The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [50]
“Great Caesar’s ghost!” Jacob exclaimed. “I plumb fergot all about him! Where’s a ladder? Quick!” Jacob rounded up rope, a ladder, and an axe to cut the black-jack vines, and with a torch of rags soaked in bear’s oil to light his way, went as fast as he could back toward the sycamore where Noah, meanwhile, having convinced himself that it really was just an apparition that he had mistaken for his brother, had supped on raw pigeon, relieved himself, and gone to sleep. Once Jacob got up into the sycamore, he had trouble waking Noah, and the still-sleepy Noah muttered to the effect that he might as well stay here. But Jacob got him down and took him home, or rather, since Noah’s cabin was washed away, into his own house, where he was bedded in the loft of the kitchen.
We have essayed, in this chapter, to approach an exploration of duality, particularly as manifested in the bipartition or conjugation of Jacob Ingledew’s dogtrot house, which he in his simplistic perspective considered a manifestation of the bipartition or conjugation of the sexes, but which, although he was nearly correct in that limited interpretation, has hints of extension into far larger dualities: of drought and flood, of hot and cold, of day and night, of living and not living, of sowing and reaping, of breaking down and building up. We shape our buildings, and thereafter they shape us.
“You know somethin?” Noah remarked one day to his brother. “Hit weren’t nearly so bad as you’d think, up there in that tree. Naw. Why, it was kinder fun. Could ye lend me the borry of yore saw and hammer…?”
Chapter five
It was an anomaly, a freak of the Ozarks, as it were, but so was Noah Ingledew, as it were. And yet, who are we to take the measure of that man and pronounce him abnormal? There is in each of us the child who yearns to build treehouses, to return to primordial man’s arboreal aerie. We don’t know Noah, and never will; a man whose vocabulary of oaths was limited to a single illogical combination of feces and flame might seem to lack the imagination to design and build the original penthouse shown in our illustration; and yet not only did he build it, but also he made a couple of innovations in architecture, to wit: it is the first split level dwelling in the Ozarks (and bigeminal, by Jiminy!) and, perhaps owing in part to the difficulty of building up a chimney of stone to that height (two hats, or over thirty feet above the ground), it was the first dwelling in the Ozarks heated by a metal stove with tin flue—although where Noah obtained the metal and how he fashioned it into a stove, and what the stove actually looked like, I cannot say.
Noah’s house and its massive sycamore tree (not the same tree he was stuck in a few pages back) were located not far from the center of Stay More, on the banks of Swains Creek, around a sharp bend of the creek as it meanders its tortuous course through the valley. The house remained stubbornly clinging to the sycamore tree for years and years after Noah’s death—unoccupied even during times of housing shortage, not necessarily through reverence for Noah’s memory but rather out of superstition—until well into the twentieth century, when a mixed crowd of “modern” youths, to whom the name “Noah Ingledew” meant merely the faceless cofounder of Stay More, climbed up into it for the purpose of sexual sport (a purpose to which Noah himself had put the treehouse on only one fleeting occasion), and through a combination of the ardor of their sport and the weight of their numbers (there were four boys and four girls) caused the tree house,