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By Root 1465 0

land would be capable of producing fifty bushels of corn to the acre, but getting it cleared was the worst job the brothers had yet done, and after three weeks of clearing bottom land Noah Ingledew was “plumb beat out” and came down with the first attack of the frakes. He didn’t know what it was, and neither did Jacob. Noah took off his buckskins and anointed the frakes with bear’s oil, but that didn’t do any good. He made a salve by boiling mullein leaves in lard, and applied that to his frakes, with negligible results. He resorted then to more drastic remedies, concocting a poultice the essential ingredient of which was panther urine, difficult to obtain. Panthers were easy enough to come by, but persuading one to urinate into a container was entirely a different matter, and since Noah was too weakened by his frakes to do the job, Jacob had to do it for him. Yet even after all the trouble that Jacob went to, the resultant panther-piss poultice had no effect whatever on Noah’s frakes. Jacob offered to hitch the mule to the wagon and drive Noah back east in search of a doctor, but Noah protested that he wasn’t worth it, for already the severe sense of worthlessness that comes after an attack of the frakes was beginning to affect him. He took to his bed and just lay there day after day. In time the frakes erupted and then began to heal over, but more and more did Noah feel that work is senseless, toil vain, life pointless, and he would not get up from his bed. In a way, he was unintentionally evening the score with Jacob, whose work Noah had done back during the time when Jacob didn’t feel like working on account of fooling around with that Indian squaw. Now Jacob had to do all the work, but Noah mocked him.

“Hit aint no use,” Noah would say. “Shitfire, yo’re jist workin yore butt off fer nuthin. Earworms or worse will git all yore corn, wait and see if they or worse don’t.”

And yet, for all his sense of futility, Noah felt one redeeming emotion, which can only be called a sense of snugness. Lying there day after day, thinking few thoughts, having no daydreams or aspirations of any kind, he was aware only of the walls and roof of his cabin, and aware of how he was sheltered, of how his ark was a refuge, snug, cozy, restful. It was home. Our illustration cannot depict the site of the Ingledews’ cabin, but the site contributed to the feeling of snugness, because the cabin was in a holler—by local definition, “a little hollered out place at the foot of a mountain.” While the land that the cabin was on was level enough for a garden and one of their cornpatches, the land on both sides of the cabin rose abruptly up the mountainside, while behind the cabin the holler extended some three hundred feet to the Ingledews’ spring, where it began an abrupt ascent of the mountain. So in his snug cabin in this snug hollow Noah aestivated. Winter came and he hibernated. Jacob never scolded him for his inactivity. He knew it could happen to himself at any time…and it would.

In the autumn Jacob went off to look for a town where he could sell his pelts. He knew nothing of the geography of the region. He knew only a few rough basics: that civilization lay mostly toward the east, that Indian Territory was mostly in the west, that in the north it got colder and in the south it got warmer. He had no idea in which direction he would most likely find a town. His agricultural labors had produced no cash crop this season, but his spare-time trapping, for beaver, ’coon, otter and mink, had produced a few dozen pelts that ought to bring enough to pay off the clock peddler with enough left over to indulge one of Jacob’s dreams: buying a cow. Next to whiskey, milk was Jacob’s favorite beverage, but a year and a half had passed since he’d last had a drop of milk. Also, getting a cow was the first step toward starting a herd of beef.

But Jacob didn’t know where any towns were. The last one they had passed, coming from Tennessee, must have been a hundred miles back on the White River. Still, if he could just find a small settlement where he could unload