The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [31]
“Don’t you think, madam,” Eli Willard asked, “that your husband would strike a more dashing figure without his beard and mustachios?”
Sarah clipped her scissors and stared at them. “Is these good for that too?”
“Up to a point,” Eli Willard replied. “But to complete the operation he would need this.” He held up the straight-razor again.
“Pay him, Jake,” Sarah told her husband. While Jacob had his bankroll out, Eli Willard gauged the thickness of the wad, and proceeded to sell Jacob a pocketknife, another for Noah, a hand saw, an adjustable plane, a brace and bit, and a hammer. Before he was done, Eli Willard also sold him a scythe blade and a hay fork, observing that, now that Jacob had livestock, he would need good tools for harvesting fodder. Meanwhile Sarah did not return to her cabin but, as had become her peculiar disposition, wandered off to her mother’s house. Jacob took advantage of her absence to draw Eli Willard aside and ask in a low voice, “You reckon you could lay hold of some glass to bring me, yore next trip?”
“Glass?” said Eli Willard in a hushed tone.
“Yeah,” Jacob whispered. “I’m a-fixin to build me a new house, and I aim to put a couple winders in her, so I’ll be needin some winder lights.”
“Glass,” Eli Willard susurrated hoarsely, “is frightfully hard to come by, and of course difficult to transport, and therefore frightfully expensive.”
“I ’spect so,” Jacob sighed, and softly inquired, “How much?”
Eli Willard whispered into his ear a preposterously exorbitant figure. “I’ll be dumbed!” Jacob croaked quietly, but then he drew himself up and declared, “Wal, you git it, and we’uns will find the money some way.”
The window of the Swain house, as we have seen, being covered with boiled and scraped wildcat hide, was translucent but not transparent. It admitted light but permitted no vision, either in or out, unless at night a figure were standing between the window and the light (nocturnal illumination in the Swain house came either from the fireplace or from “lamps” which consisted of sycamore balls floating in saucers of bear’s grease with the stem serving as a wick). The silhouette of a figure was standing between the light and window that night; the figure is Sarah’s. Jacob has not bothered to come for her. He has discovered a wonderful use for the pocketknife he bought from Eli Willard. He can whittle a stick with it.
He is whittling the stick into shavings. Neither the stick nor the shavings have any value, but the act of pushing the knife down along the stick has a certain therapeutic value, is soothing, gives him something to do with his hands, keeps him from seeming entirely idle when in fact he is entirely idle. Henceforward generations of the men and boys of Stay More will whittle to shavings millions of cords of sticks; some of them will actually carve the sticks into totemic figures or useful objects, hatchet handles and such, but the majority of the men and boys will just keep on whittling the stick into shavings and then start on another one, as if, their houses all built and finished, they have to keep on working with wood.
Tonight Jacob sits beside his fire endlessly whittling, and Noah soon catches the contagious habit and joins him. It is Sarah whose silhouette we see passing between the light and the window of her mother’s house. All the others have gone to sleep, the boys in the loft, the girls and their mother below. But Sarah’s silhouette moves across our line of vision and out of it, in the direction of the ladder leading up through the scuttle-hole into the loft. We can no longer see her through the window now, but we can imagine her climbing the ladder to her brothers’ quarters. We cannot easily imagine her motive, until we remember that Murray is still