The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [77]
He asked her directly, “You don’t know where your husband is?”
“Last I heared tell,” she replied, “he was headin fer the Missippi River for to fight fer Gen’l Steele.”
“Ah hah,” Eli Willard was moved to murmur, marveling at the difficulty of communications in Arkansas. “Madam, I have the honor to be the first informant to report to you the wonderful news that your estimable husband has been elected to the governorship of the State of Arkansas.”
Sarah went into her kitchen and began decocting an infusion of jimsonweed leaves. If that didn’t help, she might have to try a purgative of slippery-elm bark.
The narcotic in jimsonweed is similar to that of belladonna, or deadly nightshade, but the dose in Eli Willard’s drink was only enough to make him slightly intoxicated. After selling Sarah a few of his balms and unguents on credit, and failing further in his attempts to convince her that her husband was governor, he went on his way, visiting the other dwellings of Stay More, each in its turn, and the news was widely norated around the village that Eli Willard, whom everyone had always assumed to be a teetotaler, had turned up drunk, and in his drunkenness was telling everybody that Jacob Ingledew was governor of Arkansas. Sarah was boiling her slippery-elm bark as fast as she could, but still it would take several hours before it would be ready to use, and by that time Eli Willard’s case of sunstroke might have reached final coma.
Captain Isaac Ingledew of the Federal Infantry, pausing in Stay More to rest from his constant pursuit of John Cecil, learned of Eli Willard’s latest visit. He was a great admirer of Eli Willard, having spent his “growing-up” years looking forward to each reappearance of the peddler, who had usually given him a piece of candy. He knew that Eli Willard never drank. Now he did not want to believe that a nice man like Eli Willard was drunk and saying crazy things about his father, so he sought out Eli Willard himself. Being, as we have observed, the most taciturn of all the Ingledews (whence came his nickname “Coon”) as well as the most profane, Isaac said to him simply, “Shit. Governor?”
“Yes indeed,” Eli Willard replied. “And congratulations to you too, for being captain. No doubt your father will promote you to major, or even colonel.”
“Where’d ye git that?” Isaac wanted to know.
“Which?”
“That Paw is governor.”
“I read it in a newspaper,” Eli Willard declared.
“Lak hell.”
“I did, believe me. I considered that it might have been a mistake, but how many men in small Ozark villages would be named Jacob Ingledew?”
“Nary a goddamn one.”
“Then your father is governor, no doubt about it, and again my congratulations to you. Now, may I interest you in this bottle of new, sure-fire, all-purpose…”
After much thought, Isaac decided that Eli Willard might conceivably be right, even if he were obviously drunk for the first time. Isaac wanted to believe him. Still, he did not protest when his mother and a group of Stay Morons grabbed Eli Willard and held him down and made him take a large dose of slippery-elm bark. This powerful purgative gave the poor peddler such a bad case of the canters (more severe than the trots but less severe than the gallops) that he was unable to leave Stay More for three days. Sarah gave him a bed, from which, however, he frequently had to canter. On the third day, after the canter had slowed to a trot, and the trot had slowed to a walk, Sarah said to him, “Now then, what did ye say the name of the governor is?”
“John Johnson,” Eli Willard replied, and Sarah let him go on his way.
Isaac Ingledew realized that the only way to find out if his father were actually governor would be to go and find his father and make him deny it or admit it. Isaac—or any man—should have been reluctant to go off alone through bushwhacker country, but he wasn’t afraid. He decided, however, to change from his uniform into civvies, and not to carry a rifle but only a pistol concealed under his belt. This showed