The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [55]
“Um.”
His parents never talked like this during the daytime, and it puzzled Benjamin to the extent that, when he was nine years old and began to ask Noah questions, he would repeat what his parents had said in bed to Noah and ask Noah what it meant. Even assuming Noah actually knew the meaning of the various utterances, doubtless he would not have been able to discuss it with a mere lad of nine. So his “answers” were inaccurate. He would, for example, interpret “Seems lak we caint git it through” as meaning that Sarah was trying to help Jacob put his pants on and couldn’t get one leg into them. “Monkey,” he would define, is the base of the spine, where a monkey’s tail would go, so “Yore knee is in my monkey”…Benjamin seemed satisfied with these explanations, but by the time he was twelve years old and pubescent himself, and had witnessed sufficient numbers of animals wild and domestic pairing themselves together with a strange mixture both of apparent pain and intense pleasure, it dawned on him that the voices he heard in the night once a month on the average had some connection with this business of one animal having a hole which another animal would wish to probe with his dood, and although Benjamin would not have wished to suspect that his very own dear mother ever did that sort of thing with his father, at length he persuaded himself that it was inevitable, so that the time came when in the night he heard one of his parents saying to the other:
“Seems as ’ough we caint fasten our thangs together no more.”
Benjamin was moved to suggest, audibly, “Try a rope.”
Whereupon his father trundled the trundle bed out of the door, across the breezeway into the other wing, where Benjamin slept thereafter until he was fifteen, when he left home.
Noah has been accused, unjustly I think, of being partly responsible for Benjamin’s leaving home. Benjamin, like any resident of Stay More, male or female, had been obliged, from the age of seven onward, to work as hard as he possibly could, starting at sunrise and keeping on until sunset, the year around, Sundays not excepted. Since Benjamin was Jacob’s oldest son, and since at the age of fifteen he was full-grown, he was obliged to do a man’s work somewhat prematurely, with the predictable result that he came down with the frakes, which kept him in bed for most of his fifteenth year, and left him with, not so much a sense of futility or the vainness of labor, but rather with a conviction that if a man (or boy) had to work, there ought to be some kind of work somewhere that wasn’t so goshdarned hard. But when he asked his father about this, when he asked his father if there weren’t places in the world somewhere where people didn’t have to toil from sunup to sundown, his father merely gave him a lecture on how Stay More was the center of the universe, as it were, and of the necessity for a man (or boy) to do the most labor of which he was capable, to “do his damnedest,” as Jacob put it. So Benjamin went to Noah. “Uncle Noah,” he inquired, “I been wonderin: aint there anyplace out yonder in the world where a body’d not have to slave the livelong day jist to do what was ’spected of him?”
Noah could not tell him of cities, having never seen one himself, unless you count Memphis, which at the time Noah had briefly passed through it on his way to the Ozarks was scarcely more than a large town. Noah could tell him of certain shiftless persons who managed to eke out a subsistence with a modicum of effort, but Noah chose wisely not to tell him of these types. All Noah could tell him was what little he himself had heard rumored about a distant Promised Land way off in the west, which was called in the Spanish “Hot Oven,” or Californy, where gold had recently been discovered, and where, it was said, a man could spend a few hours searching for gold and then take the rest of the week off. Benjamin asked Noah to explain what “gold” was, and why it was so valuable, and Noah did the best he could.
“How come you never wanted to go there?” Benjamin asked him. Noah explained that it was a long