The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [46]
It turned out that on this particular visit, Eli Willard was hawking silk umbrellas for ladies and gentlemen, parasols for children, and oil slicker raincoats for all, as well as eaves trough hangers and metal spigots for rainbarrels. When neither Jacob nor his pupils expressed any interest whatever in merchandise of this nature, Eli Willard broke down and confessed that he had not been able to sell a single item of this line anywhere in the Ozarks and was now on the edge of penury. Reputable meteorologists back East had assured him that the following spring and summer promised to be very wet, but so far he was totally without luck in pushing his raingear and appurtenances.
“Buck up, feller,” Jacob tried to comfort him, and then explained to his class, “By and large Peddlers don’t generally cry. This is jist an exception.” Then Jacob got out of bed and conducted Eli Willard across the breezeway into the other wing of his house, and told Sarah to try to scare up something to feed the poor feller. They fed him, and Jacob paid him for the glass and reminded him of how much money he still owed him, which brought some small cheer to Eli Willard as he rode on his luckless way.
It is idle to speculate whether the Stay Morons erred grievously in failing to patronize Eli Willard in his latest line of merchandise, for the rains that came the following spring and summer would have rendered umbrellas and rainwear practically useless. It was almost as if Nature, in clumsy headlong atonement for her stinginess with moisture the year before, overcompensated, went too far. Deluged. Inundated. It was terrible. If not for the proverbial forty days and nights, it rained steadily nearly every day for over a month, nobody measured or kept track but it must have been more inches than ever fell in any other month in the history of the Ozarks.
The rains began, ironically enough, on the second Tuesday of a month, right in the middle of a gala bergu that the Parthenonians threw to fete the Stay Morons for the hospitality of their waterwell.
A bergu is a kind of stew, consisting of five hundred squirrels properly cleaned and boiled to the consistency of soup in a twenty-gallon iron kettle. The Parthenonian’s bergu was almost ready, while the Stay Morons stood around with their napkins tucked into their collars and their knives and spoons gripped in their hands, when the first raindrops fell, and then the cloudburst began, and in their haste to get the bergu indoors the Parthenonians dropped the kettle and spilled the five hundred stewed squirrels into the dry bed of Shop Creek, which soon began to fill with water. The Stay Morons went home hungry, and sat and watched as, day by day, Swains Creek rose higher and higher, left its banks and overflowed into fields, and Banty Creek roared through its gorges, engorging them. If the Stay Morons were angry at the Parthenonians for spilling and spoiling the bergu, the Parthenonians became angry at the Stay Morons because, being downstream from Stay More, they already had more water in the Little Buffalo than they could handle but Stay More kept sending its creeks on down to Parthenon anyway. “You’re stranglin us!” John Bellah of Parthenon protested to Jacob Ingledew. “Send yore creeks somewheres else!” But there was nowhere else to send the creeks.
The Parthenonians talked about bringing a cease-and-desist action against the Stay Morons in the county court, but all the lawyers had fled to higher ground. Then the Little Buffalo River submerged the hollers along the base of Reynolds Mountain and shut Parthenon off from Stay More for the duration of the deluge, and no more was heard from them.
Until the flood became really impossible, the Stay Morons managed to keep their good sense of humor and even to make jokes about it. Their favorite jokes involved Noah Ingledew, because of his name. “Keep a watch on him,” they would say, “and