The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [54]
Why, then, was his treehouse bigeminal? Merely in emulation of his brother’s dogtrot? If, as we have conclusively demonstrated, bigeminality is symbolic of the division of the sexes, was the second half of Noah’s house merely wishful thinking or subconscious yearning? A symbol of his absent “better half”? Perhaps. It could well be that he never gave up hope that some girl would again bring him a piece of cornbread which he could accept without clumsiness. But if any visitor to his treehouse remarked upon its bigeminality, Noah would simply point out that one half was where he slept and the other half was where he cooked and ate and sat, not necessarily in that order. It is only purest coincidence, of no significance whatever, that Noah’s first two years in his tree-house were the same two years that Thoreau lived at Walden, but like Thoreau, Noah had one chair for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society—although that society usually consisted only of his nephews and nieces.
In our pitiful ignorance of the man, we do not even know how he managed to entertain them, apart from presenting them with candy apples. Did he tell them stories, or did they just sit and munch their apples in silence? Little Benjamin, at least, must have been silent, for it is told about him that he was eight years old before uttering his first words, which were, “Watch it, Paw!” at the moment the latter was about to be charged from behind by a bull while in the pasture, whereupon Jacob, after jumping out of the bull’s path, exclaimed to Benjamin, “How come you never said nary a word afore now?” to which Benjamin replied, “I never had nothin ’portant to say.”
If this legend is true (and I have no reason to doubt it), then Benjamin must have sat silently munching his candy apple while Noah talked, but what did Noah say? He does not seem the storytelling type, even less the joke-cracking type. Did he verbalize his wonder at the mystery of the pollination of corn, or of the sun’s diurnal appearance? Quite possibly he did not talk at all, but it is disquieting to visualize the two of them sitting there silently, eerie in that aerie, for over four years, until Noah remarked, “Yore pap tells me ye kin talk right easy,” and Benjamin allowed, “Yep,” and Noah shook his head in commiseration and said, “A durn shame.” Thereafter, Benjamin felt obliged to say something, so he began, from the age of nine onwards, to ask Noah questions. It never mattered that Noah was unable to answer a single one of Benjamin’s questions, or at least to answer one accurately; Benjamin went on asking them, and Noah went on trying and failing to answer them. There were things Benjamin could not discuss with his parents. We know that he slept, until his twelfth year, in a “truckle,” or trundle bed, at the foot of his parents’ own bed, and that in that proximity he was suffered to eavesdrop upon their occasional (infrequent; once a month, on the average, usually the night of the Second Tuesday of the Month) exchanges of words that meant nothing to him. (Could it be that he had never talked because he associated words with nothingness, or, worse, dark unfathomable deeds connected with the words his father and mother spoke to each other in their bed at night?)
“How’s that?” Benjamin would hear one of them say to the other in the dark in their bed.
“Wal, I reckon,” he would hear the other reply. He could not tell their voices apart; his mother’s voice at such times was low and husky. Benjamin could not tell if these were his father or his mother:
“Yore nose is cold.”
“There.”
“Move down.”
“Yore knee is in my monkey.”
“Seems lak we caint git it through.”
“Here I go.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“I said.”
“Now.”
“Where?”
“Holy hop-toads!”
“Done?