“News?” said Eli Willard.
“Yeah, Connecticut must be whar lives all the gentle-peoples what made these things ye give us. Aint there any news out thar in the Nation?”
“It is all bad,” Eli Willard informed her. “What do you want to hear it for?”
“Wal, we’uns is all hidden out here in the woods, y’know. It do git kinder lonesome, times. A body’d like to hear what’s happenin far off and away.”
Eli Willard just looked at her for a long moment, and then he announced, “Lady of the Lake strikes iceberg in mid-Atlantic; 215 drown. New York City fire destroys 700 buildings. Japanese earthquake kills 12,000. Worldwide cholera epidemic kills millions. Wages rise, but prices rise faster. Financial crash occurs on Van Buren’s 36th day in office. Nation begins first great depression. Bank failures and closings spread like plague. 200,000 are unemployed. Business bankrupt; only pawnbrokers prosper. Van Buren declares ten-hour day on all federal jobs. There. Does that make you feel any better?”
Lizzie Swain smiled and all her children smiled, and Lizzie said, “Hit shore do. We thank ye kindly.”
Shaking his head and muttering to himself, Eli Willard rode on his way. He came to the Ingledew cabin, was hailed by the bitch Tige and her now-fully-grown litter of eight, who surrounded his horse and continued barking until Jacob appeared and said, “Oh. It’s you. Back already?” Then he observed, “You shore didn’t stay away long, this time. Accordin to my clock, you’ve only been gone one day, three hours and forty-five minutes.”
Eli Willard drew an envelope from his pocket, unfolded it, and read it to Jacob Ingledew. “The management deeply regrets being apprised of the alleged malfunctioning of the instrument merchandised in good faith to the customer, and under ordinary circumstances would redeem the allegedly defective instrument with one of acceptable performance, but the management must with compunction inform the customer that, since the management is at the present time no longer actively engaged in merchandising instruments of this nature, we are perforce not able to make available to the customer an alternative replacement, therefore—”
“Yeah,” Jacob said. Then, “How’s the weather out yore way?”
“Cold enough to freeze the tail off a brass monkey,” Eli Willard reported. “Blizzards up to here—” he indicated his chin, and he was still sitting on his horse. “How about you?”
“Had one good snap long about Christmas,” Jacob told him.
The two men discussed the weather for a while, one-eighth of a second by Jacob’s clock, then Eli Willard opened his saddlebag and brought out a stick of ivory which enclosed a blade much sharper than those he had given the Swain boys. He unfolded it and handed it to Jacob.
“What’s it fer?” Jacob asked, holding it gingerly.
“For shaving,” Eli Willard explained. “Perhaps if you cut off those whiskers of yours, you might more easily find a wife.”
“I’ve done found a wife,” Jacob informed him, then he called into the cabin, “OH, SAREY! COME OUT SO’S THIS HERE PEDDLAR FELLER KIN SEE YE!”
“Congratulations,” Eli Willard said to Jacob, and when Sarah appeared he amended that to, “Compliments and congratulations. A beauty. My pleasure to meet you, madam, and to present you with this.” He gave her a pair of the scissoring knives like those he had given to Lizzie Swain, and explained to her how to use them. She had no cloth to cut, but took one of Jacob’s beaver skins and snipped it to flinders, expressing her wonder and delight, then she offered to give him a bucket of wild raspberry preserves that she had made, but Jacob explained that this feller was blind to any barter except that issued by the federal government, of which Jacob still had a little hidden behind a loose stone in his fireplace. So he fetched his cash and paid for Sarah’s scissors.
“Don’t you think, madam,” Eli Willard asked, “that your husband would strike a more dashing figure without his beard and mustachios?”
Sarah clipped her scissors and stared at them. “Is these good for that too?”
“Up to a point,” Eli Willard replied. “But to complete the operation he would need this.” He held up the straight-razor again.
“Pay him, Jake,” Sarah told her husband. While Jacob had his bankroll out, Eli Willard gauged the thickness of the wad, and proceeded to sell Jacob a pocketknife, another for Noah, a hand saw, an adjustable plane, a brace and bit, and a hammer. Before he was done, Eli Willard also sold him a scythe blade and a hay fork, observing that, now that Jacob had livestock, he would need good tools for harvesting fodder. Meanwhile Sarah did not return to her cabin but, as had become her peculiar disposition, wandered off to her mother’s house. Jacob took advantage of her absence to draw Eli Willard aside and ask in a low voice, “You reckon you could lay hold of some glass to bring me, yore next trip?”
“Glass?” said Eli Willard in a hushed tone.
“Yeah,” Jacob whispered. “I’m a-fixin to build me a new house, and I aim to put a couple winders in her, so I’ll be needin some winder lights.”
“Glass,” Eli Willard susurrated hoarsely, “is frightfully hard to come by, and of course difficult to transport, and therefore frightfully expensive.”
“I ’spect so,” Jacob sighed, and softly inquired, “How much?”
Eli Willard whispered into his ear a preposterously exorbitant figure. “I’ll be dumbed!” Jacob croaked quietly, but then he drew himself up and declared, “Wal, you git it, and we’uns will find the money some way.”
The window of the Swain house, as we have seen, being covered with boiled and scraped wildcat hide, was translucent but not transparent. It admitted light but permitted no vision, either in or out, unless at night a figure were standing between the window and the light (nocturnal illumination in the Swain house came either from the fireplace or from “lamps” which consisted of sycamore balls floating in saucers of bear’s grease with the stem serving as a wick). The silhouette of a figure was standing between the light and window that night; the figure is Sarah’s. Jacob has not bothered to come for her. He has discovered a wonderful use for the pocketknife he bought from Eli Willard. He can whittle a stick with it.
He is whittling the stick into shavings. Neither the stick nor the shavings have any value, but the act of pushing the knife down along the stick has a certain therapeutic value, is soothing, gives him something to do with his hands, keeps him from seeming entirely idle when in fact he is entirely idle. Henceforward generations of the men and boys of Stay More will whittle to shavings millions of cords of sticks; some of them will actually carve the sticks into totemic figures or useful objects, hatchet handles and such, but the majority of the men and boys will just keep on whittling the stick into shavings and then start on another one, as if, their houses all built and finished, they have to keep on working with wood.
Tonight Jacob sits beside his fire endlessly whittling, and Noah soon catches the contagious habit and joins him. It is Sarah whose silhouette we see passing between the light and the window of her mother’s house. All the others have gone to sleep, the boys in the loft, the girls and their mother below. But Sarah’s silhouette moves across our line of vision and out of it, in the direction of the ladder leading up through the scuttle-hole into the loft. We can no longer see her through the window now, but we can imagine her climbing the ladder to her brothers’ quarters. We cannot easily imagine her motive, until we remember that Murray is still suffering from the after-effects of the frakes. He has no will to live. Sleeps sometimes, more often not. Lies abed, thinking no visions, hatching no plans. Feels only, if feels at all, the same feeling Noah had: of snugness, of being wrapped in the confines of this small house, of having no desire ever again to leave it. What is Sarah climbing to him for? We are not going to know.
But we should know this much, about all of those early houses in Stay More, in contrast to all of the houses that we live in today: the very architecture of “garrison”-type houses, hermetic as it was, insulating and isolating the inhabitants from extremes of hot and
cold, the possibly hostile wilderness, etc., fostered because of this an atmosphere of family “togetherness” more intense than any that has ever existed since. By closing the family in on itself, the architecture forced the people of these families into a happy intimacy which we cannot comprehend because we have never known it. There were few or no secrets in these families.
In the case of the Swains, the atmosphere of togetherness was so intense that they thought of themselves not as individuals but as parts of one person. We have already seen an example in the way they cooperated as a team to propel Sarah along the route to Jacob’s cabin and heart. But that was nothing. To observe the degree of their absorption one in another we would have to join them at the table, where there was never any need for anybody to ask to have something passed because everybody knew who wanted what and when and how much. They knew, the Swains, all of them, and nobody ever had to ask to have anything passed. When one of them was supremely happy, they were all supremely happy, and when one of them was sad, they were all sad. The only exception to this, strangely, was Murray’s frakes, which seems to be the one condition whose mood is not contagious, the one condition that must be suffered alone, without empathy from those so close around one. Whatever it was, it was not empathy that caused Sarah to climb up to Murray’s bed.
But Murray did not improve. In addition to his usual feeling of worthlessness, he developed a strange sensation that can only be called a kind of stationary acrophobia. The boys’ sleeping loft was not all that high; just about nine feet above the floor; and indeed it was not the loft that he was afraid of falling out of. Nor his bed, which was a scant two feet high. He was simply afraid of falling out of…of…well, he was simply afraid of falling. In his dreams, when he managed to sleep, he was always falling. Not from anything nor to anything, but falling. He would wake with a cry from these dreams, and, because there were no secrets in those families, in those houses, he would tell his dream to his brothers, and they to his mother and sisters, so that when in the deep of night thereafter anyone was wakened from their sleep by Murray’s cries, they would simply realize, “Murray is fallin,” and turn over and go back to sleep.
Lizzie consulted Noah Ingledew, who enjoyed some esteem as the first person to catch and suffer and endure and survive the frakes, but Noah could not remember having had any sensation of falling, and thus was not able to offer any advice. Lizzie then consulted with Jacob, who, although he had not yet experienced the frakes, was looked upon as the village sage. Jacob agreed to study the problem. He got a stick and sat with it and whittled at it with his new pocketknife. He studied and studied, whittling stick after stick. He wished Fanshaw were still around; Fanshaw might know some answers to what might help acrophobia (although Jacob, of course, did not know or use that word); whatever the condition was, it had to be related to gravity, and Fanshaw was an expert on gravity.
Jacob whittled his sticks and meditated upon how and why objects fall. At length he formulated two important premises: (1) an object must fall from somewhere, and (2) an object must stop falling when it gets to somewhere. He demonstrated and proved these concepts by throwing a rock straight up into the air as hard as he could. The rock rose and rose, but by and by Jacob heard it coming down, crashing through the trees and then making a dull thud as it hit the ground. Now the question was: where did the rock fall from? From the hand of Jacob who had thrown it, or from some unspecified point at which the rock could no longer rise? The latter, he believed, and suddenly realized, Murray Swain is falling from the place at which he knows he caint rise any farther.
He understood that much about the frakes. The next question was: when would he stop falling? When would he hit the ground? Or could somebody catch him? How? Jacob tried another experiment: he went out into his open pasture where there were no trees, and threw another rock straight up into the air and searched for it as it was coming down and ran over beneath it and cupped his hands and tried to catch it. The first few times he tried this, he missed, and the rock either hit the ground or struck him painfully on his head or shoulders. Soon Sarah and Noah and all of the Swains except Murray gathered around to watch Jacob trying to catch rocks. “S—tfire,” Noah remarked to Sarah. “You ortent to have let him out of the house, Sarey.” But finally Jacob succeeded in catching a rock, and then another, and still yet another—and by indirection commenced the legendary Ingledew prowess at that sport which, by fabulous coincidence, was being invented on that same day, at that same moment, by Abner Doubleday in Coopers-town, N.Y.
No element of sport, however, entered Jacob’s mind; he was dead serious, and after he had succeeded in catching several rocks in succession, he stopped throwing them and came and said to the others, “I think I got it.” Then he told Lizzie that they should keep a watch on Murray when he was sleeping, and if he started tossing and turning and acting like he was about to cry out, they should hold him and whisper in his ear, “I’ve caught ye!” That very night Lizzie took one of the lamps made from a sycamore ball floating in a saucer of bear’s grease and she lit it and left it beside Murray’s bed, and then in shifts she and her children kept watch on Murray until, sure enough, he began tossing and turning and acting like he was getting ready to cry out, when Orville, who was on the shift at that moment, leaned down and clutched him and whispered in his ear, “I’ve caught ye!” whereupon Murray smiled in his sleep and stopped tossing, stopped falling apparently, stopped having any but pleasant dreams: of tall wheat waving in the field, of the creek tumbling over shoals, of a cool dipper of spring water on a hot day, of fried chicken, of his sister Sarah’s warmth and depth and damp. The Swains repeated this magic incantation whenever Murray had dreams of falling, until, eventually, he seemed to be cured. Then Lizzie Swain went to Jacob and announced, “We’uns done had a ’lection, and all voted to proclaim ye mayor of Stay More,” a title that Jacob would retain for the rest of his life, even concurrently with, years later, the far grander title of governor of the whole State of Arkansas.
But Murray was not cured. Cured of dreaming dreams of falling, yes, but not of the core of his acrophobia, which festered until it erupted: one day he left his bed and dressed and went out of the house and climbed the mountain behind it until he came to a lofty projection of bluff that jutted out from the side of the mountaintop some three hundred feet (or more accurately, nineteen hats) above the mountainslope below. Young Gilbert, the Swain’s least-un, had followed Murray to see where he was going, and it was he who ran home to report it to his mother, who in turn summoned Jacob, who assured her, “I’ll catch him,” and ran up the mountainslope, fully determined to attempt to break Murray’s fall with his own arms or body, a rash resolution which, had he been able to carry it out, would have killed himself or crippled himself for life. But when he got to that area of the mountainslope directly beneath the bluff jutting out from the mountaintop, Murray was already falling, falling, and though Jacob cried out “I’ll catch ye!” and “I’ve caught ye!” he could not, would not. Limbs of trees deflected the plummet of the body away from his grasp but did not soften the descent enough to keep Murray from slamming into that which awaits the fall of all. Jacob would never forget the sound, all of the parts of the sound: of flesh violently bruised, of lungs expelled, of bones snapping, of blood spurting. Some months later, when he himself would lie abed with the frakes and the fear of, not of falling but of getting the fear of falling, he would load his rifle and instruct Sarah to use it upon him if ever he left the house except to relieve himself out back.
Murray Swain was the founder of the Stay More cemetery. There’s an old story that when the next wave of settlers came into Stay More, six families from various parts of eastern Tennessee and northern Georgia, the men were gathered at the Mayor’s—Jacob’s—house for the formality of requesting his permission to settle. One man declared that he would like to start a blacksmith shop. Another said that he intended to start a sheep ranch. Another declared his intention to start a trading post. Still another was going to start a
gristmill. Each of the men had some intention to contribute to the establishment of the village, except for one very old man who had suffered the long trip from Georgia and was ill. “What about him?” Jacob asked the others, and they replied, “Oh. Him. Reckon he aims to start the cemetery.” Jacob thought maybe they were trying to be funny, but he didn’t laugh. He just stared them down and informed them, “We done got one.” And in fact, when the old man died within a few days, and was given a proper burial, there was already another headstone in a clearing down Swains Creek a ways, a headstone quarried from slate and inscribed with the name and the too-brief dates, the last of which was the earliest in Stay More, and the inscription, “Falling no more.” It was Lizzie Swain herself who, without irony or approbation or sorrow so much as plain observation, named the lofty jag of bluff “Leapin Rock,” and defied all her descendants to go near it. Throughout the history of Stay More, it was always difficult for anyone to avoid seeing that landmark, looming up to the west of the village as a silent reminder that there is a place to fall from, a silent temptation to those who want to stop falling.
The six families were the Plowrights, the Coes, the Dinsmores, the Chisms, the Duckworths, and the Whitters. Collectively they increased the population of Stay More by thirty-three, as if to compensate for the decrease by one. They built cabins or houses very similar to, but carefully not identical to, those of the Ingledews and the Swains. Zachariah Dinsmore did indeed construct a primitive gristmill on Swains Creek, and Levi Whitter erected an even more primitive building which became the village’s first general store or trading post, much to the disdain of Eli Willard the next time he came.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 86