The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [130]
As a direct or indirect result of this article, people from the cities, particularly women, who had slaved as clerks and secretaries and millworkers, saving their money and dreaming of a better life, withdrew their deposits, packed their bags, and took the train to Harrison, where a coach took them to Jasper, where they hired the land lawyer to drive them to Stay More, and homesteaded every tract of land that had not been claimed. The men of Stay More were hired to build their houses for them; at first, the women insisted on a house that resembled the Ingledew barn, but, being assured that the barn was a barn, they accepted log cabins. For fifty dollars cash, a Stay Moron would build them a simple and quite habitable log cabin. These cabins are not illustrated here because they were anachronisms. They looked like Jacob Ingledew’s first cabin, but the door was in the gable end and the windows on the sides. Today the ruins and skeletons of these cabins are mistaken for early settlers’ houses.
The women homesteaders were flirtatious with their builders, and the building went slow, interrupted by many a roll in the bushes. Even though these women enjoyed and were undoubtedly grateful for these rendezvous, they were condescending toward the Stay Morons, openly referring to them as “blue-eyed monkeys.” Once the cabins were built, these women enlisted the Stay More menfolk to the cause of their rural education: how to plant a garden, how to tell the difference between a large mosquito and a turkey buzzard. During “nature study” hikes in the woods, they would pause frequently for further gratification of the flesh. A Stay More woman, suspicious because her husband was no longer making any demands on her, followed him into the woods one day and caught him at it, and spread the word to the other women of Stay More, who also suddenly realized that their husbands were no longer making demands on them, and were outraged at the boldness of these city women; the women of Stay More determined that they would not allow their husbands into their beds again until their husbands gave up philandering the city women; this stratagem had the reverse of the intended effect. For a long time the women of Stay More were unhappy and jealous. But everyone else was happy. The newcomers were good for the economy. The money they spent to have their cabins built went into the pockets of the natives. They bought their groceries from Willis Ingledew or the other general store, and bought their flour from the mill. They were not good at gardening, not the first year anyway, and were required to buy their produce from the local people. The first year too they had not acquired immunity to the twenty-three Stay More viruses, and they often patronized the two local doctors. Everybody, except the wives of Stay More, agreed that the city women were the best thing that ever happened to Stay More.
One day one of the city women suggested to her paramour, “Why don’t you leave your wife to her other husbands and come and be mine?” Her paramour laughed and said, “Where’d ye git the idee my old womarn had another man?” And then the awful truth was out. One by one, the city women learned that Stay Morons were not polyandrous after all, that, in fact, there was a slight surplus of females in the population, which the city women had increased. But it was too late. They had invested their life savings to have the cabins built and to establish roots in the enchanted backcountry. They loved the fresh air and the sunshine, and the smell of wildflowers and weeds and the creekwater. They loved their blue-eyed monkey lovers, even if they could never marry them. They could not go back to the cities. So they tried as best as they could to adapt themselves to Stay More life. The many snakes and reptiles of Stay More frightened them, and their general nervousness caused all of them to smoke a lot of cigarettes, in the privacy of their cabins. Their Stay More lovers discovered