The child was promptly returned to her happy parents, and was found to be unharmed.
The dead man, about 70 years of age, known, to Stick Around friends only as “Dan,” had lived in the area for about twenty years, they said. A search of his dwelling, located near Stick Around village, failed to furnish further identification.
His motive for kidnapping the child was unknown. It was speculated that the man, being penniless, had hoped to collect ransom.
State Police Headquarters in Russellville said Corp. Ellen will probably be decorated.
“It’s a lie,” Diana says to you. “That trooper didn’t ask Daniel to surrender. Daniel didn’t even see him. But that trooper wasn’t taking any chances. Daniel had already wounded three sheriff’s deputies and two state troopers, escaping with me from this house. He wasn’t trying to kill them; he was such a good shot that he could hit them just where he wanted, just enough to disable them so we could make a getaway from this house and go hide up on the mountain. But that Corporal Ellen wasn’t taking any chances. All the officers were under orders to try to take Daniel alive, if possible, or just to wound him, not kill him. But Corporal Ellen sneaked up on us in the glen of the waterfall and without any warning he shot Daniel twice. It was bad shooting too, which didn’t kill him instantly. It took him a while to die.”
On the mountain behind my house, in a grove of cedars, Diana shows you one more thing, one last thing: my grave. She readily admits that the headstone is not “authentic,” that is, not original; she has purchased it recently herself, has had it cut to order out of Arkansas granite by a stonecutter in Harrison. They had buried me here, on my own property, in my own woods, without much of a marker, just a temporary metal stake. Diana has seen fit to leave something more permanent:
DANIEL LYAM MONTROSS
June 17, 1880–May 26, 1953
The last Montross of Dudleytown
The only Montross of Stick Around
“We dream our lives, and live our sleep’s extremes.”
Now it is time for her to be taken to the glen of the waterfall. She has her last fresh tape ready in her tape recorder. You must follow after, with your rifle. You must sneak into the glen of the waterfall and “shoot” me, twice, and then, as Sugrue Ellen had done, turn and go without a word. He had turned and left, not even bothering to take or comfort the child, in order to summon his fellow officers. You will turn and leave, and go, to leave us alone together in these our last moments.
“But you’ll come back?” Diana says to you, and gives you a kiss. “Someday you’ll come back?”
“I’ll come back,” you say.
30
This is all I know of my last hour unto some other place.
I’ll sleep my first true sleep. We’ve found our true kindred; the elements care for us. Aeolus wafts a gust to dance the leaves around our heads. I am shot. Blood and being trickle off my skin. My killer’s gone back down the hill to get some help. I’m blind to all the woods and world except her face. I gaze into her eyes, and feel her grace. The waterfall roars above the roar of death. Before it quits, I’ll slip away to sleep.
Look, child, into my eyes. Speech is all I lack. Solemn and silent. But in my solemn eyes you’ll catch a glimpse of time, and know a proof of me, that will still your trembling. You mustn’t be afraid; you know I’ll live. In the mirror of my eyes you’ll see creation.
It doesn’t help to cry. You’ll learn that tears are only for yourself. Lay your head against my chest, child, and listen:
I live, I draw the breath of life. Hear this tone, this tune, this time. Hear these driftings and quivers, these settlings and stirrings, these dronings and burbles, these ripples and thrummings, these hummings and coursings: these humors in this clod, this chunk of flesh, this body knowing weight and gravity, lying quietly and waiting.
Now take your head away, child. Lift your chin and smile for me. There will be no sound. No sounds are heard in death, no winds in the leaves, no humors coursing through the flesh. The roar of the waterfall will cease. Death is a quiet woman.
Before she takes me to her breast, I’ll show you the Indian shelters and their little burial mounds in this glen of the waterfall. People lived here once. I was an Indian once, and so were you; our people lived here. We might live here again. Time is but the shadow of the world thrown against the screen of eternity; that shadow passes over us, and passes on, but circles and returns. And while it’s gone, we see the light.
Death is a silent woman, but not a dark one: all emblazoned and bespangled with timeless radiance she blinds my eyes before she takes me to her breast. And in my blinded eyes you’ll catch a glimpse of the shadow of time that’s moving over you, to give you a life you’ll see enough of the life you’ll have to help you dream its future. I had wanted to help you dream it, but like everything else I’ve tried to do, I failed again.
Bright Death repells me with her light only because I know I lived a failure. But this will be my one success: letting her take me to her breast.
I’ve known her before, without the blinding light; I’ve known her for a third of my life, in sleep. We pass a third of our lives in her embrace while we dream of the rest that comes before our final rest.
I don’t fear her, as she reaches to take me to her breast. But maybe I fear that pang, that explosion, that orgasmic climax. Which is fear of myself, not of her. I’ll last a while before I come.
Life is a duration, a passing of the shadow of time over us. Death is a timeless eternity. The orgasm is an instant.
And after that instant, she will possess all my habits and desires, and pleasures and afflictions. But not my ideas, which will roam through time in search of some other place.
Before she takes me to her breast, I remember the reading I got at my birth from my sister: Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. And our death is but a waking and a remembering. I will remember it all in the instant of that climax.
Child, if I close my eyes, don’t be frightened. I close my eyes to see my way to reach her dazzling breast.
And if you hear me cry out, don’t be alarmed. I’m singing the short song of my last instant’s ecstasy.
Finale
* * *
Putney, Vt.
June 5
Mr. B.A. Stoving
Union Bank Building
Little Rock, Arkansas
Dear Mr. Stoving
After a three-month investigation, involving some 6000 miles of travel, I was able to locate your daughter. You will be happy to know that she is very much alive, and well, and quite contented.
After finding her and hearing her story, I debated with myself for some time before reaching the conclusion that I should respect her wishes by not divulging to you her present whereabouts.
However, I can tell you this much about her: she is deeply in love with a most remarkable young man who would be the envy of any girl searching for a strong, practicable and entertaining male who offers much promise as a life’s companion. The fact that he is making his career in forest work, and has no college education, does not detract from his stature as one of the most interesting young men I’ve ever met.
She expects to bear his child in August. I hope that, after the baby is born, she will want to be in touch with you at last, to send you pictures of your grandchild. If she does not, it will be only because she feels she has her own good reasons for not writing to you.
Perhaps you will feel that a permanently missing daughter is no better than a dead one. But I’m writing to you because I thought it might be some comfort to you to know that she has found the right place in life, after a long search.
Yours sincerely,
G.
P.S. Please do not feel that you are obliged to me in any way, financial or otherwise, for this information.
Stick Around, Ark.
P.O.: Acropolis, Ark.
August 30
Dear G,
Just a few words to serve in place of birth announcement
and enclose this Polaroid snapshot of the three of us.
We have named him Daniel G. (after you, old Godfather) Stoving-Whittacker.
If you’re such a great art historian, do you recognize the “pose” of this photograph? Give up? It’s Giorgione’s “Tempest”! The “soldier” on the left is Day, and the “gypsy” on the right nursing her baby is me (and little Dan).
Guess who was on the other side of the camera? Who took the picture? I know it will give you a sleepless night, and the answer isn’t even important, but you’ll appreciate my devious cleverness in making a mystery of it, the same way that you make a mystery of everything.
Everything is wonderful here, and all of us are blissfully happy. Stick Around can get terribly hot in August, but, as you know, Daniel built this house with a kind of natural air-conditioning, and the bedrooms on the second floor are always cool.
Day and I were very pleased to hear about the progress on your book, although we have a few reservations about that title, There Was Another Place Which Was The Right Place. Why burden the book with something so unwieldy and unmemorable? Why not simply call it Some Other Place. The Right Place.?
I was glad to learn that your wife and daughters have returned home, and that your garden is so productive this year. And I was simply amazed to hear that you’ve lost twenty pounds. Is that what I started, on that day?
Incidentally, did you know that you went off and left your rifle? If you’ll forgive this last example of my “psychologizing,” whenever somebody goes off and leaves something behind, it means they want to stay, or they want to come back again. So please do.
Love,
Diana
To the memory of my father (1905–1977)
and my mother (1905–1983)
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Acknowledgments
The true basis for any serious study of the art of Architecture still lies in those indigenous, more humble buildings everywhere that are to architecture what folklore is to literature or folk song to music and with which academic architects were seldom concerned.
…These many folk structures are of the soil, natural. Though often slight, their virtue is intimately related to the environment and to the heartlife of the people. Functions are usually truthfully conceived and rendered invariably with natural feeling. Results are often beautiful and always instructive.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT
from The Sovereignty of the Individual
Chapter one
We begin with an ending: the last arciform architecture in the Arkansas Ozarks. Years afterward, waking up one morning in his bedroom at the governor’s mansion in Little Rock, Jacob Ingledew was to remember the home—house, hive, hovel, we should not call it merely “hut”—of Fanshaw. There was, clearly, not a straight line in it, not a corner, not an edge, and Jacob Ingledew was to wake up one morning and stare at the four-cornered ceiling of his bedroom in the governor’s mansion, and think: box! Immediately he would jerk his elbow into his wife Sarah’s ribs, waking her, and declare, “That’s the trouble, Sarey! We’ve done went and boxed ourself in!”
“What?” she was to answer, rousing from good sleep. “You thinkin about them delegates from Washin’ton, hon?” No, he would not have been thinking about the delegates to Washington, but at her mention of them, he was to give over to sleep again in an effort not to think about them, and he was to forget Fanshaw’s home and forget feeling boxed, and go on forever dwelling in boxes of various shapes and sizes.
The home of Fanshaw—our illustration is purely conjectural, based largely on word-of-mouth description; like structures in some of the other illustrations in this study, it no longer exists; Jacob Ingledew moved it, after Fanshaw left, to his backyard, where he used it as a corncrib for several years until it logically fell victim to rot and termites, and disintegrated—looks deceptively small; actually both pens (it was bigeminal, or, to employ the term that we will have frequent recourse to, was an architectural “duple”) were nearly ten feet high and almost thirteen feet in diameter; Fanshaw, who was uncommonly tall for his race, over six feet, was required to stoop only slightly in order to exit his door, while his wife did not have to stoop at all.
Fanshaw was stooping to exit his door when Jacob Ingledew first laid eyes on him. Jacob Ingledew with his brother Noah had come with two saddlebagged mules some six hundred miles from Warren County, Tennessee, their birthplace and rearing-place; on a hazardous journey into an unknown wilderness the two brothers had palliated their nervousness by virtually chain-smoking their pipes, with the result that their supply of tobacco had been exhausted for nearly a week before they stumbled upon the village—or camp—of Fanshaw. It was situated in a clearing on the banks of Swains Creek approximately where Doc Plowright’s spread would later be, in a narrow winding valley that snaked along through five mountains, each a thousand feet higher than the valley. At the first sight of it, Noah Ingledew retreated, refusing to go nearer. From the woods on the hillside, Jacob Ingledew watched the camp for three and one-half hours before Fanshaw emerged, stooping, from his house. Jacob decided that the village, which consisted of twelve other dwellings similar to the one in our illustration, must be deserted except for Fanshaw. A field to one side of the village was devoted to the cultivation of corn, squash, beans, and, Jacob had been pleased to see, tobacco. Although Jacob, like all Ingledew men, was uncommonly shy, so great was his desire for tobacco that, after bobbing his prominent Adam’s apple a couple of times, he began walking toward Fanshaw. Instantly Fanshaw saw him and kept his eyes fastened upon him the whole length of his approach. Jacob Ingledew walked slowly to signify he was friendly.
Fanshaw descried a man of his own height, tall, dressed in buckskin jacket and trousers, wearing a headpiece made from the skin and tail of a raccoon, thin, blue-eyed, brown-haired, long-nosed, and carrying not a rifle but a half-gallon jug with corncob stopper.
Jacob Ingledew saw a man of his own height, tall, dressed in buckskin moccasins and leggings that covered only the legs, the space between breeched with a breech clout, wearing a headpiece (actually just a bandeau) of beaver skin, eagle fathers in the roach of his hair, muscular, dark-eyed, bronze-skinned, long-nosed and naked from the waist up except for a necklace of several dozen bear claws.
Jacob Ingledew spoke, rather noisily from nervousness: “How! You habbum ’baccy? Me swappum firewater for ’baccy. Sabbe?”
“Quite,” said Fanshaw. Jacob Ingledew misinterpreted this as “Quiet,” and began looking around, wondering if the others were sleeping, although it was well into the afternoon. Actually, Fanshaw had spoken in the manner of his namesake, George W. Featherstonehaugh, a British geologist who had explored the Ozarks a few years previously and had been welcomed by Wah Ti An Kah, as he was known before his fellow tribesmen jokingly nicknamed him after their guest because he spent so much time in dialogue with the visitor, even to the point of taking pains to master the visitor’s language.
Fanshaw’s dwelling, like the others, was made of long slender poles cut, appropriately enough, from the bois d’arc tree, or Osageorange (I will discuss in due course the significance of the name bois d’arc, still today called “bodark,” which fits so perfectly with all the other thumping arks of our study). Both ends of these poles were sharpened and then the poles were bent like a bow and the ends stuck into the ground, forming a large arch which was actually a parabola—and most architectural
historians agree that the parabolic is the most graceful, not to say strongest, of all arch forms. As may be seen in our illustration, these arched poles were interwoven as they crossed in the smoke-hole at the top; the result was literally a paraboloid, an inverted basketry paraboloid. Marvelous! Over this framework reeds, cattails and other thatch materials were interwoven; as a shelter it was weatherproof; a negligible amount of water poured through the smoke-hole during a heavy rainstorm but was absorbed by woven mats covering the earthen floor which were hung out to dry in the beautiful sunshine that often comes to the Ozarks.
Portable? Yes, “quite portable,” Fanshaw explained later that afternoon when both men were warmed by firewater, Tennessee sour mash nearly comparable, or possibly even superior in some respects, to the Jack Daniels of our time…and Fanshaw’s cured tobacco wasn’t such a bad product itself. Jacob Ingledew was on his third pipeful. (Noah Ingledew still wouldn’t come out of the woods. Noah Ingledew never would work up the nerve to come and talk to Fanshaw, even though Jacob later told him, “Why, that injun kin talk ary bit as good as you or me. Better, mebbe.”)
“A gentleman and his squaw,” Fanshaw explained over the firewater, “can lift and transport their domicile over great distances where the woods are not, or, where the woods are, disassemble and reassemble. If Wahkontah—he whom you address ‘God’—wanted gentlemen to stay in one place he would make the world stand still; but he in his infinite wisdom made it always to change, so birds and animals can move and always have green grass and ripe berries, sunlight to work and play, and night to sleep, always changing, everything for good, the earth and bodies of the skies, forever and ever…” At that point a pretty Indian woman appeared briefly in the door of Fanshaw’s house and spoke gently to Fanshaw in a language that Jacob Ingledew had never heard, then withdrew, presumably into the second of the two units in the duple. Fanshaw chuckled and said to Jacob Ingledew: “The lady thinks I talk too much.” He stood up and gave Jacob his hand, saying, “Do come again, brother.”
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 79