The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [98]
In time, among all the other dark chimeras and phantasms that were conceived in this world, there appeared the unmistakable specter of Eli Willard, driving another large wagon laden with barrels. He was older, and his trip around the world had broadened him about the middle, but, no doubt about it, he was Eli Willard. The barrels he had this time, he said, contained a fuel which did not smell fishy. It smelled powerful strong, all right, but it did not smell fishy. It was made from coal, a kind of rock, a pitch black rock deep in the earth. It was called kerosine, he said. There were grown people in Stay More who had been too young during Eli Willard’s previous visit to remember him, although they had heard his name many times, but this feller trying to hoax them into believing that oil could be squeezed out of a rock could not possibly be Eli Willard, but an imposter. Everybody knows that rocks are the driest things that are. No, whale oil was good enough for them, any time. But this person pretending to be Eli Willard claimed that all the whales had been killed; there was no more whale oil. Nothing but kerosine. The Stay Morons, especially the younger ones, were suspicious of him. The sun went down, darkness fell, Eli Willard lighted one of his kerosine lamps as a demonstration. His patience was ebbing. “Take it or leave it,” he said. So they left it. Whether or not they believed that oil could be squeezed out of a black rock, they equated such an artificial product with PROG RESS, and wanted none of it.
PROG RESS is always at the expense of pain and sacrifice and expense, and even if the Stay Morons did not know of the men who had toiled and died to mine the coal and make the oil, they guessed rightly that kerosine is the product of pain and sacrifice and expense. Darkness might tend to obscure and even confuse the world, but in darkness there was little pain or sacrifice or expense. Eli Willard sold not a drop of kerosine in the Ozarks, not that year anyway, and lost his shirt. Now, at Stay More, he was more dispirited than he had been years earlier when he had failed to sell raincoats and umbrellas during the drought. He turned off his demonstration lamp and sat with his head in his hands in the darkness. He hoped somebody would offer him a bed for the night, but nobody did, because with their insomnia they no longer went to bed but stayed up telling wild and fanciful stories.
Eli Willard listened to these stories, and was amazed. He had thought he understood the Ozark mind and heart as well as any outsider could, but these stories dumbfounded him. They were either incredibly fabulous or impossibly inconceivable. At any rate, he was captivated, so that when daylight came and the people stopped telling stories and went to work, he decided to stay for another night to hear more stories. But throughout the long day, with nothing to do because nobody was buying kerosine, he felt a growing ennui that left him utterly weary and miserable by late afternoon. Salina Ingledew found him in this condition and asked what was ailing him. He replied simply, “I’m bored.”
Now, to any Stay Moron, any Ozarker, the word “bored” had nothing to do with boredom, but meant humiliated or chagrined. Salina spread the word to her neighbors, and everyone assumed that Eli Willard was humiliated because of his failure to sell kerosine, but this did not change their attitude toward purchasing coal oil. Had they known what he really meant by being “bored,” they would have been puzzled, for at that time nobody in the Ozarks had ever been bored in the sense that Eli Willard meant. “Boredom” was a word, and an emotion, like “nostalgia,” that had to be learned and acquired, and fortunately Eli Willard’s boredom was not yet contagious, although he was severely afflicted with it. Anyone who has contracted acute boredom knows that it doesn’t easily go away; hence, when the people began