The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [92]
After extinguishing the lone pine torch that had provided illumination inside the mill, Isaac bolted the doors again and then, from beneath the high desk where he kept his accounts, he took out his fiddle-case and opened it, and tucked the fiddle under his chin, and began to play.
As we have remarked, and will continue to remark, Isaac might have been taciturn with words, but not with notes of music, and there were some people, particularly old-timers, who claimed that they could understand perfectly well what Isaac’s fiddle was saying. No, they couldn’t quite put it into words, but they could still understand it. Children, especially girls, were never allowed to listen while Isaac was fiddling. None of the houses of Stay More were close enough to the mill for the sound of this fiddling to carry to them tonight. If Jacob Ingledew had gone out onto his porch and strained his ears…but no, the ex-governor’s hearing was failing in his later years. So there was nobody to hear Isaac’s fiddle, except himself…and a band of nine men sitting on their horses in the woods behind the mill. We can only imagine what thoughts they might have been having, or what words they were speaking to one another, as they listened to the fiddling.
Most biographers of Jesse James refrain from mentioning the Stay More episode, and in others it is reduced to a mere footnote or the trailing edge of a paragraph. But the James gang itself was made up largely of Ozarkers, albeit Ozark desperadoes who were clearly determined, tonight, to part Isaac from his small fortune. So these Ozarkers in the James gang must have understood part of what Isaac’s fiddle was saying to them, and they knew for the most part that it was cussing them to high heaven and daring them to enter his mill at their own peril. We may even suppose that if Frank James was there that night, which he was, he tried his best to dissuade Jesse from proceeding. Unquestionably, one or more of the James gang must have remarked to their leader that a back woods gristmill was hardly in the same class with a bank or a train, and undoubtedly Jesse himself could not shake loose his impression of what a giant of a man Isaac was. But the James gang never backed away from an enterprise, so they didn’t. Jesse himself mounted the mill porch and banged on the door, hollering, “Open up! Cut out that goddumb fiddlin and open the godburn door!” But Isaac went on fiddling, if anything, faster, louder, more obscene. Some of the gang began heaving their shoulders against the door, trying to break it down.
As we have seen, the bigeminality of Isaac’s mill was because one door was for entering, the other for leaving, to create traffic flow and avoid confusion. Now these gangsters in their ignorance were trying to enter the exit door, and this incensed Isaac all the more, and his fiddle music became really animated and profane. But the gangsters succeeded in busting the door loose from its hinges and entered, whereupon the fiddle music abruptly stopped. “You, Luke,” the ringleader ordered one of his men, “guard this here door. Bob and Cole guard the other doors.” Then he hollered into the dark interior, “Okay, mister millerman, give up, or die!”
Now Isaac’s mill, being three-and-a-half stories in height, was a labyrinth of nooks and crannies, passages, stairs, catwalks, traps, hoppers, cribs, coves, lofts, galleries and stoops. Isaac could have been in, or on, any of these; he knew them all by heart, in the pitch dark. One advantage of dark times, even though they bring desperadoes bent on crime, is that they make seeing difficult for the desperadoes. “Strike a light,” the gangleader ordered, and one of the men lighted a torch. Huddling close together, with their revolvers cocked and pointed in every direction, the men prowled the mill, searching for Isaac. They probed all over the first level, then ascended to the second, and then to the third.