The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [159]
Hank indicated the fifty-pound sack of peanuts on the mule’s shoulders, and asked, “You aim to sell them goobers in Stay More?”
“If I can,” the old man said.
They walked on, and passed through Parthenon. They did not talk much, because the old man would only speak if Hank asked him a question and although there were many questions which Hank could have asked him Hank didn’t know which one to start with, so he remained silent. Hank wondered if the old man was quitting the circus for good, or maybe he just intended to sell his peanuts in Stay More and then catch up with the circus later on. Maybe in the meantime Hank could persuade him to let him join the circus, if he really was the boss.
It was almost noon when they reached Stay More. Hank began to worry if his folks would give him a licking for sneaking off from home and taking the mule with him. He had a feeling that maybe the old man could protect him, so when the old man asked to get down from the mule at Willis’s store, Hank asked him if he didn’t mind staying with him until he took the mule home, and the old man smiled a small smile and nodded his head. Thus, the old man did not get off the mule until they reached Hank’s house, where Hank’s father and brothers were sitting on the porch waiting for dinner, and Hank’s mother came running out of the kitchen as soon as Bevis Ingledew telepathically informed her that their errant son had returned with the mule and that an unbelievably old man was sitting on the mule.
“Boy, whar on earth have ye—” Bevis Ingledew started to demand of Hank but then he stared fixedly at the old man for a long moment and exclaimed, “Strike me blind! If it aint ole Eli Willard! But it caint be! I’ve not laid eyes on ye since I was ’bout twenty, and I’m past forty now, and back then you was already senile.”
“He’s the World’s Oldest Man,” Hank declared proudly, as if he had invented, or at least discovered, him. But he had heard stories about Eli Willard and knew that he had already been in Stay More again and again and again long before Hank was born.
“Jist in time for dinner,” Emelda remarked, and invited Eli Willard into her kitchen, where she served him and Bevis and the boys a frugal but filling lunch. During the meal, Eli Willard was brought up to date on the current condition of Stay More: who had died, who had been born, the opening and closing of the bank, the closing of the mill, the coming and going of the city-women homesteaders, the Unforgettable Picnic, the making and selling of corn-husk dolls, the failure of crops, and so forth.
Eli Willard showed no particular interest or emotion at any of this news, although he remarked that he was happy to have noticed that there was now a gasoline pump standing in the road beside Willis’s store, which implied that there was now an abundance of horseless carriages in the neighborhood. He asked if there had been any more lawsuits against hapless motorists whose vehicles had frightened livestock. The Ingledews were embarrassed at his bringing up the subject, and they apologized on behalf of the departed Uncle Denton, and said that there was a legend in the Ingledew family that Uncle Denton had a peculiar sense of humor and had intended the lawsuit only as a joke. Eli Willard smiled a wan smile. Then he thanked them for the dinner and asked Hank to take him back to the general store. Eli Willard’s reappearance had caused so much excitement to Bevis and Emelda that they forgot to reprimand Hank for running away from home, or even to ask where he had been. Hank helped Eli Willard up on the mule’s back once again and took him and his fifty-pound sack of peanuts to Willis’s store, where Eli Willard attempted to buy a hundred small paper sacks from Willis, who was so astonished and delighted to find the Connecticut peddler still among the living that he refused to accept payment for the tiny sacks, but, when Eli Willard had transferred the contents of the fifty-pound sack of peanuts into one hundred half-pound sacks, with