The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [44]
“Dig,” he answered, at length. “Tell ’em to git their shovels and find the lowest meader in Stay More and git out in the middle of it and start diggin, straight down. Don’t let ’em stop ’till they find water. Class dismissed.”
School met every day after that, the children bringing their lunches in little cloth sacks their mothers made for them, lunches of corn dodger or pone, frugal but filling, and soon the children came to school clean, unspotted if not immaculate, because their fathers had dug fifty feet down in Levi Whitter’s Field of Clover and struck a vast subterranean pool of pure wonderful water. There was so much of it that when Jacob was told, he ordered it shared with their neighbors the Parthenonians, and for a time at least all rivalry between the two villages ceased as the Parthenonians came gratefully to fetch home water. For a time at least, a very brief time, Stay More was declared the county seat of Newton County, and Jacob’s imposing double-pen dogtrot served for a while as the schoolhouse and courthouse both until Sarah complained that she couldn’t fix dinner without brushing a swarm of lawyers off the table and flushing the bailiff out of the potato bin.
Jacob took no interest in the court, even though he was offered a high position there. He stayed in his own wing of the building, still bedfast, still hopeless, but determined to give an education to these children who had asked him for one. They loved school; he never had any trouble with them; he never had to get out of his bed to discipline an unruly pupil. If any one of the children, through restlessness or ennui or just pure cussedness, decided to try to disrupt the orderliness of the classroom, the other children would mob him, tie him, gag him, hoist him from the ceiling and leave him suspended there until he signaled, by frantic eyeball movements, that he was ready to behave…this whole proceeding so quick it did not interrupt the lesson that Jacob was giving.
Jacob never taught his pupils how to read. As we have seen, he was the only literate person in Stay More for a period of many years, and could not help but feel at times that his literacy was a curse upon him, or at least was something he should not infect his charges with. Deliberately then he excluded reading and writing from the curriculum, and the school was none the worse for the omission.
But what, then, did they study? Arithmetic, of course, and since all of the pupils always came barefoot to school, it was possible to do counting exercises up to and including twenty digits…or even forty, because, as in most other rural schools everywhere from time immemorial, there was a kind of buddy system, a pairing, a conjugation, a bifidity, all of them sitting and working two by two together. The curriculum also included practical matters such as how to control one’s facial muscles in order to assume a “deadpan” in times of stress, challenge, insult, reproach, etc. But in the main, the curriculum was devoted to discussion and debate on purely philosophical concepts in the arts and sciences. Why does the wind blow? What makes the rain? Why must chiggers, ticks and frakes bite? Why do we scratch? Why should we live? A whole day’s program could be built around any one of these questions. For example, a question such as “Why can’t a person tickle himself?” would lead not only into a discussion of the psychological factors involved, but also into the anatomy and physiology of tickling, a comparison of the armpit with the underchin, with excursions even into solipsistic examination: I exist because I think, but you exist because I cannot tickle myself without you. Word got back to the families of the intense intellectual stimulation of Jacob’s schoolroom, and many of the grown-ups petitioned Jacob to be allowed to attend, but this petition was not granted.
The only grown-up other than Jacob who ever came into his schoolroom was Eli Willard.
School was in session one day when the Connecticut itinerant reappeared after long absence, bringing Jacob’s window glass and other merchandise.