The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [137]
The other misers, the ones who continued to resist, did so on the claim that it didn’t matter whether prices rose or not because they never intended to spend their money anyway. “Air ye jist goin to let it stay buried after you air?” John would ask, incredulously. “Since you’re the only one knows whar at it’s hid, you’ll carry the secret to your grave.” Well, no, they said; on their deathbeds they would tell their wives or children where the money was buried. “But what if you’re hit by lightnin, or a tree falls on ye, or yore heart gives out all of a suddent?” John persisted, and one by one the misers yielded, until he had them all.
But, curiously enough, John’s exposure to all of those misers turned him into something of a miser himself. His children, fortunately, had all come of age before he turned into a miser, so they could support themselves without any help from him, although his firstborn, E.H., after apprenticing himself to the town dentist, wanted to set up his own practice, but was denied help from his father and had to seek elsewhere. His assumed daughter Lola, who was secretly Willis’s, got a job clerking in Willis’s store. Odell, Bevis and Tearle were successful farmers, but their father constantly badgered them to save every penny and deposit it in his bank. John dreaded the thought that there was a single coin anywhere in Stay More lying around loose; even more he dreaded the thought of a single coin being spent unless it was absolutely necessary. Other men continued to chat about weather and crops and Base Ball, but John never talked about anything but thrift and savings accounts, and he was a terrible bore. He had to lend money to cover the interest on the savings accounts, but he hated to, and he subjected each borrower to a merciless and embarrassing cross-examination, and then, in the rare event the loan was granted, he charged the highest interest that the law allowed. Not a few rugged farmers were known to break down and cry like babies on the other side of his desk.
But John reserved his true meanness for the city women, who, one by one, because of inflation, were using up all their savings. One by one they sat or stood, sunbonnets in hand, in front of his desk, twisting their sunbonnets and pleading for a small loan. One by one John turned them down, on the grounds that they had no employment and no prospects for income. One by one they told their pathetic plans: one intended to raise laying hens and sell eggs, one intended to weave baskets, one intended to be trained as a nurse in Doc Plowright’s office, one intended to be trained as a dental assistant in E.H. Ingledew’s office, one was expecting an inheritance from a wealthy aunt in Kansas City who was dying. One even asked for a job as a teller in John’s bank, claiming previous experience in a Chicago bank. But John set his gloomy eyes and his doomy jaw and turned them all down. One by one they starved for a while, then packed up and went back to their cities, abandoning their humble rustic cabins to the weeds and snakes. They were not missed by the women of Stay More.
The only man that John feared was a black-suited agent from the newly created Federal Bureau of Internal Revenue. Recently those politicians up in Washington, probably the same bunch of bastards who ran the Masonic headquarters, had got together and decided that the easiest way to raise money for the government was to put a tax on every man’s earnings. It was unconstitutional, a violation of free enterprise, but the black-suited agent told John that he would go to jail unless he obeyed. John called in his attorney, Jim Tom Duckworth, and asked him if it was true he would go to jail if he didn’t cough up. Jim Tom, who was having his own problems trying to