The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [49]
It was Jacob who found him. Jacob, who had nothing better to do than to search, and kept at it. The people of Stay More had begun to feel very sorry for Jacob. Every day they would hear his voice, somewhere up or down the creek, calling “NOEY!” and they would shake their heads and cast sorrowful glances at one another, and remember all over again how cruel they had been to Noah before the flood. One of the more superstitiously religious women, perhaps out of guilt, tried to justify or at least explain the loss of Noah: “Hit’s God’s new sign. In the last flood all perished but Noah. In this flood all survived but Noah.”
In fact, Jacob himself had given up the search, and what brought him to the vicinity of Noah’s sycamore tree was not the search for Noah, now abandoned, but a desire to go down to Parthenon to see if his neighbors there had survived the flood. This is how he happened to pass beneath Noah’s tree, and would not have noticed Noah if the latter had not noticed him first. At first Noah thought that Jacob was just an apparition, but perhaps as a simple reflex action, he said again, one last time, “Ahoy!” and Jacob looked up and saw him high overhead.
“Heigh-ho!” Jacob exclaimed. “Whoopee! Yippity-yay! Boy oh boy! Goody gander! Hooraw! Hi-de-ho! Man alive! Hot diggety darn! Tolderollol!” Jacob jumped up and kicked his heels together twice before coming down. Then he became solicitous. “Air ye all right, Brother? You aint drownded? How’s yore heartbeat? Breathin normal? Kin ye see out of both eyes? Hear out of both ears? Bowel movements reg’lar? I’ll bet ye could stand a drop of good corn. Come on down.”
“I’m all hung up,” Noah pointed out. “This here black-jack vine has got a mighty holt on me.”
“I’ll git ye loose,” Jacob declared, and prepared to climb the tree, but saw that the first limb was too high for him to reach. “I’ll have to fetch a rope or ladder,” he told Noah. “Keep cool. I’ll be right back. Don’t git narvous. Steady down. Easy does it. Be a man. Stay with it. Chin up.” Jacob turned and ran for home. It was not a short distance, and he wasn’t used to running. Pretty soon he had to stop for breath, and he told himself there wasn’t any real hurry, because if Noah had been up in that tree for seven days and six nights already he could last for another hour or so.
Jacob returned home to find Sarah yelling that Baby Ben had opened the cow-pasture gate and let all the cows out, and was being chased by the bull. Jacob shooed the bull off of Ben, spanked the latter and sent him to the house, then rounded up his cows and got them back into the pasture. No sooner had he finished this when word came that the Duckworths, in trying to dry their damp belongings, had built up too large a fire in their fireplace, and the roof had caught from sparks and the house was burning. Jacob grabbed up all his empty buckets and pails and took off for the Duckworth house, and spent the next hour helping them put out the fire. Part of the roof was gone but the rest of the place was saved. Then one of the sons of Levi Whitter, who was helping fight the fire, came running to tell Levi that his wife Destiny had fallen into the well, and they didn’t have rope long enough to reach her. Jacob ran home to get more rope and then down to the Field of Clover to help get Destiny out of the well. By the time they got her out and dried her off and revived her with whiskey, everybody was plumb wore out and hungry, so Jacob told Sarah to serve up a big supper for the rescue crews, and since Jacob’s place had escaped the flood and their larder was still undamaged if not exactly brimming, Sarah prepared what might in such lean times be considered a sumptuous feast, and afterwards the menfolk sat around in Jacob’s breezeway picking their teeth and belching in deep satisfaction. Dark