The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [37]
“Wal, neighbor,” said John Bellah to Jacob Ingledew, “seeing as how we’re even…” Then he asked, “How many dwellings in your village?”
“Eight,” Jacob replied.
“Seeing as how we’re equal in population, neighbor,” John Bellah observed, “I reckon we win, on account of we got nine dwellings.” To the other Parthenonians, he announced, “We win!” and they all gave cheers of hoo raw and huzzah and then went on back home.
Jacob was left to explain to his people that Mount Parthenon had become the county seat of this here county, and that while he had contested it on the grounds of Stay More’s numerical superiority, it turned out that he must have miscalculated.
Forever afterward, the rivalry between Stay More and Mount Parthenon (or simply Parthenon, as it would later be shortened to) would be intense and sensitive, if never violent. The competition between them was perhaps a factor in their growth and development, and if today Stay More is practically a ghost town then Parthenon is not much better off.
We perceive, then, one more motive that Jacob Ingledew had for building the imposing home of our next chapter: he wanted to equal the number of Parthenon’s buildings. That is as good a reason as any for building a house, for sweat, for toil, for going on.
Some time later, it was Noah Ingledew, not exactly anybody’s fool, who first realized and understood the error in census-taking that Jacob had made. “Shitfire!” he exclaimed to his brother. “You was countin yoreself on the wrong side!”
Chapter four
He built it all by himself, almost in secret. He meant to surprise Sarah with it, was possibly the reason, or maybe he just wanted the satisfaction of being solely responsible for it. We know what the real reason was, though he did not, could not have guessed, would have blushed and scoffed if we were to tell him. But it takes an awful lot of pent-up passion to build on this scale, alone and in just slightly over two weeks. Jacob’s second home is his erection. Although that is not why, like spermaries, it is bigeminal. Consciously he may have been remembering Fanshaw’s dwelling; unconsciously no doubt he was remembering one of several dreams he had the first night he slept with Fanshaw’s squaw: a dream in which he saw this very structure almost exactly as he has rendered it here: two-pens-and-a-passage, a double house divided (or conjoined) by an open breezeway.
The house was (and still is) in another holler south up Ingledew Mountain from his first dwelling. He discovered it was a better holler, had a stronger spring, and was only two whoops and a holler (which is not hollow but halloo) away from his first place. Still nobody knew exactly where it was except him and his pack of dogs. Undoubtedly the neighbors, especially the Swains, would have been glad to join him and help in a speedy house-raisin’, but he chose to go it alone, working from first light to last light and sometimes past light day after day for over two weeks. His pack of dogs went with him and sat around and watched; it was not until he was almost finished that they perked up and took a particular interest in the breezeway, discovering that it was a place where they could loll out of the rain and trot in the shade and breeze, a kind of doghouse almost, or at least a “dogtrot,” which is what Jacob called it and which, by extension, is the most common generic name for this type of house as a whole, although there are variants: possum trot, dog run, breezeway, two-wing, open entry, etc.
Jacob Ingledew was by no means the inventor of the type, which scholars have traced all the way back to medieval Sweden, where it was called “pair-cottage,” nor was Jacob’s dogtrot the first in the Ozarks: there is a magnificent two-story dogtrot at Norfork which was built by Indian agent Jacob Wolfe in the first years of the century. But the Ingledew dogtrot was the first bigeminal white man’s dwelling in Newton County, the first bipartition, the first conjugation, the first bifidity, the first duple.
Jacob hoped to install the glass in the windows before showing the house