Indeed, she was right, not alone about that instance of resistance to progress, but to the entire history of Stay More, nay, the entire history of the Ozarks. Everything new, everything progressive or forward-looking, was anathema to those people, and who are we to fault them for it? “Stay More” is synonymous with “Status Quo”; in fact, there are people who believe, or who like to believe, that the name of the town was intended as an entreaty, beseeching the past to remain present. Today, Colonel Coon’s newfangled engine is an antique; after his death, it was transferred to Oren Duckworth’s tomato canning factory, where it powered the conveyor belt for a generation, but has been out of use and rusting for half of my lifetime.
It was in the generation of Isaac, also, that Stay More and the Ozarks experienced the first serious fuel shortage, called the First Spell of Darkness. All of the lamps, as we have seen, were fueled with bear’s oil, but as the human population increased the population of bears decreased. Isaac himself shot the last bear of Stay More, and when that bruin’s lard was all used up, the people experienced their first blackout. It was very dark, and the moon wasn’t scheduled to reappear for two weeks, and it was the hottest part of summer, so that fireplace light was uncomfortable. Most people simply went to bed, but this indirectly caused a population explosion which in turn would lead to a future depletion of fuel. Isaac’s oldest sons, Denton and Monroe, ran around in the dark yard of the dogtrot catching lightning bugs and putting them into a glass jar, but this kind of lamp was feeble and temporary, since the boys didn’t know what the bugs ate and didn’t feed them, and they died. In an emergency, someone could always make a torch from sap-rich pine, but otherwise most people just went to bed…except Isaac Ingledew and his two helpers and his fireman, who had to stay up ’way past dark to finish the grinding of the day’s flour and meal. By leaving the boiler room door open, some light came into the mill, scarcely enough to work by but enough to keep the men from being entirely blind, and they lit a pine torch from time to time for delicate operations.
It was during this first Spell of Darkness that lawlessness first came to Stay More (unless we consider, as we should, the War lawless); and note that I say it came to Stay More; it did not originate there. Isaac’s mill had been running night and day for several weeks, and it was rumored that he kept a large sum of money at the mill. This was not true; he kept only enough to make change; the rest of his small fortune was kept in a location which even I do not know. But after dark the men working inside the mill bolted the doors, as any businesses do when they have closed to the public but are still working.
One night after the doors had been bolted, Isaac was standing near one of the big oak doors at the main entrance, trying to adjust a faulty elevator by pine-torch light, when there came a knocking at the door. Isaac hesitated for only a moment, deciding that it must be some customer coming in late, perhaps after a breakdown, and then he opened the door. A man slipped inside, breathing hard. Isaac gave him the once over and guessed that the man had been riding long and hard. Because of his own experience riding horses, Isaac could even guess how long the man had been in the saddle, at what speed he was traveling, and therefore how far he had come, and from which direction…Missouri. In the dim light only the man’s eyeballs could be seen clearly: his eyes were taking in everything. The man sized up Isaac, who stood a good foot taller, and asked, “You own this here mill?” Isaac nodded. The man began walking around, inspecting the machinery. Not knowing that Isaac was taciturn, he began asking Isaac a lot of questions about his business. How wide an area of the county did the mill serve? From how far away did customers come? How many employees did Isaac have? Isaac answered, if he answered at all, in monosyllables. Meanwhile, the fireman had come up from the engine room with the iron rod that he used to stir his fire, and got in back of the man without being noticed and held the iron bar above the back of his head. The two helpers had rebolted the doors and the side door leading to the engine room. Isaac felt no fear: even if he had been alone with the man, he would have felt no fear, although the dark shadow of a bulge of a gun was obvious inside the man’s shirt. After a few minutes the man asked the price of cracked corn. Isaac told him. The man said, “I’ll take two bushel. There’s eight more fellers out there with me, and their horses aint been fed.” Isaac gave him two bushels of cracked corn, and the man took out a large roll of bills and peeled one of them off and gave it to Isaac. Then they unbolted a door for him and he vanished into the darkness. They could not see any other men or horses out there, but it was very dark.
As soon as the door was bolted again, the fireman burst out excitedly, “Don’t ye know who that was?” Isaac shook his head. “Hit was Jesse James hisself!” exclaimed the fireman. “He’ll be back, no doubt about it, and he’ll rob ye! Or try to.” Isaac grinned. He did have some money that night, but it would have been small pickin for the likes of Jesse James. The fireman and the two helpers were looking at Isaac as if waiting for his instructions or for permission to return to the safety of their homes. Being taciturn, Isaac did not know quite what to say, even to his own employees. There was still work to be done in the mill that night, but Isaac figured it could wait until morning. “Fire out,” he said, which was his traditional nightly terseness signaling that the engine could be shut off and the men could go home (and which to our modern ears would sound like “Far out,” possibly a comment on the situation). They lost no time in closing up shop. But Isaac remained behind, alone, after each of them had said to him, “G’night, Colonel. Take keer.”
After extinguishing the lone pine torch that had provided illumination inside the mill, Isaac bolted the doors again and then, from beneath the high desk where he kept his accounts, he took out his fiddle-case and opened it, and tucked the fiddle under his chin, and began to play.
As we have remarked, and will continue to remark, Isaac might have been taciturn with words, but not with notes of music, and there were some people, particularly old-timers, who claimed that they could understand perfectly well what Isaac’s fiddle was saying. No, they couldn’t quite put it into words, but they could still understand it. Children, especially girls, were never allowed to listen while Isaac was fiddling. None of the houses of Stay More were close enough to the mill for the sound of this fiddling to carry to them tonight. If Jacob Ingledew had gone out onto his porch and strained his ears…but no, the ex-governor’s hearing was failing in his later years. So there was nobody to hear Isaac’s fiddle, except himself…and a band of nine men sitting on their horses in the woods behind the mill. We can only imagine what thoughts they might have been having, or what words they were speaking to one another, as they listened to the fiddling.
Most biographers of Jesse James refrain from mentioning the Stay More episode, and in others it is reduced to a mere footnote or the trailing edge of a paragraph. But the James gang itself was made up largely of Ozarkers, albeit Ozark desperadoes who were clearly determined, tonight, to part Isaac from his small fortune. So these Ozarkers in the James gang must have understood part of what Isaac’s fiddle was saying to them, and they knew for the most part that it was cussing them to high heaven and daring them to enter his mill at their own peril. We may even suppose that if Frank James was there that night, which he was, he tried his best to dissuade Jesse from proceeding. Unquestionably, one or more of the James gang must have remarked to their leader that a back woods gristmill was hardly in the same class with a bank or a train, and undoubtedly Jesse himself could not shake loose his impression of what a giant of a man Isaac was. But the James gang never backed away from an enterprise, so they didn’t. Jesse himself mounted the mill porch and banged on the door, hollering, “Open up! Cut out that goddumb fiddlin and open the godburn door!” But Isaac went on fiddling, if anything, faster, louder, more obscene. Some of the gang began heaving their shoulders against the door, trying to break it down.
As we have seen, the bigeminality of Isaac’s mill was because one door was for entering, the other for leaving, to create
traffic flow and avoid confusion. Now these gangsters in their ignorance were trying to enter the exit door, and this incensed Isaac all the more, and his fiddle music became really animated and profane. But the gangsters succeeded in busting the door loose from its hinges and entered, whereupon the fiddle music abruptly stopped. “You, Luke,” the ringleader ordered one of his men, “guard this here door. Bob and Cole guard the other doors.” Then he hollered into the dark interior, “Okay, mister millerman, give up, or die!”
Now Isaac’s mill, being three-and-a-half stories in height, was a labyrinth of nooks and crannies, passages, stairs, catwalks, traps, hoppers, cribs, coves, lofts, galleries and stoops. Isaac could have been in, or on, any of these; he knew them all by heart, in the pitch dark. One advantage of dark times, even though they bring desperadoes bent on crime, is that they make seeing difficult for the desperadoes. “Strike a light,” the gangleader ordered, and one of the men lighted a torch. Huddling close together, with their revolvers cocked and pointed in every direction, the men prowled the mill, searching for Isaac. They probed all over the first level, then ascended to the second, and then to the third. On the third-and-a-half level, they were inching along a catwalk when suddenly two of them tripped—or were pushed—and plummeted all the way back to the first level, where they broke several bones and began howling in pain. The remaining four men decided that Isaac was not to be found in the ceiling of the mill, and began to descend; by the time they got to the first level they discovered that they were not four but two: Jesse and Frank alone. They called for their comrades but received no answer. “Luke? Bob? Cole?” Jesse called to the men he had left posted at the doors, but he received no answer.
One may imagine that at this point the intrepid Jesse James felt an involuntary shudder; none of the biographies mention it, although an unfavorable biography of Frank James declares that at this point Frank “spontaneously defecated into one leg of his trousers.” “Let’s get out of here,” Frank suggested to his brother, and his brother wisely agreed. The two men quickly left the mill, remounted their horses and rode off. They had not ridden far, however, when Jesse said, “Frank, I wonder if we should jist ride off and leave ’em behind like that. Frank? FRANK??” He discovered the horse beside him was riderless, and he spurred his own horse as hard as he could, and did not even slow down until he was outside of Newton County. It would be weeks later before all of his gang would rejoin him; none of them killed, but each with various bones broken, and it would be years before the James gang went back into criminal action…never again in the state of Arkansas. Working in the mill the next day, one of Isaac’s helpers asked him, “Have any trouble last night, Colonel?” “Some,” Isaac replied, but, being taciturn, did not elaborate.
There really wasn’t much need for light after dark during the First Spell of Darkness, since no one could read, except Jacob (and, now, his ladyfriend—and they used candles). The only need for light after dark was to find one’s way to “go out.” That was a problem on a dark night. But the problem was solved when Eli Willard, making his usual timely reappearance, brought a wagon-load of chamberpots, which he facetiously called “thundermugs” and which the people of Stay More eventually referred to as “slop jars.” Ownership of a chamberpot, they felt, was not “puttin on airs” like the construction of a privy, nor was it necessarily PROG RESS; it was merely a convenient way to remain in while going out, or to go out without going out. Children were given the task of emptying and cleaning the chamberpots each morning, and were warned not to empty them into a path, lest the pots become permanently stuck to the child’s fingers. Nobody ever knew of any child whose pot stuck to his fingers, but no child was ever known to empty a pot into a path, so the superstition was just as efficacious as all their other superstitions.
Eli Willard, while selling the chamberpots to every house, happened to hear of the shortage of bear’s oil which had caused a shortage of light which had caused the boom in chamberpots, and, having sold his last chamberpot, he promised to bring relief for the fuel shortage on his next trip. True to his word, when he came again, a year later, he was driving a large wagon filled with barrels. The barrels, he said, contained “whale” oil. Since no one in Stay More had ever seen the ocean or could even imagine it, Eli Willard had to explain to them that a “whale” is a kind of big fish that lived in the ocean. Had they never read about Jonah in the Bible? Apparently not, because they did not read. They were suspicious of fish oil; they thought it would smell fishy. It did, but not like any of the fish of Stay More. Eli Willard used his pitchmanship to promote his product, and made a killing. He was also offering a line of special new lamps to burn the whale oil in, and made a further killing with these. Verily, Eli Willard made so much money selling whale oil and lamps that he retired from the game, and was not seen in Stay More again for ten years.
Those ten years were called the Decade of Light. There would be another Spell of Darkness after them, but for ten years there was a plenty of light. The last of Isaac’s children, Perlina and Drussie, had been conceived when Salina climbed him in the dark of the First Spell of Darkness. During the Decade of Light, she no longer climbed him, for, as we may have noticed, she was over-fastidious about not being seen by her children, and it was at the beginning of the Decade of Light when John, her third son, happened to spot his mother climbing his father by the light of whale oil. He was about five years old at the time. Far from suffering any “primal scene” trauma from the experience, he thought it looked like some wonderful game, and as soon as his mother was finished, he climbed his father and said, “Do me.” Salina was shocked, and never again climbed Isaac during the Decade of Light. But little John frequently climbed Isaac and said, “Do me,” to which Isaac, being taciturn, could only reply “Not now, son,” which did not deter John from later climbing his father and saying “Do me” again. This was how John got his nickname, “Doomy,” which he had so much trouble outliving in later life. Most people always thought that the nickname derived from the air of doom that seemed to surround John throughout his adult life, but that is not the fact of the case.
Because Salina would not climb Isaac during the Decade of Light, he became restless. One day he spoke to himself. Being taciturn, Isaac did not like to talk, even to himself. But now he announced to himself, “I’m gonna git me a new jug, and drink till the goddamn world looks little.” Isaac, like many silent men, was a connoisseur of fine liquor. His father Jacob had once spoken of “whiskey so good you kin smell the feet of the boys who plowed the corn.” Isaac not only could smell their feet but also could identify them and tell what they had had for breakfast. He could distinguish corn whiskey by regions as ably as any French wine taster could distinguish the vineyards of France. Abler. And in the case of metheglin—variously pronounced “mathiglum” or “mothiglum”—which is a spiced variety of mead, he could not only distinguish between that made from honey and that made from sorghum, but also identify each of the spices. So, having determined to drink until the world looked little, he was determined to do it in style, and after reflection he selected Seth Chism’s sour mash, which was, perhaps, one might say, the Château Lafitte Rothschild of Newton County.
Seth Chism had ground his grain at Isaac’s mill, and Isaac had ground it with especial care because he knew the care with which Seth Chism would distill it. Being taciturn, Isaac could not very well ask Seth Chism for a jug of it, but Seth understood the only possible meaning of a palm full of coins, and wordlessly made the sale. Isaac took his jug into his mill, barred the door, and began to diminish the size of the world. Because he was such a big man, it required half of the jug to reduce the world to half its size. He wanted to continue, but realized that if he drank all the jug the world would be reduced to nothing, so he stopped, and began to test the half-world. There was a barrel of flour in the mill which he knew weighed two hundred pounds; he hoisted it and then held it overhead, convinced it weighed only one hundred pounds. Then he went outside on the porch of his mill and looked
around. The trees were half as high, the creek half as full and wide, the blue dome of heaven half as far away. He started down from the high porch, but the top step seemed half as far as it was, and, stepping only halfway, he went over into a somersault and landed flat on his back on the hard ground below. The fall would have killed a man half his size, or broken half his bones, but all it did to Isaac was knock half his breath out of him. He lay there for a while, getting that half back, and while he was lying there a rider rode up, a stranger, a man not three foot tall on a stallion not eight hands high. The little man on the tiny stallion did not know that Isaac was taciturn, and asked him a question:
“Howdy. Whar at is yore post office?”
The only office Isaac had ever heard tell on was his father Jacob’s office, where the ex-governor claimed he was writing his memoirs, but was not. Isaac remained silent, but at length got up from the ground, dusted himself off, and looked down at the little rider. “What’s a post office?” he said.
“Whar at do you’uns git yore mail?”
Near ’bout ever farmer in Stay More valley had one or more males around the place, if this feller was referrin to topcows, but since he was ridin a stallion there weren’t no sense in his lookin fer a cow-critter male. Isaac remained silent.
The stranger turned to his saddlebags, opened them, and drew out a small card, which he offered to Isaac. “This here postcard is addressed to ‘The Good People of Stay More, Arkansas.’ I reckon this here is Stay More, aint it?”
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 99