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By Root 1441 0

things to Stay More, the strange near-hermit named Dan contributed nothing to Stay More, but rather took from it, in the form of a meticulous observation of its history and culture that resulted, indirectly, through means I have discussed in some other place, in the present volume. If Dan himself has no place in the present volume, he was responsible for it, and his house has a place in it, for it was in his house, after Dan was killed and the house was abandoned, that the Ingledews deposited the glass showcase with the remains of Eli Willard, after a flood had undermined the foundations of the abandoned mill. Even in death Eli Willard kept traveling, but once he was deposited in the abandoned house of the near-hermit Dan he was left in relative peace for another twenty years.

Just in passing, we might note that the house was, and still slightly is, yellow. It was one of the few painted houses of Stay More. We need not get involved with the architectural significance of painted vs. unpainted houses, but we should consider the symbolism of the color, as Dan saw it. It had nothing to do with cowardice, for Dan was one of the bravest men who ever lived. If he had been an Ingledew, which he was not, his legend would have equaled anything in this book. Nor did yellow have anything to do with jaundice, lemons, Fusarium wilt, Orientals, or egg yolks. The Indo-European root of yellow is ghel, a formation which also produces gold, gleam, felon, glimpse, glitter, glisten, gloss, glow, glib and gloaming. All of these apply to Dan, but he painted his house yellow as a symbol of fair-haired women, and of the rising sun.

Chapter fifteen

Recognize it? The practiced student of architecture should be able to examine an altered building and determine the form of the original—“read” it in translation, as it were. Here we see the somewhat imaginative, if architecturally uncomely, result of Oren Duckworth’s attempt to convert the unused barn that Denton and Monroe Ingledew built four chapters back into an industry, specifically a canning factory, or “Cannon Fact’ry” as they pronounced it. Unless we count the present-day ham processing operation of Vernon Ingledew as an industry, the Cannon Fact’ry was the only modern industry that Stay More ever had. Rare was the Stay Moron who enjoyed working for someone else, for wages. No farm in Stay More ever had a hired hand. Just as Jacob Ingledew had never even considered owning slaves because he felt that a man shouldn’t own more land than he and his sons were capable of cultivating, successive generations of Stay Morons felt that they should not hire help; if they needed extra hands during haying time or threshing time, they swapped help with one another. But during the Great Depression, the farms of Stay More were reduced to bare subsistence enterprises, yielding the families a meager larder and nothing else. To earn even enough to pay for staples like salt and pepper and chewing tobacco, it was necessary to find a job, and the only jobs to be found in Stay More was the seasonal labor in Oren Duckworth’s Cannon Fact’ry. Later the W.P.A. and the C.C.C. and the A.A.A. and the rest of the New Deal’s alphabet soup brought relief to some, but most Stay Morons considered those government agencies a form of welfare or even charity, which was worse than working for somebody else.

Oren Duckworth started his canning factory not to provide jobs for his neighbors but because with the death of John Ingledew Stay More was without a leading citizen and Oren Duckworth desired to become a leading citizen. He was Jim Tom Duckworth’s oldest boy, and attorneys’ sons were always expected to amount to something, although Oren was past forty before he thought of the idea of taking the old engine from behind the abandoned mill and putting it alongside the abandoned barn to convert it into a factory. I’ve always wondered why he didn’t simply convert the abandoned mill into a factory; possibly E.H. Ingledew, the oldest of his line and therefore the legatee of the mill, wouldn’t sell it to him. At any rate, when