“Aha!” said Foogle, and then, “Okay, kid, come clean. What did you do with the wristwatch?”
“What wristwatch?” said Hank, having learned in the school of life how to maintain a perfect deadpan and a tone of innocence.
Foogle, forgetting momentarily that he was no longer dealing with a ten-year-old circus punk, began to twist Hank’s arm, whereupon the grown-up Hank flung Foogle all the way back to his car. Foogle drove back to Lola’s store, thinking he might at least salvage something if he could lay claim to the showcase and contents, and exhibit it in his sideshow. Lola was more than happy to let him have it, if he would haul it off. It wouldn’t fit in his car. He drove off to Jasper to hire a truck, and Lola gloatingly boasted to the Ingledews that she had worked her will, and that soon she would set foot inside her store.
But before Foogle could get back with the truck, Hank rounded up his three younger brothers and the four of them gained entrance to the store through the rear door, and transferred the showcase and contents to the abandoned mill, where they concealed it inside the wheat roller machine, and where it remained for many years. The Ingledew brothers pledged one another to secrecy. Lola set foot in her store. She had no idea on earth, she told Foogle, where the showcase might have gone. She was just glad it was gone.
What has all of this to do with the illustration at the head of this chapter? That curious “carpenter gothic” house, located a mile up Banty Creek from downtown Stay More, was built by a man who, like Eli Willard, was not a Stay Moron, but that in itself is no reason for making his house the headpiece for this whole chapter. The man was also a native of Connecticut and was also, like Eli Willard, a wanderer, but neither are those any reasons. I will offer a reasonably good reason in just a few minutes, but for the moment I need only point out that, chronologically, the house was built during one of those years that Eli Willard lay in state in Willis’s store, the same year that Bob Cluley sold his little general store to the Beautiful Girl (although there is no connection) so that this carpenter gothic house represents those years and that year, not only chronologically but also symbolically, because the retardataire gothicism of the house relates to Eli Willard and his death. Nobody knew well the man who built it, but they knew he must have been a carpenter, not just because of all the carpenter gothic details but because it was well-built and is still standing, although it was vacant for some twenty years after the violent death of the builder.
The man was known only as “Dan.” He was already in his fifties when he first came to Stay More and although he did not have a wife he had a young child, a girl as reclusive as her father. Neither of them was seen in the village more often than the Second Tuesday of the Month. People sat on the porch of Lola’s store and speculated that the man was an escaped convict. Then one by one the people moved to the porch of the Beautiful Girl’s store not only because it had become the post office but also because they liked her better than Lola, and on that porch they speculated that Dan was a runaway bank embezzler and had a pile of money stashed away somewhere in his fancy carpenter gothic house. Now and then someone would come upon the man out in the woods hunting, and marvel at his marksmanship, extraordinary even by Stay More standards. A lucky few people happened to be within earshot on several occasions when the man was playing his fiddle, and they agreed that there had never been a better fiddler, not even the legendary Colonel Coon Ingledew.
During the years of the Great Depression, the Stay Morons all of a sudden revived their interest in the old-timey music and the old-timey ways, and both the Stay Morons and the Parthenonians tried to persuade Dan to play his fiddle for public events, but he would not, not out of shyness but because he knew that square dances fostered drunken fighting, and, as he said, he had been in enough fights to last him for the rest of his life. So, in effect, unlike Eli Willard, who over the years kept bringing things to Stay More, the strange near-hermit named Dan contributed nothing to Stay More, but rather took from it, in the form of a meticulous observation of its history and culture that resulted, indirectly, through means I have discussed in some other place, in the present volume. If Dan himself has no place in the present volume, he was responsible for it, and his house has a place in it, for it was in his house, after Dan was killed and the house was abandoned, that the Ingledews deposited the glass showcase with the remains of Eli Willard, after a flood had undermined the foundations of the abandoned mill. Even in death Eli Willard kept traveling, but once he was deposited in the abandoned house of the near-hermit Dan he was left in relative peace for another twenty years.
Just in passing, we might note that the house was, and still slightly is, yellow. It was one of the few painted houses of Stay More. We need not get involved with the architectural significance of painted vs. unpainted houses, but we should consider the symbolism of the color, as Dan saw it. It had nothing to do with cowardice, for Dan was one of the bravest men who ever lived. If he had been an Ingledew, which he was not, his legend would have equaled anything in this book. Nor did yellow have anything to do with jaundice, lemons, Fusarium wilt, Orientals, or egg yolks. The Indo-European root of yellow is ghel, a formation which also produces gold, gleam, felon, glimpse, glitter, glisten, gloss, glow, glib and gloaming. All of these apply to Dan, but he painted his house yellow as a symbol of fair-haired women, and of the rising sun.
Chapter fifteen
Recognize it? The practiced student of architecture should be able to examine an altered building and determine the form of the original—“read” it in translation, as it were. Here we see the somewhat imaginative, if architecturally uncomely, result of Oren Duckworth’s attempt to convert the unused barn that Denton and Monroe Ingledew built four chapters back into an industry, specifically a canning factory, or “Cannon Fact’ry” as they pronounced it. Unless we count the present-day ham processing operation of Vernon Ingledew as an industry, the Cannon Fact’ry was the only modern industry that Stay More ever had. Rare was the Stay Moron who enjoyed working for someone else, for wages. No farm in Stay More ever had a hired hand. Just as Jacob Ingledew had never even considered owning slaves because he felt that a man shouldn’t own more land than he and his sons were capable of cultivating, successive generations of Stay Morons felt that they should not hire help; if they needed extra hands during haying time or threshing time, they swapped help with one another. But during the Great Depression, the farms of Stay More were reduced to bare subsistence enterprises, yielding the families a meager larder and nothing else. To earn even enough to pay for staples like salt and pepper and chewing tobacco, it was necessary to find a job, and the only jobs to be found in Stay More was the seasonal labor in Oren Duckworth’s Cannon Fact’ry. Later the W.P.A. and the C.C.C. and the A.A.A. and the rest of the New Deal’s alphabet soup brought relief to some, but most Stay Morons considered those government agencies a form of welfare or even charity, which was worse than working for somebody else.
Oren Duckworth started his canning factory not to provide jobs for his neighbors but because with the death of John Ingledew Stay More was without a leading citizen and Oren Duckworth desired to become a leading citizen. He was Jim Tom Duckworth’s oldest boy, and attorneys’ sons were always expected to amount to something, although Oren was past forty before he thought of the idea of taking the old engine from behind the abandoned mill and putting it alongside the abandoned barn to convert it into a factory. I’ve always wondered why he didn’t simply convert the abandoned mill into a factory; possibly E.H. Ingledew, the oldest of his line and therefore the legatee of the mill, wouldn’t sell it to him. At any rate, when old Jim Tom Duckworth went to his reward, he left behind a modest amount of accumulated lawyer’s fees, which Oren used to purchase the simple machinery for his factory: conveyors, cleaning trough, canner and cooker.
Unconsciously no doubt, in planning his factory, Oren Duckworth preserved the bigeminality of the original barn: the left crib was where the women cleaned and prepared the snaps and ’maters and put them into cans; the
right crib was where the men sealed the cans and cooked them, and the male-female division of labor was always clear in the minds of those who worked there. Snaps and ’maters were the only products of the factory; the former were canned during June and the latter during July and August; both vegetables grew abundantly all over the place. Additional jobs were provided for the pickers. Farmers hired women, teenagers and even children to pick, paying them usually a few pennies per bushel, and hauled the bushels by wagon to Oren Duckworth’s factory, where a stout girl unloaded them into a trough around which sat a dozen women who cleaned, snapped the snaps or peeled the ’maters, pressed them into tin cans being loaded on the chute up in the loft by another person, also female, and placed them on a conveyor belt which carried them over into the other crib, where a group of men manned the machine that put a lid on each can and then arranged them in large iron bails that were lowered into a vat of boiling water; after the cans had cooked and cooled, they were conveyed up into the loft of that crib where another person, also male, packed them into cardboard cartons.
In the early days of the operation, the cans bore Oren Duckworth’s own gaudily chromolithographed labels, imprinted with the legends “Duckworth’s Finust Snaps” and “Duckworth’s Finust Maters,” but, even though the former clearly pictured a luscious mound of plump green beans while the latter showed a huge red tomato, nobody in the cities, where the cans were shipped, appeared to know that “snap” means green beans and “mater” means tomato, and the cans did not sell. Eventually Oren Duckworth made contact with a large and well-known food processor in Kansas City, a company whose lawyers will not permit me to mention its name, and thereafter Duckworth’s finust snaps and maters were sent in unlabeled cans to Kansas City, where the Big Name Food Processor attached his own label, and you and I were unknowingly eating them when we were children, although the Cannon Fact’ry closed down before we were grown up.
The Stay More ’mater had of course not retained its full aphrodisiac properties, although the ’mater of that time was surely far more erogenous than the hybridized objects that are marketed as “tomatoes” today.
Whatever might be said against Oren Duckworth’s materialistic motives for operating the canning factory, it must be acknowledged that the operation granted Stay More a reprieve, to live as a town a little longer. Without the canning factory, people would have been forced to leave Stay More and search for work in the larger towns and cities. The canning factory not only created jobs but also, because the big motortruck which came to get the cans and take them to Kansas City had to ford Banty Creek where it crosses the main road and because Banty Creek overflowed its banks six different times during the first summer the canning factory was in operation, making it impossible of passage not only for the big motortruck but also for any wagons hauling snaps and ’maters from the north side of the creek, and because Oren Duckworth’s crews had to construct a raft and laboriously float not only the raw product but also the finished product back and forth across the creek when it was flooded, which caused Oren Duckworth not only to curse but also to moan, and because he was noticed cursing and moaning not only by his employees and family but also by a federal government agent, a “spotter” from the Works Progress Administration, who wore not only a pair of binoculars but also a telescope suspended from leather thongs around his neck, and who spotted not only Banty Creek in flood but also Oren Duckworth cursing and moaning, and who told the Stay Morons that not only could he do something about it but also would he do something about it, and did: he brought in an engineer who not only surveyed Banty Creek and drew up plans for a cement bridge over it but also hired some of the local boys to assist in the labor of constructing the bridge, which took all summer. Oren Duckworth was all in favor of the bridge, and so were the local boys given jobs by the W.P.A., but, nobody else was, because a bridge was the worst form of PROG RESS and was against all tradition.
The W.P.A. bridge is not illustrated here, partly for that reason. No architectural history of the United States is complete without an illustration of the Brooklyn Bridge, and it should follow that our history should not omit the W.P.A. bridge, but it is scarcely comparable, being only three hats long, about three feet above the natural water level of the creek, and consisting of poured cement with the sides formed of a row of crenelated piers, fifteen to the side. Year by year the floods of Banty Creek would wash logs and other debris against those crenelated piers, where it would jam up, and to break the jam the Stay Morons would sledgehammer those crenellations away, until eventually only the roadway of the bridge itself remained, with one pier of the crenellation embossed like a tombstone with the legend “Built by W.P.A.” Bevis Ingledew often remarked that he would just as soon get aholt of some dynamite and obliterate the whole bridge, but for one reason or another he never got around to it, and what is left of it is still there.
Most of John Henry “Hank” Ingledew’s children do not even know what “W.P.A.” stands for, and they have had some fun conjecturing the possibilities: Well Plastered Alcoholics, Washout Prevention Association, Way Past Absurdity, What Possible Accident, Wet Persons Anonymous, etc. The fact that the “P” in W.P.A. actually did stand for PROG RESS was not lost upon the Stay Morons of the time, who helplessly watched the bridge being poured, and wondered what the world was coming to.
After work, the W.P.A. gang got into fights with local boys, but they were fighting not out of ideological controversy so much as for recreation and for the purpose of showing off in front of a very pretty teenage redhead girl named Sonora Twichell who was presumed to be the niece of the Beautiful Girl and was spending the summer with her, as she had been doing for several summers, going back home each August to her presumed mother in Little Rock. John Henry “Hank” Ingledew was one of the local boys who fought with the W.P.A. gang for the purpose of showing off in front of Sonora, although he didn’t need to, because she had eyes only for him, although he didn’t know it; because he was just as shy of females as any Ingledew had ever been, although he never forgot about Eli Willard’s chronometer wristwatch which he had buried; because he knew that some day he would have a son to give the watch to, although he couldn’t conceive of how he would ever approach a girl and get up his nerve to ask her to marry him so that they could have a son; because that was something well beyond the powers of an Ingledew, although he knew that in order for him to exist his own father somehow had to have approached his mother. The very pretty redhead Sonora thought that Hank Ingledew was the best-looking boy she had ever seen, and from the age of thirteen onward, when she first started spending summers with the woman she thought was her aunt but guessed was her mother, she decided that she would marry Hank someday. But every time she even looked at him, let alone spoke to him, he would get red in the face and turn away. Her mother, whom she presumed to be her aunt, told her about the legendary woman-shyness of all the Ingledews extending back into history. The Beautiful Girl knew the whole history of Stay More and told Sonora about the cornbread that Sarah had baked for Jacob Ingledew, so Sonora baked some corn-bread for Hank the summer she turned sixteen, and she took it to him and gave it to him, but nobody (except Eli Willard) had ever bothered to tell Hank anything about his great-great-grandfather (and Eli Willard hadn’t mentioned the cornbread) so Hank didn’t know the significance of the cornbread, except as something to eat, and he did eat it, but didn’t think it was as good as the cornbread his mother made, although he didn’t say this to Sonora, because he wasn’t capable of saying anything to her.
When Sonora went back home to Little Rock that year after the summer was over, she was emboldened to write a letter to Hank, saying things that she dared not say to his face, things that he dared not listen to, to his face. She told him that although she was only sixteen years old she already felt grown up and that she didn’t like any of the boys in Little Rock as much as she liked him and she was very sorry that he wasn’t able to talk to her and she hoped that even though he couldn’t talk to her he might be able to write
to her, and she signed it “Your friend, Sonora.”
Just holding this letter in his hands made Hank get very red in the face, especially because Sonora was the prettiest girl he had ever seen, which made it all the harder for him to conceive of ever being able to say anything to her. But he suddenly realized that saying something to her in a letter wouldn’t be the same as saying something to her face. She wouldn’t be looking at him when he said it; she couldn’t even see him. So he sat down and got out a sheet of writing paper and took his pencil and licked on it and chewed it for a while, and managed to write, “Dear Sonora:” That was as far as he got. He waited for a better day, but the day never came, so he took the sheet of paper saying only “Dear Sonora:” and put it in an envelope and mailed it to her.
The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks Page 36