The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [33]
He understood that much about the frakes. The next question was: when would he stop falling? When would he hit the ground? Or could somebody catch him? How? Jacob tried another experiment: he went out into his open pasture where there were no trees, and threw another rock straight up into the air and searched for it as it was coming down and ran over beneath it and cupped his hands and tried to catch it. The first few times he tried this, he missed, and the rock either hit the ground or struck him painfully on his head or shoulders. Soon Sarah and Noah and all of the Swains except Murray gathered around to watch Jacob trying to catch rocks. “S—tfire,” Noah remarked to Sarah. “You ortent to have let him out of the house, Sarey.” But finally Jacob succeeded in catching a rock, and then another, and still yet another—and by indirection commenced the legendary Ingledew prowess at that sport which, by fabulous coincidence, was being invented on that same day, at that same moment, by Abner Doubleday in Coopers-town, N.Y.
No element of sport, however, entered Jacob’s mind; he was dead serious, and after he had succeeded in catching several rocks in succession, he stopped throwing them and came and said to the others, “I think I got it.” Then he told Lizzie that they should keep a watch on Murray when he was sleeping, and if he started tossing and turning and acting like he was about to cry out, they should hold him and whisper in his ear, “I’ve caught ye!” That very night Lizzie took one of the lamps made from a sycamore ball floating in a saucer of bear’s grease and she lit it and left it beside Murray’s bed, and then in shifts she and her children kept watch on Murray until, sure enough, he began tossing and turning and acting like he was getting ready to cry out, when Orville, who was on the shift at that moment, leaned down and clutched him and whispered in his ear, “I’ve caught ye!” whereupon Murray smiled in his sleep and stopped tossing, stopped falling apparently, stopped having any but pleasant dreams: of tall wheat waving in the field, of the creek tumbling over shoals, of a cool dipper of spring water on a hot day, of fried chicken, of his sister Sarah’s warmth and depth and damp. The Swains repeated this magic incantation whenever Murray had dreams of falling, until, eventually, he seemed to be cured. Then Lizzie Swain went to Jacob and announced, “We’uns done had a ’lection, and all voted to proclaim ye mayor of Stay More,” a title that Jacob would retain for the rest of his life, even concurrently with, years later, the far grander title of governor of the whole State of Arkansas.
But Murray was not cured. Cured of dreaming dreams of falling, yes, but not of the core of his acrophobia, which festered until it erupted: one day he left his bed and dressed and went out of the house and climbed the mountain behind it until he came to a lofty projection of bluff that jutted out from the side of the mountaintop some three hundred feet (or more accurately, nineteen hats) above the mountainslope below. Young Gilbert, the Swain’s least-un, had followed Murray to see where he was going, and it was he who ran home to report it to his mother, who in turn summoned Jacob, who assured her, “I’ll catch him,” and ran up the mountainslope, fully determined to attempt to break Murray’s fall with his own arms or body, a rash resolution which, had he been able to carry it out, would have killed himself or crippled himself for life. But when he got to that area of the mountainslope directly beneath the bluff jutting out from the mountaintop, Murray was already falling,