The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [6]
“Yo. But in between? Between drunkenness and sobriety there is a wide country, and what is the Name of that Country?”
“Joy?”
“No. Not if, by joy, you mean that kind which, although you have never felt it and thus cannot understand it, comes to the gentleman when with the lady in one-on-top-together-fastened-between. Not a bit of it, old fellow.”
“Wal, what do you call the Country, then?”
“Importance,” Fanshaw uttered, and let the word hover in the air between them like a hummingbird before continuing. “We know that we are nothing, you and I. And it is true, we are as nothing in the sight of Wahkontah. We are but flies he swats in sport. But the pe-tsa-ni—firewater—permits us for a while to forget this. The fire burns away our personal insignificance, and leaves us for a while a great sense of importance.”
“But aint that joy?”
“Not like—” Fanshaw began, but stopped and contemplated Jacob for a moment before declaring, “My friend, some day you must experience the one-on-top-together-fastened-between.”
Jacob kicked a small rock around on the ground for a while and then drew some doodles in the dirt with a stick, and at length said, “Aw, shoot,” and, changing the subject, proposed their topic for debate that day: Which enjoys life more, a short-tailed dog or a long-tailed dog? (Both Fanshaw and Jacob Ingledew had dogs. Fanshaw’s dog was short-tailed, Ingledew’s was a long-tailed hound bitch; these animals had fought one another at first but later seemed to be on amicable terms.) Fanshaw agreed to this topic of debate, and for the next hour the two men matched oratory, but, since there was no referee, the victor could not be decided and each man felt that himself had won.
These debates between Fanshaw and Ingledew were both a sport and a diversion: they gave the two men something to talk about, because often there would be nothing to talk about after exhausting the usual run of topics: weather, crops and the existence of God. A few years later, every little settlement in the Ozarks had its debating society, and it is thought that their repertoire of topics for debate originated with Jacob Ingledew and Fanshaw. Which is worse, a cold or a hangover? Which is the superior tree, the oak or the pine? Which is worse, blindness or deafness? Which makes better whiskey, springwater or rainwater? Is the earth round or flat? And so on. It was the last named topic which, next to their debates about the existence of God, provided the liveliest disputation.
Fanshaw’s people had long believed that the earth was round and revolved slowly around the sun. This notion struck Jacob as fantastic and incredible. “If thet were so, everbody would git throwed offen it!” was his first reaction to this preposterous concept. Jacob began to believe that such a crackpot concept was the result of living in a round house, and he said so to Fanshaw. But Fanshaw proceeded by skillful argument to state his case, and Jacob lost ground, inch by inch, until he was left with only one line of defense: “Wal, if the earth is round, then we must be on the top side of it, and all them pore devils on the bottom has fell off.”
To this, Fanshaw propounded an original explanation of gravity which I would like to dignify with the title Fanshaw’s Law of Gravity, for, if it is correct, he goes far beyond Newton in explaining that mysterious force, namely, that all objects, all matter, actually weigh twice their apparent weight; the other half of their actual weight creates a counteracting “pull” which is the gravity for the objects on the opposite side of the round globe. Thus, all matter is exerting an even outward pull from the center of the earth which is matched by the inward pull that we ordinarily think of as gravity. This concept was almost beyond Jacob’s power of comprehension, but Fanshaw made it clear and simple by saying, “In other words, everything is holding everything else together.”
After Fanshaw had left that day, and Jacob’s brother Noah came back from where he was hiding in the woods during the Indian’s visit, Jacob told him