The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [103]
But it was so cold that winter that keeping the fires going night and day was a major effort. The youngsters were required to keep the fires going at night, and, as one of the survivors of that winter expressed it to me in his old age, “We had to put wood on the fire all night with one hand, and sleep with the other!” This might be an exaggeration, but we may imagine what he meant. In order to obtain enough wood for the fires, the Stay Morons practically denuded the forests during the course of the Winter that Came Twice, cutting all the second-growth timber that had started growing after the great fire which had occurred during the great drought. Before Christmas, it began to snow heavily in Stay More; snow rarely fell in the Ozarks, and never before Christmas, but now there were blizzards. By Christmas, as my informant quoted above expressed it, “the snow was so all-fired deep we had to shit standing up!” Again he might be exaggerating, but we may picture the practice.
The barns of that era were rather ramshackle, and offered little protection to the livestock, who froze; chickens saved themselves by roosting on the chimney shoulders and absorbing some warmth from the stones. The leather belts and pulleys in Isaac’s mill would not run because they were frozen, and even if he thawed them out he couldn’t make a fire hot enough to boil the frozen water in his boiler. It was too blamed cold to work in the mill anyway, and his helpers and fireman had already quit on him, so halfway through the winter, or rather between the two winters that came that year, he quit and went home to sit by the fire, which was what everybody else was already doing. With not even the chore of milking to do, since the cows were frozen, there was no work for anybody except women, except chopping wood for the fires. Everybody had runny noses, and some people had runny eyes, and some coughed badly, and several developed chest complaints, and a few, despite herbal remedies, died, but could not be buried until the ground thawed in the spring, so were left frozen in Isaac’s unused mill. Isaac’s family was more fortunate than most; the son John had a bad cough, but only Salina was sick enough to go to bed, and the girls Perlina and Drussie were old enough to assume their mother’s duties.
Although, architecturally speaking, the houses of that time were built well, the fireplaces were not of optimum efficiency: most of the heat went up the chimney. And simply sitting beside the fire was not sufficient to keep warm on the coldest days of that winter. But there was nothing else to do, and consequently the Stay Morons discovered by accident that condition which we call boredom, which had been unknown to them before. Since the word “bored” meant “humiliated” to them, they would have a problem finding a name for their condition. It was Denton Ingledew, Isaac’s oldest boy, who first identified and attempted to name the condition. He was past marryin’ age, and so was the second oldest boy, Monroe, but they, like so many Ingledews, were too shy to approach women with romance or even matrimony in mind, so they still lived at home in Isaac’s dogtrot house. One day in the coldest part of the winter, all the Ingledews of Isaac’s household were crowded together around the fire, trying to keep warm. They had been sitting there for five hours, not moving much except to throw another log on the fire. Denton yawned, and said, “I feel so kinda like…” but no