The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [109]
All the others nodded their heads and chimed in with: “It’s a fact!” “That’s the Gospel truth!” “Sure thing!”
Brother Stapleton smiled and went on with the show. Adam came on the screen, naked as a jaybird, and all the women blushed and covered their eyes. Then Eve appeared, and she wasn’t wearing a stitch either; some of the men whistled, panted or clapped. The deacons rose as one from the amen corner and stalked out of the meeting house, but most of them could later be seen peeking in the windows. When Adam and Eve looked at each other, they didn’t seem to mind that they didn’t have any clothes; in fact, they didn’t seem to notice, and pretty soon the congregation took it for granted too, because although Adam and Eve were naked they weren’t fooling around with each other or anything, they were just talking about the fruit that Eve wanted to eat, and then they were eating it, when all of a sudden they got embarrassed about not having clothes, so they made some skirts out of fig leaves, with which they made do, until God gave them some buckskins to wear. Adam and Eve never did sleep with one another as long as they were in the Garden, but as soon as they were driven out of Eden they began doing it all the time, usually behind bushes and large rocks, but eventually they were so desperate to couple that they didn’t care whether they were seen or not, and they were doing it so often that all the women and children had to leave the meeting house, and even the men were finally forced to follow the women because of their excitation. One of the deacons took a lump of charcoal and scrawled a large “X” on the front of the meeting house, and the deacons decreed that the people could watch no more of those shows.
The Ingledews were somewhat relieved, not because they hadn’t enjoyed watching the shows, but because Brother Stapleton and his sister had continued to lodge and dine at Isaac’s and Salina’s house, and the preacher had almost eaten them out of house and home. He had also, unbeknownst to them, been banishing the sourhours of Perlina and Drussie by giving the girls private screenings of some of his short subjects and previews of coming attractions, although these were all “decent,” that is, presentable. Perlina and Drussie both loved him madly, and they had walked out of the Adam and Eve show not because they were offended but because all the other women and girls were walking out and they figured it was expected of them. In truth they had been fascinated, but couldn’t admit it, even to each other. Each of them wanted to ask Brother Stapleton privately to show them the part they had missed after walking out, but neither of them could quite muster the nerve. Ingledew girls were never afflicted with man-shyness in the way that all Ingledews boys were afflicted with woman-shyness, but all the same there were limits to what a girl could ask a preacher to do.
And yet when they heard that the deacons had decreed there would be no more shows at the meeting house, they feared that Brother Stapleton would leave them for good and go somewhere else, and then the sourhours would come back again and bog them down forevermore. Perlina, at least, the older of the two sisters, would do anything to avoid that. So she washed her hair with sassafras-bark shampoo and drank a quart of tea made from butterfly weed, both of which are good for nerve, then she sought and found Brother Stapleton when he was alone and requested, “Show me the rest of that show.”
“Where did you leave?” he wanted to know.
“The part where she’d done birthed Cain and they were fixin to make Abel.”
“It gits awful free and fast, there,” he warned her.
“I don’t keer. I want to see it,” she insisted.
Long Jack Stapleton threaded his projector and allowed Perlina to view a re-run of the end of the Adam and Eve story, when the amatory couple were giving themselves up to their urges with such frequency and force and noise