He walked for five days and four nights up mountains and down without finding a settlement, and finally was stopped by a large river too wide to swim across. This, he guessed, must be the Arkansas. He followed it downstream for just half a day, and came to a good-sized town. This, he learned, was called Spadra (it no longer exists today, or is practically a ghost town, south of Clarksville). Along the riverfront were shops, and one of these was a fur trader’s. The fur trader was happy to buy Jacob Ingledew’s pelts, and complimented him on the quality of them. The beaver skins fetched two dollars apiece, while the mink and otter skins brought a dollar each, and the coonskins two bits. Jacob received a total of almost a hundred dollars. He’d never had that much money in his life. But Spadra was full of establishments designed to part a man from his money: saloons, whorehouses, gambling parlors. Jacob resisted these as best he could, although his best was not good enough: he lost half his hundred dollars before getting out.
Still, he had more than enough to pay off the clock peddler and buy a cow. The latter became his next immediate objective. Looking around, he saw a large building with a sign out front: Spadra Stock Exchange. He went inside. There were a lot of men standing around tables, holding slips of paper and talking rapidly all at once. Jacob didn’t see any cows, or any other stock. A man came up to him and asked if he could be of any help. Jacob told him he was in the market for cows. “Good,” the man said, “swine are up, beef are down. How many?” Just one, Jacob said. The man looked at him, then said, “Wait here,” and went off to confer with a group of other men standing around one of the tables. The other men cast glances at Jacob, and Jacob began to get the impression that they might be laughing at him. But at length, his man returned, and said, “All right. One cow it is. What do you bid?” Jacob said he didn’t have ary idea how much to bid. How much was usual? “Six and three-eights might do it,” the man said. “Can I go to seven?” Sure, Jacob told him, and the man went away again. He returned shortly, beaming. “Got it at six and five-eights,” he declared. Jacob paid him six dollars and sixty-three cents, plus ten percent brokerage fee and commission, and the man started to walk away, but Jacob said Hey! Where is my cow? “In Kansas City,” the man said. Jacob didn’t want to show his ignorance of geography by asking how to get there, so he left the stock exchange, and stopped the first man he met on the street and asked, Which way is Kansas City? The man pointed, toward the northwest.
Jacob left Spadra, and walked for the rest of the day northwest, but he didn’t come to Kansas City. He met another man and asked again, Which way is Kansas City? and the man pointed northwest. He walked on for two more days without finding any city, and met an old man and asked once more, Which way is Kansas City? and when the old man pointed northwest Jacob asked him how far it was. “What difference do it make?” the old man said. “You’re a-gorn there anyhow, aint ye?” So Jacob walked on.
After several more days, he finally came out of the mountains down into a valley where there was a city, or a large-sized town. There were some loafers sitting in front of the courthouse, and he asked them if this was Kansas City. “Shore thang,” one of them replied, so Jacob said he had bought a cow and wanted to find the stockyards. The loafers offered to accompany him to the stockyards; he was much obliged at their courtesy. They walked him a good distance to the other end of town, and there was the stockyards, full of cows and bulls and calves. “Jist take yore pick,” one of the loafers said, so Jacob selected a good-sized Jersey heifer. One of the loafers fetched a length of rope and tied it around the heifer’s neck, and then they opened the gate, and Jacob led her out. He walked her back through the town.
Looking back at one point, he saw that not just the loafers but a crowd of people were following him. When he got as far as the courthouse, he saw that a man wearing a silver star on his chest was tying a rope to a big maple tree in the courthouse yard, and on the end of the rope was a hangman’s noose. Then the man wearing the star came up to Jacob and said, “Do you know what we do to cattle rustlers in this town?” No, Jacob said, he didn’t know. The man pointed at the rope and said, “We hang ’em.” By this time, the town square was full of people. The man wearing the star took Jacob’s arm and started leading him toward the gallows. I aint rustled no cattle! Jacob protested. “Where’d you get that heifer?” the man demanded. Jacob explained that he had bought it for six dollars and sixty-three cents plus commission at the Spadra Stock Exchange and the feller there told him to come here to Kansas City to get it. “This here aint Kansas City,” the man said. “It’s Fayetteville, state of Arkansas. Come on,” and the man led him on over to the noose.
Jacob felt just terrible. Didn’t they at least give a feller a decent trial before hangin him? Take the heifer back! Jacob pled. But the man went on, and slipped the noose over Jacob’s head. Just then a man in the crowd, a distinguished looking old gentleman with white hair and dressed in a suit, stepped up and said, “All right, Bradshaw. This has gone far enough.” Then he said to Jacob, “I’m Judge Walker, and it just so happens I’m also the owner of the stockyard. These men have played their joke on you. Those men in Spadra also played their joke on you. But enough is enough. Take the heifer. You, Bradshaw, kindly escort this gentleman out of town and see to it that he meets no more fools along the way.” So Jacob and his heifer were allowed to leave.
He didn’t know how to get home, but he had a general notion that it was somewhere to the east, so he led the heifer in that direction. Although Jacob had no knowledge of geography, he had a sixth sense of direction which brought him, after a week of walking and leading the heifer, right back to Stay More. The effort and humiliation that he had been subjected to in order to obtain his cow would leave him sour on city people for the rest of his life, and for many years after this incident he preferred to remain in Stay More rather than venturing out into the world. In fact, thirty years later when he would be offered the governorship of the whole state practically on a platter, he would at first decline, out of his reluctance to have any further dealings with city people. We may thus consider one more quality of his cabin: it is insulation not alone against weather and wilderness but also against any intrusion from the more sophisticated city world, a fortress against cosmopolitans. If Jacob’s cabin would look ridiculous on a city street corner, no less ridiculous would a city man look, standing here in front of his cabin.
Jacob found his brother Noah practically dead from cold and starvation during his long absence. Apparently Noah had lacked the simple will or motivation to get up and keep the fire going and eat the food that Jacob had left for him. Now Jacob had to force him to eat something. Even after eating, Noah was too weak to talk. Jacob yearned to hear him say shitfire, but Noah couldn’t. So Jacob did all of the talking, telling him of his recent adventures in Spadra and Fayetteville and along the way. By the time he was finished telling it, Noah had recovered enough strength to say shitfire. And then he added, “All that bother and trouble fer nuthin. You should of stood in bed, like me.”
“But allow as how we got us a cow now,” Jacob replied.
“Wow,” Noah said. “So let’s have some milk.”
But Jacob realized that the heifer would have to be serviced and have a calf before she would start giving milk. Where would they find a bull? Occasionally a small herd of buffalo wandered through the valley; Jacob wondered if a buffalo bull could service a Jersey heifer. If a jackass could service a mare and produce offspring, why not? Jacob had hoped that maybe his bitch hound Tige would get serviced by a wolf or coyote and produce dogs well-suited for wilderness living. Tige was now all swollen out around the middle but as far as Jacob knew she hadn’t met up with any eligible wolves or coyotes; probably the father had been that short-tailed cur of Fanshaw’s. Yes, a few weeks later, when Tige had her litter, Jacob noted that the pups seemed to resemble Fanshaw’s dog. Well, we’re even, in a way, now, Jacob reflected: I serviced his squaw, his dog serviced my bitch.
But where, or how, to find a bull? Winter came
on, yet no more herds of buffalo wandered into the valley. Probably the Indians had wiped out all the buffalo. Jacob’s Jersey heifer, who with want of imagination he named “Jerse,” went into heat and bawled and bawled, but there was no relief.
Then Eli Willard the clock peddler returned after being away six months (or 143 years by his clock’s reckoning). Again he had only a single clock strapped to his saddlebag. He observed, “This is still the end of the road. But you have survived. Many don’t, you know.” Then he asked, “How’s the clock?”
“Blankety-blank,” Jacob replied. “Goshawful. Cuss-fired. No-account. Tinhorn. Punk. Torrible. Infernal. One-gallused. Muckeldydun. Not worth the powder to blow it up.”
“But does it run?” Eli Willard asked.
“It’s runnin fer its life,” Jacob said. “It’s runnin like hell was only a mile away and all the fences down.”
“Well, well,” said Eli Willard and coughed. “I always insist upon my customer’s satisfaction. I will replace your defective clock with this superior model. The works are not made of wood but of brass. Recently in Connecticut all the clockmakers have converted from wood to brass.”
“I aint so sartin that we’uns need ary kind of clock, even if it was made of gold.”
“Everyone needs a clock,” Eli Willard declared. “All the other people hereabouts have clocks.”
“What other people? There’s jist me and Noah.”
“The Ozarks are filling up with people.”
“I aint seed any of ’em. Did ye happen to notice if any of them people had a bull?”
“A bull?”
“Yeah, I got a heifer near ’bout two year old and she needs sarvice somethin turrible.”
“I don’t examine my customers’ livestock,” Eli Willard said. “I’m sorry.”
“Wal, whar is all them folks you’re talkin about?”
“That way,” Eli Willard said, and pointed, the way he had come, toward the north. Jacob realized that he and Noah had come in from the east and that he had gone south and come back from the west, but they had never been north. The bulls would be to the north.
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.
The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks Page 5