The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [2]
“A gentleman and his squaw,” Fanshaw explained over the firewater, “can lift and transport their domicile over great distances where the woods are not, or, where the woods are, disassemble and reassemble. If Wahkontah—he whom you address ‘God’—wanted gentlemen to stay in one place he would make the world stand still; but he in his infinite wisdom made it always to change, so birds and animals can move and always have green grass and ripe berries, sunlight to work and play, and night to sleep, always changing, everything for good, the earth and bodies of the skies, forever and ever…” At that point a pretty Indian woman appeared briefly in the door of Fanshaw’s house and spoke gently to Fanshaw in a language that Jacob Ingledew had never heard, then withdrew, presumably into the second of the two units in the duple. Fanshaw chuckled and said to Jacob Ingledew: “The lady thinks I talk too much.” He stood up and gave Jacob his hand, saying, “Do come again, brother.”
But it was a long time before Jacob Ingledew visited again and that was after Fanshaw had come to him. “Jist too blamed tard to ’sociate,” Jacob explained, pointing at the work that he and his brother were doing, the construction of their cabin (see our illustration to the following chapter). There had been some argument between the brothers over settling here. Noah Ingledew did not want to build in the vicinity of Indians. Jacob Ingledew liked the landscape, and besides, these Indians were friendly, and besides that, there were only two of them, Fanshaw having told him that the other members of the tribe had gone off on a hunting trip over a year previously and had not returned. As a result of having imbibed Featherstonehaugh’s firewater too freely, Fanshaw had broken his leg in a fall from his horse at the outset of the hunting trip, and was required to remain behind. He was skeptical that the others would return. He hoped they would, of course, but it had been such a long time since they had gone hunting, and he had had plenty of spare time to imagine the worst: they had met their enemies the Cherokees and been defeated, or met the blue-coat government men who forced them westward into reservations. He did not know. He still walked with a limp.
Jacob and Noah Ingledew worked from sunup to sundown for a fortnight building their cabin. For a discussion of their methods, we must await the next chapter, but suffice it to say here that this work was drudgery, although it lasted only a fortnight. At the end of that time, Fanshaw sought Jacob out (Noah scampered off into the woods as the aborigine approached and wouldn’t come back until he had left, a couple of hours later). Jacob Ingledew passed his jug to Fanshaw, realizing that now his cabin was nearly finished he could get his corn planted but even so it was going to be a dry summer, “dry” before he could get a new run of whiskey made. He told Fanshaw that he was just too tired at the end of each day building his cabin to visit him again.
Fanshaw studied the Ingledew cabin, scratching his chin. He just looked at it for a long time, walking all the way around it like a bird studying some other bird’s strange nest. Not portable, he observed. But worse, to his point of view, it was all square, foursquare, quadriform, there was not a curved edge to it, not one. After passing the jug back and forth between them for a while, they got into a long argument about architecture. I will repeat here only the end of the argument, the point at which it stopped. Although we may be sure that Fanshaw did not have the