• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1377 0

gatherings, but she insisted on attending, and threatened to tell on them if they didn’t let her, although she never participated in their activities but remained an interested kibitzer. They said and did things in her presence that they would never have dreamed of saying or doing in the presence of any other female, but after all she was their sister; if they had known she was only their half-sister, they would have said and done only half the things. Lola remained a spinster all her life, and one cannot help but wonder if the fact that she was the only girl among six brothers had anything to do with it, or whether her watching and listening to the goings-on of the hayloft clubhouse gave her a negative attitude toward the opposite sex.

During the pastoral age symbolized by our barn, there was an influx of new homesteaders, not farmers but people from the cities, mostly single women. A smart land lawyer in Jasper got rich by challenging in court Jacob Ingledew’s decree against further immigration, on the grounds that it violated the Homestead Act, and winning the case, and selling his services to people suffering from “city fever” who wanted to get back to the land. These people had spent all their lives in the cities, laboring in business and industry, saving their pennies, and dreaming of a better life. There appeared on the newsstands of the cities a rash of new magazines: Country Life in America, America Outdoors, Rural Digest, Arcadian Times, Hill and Dale, Silvan Weekly, Ladies’ Bucolic Companion, Back-country Journal, Pastoral Pictures, extolling the healthful benefits of a return to the soil.

The only possible real return to the soil is to the grave, but the magazines did not believe it. They sent their reporters out across the land. One of them, a young woman from Arcadian Times, published in Chicago, got lost in the backcountry and stumbled upon Stay More. She walked down the Main Street, slowly, with her notebook in hand, pausing now and then to write “impressions.” The Stay Morons watched her. She was wearing a skirt that came down to a pair of high button shoes, and a ruffled blouse that revealed most of her shoulders; beneath these garments she wore a corset which constricted her waistline to, as one observer put it, “not no more thick than my thigh.” She entered Willis Ingledew’s General Store and browsed around, mumbling from time to time, “How quaint,” and pausing to write impressions in her notebook.

“Could I be of some hep to ye, ma’am?” Willis asked her.

She stared at him, then smiled with delight, and requested, “Say that again, please.”

“Could I be of some hep to ye, ma’am?” he repeated patiently.

She wrote these words down in her notebook, then asked, “What is the name of this place?” Willis pointed at the post office in one corner of the store, where a sign clearly said, “U.S. Post Office, Stay More, Ark.” She wrote this down, then said, “Oh! Is that your post office?”

“Nome,” said Willis, “it’s the undertaker’s.”

The young woman was moved to remark, “Ha, ha.” Then she wrote this down in her notebook.

“Was you wantin to buy anything, lady?” Willis asked.

After writing this down, the woman said, “No, thank you. I’m simply gathering gleanings. What is your name?”

“Willis Ingledew, ma’am,” he replied.

“How quaint,” she said, and wrote this down, then wandered on out of the store. She strolled along to the gristmill, and walked all the way around it to the creek. It was in busy operation, but over the noise of the machinery she approached Isaac Ingledew and asked him, “Does it really run?” Isaac slowly shook his head. “How tall are you, by the way?” she asked. Isaac held out his hand at the level of his headtop, to indicate how tall he was. This tactic provoked her to comment, “Hee, hee.” Then she scribbled in her notebook. She asked him, “And what is your name, sir?”

One of the other men at the mill said to her, “Hit’s Isaac Ingledew, lady, and he don’t like to talk none, so you’d best not be askin him no questions.”

“How quaint. Are you related to Willis Ingledew?” she asked Isaac. He