The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [52]
Noah, for his part, was more than a little discomfited. Although he had said to each visitor, “Howdy. Make yerself pleasant,” this had been a mere formality, and not one of the people had taken him at his word and sat down in the other chair, until this feller came along. The feller seemed tetched in the head someway. He was dressed kind of funny, too, in a black suit and hat and necktie. And now he was asking to be forgiven for trespassing. “Aint no trespass,” Noah reassured him. “If all them other folks could come up here, reckon ye got as much right as any.”
God—or Saint Peter—talked kind of funny, the preacher thought. He talked just like he looked: just plain folks. Well, sure, the preacher realized, God would want to make Himself appear like one of His people. “You fergive me, then?” he timidly asked.
“Why, shore,” Noah declared. “Come again sometime.”
“You mean that’s all?” the preacher asked. “That’s all there is to it? I kin git to go to heaven, now?”
Noah was a little annoyed by this feller’s silliness, but he wanted to make light of it. “Shitfire,” he remarked, “you kin git to go to hell, fer all I care.”
The preacher fainted. When he came to, he was no longer in God’s treehouse, but flat out on a sandbar by a riverbank surrounded by a vast mob of howling fiends who were pointing their fingers at him and cackling fit to bust. He fainted again at the sight of these denizens of hell, and when he revived the second time there were not so many of them and they were not cackling but just chuckling, and a woman among them who felt sorry for him took the trouble to explain the trick that had been played upon him.
He grew exceedingly angry, as well as mortified. Strangely enough, the brunt of his anger became focused upon Noah, as if Noah had been responsible for the trick, and the preacher became determined to “git even, someway.” He began to preach against men living in trees. His gatherings were small, because most people were still laughing at him too much to be able to sit and listen to him seriously. But to whatever gathering he could assemble, in the name of God, in brush arbors constructed in Stay More, Parthenon and Jasper, he ranted against the unnaturalness of men living in trees.
By purest coincidence only, this was just two years after Darwin had published the findings of his voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle, and we may be sure that the preacher had never heard of Darwin, and in any case the conflict between religion and the theory of evolution was still years in the future, but the preacher accused Noah Ingledew of being a monkey. “What other reason would a creature have fer livin up in a tree?” he would demand of his audiences, and quote Scripture to prove that man was meant to walk on the ground and dwell on the ground, and a man living up in a tree was bound to bring the wrath of God upon all the people.
Little by little, the preacher converted a few of the people to his position against Noah, but he could persuade none of them to join him in his plan, which was to take an axe and chop down the sycamore, so in the end he had to go it all alone. But as soon as he began swinging the axe against the tree, in the light of the moon one night, Noah stepped to the edge of his dogtrot (or rather birdtrot, because no dogs