The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [78]
Isaac, we may have noticed, was a big man, one might almost say a giant of a man, six feet seven inches in height, 230 pounds in weight, shoes size fourteen. Dressed as a farmer, he should have been able to talk his way out of several of the ambushes, but, being taciturn, he was unable to talk his way out of any of them. He fought his way bare-handed out of nine and was required to use his pistol in the remaining eight ambushes, in which he killed thirteen bushwhackers and wounded the same number. At the onset of each ambush, he uttered a single obscene expletive, employing a different one each time, making a total of seventeen distinct obscene expletives. He was somewhat fatigued by the time he reached Little Rock late one afternoon, but he began at once to search for the governor’s mansion.
Being taciturn he didn’t want to ask anyone for directions, but Little Rock was not a very large town in those days, and he knew that if he just kept looking he would find the governor’s house. He did, too, somehow, but when he found it he realized that he would feel like a goddamn fool if it turned out that the occupant of the mansion was not his father. He couldn’t very well just go up and holler the goddamn house and disappear if the man wasn’t his father. Back home you didn’t need to holler a house because everybody had dogs and the dogs hollered the house for you. But here in the city, the governor, whoever he was, didn’t seem to have any goddamn dogs around the place, and Isaac would have to holler the house, and if the man wasn’t his father he would be embarrassed as hell or maybe even put in the goddamn jail. No, he couldn’t do it. He went away and wandered around through the town, thinking. He couldn’t just stop somebody on the street and ask them who the governor was. If he could read, he could have bought any one of Little Rock’s three daily newspapers and have found some mention of the governor in it, but he couldn’t read.
After much thought, he decided that the best thing would be to wait until dark, and sneak around the governor’s house peeking into windows, and if he saw that the man really was his father then he wouldn’t be reluctant to holler the house. So he did that: he waited until it was full dark and went back to the governor’s house, which had a lot of lights burning inside. But there was a soldier on the porch standing guard by the door. Isaac sneaked around to the back, but there was another soldier back there guarding the rear door. At least the two sides of the house weren’t guarded, and the bushes were fairly thick at the sides. Crawling on his belly, Isaac wormed through the side yard and the bushes and up to the side of the house, where he raised his head up to the windowsill and peered into a room. There wasn’t anybody in it. But Jesus jumping Christ, Isaac said to himself, what fancy furniture and stuff! He couldn’t conceive of his father living in a place like that, and once again, for the thousandth time, he wondered if Eli Willard actually was a goddamn drunken liar. He crept along the side of the house and peered into another window, another room. Nobody in there either, just more fancy furniture.
Wait a minute. Yonder through the door comes a woman. She is dressed in silk to the floor. She is laughing and tossing her head. The governor’s wife, you’d reckon. So Eli Willard is a drunken goddamn liar, after all. Wait a minute. Yonder through the door comes a man. He is dressed in a fancy suit with vest and tie, but that doesn’t fool Isaac. Isaac would know that face anywhere. The governor is laughing too, and holding in each hand a fancy tulip-shaped glass with amber liquid in it. What does he need two of them for? No, he is handing one to the woman. Then he and the woman bang their glasses together, and each takes a drink, and the woman gives the governor a big kiss on his cheek, and they sit