Eli Willard produced the I.O.U. that Jacob had signed six months previously. “If you will settle your account, sir, I shall be happy to leave this new clock of entirely brass works with you.” Jacob realized that his primary purpose in selling the fur pelts had been to pay off the clock peddler, and he did have the twenty dollars, so he gave the money to Eli Willard, who thanked him, but added, “Of course brass being more accurate than wood and in other ways more desirable, it is also more expensive than wood, and, regretfully, we are required to charge a little extra for—”
“How much?” Jacob asked.
“Twenty dollars,” Eli Willard declared.
“I’ll see you in six months,” Jacob said. So he signed another I.O.U., and Willard rode off the way he had come, toward the north.
The new clock compensated for the old one by being as slow as the old one was fast, and Jacob calculated that he was regaining all the years he had lost to the old clock. Also, the new clock had a metal chime to strike the hours in place of the harsh wooden pecker of the old clock. The new chime said PRONG, and since it struck only on the second Tuesday of each month, it was not at all annoying—in fact, an occasion to be looked forward to. In time the brothers turned the occasion into ritual: on the second Tuesday of each month, at the moment the clock was scheduled to chime, they would drop whatever they were doing (or Jacob would; Noah would simply rise up from his bed) and stand beside the clock. Noah would salute as the moment approached; Jacob had his rifle loaded and ready. The clock would say prong and the brothers would let out with whoops and Jacob would fire off his rifle (through the door, the sole opening of the house, so as not to hit anything in the cabin) and the bitch Tige and all eight of her pups would start baying and yipping and chasing their tails and the heifer Jerse would bawl at the top of her lusty lungs, and the sun would stand still for a moment. This was the origin of the custom in our own time of the Lions, Rotarians and Kiwanians meeting for lunch on the second Tuesday of each month.
One noon in the early spring, the Ingledew brothers were having their dinner. Little has been said, up to this point, about their diet; here we might relate it to the architecture of their cabin by observing that, while looking plain and simple on the surface, it actually was quite variegated, and the reason the food looked plain and simple was the result of Jacob’s cooking; it would have been nearly impossible to tell from the appearance of the cooked food whether it was fish or fowl, pork or potato; but the fact was that in terms of variety, beef was the only meat that the brothers did not have.
“Meat” of course to the Ozarker meant only pork: bacon or ham or salt pork or sidemeat, and there was a superabundance of this available in the wild hogs—“razorbacks”—roaming the woods and feeding on acorn mast and providing in turn food for panthers, bobcats and bears as well as ingledews. Both Jacob and Noah seemed to prefer pork to other kinds of meat, although they were not all that particular, and had discovered that even panther meat, eschewed by most hunters, had a taste like delicate veal. Bear meat had a stronger taste.
In the beginning the brothers kept no domestic fowl since the woods were filled with pigeons and wild turkey, one of the easiest game animals to bag—Jacob wouldn’t even waste powder and shot on them because he could kill them just as easily by throwing rocks at them. Likewise he wouldn’t bother wasting bait to catch fish but used instead a gig, one of the few pieces of iron brought with them from Tennessee, and the stream of water that would be called Swains Creek or Little North Fork of the Little Buffalo River was teeming with bass and perch and bream and crappie and catfish, so that his fishing expeditions never lasted more than two and one-half minutes.
Jacob and Noah were also fond of “sallit,” what we would call greens, but wild, the tender leaves of mustard, lamb’s quarters, pepper-grass, pokeweed, dock, thistle and wild lettuce, which Jacob would mix together and boil for a long time in his kettle with a bit of bacon rind and then throw in some onions and pour hot bear’s oil over it and cook it and stir it until it was the same brown color as the main dish and indistinguishable from it on the plate…and palate.
Since there was no milk—yet—the brothers washed their food down with plain spring water, occasionally diluted with a jigger of whiskey, or else their coffee substitute made of roasted corn meal and molasses. For dessert, in season, there might be a watermelon or canteloupe chilled in the spring, or simply wild honey on a corn muffin, or Jacob might try his hand at cooking fried pies which were stuffed with wild berries and were the same brown color as all the other food consumed.
Where were we? Yes: one noon in the early spring, the Ingledew brothers were having their dinner (and it is understood that “dinner” always means the noon meal; the evening meal is always “supper”) when suddenly the population of Stay More took a dramatic leap from two to seventeen. The bitch Tige and her eight pups started barking and it wasn’t even the second Tuesday of the month, and the Ingledews grabbed their rifles and went outside, and there, coming up the trail, was a caravan: a covered wagon in the vanguard, drawn by horses, not mules, followed by pedestrians serving as drovers for a menagerie that might have come from the Biblical Noah’s Ark: a pair, male and female, of each: two sheep, two goats, two beeves (one a bull!), two dogs, two pigs, two house cats—and the rooster with a harem of hens. A middle-aged woman was driving the wagon, and the Ingledews noticed that the others, fourteen in number, were all young people or children. There was no grown man.
“Howdy,” said the woman, halting her team. “‘Pears lak this here road don’t go no further.”
“Hit don’t, I reckon,” Jacob observed.
“Reckon we’uns’ll jist have to turn back a ways. Shore is purty country ’way back around up in here. You’uns the only folks hereabouts?”
“Fur as I know, seems lak,” Jacob confessed.
“I’m Lizzie Swain,” the woman said. “Come from Cullowhee, North Caroliner. This un here’s my leastun, Gilbert”—she indicated the small boy sitting beside her—“and thatun’s Esther. Yonder’un’s Frank, and Nettie standin beside him. Thatun’s Boyd. Next him is Elberta and Octavia. Whar’s Virgil? YOU, VIRGE! Come out so’s these fellers kin see ye. Thar he is! Thatun’s Virgil. Then over yonder is Leo, tendin the sheep. Next him is Zenobia. The one tendin the goats is Orville. Aurora is inside the wagon here, layin down with a stomachache. Thatun with the cow and topcow is Murray, he’s my eldest boy. And yonder’s my eldest gal, Sarah, she’s done past twenty. All of ya’ll kids say howdy to these here fellers.”
“HOWDY!” they all said at once, with friendly, enthusiastic smiles.
“Howdy do,” responded Jacob, and Noah didn’t respond at all. In their shyness before all of these females, it never occurred to them to introduce themselves.
“How fur back up the road does yore land go?” the woman asked.
“I don’t rightly know,” Jacob said. “I aint been very fur up thataways. I hear tell there’s a lot of folks up around yonder some’ers, but I aint seed ary one.”
“Wal, I reckon we’uns will jist git on back a ways,” Lizzie Swain declared, and began turning the team of horses around.
In his discomfiture, Jacob did not even think to offer the ritual invitation, “Stay more.” He just stood and watched the caravan return back up the trail. But they were scarcely out of sight when he began to hear the noise: thock, the unmistakable sound produced by an axe hitting a tree. It was followed rapidly by an identical sound, and then another, and then a succession of thucks made by a different axe, and then began a series of thacks, from yet another axe, followed by some thecks from yet a fourth axe, and finally the chorus was joined by a fifth axe that said thick, until the air was filled with a constant cannonade of thock thuck thack theck thick.
“Shitfire,” Noah remarked. “They must be choppin the woods all to hell.”
Jacob went to investigate and discovered that the family had elected to settle less than half a mile from his own place. Four of the older boys and Lizzie Swain
were busy chopping at oak trees, the beginning of the structure that we shall examine in the following chapter. Jacob went up to Lizzie Swain and took the axe out of her hands.
When he did, she looked startled, and asked, “Air we too close on ye?” and the boys raised their axes to defend her, but Jacob simply took the axe and began swinging it at the tree that Lizzie Swain had been chopping. He set a pace for the other boys, but his tree was felled long before theirs were. “That’s right neighborly of ye,” Lizzie Swain said to him. He started in on another tree.
Mrs. Elizabeth Hansell Swain was a true courageous pioneer mother—the first white woman in Stay More. Her husband had died the year before back in Cullowhee, North Carolina, and she decided to bring her fourteen children west in order that, as she would later explain to Jacob, “they could grow up with the country.” All of the children threw their hearts into the idea, and although they had suffered a number of troubles and privations on the long journey (they had left North Carolina over two months previously, in the dead of winter), they were not daunted but overjoyed to have reached their new home at last. While the older boys chopped down the virgin oaks, the older girls and their mother busied themselves constructing a campfire and preparing a first supper that would be a feast in celebration of arrival. Jacob was felling his eighth tree when he heard a dinner horn blow, and, looking up, saw Lizzie Swain blowing it and welcoming him to supper. Jacob had the first fried chicken and the first milk that he would eat and drink in Stay More, and this was the origin of the favorite meal of the people. He liked it so much that, after supper, as dusk settled in the woods, it took little urging from the children to get him to open up and tell about his adventures, and they all sat around and listened to him tell about the Indian Fanshaw and his strange beliefs and customs, such as maidens proposing to braves by giving them cornbread, and he gave them a bloodcurdling imitation of the Dawn Chant, and the children listened, awed and entranced. Years afterward they would tell their own children of these things, so that was the origin of the “oral tradition” which was so strong in the Ozarks for over a hundred years, and perhaps even today has not completely died out.
Noah Ingledew did not help the Swains build their cabin. Jacob apologized for his brother, explaining that he had recently had a terrible affliction from which he was still recovering. Lizzie Swain pressed for details of the affliction, because she was an expert in home remedies and herbal cures, but Jacob blushed and said it wasn’t “decent” to describe. Jacob also was considerably embarrassed in his plan to get his heifer serviced by the Swains’ bull. (In the Ozarks a man would rather cut his tongue out than utter the word “bull” in the presence of a female. There were many circumlocutions: “male,” “topcow,” “cow-critter,” “surly,” “gentleman-cow,” “brute,” “cow-brute,” or simply “he-cow,” but Jacob could not employ these euphemisms if his object was to ask Lizzie for her bull’s service. At first he tried to get around the problem by dealing with Lizzie’s oldest son, Murray, but Murray just said, “Ask Maw.”) But Jacob just couldn’t. He kept putting it off, until finally the heifer Jerse came into heat again and set up such a loud bawling that all the Swains could hear her from half a mile off. “Sounds lak somebody’s heifer wants a calf,” Lizzie Swain remarked. Jacob didn’t say anything. “Wonder whose it is,” she went on. He couldn’t tell her. “You said you and yore brother was the only folks around,” Lizzie observed. Jacob could only nod. “Did ye happen to notice, we’uns got a right full-blooded topcow,” Lizzie informed him. Jacob gulped and nodded again. “Considerin all the help you’re a-givin us a-buildin our house, the least we could do is lend ye our topcow.” Jacob tried to find words to thank her, but could find no words. “Murray,” she said to her oldest boy, “you and Orville and Leo take ole Horns up yonder where that heifer’s a-bawlin, and see if he caint git her to hesh up.”
Jacob went with them, helped them, then returned to his work, the work of building their house, and worked with a new vengeance that came both from gratitude and from his inability to express himself. Soon the Swains’ house was finished. The “community effort” of over a dozen people at work on the house-raising (even the youngest children helped with the job of chinking the cracks between the logs with clay and straw) reminded Jacob of Fanshaw’s description of the Indian’s ritual house-raising, and he told the Swain children about it: how after the maiden had proposed to the young brave by offering him a piece of cornbread, the whole community joined together for the festival of lodge-building for the couple. Jacob brought the Swain children to his own place one day and showed them his corncrib, which was made from the two halves of Fanshaw’s house reversed upon one another to form a large egg-shaped structure resting upon a cradle of stone. He explained how the house had looked in its original form. The older children touched it and peered inside, but the younger children were afraid even to touch it.
Our first chapter ended with a leaving; this one ends with a coming—appropriately in the early spring. The Swains’ house is finished in a fortnight, and they can turn their attention to the land: pulling the stumps of the oaks they have cut and plowing the earth and planting it. I think of the smiling faces of the children, and Lizzie pleased with her new home, and the smell of fresh-plowed earth, and the opening of dogwood and redbud blossom, and then somehow the thought of all the pests and plagues and vermin is endurable.
Weeks and weeks were to pass before, one day, Sarah Swain, the oldest girl, past twenty, hair dark as pitch, would show up at the door of Jacob’s cabin with a piece of freshbaked cornbread, which she would offer into his astonished hands.
Chapter three
At first glance it seems similar to the Ingledew cabin, but in the Ozarks, unlike other areas of the country where prepackaged houses come monotonously identical, there were no two dwellings exactly alike. We are impressed with the two most conspicuous differences: the Swain house has a porch, and its timbers are hewed rather than left round. There are other differences, subtle to notice or not visible in our illustration: a puncheon floor inside, whereas the Ingledew cabin had no floor but earth. (Puncheons are simply split logs with their flat side up, very sturdy, and over the years worn smooth and shiny by the bare feet of many children.) The Swain chimney is slightly taller than the Ingledew chimney, reducing the hazard of igniting the roof. The gable ends are shingled in the Swain house, rather fancifully, and the roof covering is true riven shingles, not boards. The chinking in the interstices between the timbers is not simply mud but more durable clay, finished off with a layer of white lime plaster. There is, as it were, a second story, which was the sleeping quarters for the seven Swain boys: a loft under the gables, reached by a ladder through a scuttle-hole. And there is a window! If we look carefully we can find it, just to the side of the chimney. Glass being unavailable, the window was “glazed” with a bobcat skin, boiled in lye and scraped and oiled, nailed over it. The bobcat skin was translucent but not transparent, letting in light but no prying eyes.
Notice that the corners, the ends of the logs, are not saddle-notched but dovetailed. This makes for a tighter fit and a more sturdy building. The hardest job in building this cabin, which fell exclusively to Jacob Ingledew and the older Swain boy, Murray, was the hewing of these logs. A chalk line was stretched the length of the log and snapped, marking it along the rounded edge; then a chopping axe was sunk into this line at intervals, and then a broadaxe (with curved handle so as to avoid hitting one’s ankles) was used to hack off the rounded sides of the log. It was painstaking, grueling work—and Murray Swain, as we shall see, came down with the frakes at the end of it. But the result of this work was a house that not only looks much more “modern” than the Ingledew cabin, but is also more durable. The Swain house is the first dwelling in our study which still exists today, although, being unoccupied, its porch has collapsed and most of the shingles have blown off the roof and it is used only by young boys looking for a place to sneak a smoke or older boys with their girls looking for a place t
o sneak a joy. Until about twenty-five years ago, however, it had been lived in continuously by five generations of Swains.
The similarities between the Swain house and the Ingledew cabin are apparent: both have only one door and both are roughly sixteen feet (or one hat) square. The architect of the Swain house is not easy to establish; the similarities between it and the Ingledew cabin would lead some scholars to attribute it to Jacob Ingledew, but since the Swain house was essentially Lizzie Swain’s house, we may assume that she had a large, if not exclusive, hand in the design of it, particularly the porch, which is like a woman’s sunbonnet shading her face, and which provided extra room in temperate weather for the crowded family. Undoubtedly Jacob Ingledew and Lizzie Swain may have discussed, or even argued, several points in the design and construction of the house, just as, later, after she had become his mother-in-law, he would, as men are always doing with their mothers-in-law, argue: they would argue religion, they would argue folk medicine and superstition, they would argue the use of alcoholic beverages, and above all they would argue the naming of things and places in Stay More. It was Lizzie who named Swains Creek and Bantam (Banty) Creek (after one of her little fowl who drowned there) and Leapin Rock (after one of her children who would leap from it) whereas Jacob named Ingledew Mountain and its benches (“West Banch, North Banch,” etc.) and various individual holes of water in the streams that Lizzie had named, Ole Bottomless in Banty Creek, Ole Beaver, Ole Crappie and Ole Stubtoe in Swains Creek. Lizzie also wanted to name the town itself—Cullowhee after her hometown—but Jacob pointed out to her that it had already been named Stay More and so it would stay.
Did Jacob accept that cornbread? The whole idea was Lizzie’s, to begin with. She knew that Sarah was past marryin’ age, and where else was she going to find a man? Jacob might be ten years older than Sarah, but he was ten years younger than Lizzie and besides Lizzie had already had all the children she wanted. Sarah was hard to sell on the idea, though. Like all the Swain children she idolized Jacob Ingledew and for that very reason the thought of marriage to him frightened her, almost as if it had been suggested that she go off and live with God as His wife. It would be an honor to be Mrs. God, but wouldn’t it also be a terrible responsibility? When none of these arguments dissuaded her mother from trying to persuade her to take some cornbread to Jacob, Sarah argued that a man Jacob’s age who had not married probably didn’t care for women in the first place and would just laugh at her if she gave him some cornbread and then she would just die of mortification.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 84