The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [102]
He was interrupted and drowned out by a chorus of protests. No heaven? No hell? Fiddle-faddle! If there is no hereafter, why live? If there had been one thing that all the other preachers had agreed upon, it was that we must conduct our lives in such a way as to be rewarded after death and avoid punishment in the hereafter. The men began shaking their fists at Eli Willard, the women spat at him, and the younger people began throwing rocks at him. He had to duck inside the mill for protection. He stayed there until everyone had left, except Isaac. He said to Isaac, in parting, “Well, I tried.” Isaac, who did not believe in the hereafter but had no use for Unitarianism either, did not comment.
None of the Ingledew males were ever converted to any religion, perhaps a heritage from Jacob, who had originally left Tennessee because, as he had told Fanshaw, “the preachers was so thick a feller couldn’t say ‘heck’ without gittin a sermon fer it.” Isaac, if anything, was even less of a believer than his father had been, and his sons would be less than he, and their sons less than they, and so on, until the last Ingledew, who…but he is the last chapter, and we are only halfway there. What little light there was during the Second Spell of Darkness came in the form of lightning; Isaac would shake his fist at the lightning and silently dare God to strike him down. God never did. God killed many an animal with lightning, and blasted many a tree, and from time to time destroyed a human being or two, but God never hit Isaac.
Isaac’s wife Salina “caught religion” when the Presbyterian produced an eclipse of the sun, and although she was most partial to the Baptist, she attended all the church services in Stay More, and Isaac sometimes accompanied her out of curiosity, which is the bottom rung on the ladder of motives for going to church, the other rungs being, in ascending hierarchy: 2, being too timid to refuse, 3, a sense of duty, 4, a desire to mingle with others, 5, a desire to learn the means of salvation, 6, a desire to be saved, 7, lust for paradise in the hereafter, 8, schizophrenic need to need, 9, insanity, and 10, sainthood. There were very few Stay Morons who ascended to the top of this ladder. Isaac remained on the bottom rung, and Salina got about as far as the sixth. As far as anybody could tell, she never asked him what he thought of the sermons, or never asked him anything about religion, although she talked to him freely, for hours on end, expressing her own views and opinions. One of the preachers had gone so far as to hint that sexual intercourse, even between lawfully wed husband and wife, was not in the best interests of attaining heaven, and once again Salina ceased climbing Isaac, even though it was dark and no one could see them, and once again Isaac turned to strong beverages for solace.
Nearly all the preachers, in particular the Methodist, abhorred alcohol, and preached frequently against it, and consequently Seth Chism had “caught religion” and given up the making of his superior sour mash, so Isaac was required to patronize Caleb Duckworth’s inferior brand of rotgut. This stuff was just as capable of reducing the world to half its size, but it also reduced time to half its length, which was terribly confusing to Isaac, who in compensation for it began to double everything: each day was forty-eight hours in length, or rather Monday came twice a week, and the Second Tuesday of the Month was also the Third; spring and summer came twice a year, and so did autumn, which wasn’t so bad, but two winters in one year was awful.
Actually, the Year that Winter Came Twice was perceived not alone by Isaac but also by everyone in Stay More. It was the coldest and longest winter that anyone had ever known. Isaac could have warned them of its coming, because he knew that the first frost always occurred six weeks after the first chirp of a katydid, and he had heard the first katydid’s chirp twelve weeks before, which, even by his double reckoning, meant that a heavy frost was coming any minute now,