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By Root 1468 0

of the children threw their hearts into the idea, and although they had suffered a number of troubles and privations on the long journey (they had left North Carolina over two months previously, in the dead of winter), they were not daunted but overjoyed to have reached their new home at last. While the older boys chopped down the virgin oaks, the older girls and their mother busied themselves constructing a campfire and preparing a first supper that would be a feast in celebration of arrival. Jacob was felling his eighth tree when he heard a dinner horn blow, and, looking up, saw Lizzie Swain blowing it and welcoming him to supper. Jacob had the first fried chicken and the first milk that he would eat and drink in Stay More, and this was the origin of the favorite meal of the people. He liked it so much that, after supper, as dusk settled in the woods, it took little urging from the children to get him to open up and tell about his adventures, and they all sat around and listened to him tell about the Indian Fanshaw and his strange beliefs and customs, such as maidens proposing to braves by giving them cornbread, and he gave them a bloodcurdling imitation of the Dawn Chant, and the children listened, awed and entranced. Years afterward they would tell their own children of these things, so that was the origin of the “oral tradition” which was so strong in the Ozarks for over a hundred years, and perhaps even today has not completely died out.

Noah Ingledew did not help the Swains build their cabin. Jacob apologized for his brother, explaining that he had recently had a terrible affliction from which he was still recovering. Lizzie Swain pressed for details of the affliction, because she was an expert in home remedies and herbal cures, but Jacob blushed and said it wasn’t “decent” to describe. Jacob also was considerably embarrassed in his plan to get his heifer serviced by the Swains’ bull. (In the Ozarks a man would rather cut his tongue out than utter the word “bull” in the presence of a female. There were many circumlocutions: “male,” “topcow,” “cow-critter,” “surly,” “gentleman-cow,” “brute,” “cow-brute,” or simply “he-cow,” but Jacob could not employ these euphemisms if his object was to ask Lizzie for her bull’s service. At first he tried to get around the problem by dealing with Lizzie’s oldest son, Murray, but Murray just said, “Ask Maw.”) But Jacob just couldn’t. He kept putting it off, until finally the heifer Jerse came into heat again and set up such a loud bawling that all the Swains could hear her from half a mile off. “Sounds lak somebody’s heifer wants a calf,” Lizzie Swain remarked. Jacob didn’t say anything. “Wonder whose it is,” she went on. He couldn’t tell her. “You said you and yore brother was the only folks around,” Lizzie observed. Jacob could only nod. “Did ye happen to notice, we’uns got a right full-blooded topcow,” Lizzie informed him. Jacob gulped and nodded again. “Considerin all the help you’re a-givin us a-buildin our house, the least we could do is lend ye our topcow.” Jacob tried to find words to thank her, but could find no words. “Murray,” she said to her oldest boy, “you and Orville and Leo take ole Horns up yonder where that heifer’s a-bawlin, and see if he caint git her to hesh up.”

Jacob went with them, helped them, then returned to his work, the work of building their house, and worked with a new vengeance that came both from gratitude and from his inability to express himself. Soon the Swains’ house was finished. The “community effort” of over a dozen people at work on the house-raising (even the youngest children helped with the job of chinking the cracks between the logs with clay and straw) reminded Jacob of Fanshaw’s description of the Indian’s ritual house-raising, and he told the Swain children about it: how after the maiden had proposed to the young brave by offering him a piece of cornbread, the whole community joined together for the festival of lodge-building for the couple. Jacob brought the Swain children to his own place one day and showed them his corncrib, which