The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [43]
The next delegation to Jacob’s bedside, the last delegation (for they alone remained to try), were the children. The children came, seventeen of them, and stood around his bed. They had no jokes to tell, nor songs to sing, nor stunts to do. They were indescribably dirty, because nobody had had a bath or a swim in three months and children naturally need washing more often anyway. They were thin too, not starving yet, but close to it. Among these children were the younger sons and daughters of Lizzie Swain, the same children who had worn such big smiles when Jacob first saw them, the same who had been so happy and excited to find a new home in a beautiful, bountiful wilderness. None of them were smiling now. They just stood around with their pinched soiled faces staring at Jacob in his bed. He became, finally, aware of them.
“What do you little squirts want?” he asked.
Nine-year-old Octavia Swain, their spokesperson, spoke. “Uncle Jake,” she said, “you aint got nothin to do, and neither has we’uns. So let’s us start us a school, and you be the teacher.”
“Gosh all hemlock,” Jacob groaned. “What would be the use?”
“So’s we’uns could git the smarts, like you,” she explained.
“What’s the use of bein smart?” he demanded. “Class, let me see a hand! Who’s the first to answer? What’s the use of bein smart?”
And without realizing it, Jacob had already founded the first Stay More elementary school. The pupils sat, two by two, on the floor around Jacob’s bed, and he even sat up in his bed for the first time in months. One little boy timidly raised his hand and Jacob called on him.
“If yo’re smart, you kin git rich easy,” offered the boy.
“That aint no answer,” Jacob responded. “What’s the use of bein rich? Come on, let’s see if there’s anybody knows the answer. Let me see another hand.”
None of the children raised their hands, until finally Octavia Swain lifted hers.
“You, Tavy,” Jacob said.
“Well, sir,” she offered, standing up, “if I was smart, I could use my brain to answer hard questions like, ‘What’s the use of bein smart?’” She sat down.
Jacob thought about that for a moment, and then he did something he hadn’t done in a coon’s age: he laughed. Well, it wasn’t exactly an all-out gutbusting hawr-de-hawr horselaugh, but at least it was a respectable straight-up-and-down chortle, and when he did, the students laughed too. “Tavy,” he said, admiringly, “I ’low as how that’s as good a answer as any. Okay. Now it’s your turn. Axe me a question.”
Octavia stood up again. “Sir, how kin we git water?”
Jacob frowned. “That’s a tough one,” he said. “Let me study on it a minute.” His first impulse was to tell them that the only way they could get water would be to leave, abandon Stay More, go back where they all came from, where there was always a plenty of water even if an overplenty of people. But he did not suggest this. Instead he meditated on the meaning of rainfall, the circulation of waters, and the certainty of recurrence. A man could be sure of only one thing: a drought is always ended by a rainfall. But where does all the water go during the drought? He knew that the waters ran to the rivers and the rivers ran to the sea but the sea didn’t run anywhere. If Swains Creek and the Buffalo River were empty, was the sea flooded? He remembered Fanshaw’s theory of gravity, and the notion that the earth is round. If all the creeks and rivers were empty on this side of the earth, and the seas weren’t flooded, then all the water must be over on the other side of the earth. But if that were so, and the earth really rolled around the sun as Fanshaw said it did, then it would wobble, and you’d feel it wobbling. No, the water must be someplace else. It couldn’t all be evaporated up into the sky because if it were then the sky would be full of clouds that would soon rain. So if the seas had their share and couldn’t hold any more, and the rivers were empty and the sky was clear, the only other place the water possibly could be was right down inside