The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [89]
Everyone in Stay More, and half the populaces of Parthenon and Jasper, gathered at The Ingledew Grist Co. to watch the first firing of the engine. Toliver Cole (or Cole Toliver) was impressed with the size of his audience, and for the occasion he wore a top hat, cutaway, and spats, although in place of a tie he wore his usual red bandana. Fifteen girls fell in love with him, so he could take his pick, and afterwards picked Rachel Ingledew, Isaac’s young sister, who became Mrs. Cole, or Mrs. Toliver. But the ceremony of the firing was awesome, horrifying, well worth the trip to those who had come from a distance. Lum Ingledew, Isaac’s brother, was given the concession, and did a brisk business in sassafrasade, jujubes, and folding fans. As the engine started up, women fanned themselves, and prayed, or fainted. Grown men trembled and wiped their sweating palms on their shirtfronts. Children screamed, dogs howled, birds flew away. It was the Second Tuesday of the Month, and up the hill at the Ingledew dogtrot, the old Eli Willard clock said PRONG, unnoticed, unheard.
Strange to relate, Isaac’s business fell off. People reverted to laboriously pounding their grain in stone mortars, Indian-fashion. Being taciturn, Isaac could not go around asking people why they would not patronize his mill. Were they actually afraid of his engine? At any rate, he had to lay off his new brother-in-law, who went back to Springfield, taking Rachel with him. For days, weeks, Isaac sat in his captain’s chair on the porch of his mill, waiting for customers. He would go home late in the evening, and Salina would climb him and make him feel better, momentarily, but she never asked him, “How’s business?” and even if she had, he could not have told her. He kept a fire lighted under his boiler, and checked the pressure gauge now and then, but never threw the switch to start the engine.
Gradually, the people, although they did not want to patronize his mill, began to miss the chatting and gossip that they had indulged in while waiting for Colonel Coon to grind their grain, and one by one, sackless or with their gunnysacks empty, they began coming back to his mill and sitting on his porch and chatting and gossiping with one another. Isaac sat among them, listening, yearning to open his mouth and ask them why they did not patronize his mill any longer. Were they afraid of his engine? Would they bring their grain to him if he threw out the engine and moved the mill around so that its wheel was in Swains Creek? What about earplugs? Or what if he offered to pick up and deliver their grain so that they did not have to see, let alone hear, the engine? But he could not ask these things. And because he never spoke, the people began to take his presence for granted, they began to feel that he was only an inanimate fixture, and they began to talk about him as if he were not there.
It is amazing how much a man can learn about himself in this fashion. Isaac learned that he was well-belovèd to them all. He learned how much the men envied him because of his beautiful wife Salina, and how much the women envied Salina because she had “caught” a big, strong, handsome man like Isaac. He learned that there was not a man in Newton County who was willing to fight him, on a dare, or for any amount of money. He learned that all of the men had dreams, nearly every night, involving amatory sport with Salina, and that the women had dreams involving the same with Isaac. But he did not learn why neither the men nor the women, nor the children, would bring their grain to be ground in his mill.
In time, his own fields of wheat and corn were ripe for harvest, and he harvested them,