To Jelena he will announce, “I do not have the frakes.” “But you do,” she will point out. “Yeah, but I choose to ignore them,” Vernon will say. And, ignoring them, they will go away. They will be no more. Never again will man be punished for his efforts to accomplish something.
And Vernon will accomplish something: ignoring his frakes, he will build this house. Although it will be smudged and obscure to us, it will be very real to him and to Jelena, who will live in it and love in it, for the rest of their days. Although they will enjoy their privacy, they will not be exactly recluses, for they will invite their friends, Day Whittacker and his wife or girlfriend (whose name, we will now know, is Diana Stoving) to visit them. Vernon’s sisters and their husbands will never visit, because his sisters will be ashamed that Vernon will be “living with” and “running around with” his own cousin, and because, in fact, all but one of his sisters will leave Stay More and move to California and St. Louis and Kansas City and Eureka Springs, respectively. (The population of Stay More will be only nine.) The one sister who will stay more will be Patricia, who will be Jelena’s age and will have been her best friend in childhood and who will at least speak to Jelena whenever she sees her, but who will not visit her at home. Vernon’s father will visit occasionally, because, as Hank will remark, “If a feller is crazy enough to build a house like this, I reckon I’m crazy enough to come and see it now and again.” Also Vernon’s great-uncle Tearle, the last survivor of his generation of the Ingledews, will visit occasionally, complaining, “It aint got no porch. Nobody builds a porch to set on no more.” But Jelena will have a beautiful garden bordering the cool spring that bubbles up out of the property, and there will be lawn furniture to sit on in that garden.
I will hope that on my next visit to Stay More I will be invited to sit with them in that garden. I will also hope that Vernon will be willing to discuss the architecture of his house. I will expect him to let me have a look at some of those documents he will have found. I will look forward to sampling some of that fabled Ingledew Ham. The old Ingledew General Store will be disintegrating, and I will attempt to persuade Vernon and his father to allow me to assist them in removing the glass showcase containing the body of Eli Willard and giving it a proper burial in the Stay More cemetery, for even if Eli Willard was not a Stay Moron, he will have to have a permanent resting place, with a permanent headstone, the inscription of which I will be glad to furnish.
I’m sure that Vernon will understand.
Acknowledgments
The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks is not purely a work of the imagination. Over the years I have attempted to read everything about the Ozarks that has been written, as some small consolation for not being able to go there and dwell there as long as I would like. My ancestral roots are deep in the Ozarks, and I know its people and its architecture and its traditions intimately, but I have tried to write this book with a self-imposed detachment which required a geographical detachment too. During the time of the writing of this book, I was able to visit the Ozarks on only one occasion, of one day’s duration, and the roll of film I shot that day did not develop. But here in my small room I am surrounded by books and magazines on the Ozarks, piles of photographs taken earlier, souvenirs of my childhood, letters from Ozark friends and relatives, and a mountainous landscape of notes that I obsessively write to myself. The view from my window is of a sycamore tree exactly like Noah Ingledew’s, backed by a meadow and a mountain.
Some of the more unbelievable situations and people in this novel are based upon “reality”; indeed, the more implausible or incredible an episode or person may seem to be, the more likely that true history is being imitated. For example, John Cecil was an actual person and the Battle of Whiteley’s Mill was an actual battle, fought as described here. The governor of Arkansas during Reconstruction actually was a blue-eyed Ozarks mountaineer. The woman homesteaders from the cities actually did homestead in Newton County. Of course there is an actual Newton County in the actual location of the Ozarks given, with a county seat named Jasper, and another town named Parthenon, and, as far as you and I are concerned, another town named Stay More. I would be happy to show it to you, but I feel I have.
Walter F. Lackey’s History of Newton County, Arkansas was the principle reference for this book, but I have also been influenced by the Ozark writings of Vance Randolph, Otto Ernest Rayburn, Waymon Hogue, Charles Morrow Wilson, John Gould Fletcher and many others, as well as such periodicals as The Ozarks Mountaineer.
Before writing the novel, I corresponded with many persons in the Ozarks. Mrs. Oliver Howard, reference librarian of the State Historical Society of Missouri at Columbia, was especially helpful, and her colleague, Lynn M. Roberts, editorial secretary of the Missouri Historical Review, furnished me with Xerox copies of several illustrations in their collection of Missouri Ozarks buildings, which are strikingly similar to Arkansas Ozarks buildings. Amanda Sarr of the University of Arkansas library furnished me with a complete bibliography of books and articles on Arkansas architecture, and Martha McK. Blum, graduate assistant in the University of Missouri library, did the same for Missouri architecture. I exchanged several letters with Professor Cyrus Sutherland of the Department of Architecture at the University of Arkansas, and I am grateful for his help. I also exchanged several letters with Tom Butler, a resident of Newton County, and with Day Whittacker and Diana Stoving, also residents of that enchanted county. My letters were generously acknowledged by Dorothy Doering of the Drury College library, Christopher Darrouzet of the Missouri State library, John L. Ferguson of the Arkansas History Commission, Robert E. Anderson of the School of the Ozarks library, Charles McRaven, also of the School of the Ozarks, and the anonymous librarian of the Arkansas Gazette.
In its original form, this novel was much more sexually explicit than it is now, replete with such language as “joist,” “beam,” “stud,” “timber,” “pole,” “erection,” “rear elevation,” “door,” “gable,” “sill,” “rail,” and “jamb.” I am very grateful to my editor, Llewellyn Howland iii, for persuading me to leave such things to the reader’s imagination, and I trust that the reader’s imagination has succeeded. My editor was the first person to hear of this project, the first person to encourage it, and the first person to see it when it was finished. In addition to removing certain passages, he made two other sweeping changes of an important nature.
His devoted secretary, Rosemary Gaffney, not only spent many hours making his letters to me legible and coherent, but also spent days tracking down a crucial but elusive doctoral dissertation in the archives of Harvard University. She is simply a wonderful person.
Helpful in a way they did not realize were the few people who wrote letters of appreciation for my previous volumes, and I would like to list them here: George Eades, Katherine Berry, Sandee Jo Joy, Rhode Rapp, Weld Henshaw, Juanita Melchert, Sue Anderson, Mrs. John Ingle, Gretchen Keiser, Linda Gray, Alex Humez, Sharon Karpinski, Joanna Noe, Willie Allen, John Braden, Carol Cross, Eleanor Jacobson, my two United Kingdom “fans,” Capt. Archibald A.J. Dinsmore and Gayle Harrison…and Dione, wherever you are. Without the encouragement of these good people, this book would not exist.
To my students in my architecture classes at Windham College, I am indebted for a spirited give-and-take over the years that has taught me much about architecture, and I apologize to them for never discussing the architecture treated in the present volume.
As to the chapter head illustrations, there is no point in claiming that any resemblance between these buildings and actual buildings living or dead is purely coincidental. Most of these structures no longer stand, but that fact makes them no less “real.” They stood, and that is, like all of us, what matters.
About the Author
Donald Harington
Although he was born and raised in Little Rock, Donald Harington spent nearly all of his early summers in the Ozark mountain hamlet of Drakes Creek, his mother’s hometown, where his grandparents operated t
he general store and post office. There, before he lost his hearing to meningitis at the age of twelve, he listened carefully to the vanishing Ozark folk language and the old tales told by storytellers.
His academic career is in art and art history and he has taught art history at a variety of colleges, including his alma mater, the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, where he has been lecturing for fifteen years. He lives in Fayetteville with his wife Kim.
His first novel, The Cherry Pit, was published by Random House in 1965, and since then he has published thirteen other novels, most of them set in the Ozark hamlet of his own creation, Stay More, based loosely upon Drakes Creek. He has also written books about artists.
He won the Robert Penn Warren Award in 2003, the Porter Prize in 1987, the Heasley Prize at Lyon College in 1998, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 1999 and that same year won the Arkansas Fiction Award of the Arkansas Library Association. In 2006 he was awarded Oxford American magazine’s inaugural award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. He has been called “an undiscovered continent” (Fred Chappell) and “America’s Greatest Unknown Novelist” (Entertainment Weekly).
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Acknowledgments
About the Author
The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks Page 46