The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [12]
One day in early summer Fanshaw came and simply said “Come” and led Jacob back to Fanshaw’s paraboloid house. His woman was standing in front of it. It was the first time that Jacob had ever got a good look at her in the daylight, and he was embarrassed. He found it hard to keep looking at her, but he did, and saw that she was very pretty. Also he saw that her belly was bulging. Fanshaw pointed at the bulge, and then at himself. “Me mule,” he declared. “Sterile. You, jackass. She mare. Jackass serve mare, make more mule.”
Jacob didn’t know what to say. “Wal, I’m sorry. You tole me to.”
“Yo. Good? Not good?”
“It ’pends on how ye look at it,” Jacob suggested.
“Yo. Good? Not good?”
Jacob meditated, and at length replied, “Good. Ever womarn orter have the right to have a baby.”
“Yo. She happy.” Fanshaw spoke a word to his squaw and she smiled. “I tell her smile, she smile. Now we go.” Fanshaw elevated his palm above his head in the Indian “how” fashion. Jacob didn’t know what else to do, so he raised his hand in the same way. When he did so, Fanshaw clasped his elevated hand and held it up there in a long tight grip which made Jacob think maybe he was trying to Indian-wrestle. Jacob was ready to break his arm off if he was, but the Indian merely held their hands together above their heads and said to him, “Farewell.”
“Aw, you don’t have to leave,” Jacob protested. “Stay more, and we’ll have us some real fine deebates.”
But the Indian merely said, in his own custom, “Fuck off,” and then he and his squaw, with their few possessions rolled in a blanket, began walking west. Jacob never saw them again. Sometime later, as we shall see, he removed their domicile to his backyard, where he converted it into a corncrib. Noah burned the other Indian homes in the clearing, and converted the clearing into a corn patch.
If this has been a quiet, lonely chapter, I think I must have intended it so: the moon sometimes hanging in the night sky for hour upon hour, the wind timidly on occasion rustling a few leaves, in summer the lightning bugs (even then) going off and on lazily as they had all night, or in winter morning wisps of woodsmoke rising and drifting with the morning mist. Things will pick up, as we go along.
“Funny,” Jacob remarked one day to his brother Noah. “I never even learned that injun’s name.”
“Which?” Noah said. “Him or her?”
“Neither blessit one of ’em.”
Chapter two
Let us first consider the points of resemblance between Fanshaw’s domicile and the first Ingledew house, dissimilar though they may seem. Both had no windows. Both had but an earthen floor. And although the Ingledew place is foursquare, it is built of rounded logs. Later houses in Stay More would be built of logs hewed flat, but in their haste to clear a bit of land and put a roof over their heads, the Ingledew brothers did not take the time to hew the logs. (One early authority makes a distinction between the rounded-log dwelling and the hewed-log dwelling by referring to the former as “cabin,” the latter as “house,” and we shall do likewise.) Fanshaw and Jacob Ingledew were both over six feet tall, but Jacob did not have to stoop, even slightly, to go through his door, which cleared his head by several inches.
There were (the past tense is deliberate; Jacob’s cabin, like Fanshaw’s domicile, is gone now; it was washed away in a flood) no windows for several reasons. First, the difficulty of cutting openings in the large, heavy hardwood logs; second, the impossibility of obtaining glass for panes; third, the need to provide maximum insulation in winter and summer; and fourth, perhaps most important, what was a kind of psychological