The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [150]
But still no paying guests arrived to spend the night at her hotel.
The economy was in bad shape, at least locally. The Jasper Disaster ran side-by-side stories about how Newton County was going to the dogs while nationally the city folks were all getting rich and lavishing their money on bootlegged booze and fancy autos and a strange music called jazz. Letters-to-the-editor poured in to the Disaster asking him to please stop rubbing it in. Drussie wrote pointing out that such stories of local poverty might frighten off potential guests for her hotel. The people of Stay More might not even have known they were poor if that dadblasted newspaper hadn’t told them so.
John Ingledew asked Jim Tom Duckworth to bring suit against the newspaper, but it was too late: one by one the customers of John’s bank withdrew their savings in order to make the down payment on crank-up phonographs and records, player pianos, cream separators, fancy cast-iron cooking stoves, inner-spring mattresses, wristwatches, and new radiators for their Fords. After all their savings were spent, they tried to float loans from John, but he had nothing to loan them, and the bank failed. There was no need for a bank; every penny that was earned was spent to meet the installments on credit purchases. And not many pennies were earned, because the land itself had been used up over the years, worn out from one-crop farming: year by year the average size of an ear of corn became smaller and smaller, until the nubbins were too tiny to husk and shell, and there was no grain for Denton and Monroe to grind in the mill, and the mill closed down. Denton and Monroe had no choice but return to farming full time, but the earth was too poor to farm, and they talked of going off to a city and finding work, although they hated the idea, and did not want to leave Stay More, or at least Newton County, or at least the Ozarks, but since there were not yet any cities in the Ozarks, at least not in Arkansas, and since the only city in Arkansas was Little Rock, Denton and Monroe went there and found work and lived in a boarding house and were not seen again in Stay More for several years.
Bevis Ingledew, who had a wife and four sons to support, was no more lucky at farming than Denton and Monroe, but he wouldn’t move to Little Rock, and he kept on farming, refusing to accept the fact that there was no profit in it. As soon as his four sons were old enough, he got them out of bed before daylight and put them to work until past sunset, and Emelda cried because she couldn’t scare up enough grub to feed them sufficiently for all that work. Nightly her dreams were shared with Bevis, but more often than not their dreams were nightmares, until the only dream that Emelda had remaining consisted of a doll fashioned from cornhusks. When they were awake, Emelda silently “discussed” with Bevis the possible significance of this cornhusk doll, but he, who had had his share of that image in their remaining common dream, did not know its meaning any better than she. Emelda treasured the humble cornhusk doll because it was the only pleasant dream that still came to her at night, and it appeared faithfully every night. In time, during a spare moment, Emelda fashioned a real cornhusk doll and clothed it with mother-hubbard and sunbonnet made of calico from a flour sack. Her sons admired it and wished their father would speak up and admire it too, not knowing he already had. Having created the female cornhusk doll, Emelda next created a male one dressed in dungarees. Having created thus a pair female and