The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [120]
Once the Lodge was established, John wrote off to the national headquarters in Washington asking to be supplied with enough secrets to keep them busy for a year or so. In reply he received a request for a tithe of the dues. He did not know what a tithe was, and none of the other members did either. They figured it was one of the secret words. He answered to headquarters by protesting that he couldn’t very well send a tithe if they wouldn’t send him the secrets first so he could find out what a tithe was and send it to them. This brought a rather sarcastic reply intimating that if John and his Lodge brethren did not know the meaning of tithe, they were perhaps not intelligent enough to be Masons. Stung by this, John rode off to Jasper and asked the county judge what a tithe is. The judge referred him to the county clerk, who suggested that he ask the sheriff. One-eyed Barker referred him to the county surveyor, who recommended the coroner. The county coroner didn’t know but was pretty sure that the treasurer would know, and sure enough Curgus Young the county treasurer told him what a tithe is. He returned home and conveyed this information to his Lodge brethren. “Men,” he declared, “we’ve solved half the problem. Now if we can just find out what ‘dues’ are.” He was only kidding, of course, because he already knew what dues are, but he did not know how much he should assess. It seemed reasonable that if the national headquarters got ten percent of their dues, then the dues ought to be ten percent of the members’ income. But no member except Willis Ingledew had ever sat down and figured out what his income was, and even Willis’s figures were based on gross rather than net. So John just took off his hat and passed it around among the members, counted up the proceeds, divided that by ten, and sent ten percent, which was $2.15, to Washington. In return he received a protest against his parsimony, but he also received an official kit full of secret words to play with.
None of the words, however, was parsimony, so he still didn’t know what that meant. The words were, in alphabetical order: ashlar, brazen pilar, circumambulation, discalceation, esoteric, floor cloth, gauntlet, hele, indented tassel, joined hands, low twelve, northeast corner, omnific, pectoral, quorum, rite, symbol, trowel, unaffiliate, vouching, winding stairs, xenophobe, and zeugma.
The brethren of the Lodge were summoned, Willis was posted outside the door with his mace and a blank look, they donned their little lambskin aprons, discalceated themselves, spread a floor cloth with indented tassel, vouched for one another, holding a trowel in one hand and placing their other hand on their pectorals, joined hands and began to circumambulate from the northeast corner. It was all very esoteric, and lasted until low twelve.
They did that on the Second Tuesday of every Month for over a year, until the novelty began to pall, and John Ingledew passed the hat once more. It had been a drought year, so the tithe of the collection came to only $1.68, which he sent off to headquarters, requesting a new supply of secrets. In return he received another kit with a covering letter execrating his niggardliness, but the kit contained neither “execrating” nor “niggardliness”; in fact, this kit did not contain secret words but secret abbreviations, and headquarters had neglected to include any definitions or explanations