The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [99]
Both the post office and the school remained closed during the Second Spell of Darkness, but nobody seemed to miss either one of them. Most of what came through the post office had been what we would today refer to as “junk mail” and it was a relief not to get any. As for the school, the people began to realize that Jacob Ingledew had had a good reason for excluding reading and writing from his old academy. The more one read or wrote, the less one talked. At any rate, Boone Harrison the schoolmaster returned home to the county and town he was named after, and the schoolhouse was converted, as we shall soon see, to other purposes. When everybody told, or had heard, every possible tale and fiction that could be told or heard, and the most inventive of the yarn spinners had exhausted their imaginations, the Stay Morons turned for diversion to the singing of songs. Modern folklorists have tabulated and recorded 2,349 distinct “folk songs” heard in the Ozarks, all but 847 of which have been traced to ancient England, Scotland, Wales, or Ireland; 176 of the latter were invented and composed in Stay More at one time or another, but all 2,349 of the songs were known by heart to one or more Stay Morons, so the dark and starless nights were filled with song, and Isaac Ingledew would furnish accompaniment with his fiddle, at least after the children had gone to bed.
Song is poetry, of a kind, and the night is the most poetic of times, so the people of Stay More were no longer oppressed by the darkness, and most all of them were able to sleep again after a night of singing. Most all of them, that is, except Isaac Ingledew, who had discovered during his months of insomnia that sleep is an extravagant and useless pastime, and who never slept again, to the end of his days. We do not know, and can scarcely imagine, how he passed the many hours of life that others give over to slumber, but he was never idle, except when Salina was climbing him, which she continued to do, every chance she got, until…. But that is another story, another chapter, another edifice.
Chapter nine
It was built as a schoolhouse, and so it remained during the Decade of Light, Boone Harrison holding sway as literacy-giver to the young and old of Stay More, many of whom would walk three or four miles in all kinds of weather just to “git a little schoolin.” The schoolhouse was both a house of learning and the community center. Its bigeminality (we have hinted unsubtly and often that architectural bigeminality is sexual) was definitely and overtly sexist: the left door was for females, the right door for males, without exception (although an occasional “tomboy” among the girls would boldly use the right door…but no boy ever used the left door, because there was never the equivalent of a “queen,” “nancy,” “molly,” or “betty” anywhere in the Ozarks). Since both doors led to the same one-room interior, we may assume that the reason for two of them was to facilitate egress at recess, lunch and dismissal, which, when indicated by Boone Harrison, cleared the room in 3.6 seconds. Any door, of course, is for both entering and leaving. Some doors are more pleasurable to enter, while others are more pleasurable to exit, but in any case one must usually always enter before exiting. The study of architecture is a fine thing.
Boone Harrison never discussed the doors with his pupils; tacitly they understood what the doors were for, and which to use, according to sex. The signal to enter was the ringing of the bell, housed in the small cupola atop the ridgepole; the signal to exit was Boone Harrison sitting down. When he sat down, he would take out his pocketknife and whittle goose-feathers into