The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [133]
He made elaborate mental plans for his bank and its building, which adorns this chapter. In the first place, he determined, a bank building had to be a stronghold, so it couldn’t be robbed. He knew he must build his bank of heavy stones and cement. There were plenty of heavy stones lying around loose, but he would have to buy the cement, and he didn’t have the money. “Willis,” he said to his brother, “aint you a little bit skeered that somethin might happen to all the money you got stashed away some’ers?”
“If you’re tryin to git me to tell whar it’s hid, it won’t do you no good,” Willis said.
“Naw, naw, I aint interested in whar it’s hid. I just got to wonderin if you’d ever give a thought to whether somebody might find it and take it from ye?”
“That’ll be the day.”
“A furriner or a stranger or a tourist might come a-passin through, and when he sees that thar Model T he’ll know you got lots of money hid some’ers, and he might start sneakin around lookin fer it.”
“What Model T?”
John snorted. “Aw, I aint fooled. That’s it a-settin yonder, plain as day, even if nobody else believes it. Now look, here’s what I got in mind: I’m aimin to start me a bank. All I need is the cash to pay fer the see-ment, if you’d be so kind as to loan it to me and take it out of my wages.”
“Hmmm,” Willis said, and pondered his brother’s venture. “Whar you aim to find a steel door with combination lock fer yore vault?”
“Hadn’t thought of that,” John confessed. “Do ye reckon Sears, Roebuck would carry them things?”
“I misdoubt it,” Willis said. “But I got some equipment catalogs that might have ’em.” He dragged out his catalogs, and the brothers pored through them, until they had found a steel door with combination lock manufactured in St. Louis. The price of it, John was dismayed to learn, was almost enough to pay for an automobile. But whereas he couldn’t ask Willis for a loan to buy a car, he could, and did, ask Willis to help him get set up in his bank, pointing out the advantage to Willis, and to their father, and to their brothers and sisters and everybody, of having a safe place to keep their money. Willis thought a bank would just be an extra temptation to rob it, but John said he was going to make his bank out of heavy stone and put bars on the windows and with that steel door with combination lock for the vault, the only way any robber could get the money would be to hold up John, and as everybody knew John was the fastest trigger east of Indian Territory, which wasn’t Indian Territory anymore because Oklahoma had been granted statehood and Arkansas was no longer the western frontier.
After much persuasion, Willis considered the fact that if John left his employ and went into business for himself Willis would be getting rid of a clerk whom many customers didn’t like on account of his gloomy, doomy expression, and he also realized that while a gloomy-doomy expression is not an asset for a store clerk, it would be just perfect for a banker. So he loaned John the money for his cement, and sent off to St. Louis for a steel door with combination lock. It was summer, the creeks were dry, and the bed of Swains Creek was cluttered with an abundance of large stones; John selected among these and hauled them up Main Street to the north end, and began building his bank on the east side of the street. He named it the Swains Creek Bank and Trust Company, appropriately, for the creek had furnished the building materials. While he was building it, he attracted much curiosity, particularly among the younger generation, who wanted to know what kind of shop he was building. When he told them it was a bank, they asked