The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [42]
All of the men laughed and slapped their thighs and elbowed each other, but Jacob did not stir. They eyed him carefully for any sign of perhaps a twitching at the corner of his mouth or even a slight sparkle in his eye, but there was none. Maybe he had taken it too personal, they decided. So Levi Whitter told one about his oldest boy, Tim, who everybody knew was not over-bright, how Levi was rolling a load of cow manure out to his field when Tim asked him what he was going to do with it, and Levi answered “I’m going to put it on my strawberries,” and Tim give a snort and says, “I put honey and cream on mine, and everybody says I’m a damn fool!”
Jacob didn’t seem to care much for that one either, so Zachariah Dinsmore thought to play upon Jacob’s disdain for religion by telling one about a preacher who stopped by to look over a farmer’s spread and says, “Well, you and the Lord have sure raised some fine corn.” Then when he seen the hogs, he says, “With God’s help, you have got a lot of good pork.” Finally they was looking at the garden next to the barn, and the preacher says, “You and God have sure growed some fine vegetables.” The farmer was losing his patience, and says, “Listen, Preacher, you ought to have seen this here farm when God was a-runnin it all by Hisself!”
But this too failed to provoke any glimmer of mirth in Jacob Ingledew. The men started over, and told a round of the second-funniest jokes they could remember, and then a round of the third-funniest, and so on, and by the time they got to their ninth-funniest jokes they weren’t even laughing themselves, so they gave up and went home.
The drought dragged on, the hot winds parched the flesh, the woods caught fire, and acres of virgin timber burned unchecked, leaving vast black scabs of burnt-out woodland on what had once been the beautiful countryside. Perhaps mercifully, the fires exterminated all of the woods-creatures who were dying of thirst. There would be no game to hunt during the coming famine.
A delegation of womenfolk came next to Jacob, and they stood around his bed, singing happy and pleasant inspirational songs in soprano-contralto harmony. They sang “Keep on the Sunny Side of Life” and “Home, Sweet Home” and “Burdens Are Blessings” and “Smile All the While” and “Bright Cheer Year by Year” and “Oh Happy Day” and “Juberous Times” and “Ah, Happy Heart, Light the Long Hours Ever So Gaily and Anon.” Yet, even though this last was a brilliant coloratura number, Jacob’s mood remained essentially unaltered. In fact, so steadfast did his mood remain that it infected the women, who began singing sad songs until Sarah shooed them off.
Then Sarah’s breasts began to dry, and baby Benjamin spent long hours wailing for milk that he could not get. Was Jacob at least stricken by his small son’s cries? If he was, it was hard to tell.
A delegation of young people came next to Jacob’s bedside, where they performed stunts, antics, headstands, slapsticks and pratfalls, roughhouse and gymnastics, roister and fling and shindig, merrymaking to melt the heart of all but the most hopeless case…which Jacob, unfortunately, was, and remained. The summer passed, and although in September the temperature dropped slightly below 100° for the first time in weeks, there was still no rain. Nobody but the women had anything to do. The women still had to cook, whatever corn and meal remained from the year before, whatever salt pork, whatever reptiles that had not perished. The women tried to find occupation for the men and boys by putting them to work with the carding and spinning of wool shorn from the dead sheep, and scutching and swingling flax to be spun into linen thread, and even with the weaving itself. The making of dry goods, with ironic symbolism, became a busy industry during the drought. Come winter, even if there was no food to eat, everybody would have plenty of clothes and could