The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [39]
He went into a deep and most restful sleep then. Sarah slept too, and dreamed, knowing and believing the ages-old tradition that the dream dreamt on the first night in a new house will come true. She was as excited as her great-granddaughter would be on her first visit to a motion picture theater…but she was as puzzled by the dream as her great-granddaughter would have been if she had unwittingly stumbled upon a film by Luis Buñuel.
She (Sarah) was in a large room, much larger than any she had ever been in before, where there were many people, the women dressed in fantastic silken dresses with skirts as big as haymows, the men in black woolen coats with tails like a swallow’s, and Sarah was ashamed of her dusty buckskin frock, until she looked down at herself and saw that she too was dressed in a silken gown with skirt big as a haymow, the air circulating freely around her legs and loins. She saw Jacob, who was dressed in the finest of the black woolen swallowtail coats and was smoking a very large cigar, surrounded by other men who were listening to him talk and talk. He caught sight of her and blew her a kiss. Then he motioned for her to come over. She did, and he told her the names of each of the gentlemen around him, and then told them her name, and one by one they took her hand and bent sharply at the waist and placed their mouths on the back of her hand. She did not say anything. She did not know what to say. The other men then ignored her and resumed talking to Jacob. Each of them called him “Your Excellency.” Some of the women came and tried to talk to Sarah, but she did not know what to say, and was not sure that she understood what the women were saying, whether they were asking questions or just making statements. She was very embarrassed.
But then the women stopped talking, because there was loud music coming from outside. Jacob came and took her hand and led her out onto the porch, and this porch was very high, there must be another house underneath it, and from this porch she could see that the yard and the road were filled with people, some of them in uniforms beating on drums and blowing bugles and fifes and all kinds of strange brass tooters and horns. Jacob waved to all the people, and they cheered “Huzzah!” He nudged her, so she waved too, and again they cheered “Huzzah!” The music-makers played louder, and the crowd cheered louder, and then, loudest of all, somebody fired off a battery of cannon, and the noise made Sarah start shaking.
When she woke up, in the early morning, she discovered that she had both hands clamped tightly over her ears. She remembered the dream and tried to puzzle it out, but all she could get from it, if it were going to come true, was that someday she and Jacob were going to be of the better sort. Quality folks. She rose and took the bearskin off the window, to let in the morning light. Jacob was still sleeping. The quilt was off him. His buckskins were piled on the floor beside the mattress. Sarah’s cheeks waxed hot, seeing his bare prides, but then she noticed that his prides seemed mighty hot too, and, stooping for a closer look, saw that they, and the skin of his groin all around them, were covered with a red rash, thousands of tiny scarlet blisters, almost like chicken