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By Root 1378 0

and gossiped freely with one another, while he ground their grain and meal in silence. Whenever something went wrong with the machinery in his mill, he would cuss profusely and obscenely, but otherwise he kept his mouth shut. People came from miles in every direction to Isaac’s mill, but everyone knew that Colonel Coon did not enjoy speech, and no one tried to draw him out. Still they could not help wondering whether he ever spoke at least to his wife. It is something of a miracle that Isaac Ingledew had a wife. But he did. Her name was Salina Denton, naturally pronounced “Sleeny,” and she was a real “looker,” as they said of her. Isaac Ingledew came across her, or chanced upon her, or stumbled into her life, toward the end of the War, when he and his men (or rather man, a lone major who remained the last infantryman in Colonel Coon’s command at that late juncture) were pursuing the remnants of the Confederate army in Newton County, a band of three bushwhackers.

Although small in numbers, this band was still wreaking havoc from one end of the county to the other, terrorizing helpless women and children and old men, and Isaac and his one-man army were determined, although outnumbered, to wipe them out. They caught and killed one of the three after the band had raided the Denton cabin, thereby equalizing the two armies, and while his major went off in pursuit of the other two, Isaac inspected the damage to the Denton cabin, and found Salina Denton cowering there, alone, in ranting hysterics. He wanted to calm her down, but, being taciturn, he didn’t know what to say. He tried to pat her on the back, but when he did so, she began to climb him. He set her down gently but she climbed him again. Again he set her down, but again she climbed him, and by this time he became aroused, to put it mildly. So the third time she climbed him, he did not set her down, although she went on raving. He was, we should remember, a giant of a man, and while there was nothing exactly small about Salina Denton, he supported her easily. Apparently the act or deed brought her to her senses, for afterward she said calmly, “Whar am I?” and then she looked at him and said, “Who are you? And what’s thet out fer?” Hastily he buttoned himself and fled.

He and his major spent the next year tracking down and killing the two remnants of the Confederate Army, and then they declared the War won and went home. Isaac planted most of the eighty acres his father had given him in wheat and corn, and began the construction of his mill, assisted by his brother Lum and his Swain uncles. He had finished one door of the mill when a girl appeared, on foot, barefoot, holding an infant in her arms. It took him a moment to recognize and remember her, but still he did not even say “Howdy.” She did, however, and then she held out the infant to him and asked, “Do ye wanter take a gander at yore son?” Isaac took a gander at the baby, and even chucked it under the chin; he tried to mumble “Cootchycoo,” but the words would not come. And then he said to Salina the only thing that anybody ever heard him say to her publicly. Gesturing across the valley at the distant knoll where the dogtrot house his father had given him was located, he declared, “That’s my place up yonder.” Salina and her baby moved in. The infant boy was named Denton Ingledew, after his mother’s last name. Turning back to his work, Isaac built another door on the mill, and thus we might think of the mill as being also bigeminal in symbolism of the new union, but in this particular case we know that the bigeminality was strictly functional: one door was for people going into the mill, the other door was for people coming out.

Isaac worked that day until well past dark, deliberately postponing going home to his woman, to whom he did not know what else to say. But inevitably he had to go home, where Salina was waiting with a pretty fine supper she had fixed. While he ate it, Isaac couldn’t think of a blessed thing to say, but that was all right, because Salina, by contrast with her husband, was just about the most