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By Root 1449 0

insulation against the wilderness, the possibly hostile new world, the Indians if ever they returned, etc. Just as at Deerfield, Massachusetts, and in garrison houses all over colonial New England, the first cabins and houses in the Arkansas Ozarks were a physical manifestation of the settler’s desire to protect himself from unknown dangers. We can think, therefore, of the Ingledew place as a “shy” dwelling. And it is medieval; yet all of the best Ozark architecture remains essentially medieval, in the tradition of the vernacular architecture in England and Presbyterian Ireland, whence the settlers’ forebears came; the classicizing tendencies of the Renaissance, baroque and rococo periods never affected the humbler architecture of those areas, and would never affect, or only slightly affect, the architecture of the Ozark highlands.

Watch this cabin leave the ground! In three upward stages, first the base: the base is of fieldstone, mostly sandstone, but rocks, of the earth, of the ground, clinging to it. The next part up is of logs, their interstices chinked with mud, not so much of the earth as rocks, but still, particularly because the logs are not hewed but left round, and because the mud was wet dirt, still of the earth. And finally the roof, rived thick boards, not shingles actually, farthest from earth, last in the ascending transition from earth to sky, split from oak logs with a frow, worked: most of the brothers’ labor went into the roof, which they laid in the dark of the moon so the boards would not warp or crack—a superstition, but one that works. Notice how the brothers’ labor increases as the house rises, except in the chimney (“chimbly” is how they say it, all of them) whose inward taper is itself a part of the ascending transition from earth to sky, rock to air.

Axe, adz, and auger were all it took. And sweat. The reasons they don’t make ’em that way anymore are two: good virgin hardwood is hard to come by, and good lathering sweat seems unnecessary in an age of power machinery. If, as Jacob suspected, laziness may be correlated with sexual activity, then the Ingledew cabin was the product of years of stored-up energy. The two brothers built it, as we have seen, in a fortnight of sunup to sundown sweating. They killed two birds with one stone, however: the trees they cut to build the house cleared a field to plant in.

There is one other thing the cabin has in common with Fanshaw’s place: there is not a bit of metal in it. Astonishing. No nails: the roof boards are tied to the rafters. The door hinges are made of wood. There is no iron. Where would the Ingledews find iron? Even the works of their clock were all wood.

The first “visitor” to Stay More was a young clock peddler from Connecticut, named Eli Willard. He showed up at the Ingledew cabin one evening not long after Fanshaw had permanently departed, and the Ingledew dog barked at him. This dog, whom we had little reason to notice in the previous chapter, was a hound bitch named, despite her sex, Tige or Tyge. One of the main functions of a dog was to bark at strangers and thus alert the house. But so far Tige had not barked, and Jacob wondered if she still knew how. Sometimes he would bark at her in an effort to stimulate her barking but she had simply stared at him with what might be called doggy disconcertion. So now, when the clock peddler showed up and Tige began barking, the brothers, who were inside the cabin eating their supper, were at first puzzled.

“Is that ole Tige?” Noah wondered aloud.

“Caint be,” Jacob allowed, but he went to investigate, and saw the clock peddler, Eli Willard, sitting on his horse. Strapped to the saddlebag was one (1) shelf clock.

“Good evening, sir,” said Eli Willard to Jacob.

“Howdy, stranger,” Jacob replied. “Light down and hitch.” As there was no hitching post at the Ingledew cabin this invitation must have been merely a formality, like “stay more.” Nevertheless Eli Willard dismounted and found a large rock with which to weight down the ends of his horse’s reins. Then he observed, “The road seems to end