The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [58]
“What’s a Mormon?” Jacob said to Lizzie.
But Lizzie could only shake her head, and ask, “Is the news pretty bad?”
Jacob declared, “My boy Benjamin is dead.”
Everyone in Stay More assembled in the yard of Jacob’s dogtrot to offer their condolences to Jacob and Sarah, and to discuss the news of the atrocity. Jacob asked them if any of them knew what a Mormon was, but none of them had ever heard of such a creature. Jacob addressed the gathering briefly, in conclusion, expressing his sorrow at the loss of his eldest son, and more particularly his sorrow that his son had been misguided and deluded into leaving home. Jacob’s voice rose. “But jist let me say this. Fer all of you folks, and fer all of yore generations after ye, from this day forward, ferevermore, I, Jacob Ingledew, do hereby solemnly place a curse upon any person who leaves Stay More to go west. Amen.”
So it was that Isaac took his brother’s place as the oldest son, just as earlier he had taken his brother’s place sleeping at the foot of the parents’ bed, where he remained until manhood, wisely keeping his mouth shut when he heard his father or mother saying unfathomable words in the dark once a month. Isaac Ingledew was never much given to talk anyway, and it is said of him that he earned his nickname, “Coon,” because, like a raccoon, he never opened his mouth except to eat or to cuss.
To appreciate his nickname, we would have to have heard a raccoon cussing, and many of us have not. Isaac, as we shall see (or hear), was the greatest cusser of all the Ingledews. Unlike Benjamin, who allegedly never spoke until he was eight, Isaac said his first word at eleven months, the word being “shitfire,” which he must have learned from one of his relatives, but by the age of six he had broadened his stock of oaths to include all that were known (and some unknown) in Stay More. When his father bought for him a fiddle from Eli Willard, he quickly learned how to play it, and became eventually a champion fiddler who was capable, on occasion, of making the fiddle cuss. We are going to see and hear a lot of Isaac “Coon” Ingledew, for it was he who fought beside his father in the War.
The War. The first anybody (other than Jacob Ingledew, who kept it to himself) heard of war, heard that the whole nation had split itself right in two and was fighting itself, was when coffee, tea, pepper and such, which were always imported, became at first short in supply, and then impossible to obtain, at which point Eli Willard, who had been supplying these items, confessed that he could no longer obtain them. Then he held aloft the particular item that he was selling this year: a Sharps rifle.
“Stop!” Jacob Ingledew exclaimed. “Turn yore wagon and git the hell back whar ye came from!”
The people stared at Jacob, wondering why he was being suddenly hostile to his old friend from Connecticut.
“But you’re going to need these,” Eli Willard protested, still holding the Sharps rifle aloft. “No man should be without one. As a weapon it is vastly superior to your old breechloaders and flint-locks.”
“Fer shootin folks, you mean,” Jacob said. “Git back down the road, I say.”
But the other men of Stay More were curious to examine the new hardware (Eli Willard was also carrying a line of side-arms), and they protested to Jacob, as respectfully as they could, stopping short of telling him outright to shut up, but making it clear that they couldn’t understand why they shouldn’t buy a new shootin iron if they felt like it.
“Yeah,” Noah chimed in, “shitfire, let me see thet thang,” and he took the Sharps rifle from Eli Willard and began examining it appreciatively.
Jacob sighed. It was a small sigh, as sighs go, but we should try to understand it: two years previously, the people of Newton County had been asked to send a delegate to a special state