As a direct or indirect result of this article, people from the cities, particularly women, who had slaved as clerks and secretaries and millworkers, saving their money and dreaming of a better life, withdrew their deposits, packed their bags, and took the train to Harrison, where a coach took them to Jasper, where they hired the land lawyer to drive them to Stay More, and homesteaded every tract of land that had not been claimed. The men of Stay More were hired to build their houses for them; at first, the women insisted on a house that resembled the Ingledew barn, but, being assured that the barn was a barn, they accepted log cabins. For fifty dollars cash, a Stay Moron would build them a simple and quite habitable log cabin. These cabins are not illustrated here because they were anachronisms. They looked like Jacob Ingledew’s first cabin, but the door was in the gable end and the windows on the sides. Today the ruins and skeletons of these cabins are mistaken for early settlers’ houses.
The women homesteaders were flirtatious with their builders, and the building went slow, interrupted by many a roll in the bushes. Even though these women enjoyed and were undoubtedly grateful for these rendezvous, they were condescending toward the Stay Morons, openly referring to them as “blue-eyed monkeys.” Once the cabins were built, these women enlisted the Stay More menfolk to the cause of their rural education: how to plant a garden, how to tell the difference between a large mosquito and a turkey buzzard. During “nature study” hikes in the woods, they would pause frequently for further gratification of the flesh. A Stay More woman, suspicious because her husband was no longer making any demands on her, followed him into the woods one day and caught him at it, and spread the word to the other women of Stay More, who also suddenly realized that their husbands were no longer making demands on them, and were outraged at the boldness of these city women; the women of Stay More determined that they would not allow their husbands into their beds again until their husbands gave up philandering the city women; this stratagem had the reverse of the intended effect. For a long time the women of Stay More were unhappy and jealous. But everyone else was happy. The newcomers were good for the economy. The money they spent to have their cabins built went into the pockets of the natives. They bought their groceries from Willis Ingledew or the other general store, and bought their flour from the mill. They were not good at gardening, not the first year anyway, and were required to buy their produce from the local people. The first year too they had not acquired immunity to the twenty-three Stay More viruses, and they often patronized the two local doctors. Everybody, except the wives of Stay More, agreed that the city women were the best thing that ever happened to Stay More.
One day one of the city women suggested to her paramour, “Why don’t you leave your wife to her other husbands and come and be mine?” Her paramour laughed and said, “Where’d ye git the idee my old womarn had another man?” And then the awful truth was out. One by one, the city women learned that Stay Morons were not polyandrous after all, that, in fact, there was a slight surplus of females in the population, which the city women had increased. But it was too late. They had invested their life savings to have the cabins built and to establish roots in the enchanted backcountry. They loved the fresh air and the sunshine, and the smell of wildflowers and weeds and the creekwater. They loved their blue-eyed monkey lovers, even if they could never marry them. They could not go back to the cities. So they tried as best as they could to adapt themselves to Stay More life. The many snakes and reptiles of Stay More frightened them, and their general nervousness caused all of them to smoke a lot of cigarettes, in the privacy of their cabins. Their Stay More lovers discovered that cigarettes aren’t as much bother as a pipe, and can also be inhaled, and the Stay More men took up the smoking of cigarettes, in public as well as in private, and were nagged by the womenfolk, who warned them that the cigarettes, no less than the city women, would be their undoing.
One night the whole sky seemed to explode with gigantic sparks, in what was one of the rare reappearances of the comet known as Halley’s but unknown to the Stay Morons, who interpreted it as a cosmic caution to give up their sinful ways. Although they did not give up the smoking of cigarettes, they gave up philandering with the city women. The city women were required to turn their attention to unmarried men. But all of the unmarried men were Ingledews, who, the city women were dismayed to discover, were too shy even to notice them, except Willis Ingledew, who waited on them in his general merchandise store but who, if he talked at all, talked endlessly about his experiences at the St. Louis World’s Fair some years before, which bored the city women, since they had all been to the fair.
Searching for men, the city women began to attend the games of Base Ball and the shooting matches where the men and boys of Stay More, having taken down their grandfathers’ muzzle-loaders from over the doors of their houses, competed for a beef calf by firing, from four hats away, at a slip of paper tacked to a tree. The women were amazed at the marksmanship, particularly of the Ingledews, who always won, but the women failed utterly to attract the notice of any of the Ingledews…except the youngest, Raymond, who was only fourteen years old. Raymond, having an excess of the humor of semen in his system, couldn’t wait until he was old enough to philander one of the city women, not realizing that when he was old enough to court one of them, they would be too old for him. Whenever they were watching the games of Base Ball or the shooting matches, Raymond always did things to call attention to himself, making diving catches of the ball, shooting from the hip with Jacob’s muzzle-loader. “What a cute boy,” the city women would exclaim, but they wouldn’t flirt with him. At the meetings of the hayloft clubhouse, Raymond would boast to his older brothers of what he intended to do to the city women, but his older brothers, although they themselves constantly talked of precisely what they would like to do to the city women if only they weren’t too shy to approach them, laughed at Raymond and told him he was too young, and double-dog-dared him to find a hole for his pole.
This became a constant obsession for Raymond. He would stop at a city woman’s cabin and say to her, “I was on my way to the store and jist a-wonderin iffen I could bring ye anythang.” “Why, bless your heart,” she would reply. “I need a spool of white thread.” He would bring it to her, and hang around, waiting to see if she would flirt with him, but she would not. He would try another woman, offering to mow the weeds around her cabin, and when he was finished the woman would ask, “What can I give you?” “Aw,” Raymond would say, “…you know…” “Twenty-five cents enough?” she would ask, and fetch him a quarter. There was one very pretty woman who had obtained a cow but did not know how to milk it. Raymond offered to show her. After she had mastered the practice, and was stroking the cow’s teats firmly, Raymond boldly asked her, “What does that make you think of?” After a moment’s reflection, the woman replied, “Butter. I’m going to get me a churn and make my own butter.” There was another woman who was noted for her devotion to nature study, and had been known to tour the woods with several different men before the exploding night sky had frightened them out of the practice. “By golly,” Raymond said to her, “I know jist as much about the woods as e’er a man alive.” “You sweet boy,” the woman replied. “Let’s see if you do.” They went into the woods, and Raymond demonstrated that he could name every tree and every flower. But the woman showed no intention of flirting with him. “Aint we gonna lay down?” he asked her. “I’m not tired,” she replied and thanked him for the tour and went back to her cabin, leaving him less satisfied than ever.
Raymond decided he would have to commit rape. There was one woman whose cabin was way off up on Ledbetter Mountain, too far for the nearest neighbor to hear her if she hollered. Raymond made a disguise out of a pillowcase with two slits for his eyes, and went to the cabin. The woman hollered. “Won’t do ye no good,” he told her. “Nobody kin hear ye. You know what I’m after, and I aim to git it.” She asked, “Aren’t you that cute Raymond Ingledew boy who shows off at Base Ball and shooting matches?” “Nome
, I’m one a his older brothers,” he replied. She reproved him, “I never thought an Ingledew would be a robber.” “I aint a robber, ma’am, I’m a rapist.” The woman broke up with laughter; she couldn’t stop. Raymond tried to hold her still so that he could rape her, but he couldn’t hold her; she went on rocking with laughter. Raymond went home and buried his disguise, and decided he would wait until he was fifteen and see what happened.
Chapter twelve
Willis Ingledew made so much money from the operation of his General Merchandise Store, particularly after the city women became his customers, that he didn’t know what to do with it. He had no family to support, and he was nervous about having so much money, which he kept in a locked drawer of the post office, but he knew that this was a misuse of U.S. government property. He decided he would have to buy something. What was the most expensive article that he could use?
After considerable thought, he decided that a hossless kerridge probably cost a right smart of cash, so he ran off to Springfield, Missouri, where the nearest Ford agency was located, and bought himself a Model T Ford and brought it home, but the people of Stay More, having learned long since not to believe Willis Ingledew, did not believe he had a hossless kerridge, and ignored it. He drove up and down every dry road in the village, tooting his horn and waving, but nobody believed it, and nobody returned his waves. He offered rides to his nephews and his niece Lola who was his secret daughter, but all of them said, “Aw, you’re jist a-funnin us” and “Quit yore kiddin, Uncle Will.”
There was one person in the town, however, who did believe that Willis had acquired a Model T Ford, who could not ignore him, and that was his brother John. As we have seen, it was very important to John to be able to feel superior to Willis. Even though Willis owned the General Store, John was the respected leader of the lynch mob and the Worshipful Master of the Masons, or Top Tippler of T.G.A.O.T.U., but he did not own, and could ill afford to own, a hossless kerridge.
Consumed with envy, he began a systematic campaign to persuade the other Stay Morons that Willis was a villain because hossless kerridges were the worst form of PROG RESS and dangerous and they spooked the livestock and polluted the air and ought to be permanently banished from Stay More, but nobody listened to John because nobody believed that Willis really had one. It was very frustrating to John, trying to convince the people that Willis actually did possess an automobile, in order to persuade them that his possession of the automobile was deleterious. “Don’t carry on so, Doomy,” his older brothers Denton and Monroe said to him. “There’s nothin to worry about. Hit’s all only in yore haid. Fergit it. We aint interested.”
He appealed to Brother Long Jack Stapleton to make a picture show of Willis’s automobile, so that the people could see it, but Long Jack just stared at him and said, “What automobile?”
In time, John’s envy of Willis’s Model T Ford revealed itself to him for what it really was: envy. He came to realize that he would never be content until he had a Model T Ford for his very own, or, better yet, a Model U, V, W, X, Y or Z. Yet he had no money. He asked his father for a loan, but Isaac did not reply. The only other person who had money was Willis, and John couldn’t very well ask Willis for a loan to go out and buy a car to best him with. Like all of us who have at one time or another been short of cash, he dreamed of robbing the bank. He hatched elaborate plans for holding up the bank, in disguise. He considered many different types of disguise, and even tried out several. Then he suddenly realized that there wasn’t any bank. Stay More didn’t have one. In that case, he decided, somebody had better start one, and it might as well be him.
He made elaborate mental plans for his bank and its building, which adorns this chapter. In the first place, he determined, a bank building had to be a stronghold, so it couldn’t be robbed. He knew he must build his bank of heavy stones and cement. There were plenty of heavy stones lying around loose, but he would have to buy the cement, and he didn’t have the money. “Willis,” he said to his brother, “aint you a little bit skeered that somethin might happen to all the money you got stashed away some’ers?”
“If you’re tryin to git me to tell whar it’s hid, it won’t do you no good,” Willis said.
“Naw, naw, I aint interested in whar it’s hid. I just got to wonderin if you’d ever give a thought to whether somebody might find it and take it from ye?”
“That’ll be the day.”
“A furriner or a stranger or a tourist might come a-passin through, and when he sees that thar Model T he’ll know you got lots of money hid some’ers, and he might start sneakin around lookin fer it.”
“What Model T?”
John snorted. “Aw, I aint fooled. That’s it a-settin yonder, plain as day, even if nobody else believes it. Now look, here’s what I got in mind: I’m aimin to start me a bank. All I need is the cash to pay fer the see-ment, if you’d be so kind as to loan it to me and take it out of my wages.”
“Hmmm,” Willis said, and pondered his brother’s venture. “Whar you aim to find a steel door with combination lock fer yore vault?”
“Hadn’t thought of that,” John confessed. “Do ye reckon Sears, Roebuck would carry them things?”
“I misdoubt it,” Willis said. “But I got some equipment catalogs that might have ’em.” He dragged out his catalogs, and the brothers pored through them, until they had found a steel door with combination lock manufactured in St. Louis. The price of it, John was dismayed to learn, was almost enough to pay for an automobile. But whereas he couldn’t ask Willis for a loan to buy a car, he could, and did, ask Willis to help him get set up in his bank, pointing out the advantage to Willis, and to their father, and to their brothers and sisters and everybody, of having a safe place to keep their money. Willis thought a bank would just be an extra temptation to rob it, but John said he was going to make his bank out of heavy stone and put bars on the windows and with that steel door with combination lock for the vault, the only way any robber could get the money would be to hold up John, and as everybody knew John was the fastest trigger east of Indian Territory, which wasn’t Indian Territory anymore because Oklahoma had been granted statehood and Arkansas was no longer the western frontier.
After much persuasion, Willis considered the fact that if John left his employ and went into business for himself Willis would be getting rid of a clerk whom many customers didn’t like on account of his gloomy, doomy expression, and he also realized that while a gloomy-doomy expression is not an asset for a store clerk, it would be just perfect for a banker. So he loaned John the money for his cement, and sent off to St. Louis for a steel door with combination lock. It was summer, the creeks were dry, and the bed of Swains Creek was cluttered with an abundance of large stones; John selected among these and hauled them up Main Street to the north end, and began building his bank on the east side of the street. He named it the Swains Creek Bank and Trust Company, appropriately, for the creek had furnished the building materials. While he was building it, he attracted much curiosity, particularly among the younger generation, who wanted to know what kind of shop he was building. When he told them it was a bank, they asked what he was going to sell, and when he told them that he was not going to sell anything but just take in money, they went home and told their parents that John Ingledew was playing with rocks and some of the rocks had gotten into his head. But all six of John’s sons helped him with the masonry, and from time to time a lodgebrother from T.G.A.O.T.U. would stop by to help out, and the building was finished just in time to install the steel door with combination lock shipped from St. Louis. The vault was constructed of the same masonry as the building itself, and was bonded to it; it took six men to lift the steel door and hold it in place while it was bolted to the vault. Then John went to Jasper, where a job printing outfit was operated as a sideline to the Jasper Disaster, and ordered the printing of his deposit slips, checks, savings books and other forms.
The printer was also the editor of the Disaster, and he interviewed John and ran
a front page story under the headline, NEW FINANCIAL EMPORIUM TO DEBUT AT STAY MORE. The article mentioned that a gala ribbon cutting and grand opening would feature refreshments on the house to all comers. John went all the way to Harrison just to get the lemons to make lemonade with, to serve to the womenfolk and children; to the men, of course, he would serve the best corn that could be found. Sirena and her daughter Lola were kept busy for a week baking pies and cakes.
The festivities lasted all day on the Second Tuesday of the Month, and were enjoyed by all present in downtown Stay More. John wished that Eli Willard was there to photograph the whole shebang. He waited until late afternoon, when most of the men were pleasantly plastered, to make his speech. Then he stood on the porch of his bank and addressed his townsmen, with an air of civic pride, telling them how glad he was to be able to contribute this handsome stone edifice to the Main Street skyline, a rugged building that would last forever, that all of us gathered here together can boast of to our great-great-grandchildren that we were present on the day it was first opened, a building solemnly dedicated to the preservation and protection of our hard-earned pennies and nickels, so that we may sleep better at night secure in the knowledge our riches are sealed away in a vault behind a door that took six men to lift, dedicated to the proposition that this great land of ours is a society of free enterprise wherein a man may work to earn capital and possess his capital in the form of cash and coins, and deposit his capital into the firm and powerful safekeeping of the Swains Creek Bank and Trust Company and hold up his head before all other men, the line forms right over here.
The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks Page 29