The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1

by Donald Harington

  This was true in Jacob’s case; since his own house did not require drying out and cleaning like the others, he could spend all of his time searching for his brother…or his brother’s body…but whenever he went far enough downstream to hear the distant, faint “ahoy” he took it as only an echo of his own voice calling “NOEY!”

  In time, Noah became too weak to yell very loudly. It is a marvel how he survived, but he did. Some of the details of his survival technique are not pleasant to dwell upon, but a few of the less unsavory may be mentioned: the sunshine dried his cold wet buckskins (although also drying, and tightening, the black-jack vines that bound him to the tree); there was a small saucer-shaped depression in a tree limb near his head which contained rainwater, or spunkwater as they call it, and which he, by craning his neck, could dip his tongue into and slake his thirst from time to time; his hands were still free, and he could use these to: (1) tear off leaves from the tree to chew upon; (2) unfasten his trousers in order to relieve himself; (3) seize, and pluck the feathers off of, pigeons, whose uncooked flesh was better than nothing. In this manner he managed to subsist for nearly a week, until he was found. He slept well without fear of falling into the water—or, now that the flood was gone, the ground, thirty feet below him. He was bothered by backaches occasionally, and, for two days, by constipation, but these were minor annoyances. He was troubled by thoughts of what unknown desolation the flood may have wreaked upon Stay More. One day a dove brought him an olive branch, but he did not know what it was, and ate the dove.

  It was Jacob who found him. Jacob, who had nothing better to do than to search, and kept at it. The people of Stay More had begun to feel very sorry for Jacob. Every day they would hear his voice, somewhere up or down the creek, calling “NOEY!” and they would shake their heads and cast sorrowful glances at one another, and remember all over again how cruel they had been to Noah before the flood. One of the more superstitiously religious women, perhaps out of guilt, tried to justify or at least explain the loss of Noah: “Hit’s God’s new sign. In the last flood all perished but Noah. In this flood all survived but Noah.”

  In fact, Jacob himself had given up the search, and what brought him to the vicinity of Noah’s sycamore tree was not the search for Noah, now abandoned, but a desire to go down to Parthenon to see if his neighbors there had survived the flood. This is how he happened to pass beneath Noah’s tree, and would not have noticed Noah if the latter had not noticed him first. At first Noah thought that Jacob was just an apparition, but perhaps as a simple reflex action, he said again, one last time, “Ahoy!” and Jacob looked up and saw him high overhead.

  “Heigh-ho!” Jacob exclaimed. “Whoopee! Yippity-yay! Boy oh boy! Goody gander! Hooraw! Hi-de-ho! Man alive! Hot diggety darn! Tolderollol!” Jacob jumped up and kicked his heels together twice before coming down. Then he became solicitous. “Air ye all right, Brother? You aint drownded? How’s yore heartbeat? Breathin normal? Kin ye see out of both eyes? Hear out of both ears? Bowel movements reg’lar? I’ll bet ye could stand a drop of good corn. Come on down.”

  “I’m all hung up,” Noah pointed out. “This here black-jack vine has got a mighty holt on me.”

  “I’ll git ye loose,” Jacob declared, and prepared to climb the tree, but saw that the first limb was too high for him to reach. “I’ll have to fetch a rope or ladder,” he told Noah. “Keep cool. I’ll be right back. Don’t git narvous. Steady down. Easy does it. Be a man. Stay with it. Chin up.” Jacob turned and ran for home. It was not a short distance, and he wasn’t used to running. Pretty soon he had to stop for breath, and he told himself there wasn’t any real hurry, because if Noah had been up in that tree for seven days and six nights already he could last for another hour or so.

  Jacob returned home to find Sarah yelling that Baby Ben had opened the cow-pasture gate and let all the cows out, and was being chased by the bull. Jacob shooed the bull off of Ben, spanked the latter and sent him to the house, then rounded up his cows and got them back into the pasture. No sooner had he finished this when word came that the Duckworths, in trying to dry their damp belongings, had built up too large a fire in their fireplace, and the roof had caught from sparks and the house was burning. Jacob grabbed up all his empty buckets and pails and took off for the Duckworth house, and spent the next hour helping them put out the fire. Part of the roof was gone but the rest of the place was saved. Then one of the sons of Levi Whitter, who was helping fight the fire, came running to tell Levi that his wife Destiny had fallen into the well, and they didn’t have rope long enough to reach her. Jacob ran home to get more rope and then down to the Field of Clover to help get Destiny out of the well. By the time they got her out and dried her off and revived her with whiskey, everybody was plumb wore out and hungry, so Jacob told Sarah to serve up a big supper for the rescue crews, and since Jacob’s place had escaped the flood and their larder was still undamaged if not exactly brimming, Sarah prepared what might in such lean times be considered a sumptuous feast, and afterwards the menfolk sat around in Jacob’s breezeway picking their teeth and belching in deep satisfaction. Dark came on. One of the men remarked philosophically, “Wal, boys, I reckon we’ve seen the worst of it.” The other men nodded sagely, and got out their pocketknives and commenced whittling. The jug of corn was circulated freely among them, until, one by one, they got up and expressed their thanks for the fine supper and said they’d best be getting on down home. The last leaver clapped Jacob on the back and said, “Yeah, Jake, I reckon we’ve seen the worst of it. You’ve lost Noah, but—”

  “Great Caesar’s ghost!” Jacob exclaimed. “I plumb fergot all about him! Where’s a ladder? Quick!” Jacob rounded up rope, a ladder, and an axe to cut the black-jack vines, and with a torch of rags soaked in bear’s oil to light his way, went as fast as he could back toward the sycamore where Noah, meanwhile, having convinced himself that it really was just an apparition that he had mistaken for his brother, had supped on raw pigeon, relieved himself, and gone to sleep. Once Jacob got up into the sycamore, he had trouble waking Noah, and the still-sleepy Noah muttered to the effect that he might as well stay here. But Jacob got him down and took him home, or rather, since Noah’s cabin was washed away, into his own house, where he was bedded in the loft of the kitchen.

  We have essayed, in this chapter, to approach an exploration of duality, particularly as manifested in the bipartition or conjugation of Jacob Ingledew’s dogtrot house, which he in his simplistic perspective considered a manifestation of the bipartition or conjugation of the sexes, but which, although he was nearly correct in that limited interpretation, has hints of extension into far larger dualities: of drought and flood, of hot and cold, of day and night, of living and not living, of sowing and reaping, of breaking down and building up. We shape our buildings, and thereafter they shape us.

  “You know somethin?” Noah remarked one day to his brother. “Hit weren’t nearly so bad as you’d think, up there in that tree. Naw. Why, it was kinder fun. Could ye lend me the borry of yore saw and hammer…?”

  Chapter five

  It was an anomaly, a freak of the Ozarks, as it were, but so was Noah Ingledew, as it were. And yet, who are we to take the measure of that man and pronounce him abnormal? There is in each of us the child who yearns to build treehouses, to return to primordial man’s arboreal aerie. We don’t know Noah, and never will; a man whose vocabulary of oaths was limited to a single illogical combination of feces and flame might seem to lack the imagination to design and build the original penthouse shown in our illustration; and yet not only did he build it, but also he made a couple of innovations in architecture, to wit: it is the first split level dwelling in the Ozarks (and bigeminal, by Jiminy!) and, perhaps owing in part to the difficulty of building up a chimney of stone to that height (two hats, or over thirty feet above the ground), it was the first dwelling in the Ozarks heated by a metal stove with tin flue—although where Noah obtained the metal and how he fashioned it into a stove, and what the stove actually
looked like, I cannot say.

  Noah’s house and its massive sycamore tree (not the same tree he was stuck in a few pages back) were located not far from the center of Stay More, on the banks of Swains Creek, around a sharp bend of the creek as it meanders its tortuous course through the valley. The house remained stubbornly clinging to the sycamore tree for years and years after Noah’s death—unoccupied even during times of housing shortage, not necessarily through reverence for Noah’s memory but rather out of superstition—until well into the twentieth century, when a mixed crowd of “modern” youths, to whom the name “Noah Ingledew” meant merely the faceless cofounder of Stay More, climbed up into it for the purpose of sexual sport (a purpose to which Noah himself had put the treehouse on only one fleeting occasion), and through a combination of the ardor of their sport and the weight of their numbers (there were four boys and four girls) caused the tree house, both pens of it, to detach itself from the tree and crash to the ground. All eight of the youths were injured, none seriously, but their biggest problem was explaining to their elders the nature of the accident—the truth got out, and some of the older elders claimed they could see the ghost of Noah Ingledew nightly surveying the ruins of the treehouse.

  Initial public reaction to Noah’s construction of the treehouse was mixed; half of the Stay Morons declared that it confirmed their suspicion that Noah was “not over-bright,” while the other half countered by saying Well as I live and breathe! and What do you know about that! and If thet aint the beatinest thang ever I seed! These people coaxed out of Noah an invitation to climb up and view the interior(s); he could admit them only one at a time; the others queued up at the base of the tree, and even some of those who had deemed Noah “not over-bright” joined the line and waited their turns to climb up and look inside his treehouse. Word quickly spread, and soon people from Parthenon and even Jasper were joining the queue, which grew longer and longer. An itinerant evangelist, or wandering “saddlebag preacher,” happened by the end of the queue, which at that point was stretched out of sight of the treehouse around a bend in Swains Creek.

  There was some profane cursing going on at the end of the queue, with imprecations of “Quit shovin!” and “Git in line!” and “Keep off my toes!” and the profanity, more than the queue itself, drew the preacher’s attention. “Brethern and sistern,” he addressed them, “how come you’uns take the Lord’s Name in vain?” The people just stared at him, until one of them said, “Light down often yore goddamn horse, and take yore place in line like everybody else.” This incensed the preacher, but he got down and tethered his horse to a tree, and took his place in line. The line moved slowly, and by and by the preacher tapped the shoulder of the man ahead of him and asked, “What air we a-waitin fer, anyhow?” The man, who happened to be Jacob Ingledew, looked at him. Jacob judged from the preacher’s clothing, and from his remark about taking the Lord’s name in vain, that he might be an ignorant preacher who had just stumbled by, and he asked him, “Air ye a preacher, Reverend?”

  “Some has been known to say so,” the preacher replied.

  “Wal, Reverend,” Jacob said, “you’re jist in time. It’s the Jedgment Day, and up yonder God has set Hisself a booth up in a tree, and we’re all a-waitin to be jedged.”

  The preacher began to sweat, and while he continued to wait patiently in the queue, he gave himself over to silent prayer. After a while his place in line had moved around the bend of Swains Creek, and he came in view of the big sycamore tree with Noah’s treehouse thirty feet off the ground, and people climbing up the ladder to it. His knees trembled and he stumbled against Jacob, who said, “Quit shovin, Reverend. God has got all day.” Jacob meanwhile had quietly passed along to the others the news of the joke that was being played on the poor preacher, and the others gave him amused looks and tried hard not to laugh. One woman said to the preacher, “You aint skairt, air ye, Reverend? Don’t the Lord place the preachers on His right hand?” “Yeah,” the preacher replied, “but there was a few sins in my past that air still a-troublin me.”

  By the time the preacher reached the head of the queue at the base of the big sycamore tree, he was lathered with sweat and trembling as if with the palsy. Jacob took his turn climbing up to view the interior(s) of his brother’s treehouse, but decided against telling Noah that his next visitor would be a dumb preacher expecting to meet God. When Jacob climbed down, he had to assist the preacher in climbing the rude rungs up the tree, and to give him a final shove to propel him through the door of the treehouse, where the preacher fell down on his knees before the astonished Noah, crying, “LORD, I REPENT EVER BIT OF IT!” Noah, who had been sitting in his chair welcoming each visitor with the same mild words: “Howdy. Make yerself pleasant” (that is, “Make yourself at home”), and had repeated this so many times by now that it was automatic, now said to the prostrate preacher, “Howdy. Make yerself pleasant.” The preacher looked around him and saw that there was an empty chair in the room, and managed to hoist himself into it, where he sat with clenched hands between his knees and gazed in awe at Noah. Noah at that time was about thirty-four years old, and he sure didn’t look like anybody’s conventional conception of God, but the preacher had never seen God before, and you couldn’t never tell. Maybe he was just Saint Peter, the preacher thought, but either way the preacher was in for a hot time of it, on account of his past sins. “Fergive us our trespasses,” he beseeched, “as we fergive them that trespass against us.”

  Noah, for his part, was more than a little discomfited. Although he had said to each visitor, “Howdy. Make yerself pleasant,” this had been a mere formality, and not one of the people had taken him at his word and sat down in the other chair, until this feller came along. The feller seemed tetched in the head someway. He was dressed kind of funny, too, in a black suit and hat and necktie. And now he was asking to be forgiven for trespassing. “Aint no trespass,” Noah reassured him. “If all them other folks could come up here, reckon ye got as much right as any.”

  God—or Saint Peter—talked kind of funny, the preacher thought. He talked just like he looked: just plain folks. Well, sure, the preacher realized, God would want to make Himself appear like one of His people. “You fergive me, then?” he timidly asked.

  “Why, shore,” Noah declared. “Come again sometime.”

  “You mean that’s all?” the preacher asked. “That’s all there is to it? I kin git to go to heaven, now?”

  Noah was a little annoyed by this feller’s silliness, but he wanted to make light of it. “Shitfire,” he remarked, “you kin git to go to hell, fer all I care.”

  The preacher fainted. When he came to, he was no longer in God’s treehouse, but flat out on a sandbar by a riverbank surrounded by a vast mob of howling fiends who were pointing their fingers at him and cackling fit to bust. He fainted again at the sight of these denizens of hell, and when he revived the second time there were not so many of them and they were not cackling but just chuckling, and a woman among them who felt sorry for him took the trouble to explain the trick that had been played upon him.

  He grew exceedingly angry, as well as mortified. Strangely enough, the brunt of his anger became focused upon Noah, as if Noah had been responsible for the trick, and the preacher became determined to “git even, someway.” He began to preach against men living in trees. His gatherings were small, because most people were still laughing at him too much to be able to sit and listen to him seriously. But to whatever gathering he could assemble, in the name of God, in brush arbors constructed in Stay More, Parthenon and Jasper, he ranted against the unnaturalness of men living in trees.

  By purest coincidence only, this was just two years after Darwin had published the findings of his voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle, and we may be sure that the preacher had never heard of Darwin, and in any case the conflict between religion and the theory of evolution was still years in the future, but the preacher accused Noah Ingledew of being a monkey. “What other reason would a creature have fer livin up in a
tree?” he would demand of his audiences, and quote Scripture to prove that man was meant to walk on the ground and dwell on the ground, and a man living up in a tree was bound to bring the wrath of God upon all the people.

  Little by little, the preacher converted a few of the people to his position against Noah, but he could persuade none of them to join him in his plan, which was to take an axe and chop down the sycamore, so in the end he had to go it all alone. But as soon as he began swinging the axe against the tree, in the light of the moon one night, Noah stepped to the edge of his dogtrot (or rather birdtrot, because no dogs ever got up there) and urinated down upon the preacher’s head. The preacher retreated, yelling, “I’ll git ye, yet!” and he went away and preached to the people for several more days and nights, without succeeding in persuading any of them to help him chop down the tree. He went again with his axe late at night, when he was sure Noah would be asleep, but at the first THOCK of the axe Noah woke up, and squatted backwards at the edge of his birdtrot. Enraged, the preacher hurled his axe at Noah. The axe missed Noah, but imbedded itself in the side of the treehouse, where Noah allowed it to remain as an ornament, and where it may be minutely detected in our illustration. His brother Jacob, visiting the next day, noticed it and asked Noah about it and then declared, “Wal, that preacher has done went too far.” So Jacob assembled the menfolk of Stay More and they took a split rail off a fence and carried it to the preacher and Jacob said, “Climb up. Or do you need a saddle?” and, to use the expression that would be employed whenever this ceremony was duplicated in the future, they “rode him out of town on a rail.” He protested, “If it weren’t fer the honor, I’d jist as soon walk.” He was never seen again. Nor, for that matter, were any other preachers, saddlebag or otherwise, seen in Stay More for years thereafter.