The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [163]
“What wristwatch?” said Hank, having learned in the school of life how to maintain a perfect deadpan and a tone of innocence.
Foogle, forgetting momentarily that he was no longer dealing with a ten-year-old circus punk, began to twist Hank’s arm, whereupon the grown-up Hank flung Foogle all the way back to his car. Foogle drove back to Lola’s store, thinking he might at least salvage something if he could lay claim to the showcase and contents, and exhibit it in his sideshow. Lola was more than happy to let him have it, if he would haul it off. It wouldn’t fit in his car. He drove off to Jasper to hire a truck, and Lola gloatingly boasted to the Ingledews that she had worked her will, and that soon she would set foot inside her store.
But before Foogle could get back with the truck, Hank rounded up his three younger brothers and the four of them gained entrance to the store through the rear door, and transferred the showcase and contents to the abandoned mill, where they concealed it inside the wheat roller machine, and where it remained for many years. The Ingledew brothers pledged one another to secrecy. Lola set foot in her store. She had no idea on earth, she told Foogle, where the showcase might have gone. She was just glad it was gone.
What has all of this to do with the illustration at the head of this chapter? That curious “carpenter gothic” house, located a mile up Banty Creek from downtown Stay More, was built by a man who, like Eli Willard, was not a Stay Moron, but that in itself is no reason for making his house the headpiece for this whole chapter. The man was also a native of Connecticut and was also, like Eli Willard, a wanderer, but neither are those any reasons. I will offer a reasonably good reason in just a few minutes, but for the moment I need only point out that, chronologically, the house was built during one of those years that Eli Willard lay in state in Willis’s store, the same year that Bob Cluley sold his little general store to the Beautiful Girl (although there is no connection) so that this carpenter gothic house represents those years and that year, not only chronologically but also symbolically, because the retardataire gothicism of the house relates to Eli Willard and his death. Nobody knew well the man who built it, but they knew he must have been a carpenter, not just because of all the carpenter gothic details but because it was well-built and is still standing, although it was vacant for some twenty years after the violent death of the builder.
The man was known only as “Dan.” He was already in his fifties when he first came to Stay More and although he did not have a wife he had a young child, a girl as reclusive as her father. Neither of them was seen in the village more often than the Second Tuesday of the Month. People sat on the porch of Lola’s store and speculated that the man was an escaped convict. Then one by one the people moved to the porch of the Beautiful Girl’s store not only because it had become the post office but also because they liked her better than Lola, and on that porch they speculated that Dan was a runaway bank embezzler and had a pile of money stashed away somewhere in his fancy carpenter gothic house. Now and then someone would come upon the man out in the woods hunting, and marvel at his marksmanship, extraordinary even by Stay More standards. A lucky few people happened to be within earshot on several occasions when the man was playing his fiddle, and they agreed that there had never been a better fiddler, not even the legendary Colonel Coon Ingledew.
During the years of the Great Depression, the Stay Morons all of a sudden revived their interest in the old-timey music and the old-timey ways, and both the Stay Morons and the Parthenonians tried to persuade Dan to play his fiddle for public events, but he would not, not out of shyness but because he knew that square dances fostered drunken fighting, and, as he said, he had been in enough fights to last him for the rest of his life. So, in effect, unlike Eli Willard, who over the years kept bringing