The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [40]
She shook him awake. “Frake, look, you’ve got the jakes!” she exclaimed, but corrected herself, “Jake, look, you’ve got the frakes!” He yawned and raised himself enough to take one look, then fell back to his original position, where he would remain for months on end.
Jake’s frakes became the concern of the whole community; farfetched remedies were suggested and tried, but with no effect. Lizzie Swain recommended that Sarah try the blood of a black hen, but it worked no better for Jacob than it had for Murray. Noah appeared, clawed and scratched and bloody, with a quantity of panther urine that he made into a poultice, but it worked no better for Jacob than it had for Noah. Perilla Duckworth recommended a purgative from a decoction of white walnut bark peeled downward, and then an emetic from a decoction of white walnut bark peeled upward, but these only aggravated Jacob’s disposition. Destiny Whitter was certain that the frakes was just a form of erypsipelas, or “St. Anthony’s Fire,” which everybody knew could be easily cured with the blood of a black cat. All of the black cats of Stay More were rounded up, a total of nine, and, since it is terrible bad luck to kill a cat, particularly a black one, none were killed, but each had an ear snipped off and an inch removed from its tail, and enough black cat gore was collected to cover Jacob’s frakes in three coats after first washing off all the other stuff that had been applied and caked and dried.
This bold treatment, needless to say, had absolutely no effect, and in time Jacob’s frakes erupted and healed over, but he remained abed with feelings of utter worthlessness, so melancholy that not even the birth of his firstborn, Benjamin, which happened then, could rouse him from his Slough of Despond. Nor did he receive any comfort from the confines of his new house, which lacked the certain snugness of the first Ingledew cabin and the Swain house, and was a constant reminder to him of the futility of human endeavor. He could no longer understand nor remember what had motivated him to build the house. Gradually it filled up with furniture, made by Noah; and Sarah, who in the last months of her pregnancy had taken up flax-spinning and weaving, made linen curtains for the windows and other cloth decorations, so that it was indeed the most elegant home in Stay More or all of Newton County, but this brought no cheer whatever to despairing Jacob.
Almost as if Nature herself agreed with his forlorn mood, Stay More began to suffer its first severe drought. In early July, before any of the crops had been harvested except peas and spinach, the sixtieth day without rainfall occurred, and from then on it did not rain a drop for the rest of the summer. The creeks began to dry up, first Banty Creek and then Swains Creek itself, the deep holes of water remaining until last as diminishing puddles engorged with fish. If Jacob had cared, if he had not lost all sense of any purpose to life, he would have urged the people to harvest these fish and dry them as insurance against the famine ahead, but he did not, and the puddles dried until they were only mounds of dead fish. The springs from the mountainsides kept on trickling enough water for man and livestock, a few weeks after the creeks were bone dry, but then the springs began to fail, until there was no water, no trace of water of any kind, at all. By this time, the cornstalks were twisted freaks, and none of the other crops, not even the heat-loving Tah May Toh, were bearing any fruit. Great swarms of grasshoppers and locusts, apparently needing no water to survive, flew in on the hot wind and devoured all the remaining vegetation. The livestock began to die. The cows managed to find a few small tufts of brown grass and convert it into a liquid that