as fast as he could, tried to drape his equipment and his automobile with the canvases that he used as backdrops for his photographs, when suddenly his eye caught sight of Denton’s and Monroe’s unusual barn in a nearby field. “Whose barn is that?” he asked the people taking refuge from the rain on the store porch. “Mine and Denton’s,” said Monroe, who was there. “Might I ask permission to park there out of the rain?” asked Eli Willard. “Park?” said Monroe, who had never heard the word before. “I’d like to remove my motorcar there,” Eli Willard said rapidly, because the rain was coming down in torrents now. Monroe had, of course, heard of the word “remove,” as in remove one’s hat, but, whereas a hat is pretty light-weight and easy to remove, it would take a mighty stout feller to remove a whole motorcar, unless…it suddenly occured to Monroe that perhaps what Ole Eli Willard wanted to do was drive the motorcar up to the barn and into the passageway, or maybe, if he wanted to remove it there, it meant he wanted to drive it there and remove it, take it apart, or whatever. “Wal—” Monroe said, but faltered. He didn’t particularly care one way or the other himself, but maybe he ought to go find Denton and talk it over with his brother to see if Denton didn’t mind.
“I’ve got to get my motorcar out of the rain!” Eli Willard beseeched. “Aw, yeah, shore,” Monroe said. “Go right ahead.” Eli Willard cranked his engine, hopped in, and drove quickly to the Ingledew barn. He had to get out and unlatch the barnyard gate and drive through it and get out again and relatch the gate, and by the time he was sheltered in the passageway, frightening the cows and horses, he might just as well have stayed out in the rain because he and his car were soaked. He took a tin can from his tool box and began to bail the water out of the car.
Denton Ingledew had meanwhile been inside the cow crib milking one of the cows. When the Oldsmobile pulled into the passageway, Demon’s cow put her hind foot in the milk pail and kicked it over, lashed the side of his face with her tail, commenced bellowing along with her sisters, and turned completely around, mashing Denton against the wall. He got out alive, and began cussing Eli Willard, who protested, “Your brother said I could park here.” “Park?” said Denton, who had never heard the word before.
“It’s raining cats and dogs,” Eli Willard pointed out. “I had to get my motorcar out of the rain.”
Denton noticed how wet Eli Willard and his motorcar were, and observed, “Didn’t do ye much good, did it? My cows is havin conniption fits. And lookee at them hosses in thar, a-bustin up their stalls. You have done went too far, Mr. Willard. I am a-gorn to have to law ye.”
“Law me?” said Eli Willard.
“Sue ye in court,” Denton explained, and he went off to confer with his attorney, Jim Tom Duckworth, who counseled him that it stood to reason, even if it didn’t stand in the books, that damages and nuisances caused by animals’ reactions to the sight and sound of self-propelled conveyances ought to be actionable, and Jim Tom straightway took the matter to court at Jasper.
Eli Willard was summonsed, to appear as soon as the rain stopped. But the rain lasted for several days before stopping, and by then the dirt road was a morass of mud. The motorcar was mired hopelessly before it had gone fifty feet from the barn. Laughing, Monroe Ingledew offered, for a small consideration, to hitch a team of his horses to the motorcar and get it out. The horses performed this task contemptuously but successfully. Eli Willard paid Monroe the small consideration, and drove on. He had not gone far, however, when he got stuck again, up to the hubs. One of the Swain men hitched a team to him and pulled him out, for a slight fee. In front of the Plowrights’ house, another team extricated him from the ooze, in return for a freewill donation. The Dinsmores accepted a trifling premium. The Chisms required only a scant compensation. The Duckworths’ bill was insignificant. But Eli Willard realized that at his present rate of travel he would take weeks to reach Jasper, so he persuaded the Whitters, after they had hauled his motorcar out of the mud for a pittance, to accept a substantial reward in return for pulling him all the way to the Jasper courthouse, which they did, people pointing and laughing all along the route. Eli Willard hired one of the lawyers hanging around the courthouse to represent him.
There was no jury; the judge alone heard the case. “Yore Honor,” Jim Tom began, “my client the plaintiff here, with the help of his brother a-sittin over thar, built a mighty fine barn up to Stay More, with a sorta open passway right through the middle of it for the purpose of drivin a team and wagon into the barn under cover to unload the hay and put it up in the two lofts either side of the passway. The defendant, thar, on the date mentioned, did unlawfully operate a self-propelled vee hickle, or hossless kerridge, that’s it yonder a-settin right out thar through the winder, in such a manner as to enter the aforementioned passway, with the intent to, or fer the purpose of, gittin in out a the rain, and by so doing, did aggerpervoke the plaintiff’s cows and hosses, which caused the former to give sour milk ever since, and caused the latter to rare up and strike the gates of their stalls in such a way as to shatter same, not to mention it has lately been discovered one of ’em has got a lame fetlock. We ask real damages of one hundred smackers plus punitive damages of one hundred.”
Eli Willard’s attorney said, “If hit please the Court, I’d like to ask Yore Honor to find whar it says, anywhar in the statues, that hit’s a-gin the law to drive a hossless kerridge into a barn.”
The judge recessed the court while he consulted the books, which said nothing whatever about hossless kerridges. He reconvened the court, informed the plaintiff and defendant of this fact, and declared, “Since I caint rule ipso jure, reckon I’ll jist have to rule ipso facto. Proceed, gents.”
Eli Willard’s attorney argued that the defendant had received permission from the plaintiff’s brother, co-builder of the barn, to deposit his vee hickle there. The defendant did not know that the barn was inhabited by cows and horses at that moment, and the defendant had no intention of causing any damage, and furthermore the defendant, as you can plainly see, is very old and probably senile and probably didn’t even know what he was doing.
Be that as it may, argued Jim Tom Duckworth, a senile old man had no business operating a dangerous machine. “Yore Honor,” he asked the judge, “do you know what makes that hossless kerridge go?”
“Court perfesses ignorance,” replied the judge.
“Infernal combustion!” declared Jim Tom. “That thar senile ole defendant has been combustin all over creation, and it’s all that combustin what skeers the cows and hosses and gener’ly raises up hell.”
Eli Willard was not feeling well. He did not enjoy hearing references to his advanced age, and he did not like the thought that he was senile. He told his attorney, “Rest our case, and let’s get it over with.”
“Yore Honor,” the attorney began his summation, “jist let me say this. My client is innocent. As you well know, all my clients is innocent, but this here client, I’m a-tellin ye, is straight-up-and-down innocent, which means that he caint possibly be guilty noway. Why, he’s the tore-downdest innocentest feller they ever was. To look at it another way, he is blameless. The fault, if thar ever was one, aint his’n. May hit please the Court, I do hereby pronounce this pore ole senile Yankee peddler feller, whose hands is clean as a hound-dog’s tooth, pure of crime and in the clear! Defense rests.”
“Yore Honor,” countered Jim Tom Duckworth, “I shore wouldn’t swaller that line, iffen I was you. The defendant’s hands aint clean; they’re red! Look at ’em! Why, that feller is guilty. He is the guiltiest defendant ever I saw; in fact, he is the most guiltiest defendant ever I saw. It’s all his fault, ever bit of it, right down the line. He has transgressed! He has trespassed! He has offended! He has damaged! Judge, listen to me, if he aint guilty, I’m a monkey’s uncle. If he aint guilty, black is white and
up is down and hot is cold and dry is wet and God knows what all! I swear up and down and all over the place that he is guilty. He don’t know what innocent is. He has done wrong and must pay for it. I stand here with proud haid bared afore the bar of justice and I p’int my finger at that rascal and I declare that he is, without the slightest doubt in the least, to blame. He is GEE EYE DOUBLE-ELL TEE WHY!”
The judge listened thoughtfully to both of these summations, and decided that Jim Tom’s was the more eloquent of the two, and thus he found against the defendant. Eli Willard paid up, and left town.
The Jasper Disaster gave the case brief mention under the headline motorist convicted of spooking livestock. The years went by, one by one, and Eli Willard did not come back to Stay More again. The people wondered if he was just sulking, or if he had died. Either way, they were very sorry to see him go, or, rather, very sorry to see him not come back. Denton Ingledew himself wanted to write a letter to Eli Willard and apologize and invite him to come back, but he did not know where to address it. At any rate, no more hossless kerridges were seen in Stay More for several years, and the Ingledew barn remained pastoral.
These were the Ingledew children, John’s sons, conceived at night while he slept, and his assumed daughter: Elhannon Harvey, who never could speak his own name, and was called “E.H.”; he had an excess of yellow bile, and was generally irascible. Odell Hueston, called variously “Ode,” “Dell” and “Odd,” had an excess of black bile, and was thus the son who most resembled his father: gloomy and doomy. Bevis Handy, called “Beef” or sometimes “Bevis,” destined to become the father of the next (and penultimate) wave of Ingledews, had an excess of blood, and was, depending on how you interpreted it, excitable, passionate or maniacal. Tearle Harley, called always “Tearle,” which is pronounced “Tull,” had an excess of sweat and was industrious, too much so, which made him frakes-prone, so that in his thirties he acquired an excess of alcohol, which rendered him good natured and witty, because alcohol is the most humorous of the humors. Lola Hannah, called “Lola,” pronounced “Lowly,” the only daughter, who was not really John’s daughter but Willis’s, although none of them knew that, not even her mother, who was sleepwalking when she entered Willis’s room, and not Willis, who slept through it all; Lola had an excess of menses, and was untouchable. Stanfield Henry, called, for some reason, “Stay,” as in Stay More, or sometimes “Flem” because he had an excess of phlegm and was sluggish, or self-possessed. And the last-born, Raymond Hugh, called “Ray,” who had an excess of semen, and was lustful. Raymond was just reaching puberty when his older brothers and his half-sister turned the hayloft of the barn into a clubhouse, but he could tell a joke just as ribald as anyone’s.
The boys tried to exclude Lola from these hayloft gatherings, but she insisted on attending, and threatened to tell on them if they didn’t let her, although she never participated in their activities but remained an interested kibitzer. They said and did things in her presence that they would never have dreamed of saying or doing in the presence of any other female, but after all she was their sister; if they had known she was only their half-sister, they would have said and done only half the things. Lola remained a spinster all her life, and one cannot help but wonder if the fact that she was the only girl among six brothers had anything to do with it, or whether her watching and listening to the goings-on of the hayloft clubhouse gave her a negative attitude toward the opposite sex.
During the pastoral age symbolized by our barn, there was an influx of new homesteaders, not farmers but people from the cities, mostly single women. A smart land lawyer in Jasper got rich by challenging in court Jacob Ingledew’s decree against further immigration, on the grounds that it violated the Homestead Act, and winning the case, and selling his services to people suffering from “city fever” who wanted to get back to the land. These people had spent all their lives in the cities, laboring in business and industry, saving their pennies, and dreaming of a better life. There appeared on the newsstands of the cities a rash of new magazines: Country Life in America, America Outdoors, Rural Digest, Arcadian Times, Hill and Dale, Silvan Weekly, Ladies’ Bucolic Companion, Back-country Journal, Pastoral Pictures, extolling the healthful benefits of a return to the soil.
The only possible real return to the soil is to the grave, but the magazines did not believe it. They sent their reporters out across the land. One of them, a young woman from Arcadian Times, published in Chicago, got lost in the backcountry and stumbled upon Stay More. She walked down the Main Street, slowly, with her notebook in hand, pausing now and then to write “impressions.” The Stay Morons watched her. She was wearing a skirt that came down to a pair of high button shoes, and a ruffled blouse that revealed most of her shoulders; beneath these garments she wore a corset which constricted her waistline to, as one observer put it, “not no more thick than my thigh.” She entered Willis Ingledew’s General Store and browsed around, mumbling from time to time, “How quaint,” and pausing to write impressions in her notebook.
“Could I be of some hep to ye, ma’am?” Willis asked her.
She stared at him, then smiled with delight, and requested, “Say that again, please.”
“Could I be of some hep to ye, ma’am?” he repeated patiently.
She wrote these words down in her notebook, then asked, “What is the name of this place?” Willis pointed at the post office in one corner of the store, where a sign clearly said, “U.S. Post Office, Stay More, Ark.” She wrote this down, then said, “Oh! Is that your post office?”
“Nome,” said Willis, “it’s the undertaker’s.”
The young woman was moved to remark, “Ha, ha.” Then she wrote this down in her notebook.
“Was you wantin to buy anything, lady?” Willis asked.
After writing this down, the woman said, “No, thank you. I’m simply gathering gleanings. What is your name?”
“Willis Ingledew, ma’am,” he replied.
“How quaint,” she said, and wrote this down, then wandered on out of the store. She strolled along to the gristmill, and walked all the way around it to the creek. It was in busy operation, but over the noise of the machinery she approached Isaac Ingledew and asked him, “Does it really run?” Isaac slowly shook his head. “How tall are you, by the way?” she asked. Isaac held out his hand at the level of his headtop, to indicate how tall he was. This tactic provoked her to comment, “Hee, hee.” Then she scribbled in her notebook. She asked him, “And what is your name, sir?”
One of the other men at the mill said to her, “Hit’s Isaac Ingledew, lady, and he don’t like to talk none, so you’d best not be askin him no questions.”
“How quaint. Are you related to Willis Ingledew?” she asked Isaac. He shook his head. “You look as if you might be his father,” she observed. “Why is it that you don’t like to talk?” He did not answer. “Perhaps you have a congenital speech impediment that medical science could cure? Or possibly it’s psychological. Do you understand psychology?” He made no response. “It could be that when you were a child something frightened you speechless and you’ve never been able to talk since.”
“Lady,” said one of the other men, “he aint never been frightened by man nor beast in his whole life long, so you’re jist a-wastin yore time. He don’t like to talk because—”
“Not so fast,” said the young woman, taking notes as rapidly as she could. “I can’t keep up with you.”
“He don’t like to talk because he don’t like to talk. Now why don’t you ask me somethin, and leave him alone?”
“Very well. What is your name, sir?”
“Puddin Tame,” he replied.
“How do you spell that last name?”
“I caint spell, ma’am.”
“How quaint. Have you lived here all your life?”
He felt his pulse. “No. Not yet.”
“Hi, hi,” she commented. “What work do you do?”
“I keep the ’skeeters out of the mill.”
“Mosquitoes? How do you keep them out?”
“With my shotgun.”
“My. Are they that big?”
“You aint seen any Stay More ’skeeters yet? Wal, iffen ye do, don’t swat at one. Jist makes it mad. Fling rocks at it as fast as ye kin.”
“I believe you are having me on, sir,” she said, closing her notebook and leaving the mill. But as she strolled further about the village she kept her eyes open, and at one point she bent down and picked up a rock which she carried in her hand. She caught sight of the unusual Ingledew barn and walked all around it, noting that it had no windows and was dramatically cantilevered. She walked into the passageway that ran through it, where she heard voices coming from the loft above. She listened, hearing an off-color joke. Then she climbed to the top of the ladder, with difficulty on account of her ankle-length dress. The young Ingledews were surprised to see this elegant young lady holding a notebook in one hand and a rock in the other. Hastily they buttoned themselves. “How quaint,” the elegant young lady was moved to comment. “What is this?” None of them answered. “Is this your house?” They looked at one another and then nodded in unison. “What is all the dried grass for?” she asked. “Oh, is it to sleep on?” They nodded. She looked at Lola. “Are you the lady of the house?” Lola nodded. “Which of them is your husband?” “All of ’em,” declared Lola solemnly. “How quaint. Even him?” she said, indicating thirteen-year-old Raymond. Lola nodded. “What are your names?” “Ingledew.” “All of you?” They nodded. The elegant young lady climbed down the ladder.
She noticed the two cribs, which were empty; the horses and cows were out to pasture. One of the horses, she noticed, was mounted upon one of the cows. To herself she remarked, “How quaint.” Then somehow she found the road to Jasper. As she walked along it, a turkey buzzard flew out of a tree in her direction. She screamed and threw the rock she was carrying at it. The rock missed, but the turkey buzzard did not come and sting her. At Jasper she caught a coach which took her to Harrison, where she caught a train back to Chicago. Not long afterwards, an issue of Arcadian Times carried her article, “A Most Quaint Village Deep in the Ozarks,” with wood engravings by the staff artist illustrating a typical home filled with dried grass, a giant mosquito, and a seven-foot inhabitant who never spoke. All of the inhabitants, said the article, were named Hinkledew, with the exception of a Mr. Tame, who had told her how to deal with the giant mosquitoes. The region was an utterly enchanting and enchanted one. The people ground their own flour and meal in an enormous mill powered by a steam engine. The post office was in the general store. The only painted buildings in town were the small offices of two doctors and two dentists. The people were polyandrous, one woman having as many as six husbands; there was probably a shortage of women. Their pastimes were sensual. The pastimes of the horses and cows were sensual. Everything, except for the giant mosquitoes, was utterly enchanting.
The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks Page 28
