The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [15]
“Well,” Eli Willard concluded, “I am not above accepting a note of credit.” Then he explained that he would return in six months and, if the gentlemen were satisfied with their clock, they could pay him at that time. If not satisfied, they could return their clock, or, better, Eli Willard would replace it with one more satisfactory. So he got Jacob’s signature on an I.O.U. for twenty dollars, shook hands with both men, and began to disappear.
“Stay more!” Jacob invited. “You caint go rushin off this time of evenin. It’ll be pitch dark soon. Stay the night.”
“Busy, busy,” was all Eli Willard replied, and rode his horse off into the dusk. The brothers wondered where he would spend the night. Maybe he didn’t spend the night. Maybe he just went to sleep on his horse and kept on going. At any rate, the brothers would not see him again for six months, when he would return for his money, and they knew they had better get to work and do something to earn twenty dollars in cash money. So they got to work.
Now that the redskin squaw was no longer there to tempt him, Jacob found that he had a lot of energy again. Both brothers rose at dawn, and after a quick breakfast (there was no coffee, not even green coffee; instead a rather palatable substitute was made from roasted corn meal and molasses) they would plunge into their work: clearing land and more land, felling trees and burning them and digging up the stumps by hitching the mule (there was only one now; a panther got the other) to the stump to pull it out: it took weeks of such labor to clear a mere acre. Each night right after supper the brothers fell into their beds, exhausted but satisfied.
Although the Ingledew cabin was medieval, we may note a few features it has in common with classical colonial buildings: the saddle-notched ends of the logs overlap one another exactly in the same manner as quoins, but whereas the quoins on most American colonial houses were false quoins made of flat boards, the quoins of the log cabin are true quoins holding not just one log to the other, but one wall to the other: they hold the whole house together. In classical Greek architecture, it is thought that the grooves in the triglyph of the frieze are a translation into marble of the grooves scored into the wooden ceiling joists of the original temples, which were made of wood instead of marble. This doesn’t have anything to do, directly, with the Ingledew cabin, except to indicate that even the most elaborate classical detail has its origins in such humble structures as a log cabin’s quoins.
The dimensions of the Ingledew cabin, and of space in general at Stay More, may be measured in “hats”—one hat being the distance that Jacob Ingledew could toss his coonskin headgear: approximately 16.5 feet. The Ingledew cabin is almost exactly one hat long by one hat wide, or, simply, one hat square, and also one hat in elevation, from base to gable-peak. When the brothers measured the size of a tree they had felled, or a piece of the acreage they had cleared, or the distance from their backyard to their spring, Jacob would put his coonskin cap to good use. It was a satisfying life for both of them, building and felling and clearing and pacing off, hat after hat.
Lest we get too pastoral a picture of their life and work, however, brief mention should be made of their afflictions, plagues and pests. In addition to the abovementioned panther who in the dark of night screamed at their mules, petrifying them, then attacked and killed one of them and dragged it off into the woods and devoured it, the Ingledews were constantly assailed by natural enemies, both vegetable and animal: poison ivy, poison oak, poison sumac, stinging nettles, rattlesnakes, copperheads, cottonmouths, leeches, stinging scorpions, deadly spiders, wasps, bees, yellow-jackets, hornets. One would almost believe that Nature did not want the Ingledews. Maybe She didn’t.
What was worse in terms of pure torment were the ticks, the chiggers,