Yonder Mountain: An Ozarks Anthology

Donald Harington

Donald Harington Donald Harington was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, on December 22, 1935. Before his death in 2009, he authored fourteen novels, among them The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, The Choiring of the Trees, Lightning Bug, With, and his final Enduring. Let Us Build Us a City, an exploration of small towns in Arkansas, is nonfiction. His fiction is largely set in the imagined town of Stay More, Arkansas, its denizens fondly known as Stay Morons. A Distinguished Professor of Art History at the University of Arkansas, living in Fayetteville with his wife, Kim, Harington was the recipient of literary prizes including the Porter Prize, the Heasley Prize, and the Robert Penn Warren Award. In 1999, he was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame and in 2006 was presented the Oxford American award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. Having lost his hearing at age twelve, Harington is praised for his reproduction of vanishing Ozark folk language; he spent his boyhood Ozark summers in Drakes Creek, the village a model for his beloved Stay More. qQ Telling Time One time there was a man in our town who could tell stories. Lion Judah Stapleton was his name, but everyone called him simply Lion Jude, or I thought they did, taking the nickname to refer not to his lionheart nor to the emblematic lion of Judah (Genesis 49:9) but to 76 one of his stories involving a mountain lion. Years later, I had gone away to college and was lying in bed one night, just lying there freeassociating , as one does when one can’t sleep, when the memory of Lion Jude came abruptly back to me, and I suddenly realized my error: his nickname had not been Lion but Lyin’ because he told such stories. But I decided to go on remembering him as Lion Jude. Not that I wasn’t willing to accept the truth that all of his stories had been lies, but because, as one does when one learns one’s mistake, I preferred clinging to the original spelling and even to endowing the memory of Jude with leonine qualities to go with it: he did, after all, possess a rather long, shaggy mane of hair, was muscular in the right places, and, when lounging, as he nearly always was, he lounged with a catlike languor. He was the only loafer on Ingledew’s store porch who didn’t whittle. Some said it was because he couldn’t whittle and talk at the same time, but whittling didn’t stop the other men from talking, not even Fent Bullen, who alone among the whittlers was actually carving something artistic. The other men just endlessly sliced their barlows across sticks of cedar, basswood or white oak, systematically covering their ankles with worthless shavings in the course of the day, but Fent Bullen employed a variety of fancy knives, some with spey blades and spear blades, to carve wooden chains, intricately linked, some links with a ball-in-cage or a slip joint, illusionistic, complicated , pleasant to the eye and fantastic to the finger. Nobody anywhere could compete with Fent in the carving of wood . . . but my story is about Lion Jude, not Fent. Nobody anywhere could compete with Lion Jude in the telling of stories. Or so we thought. In fact—and this is a little story I sometimes tell on myself, in self-deprecation, because I was the only son of Stay More ever to attend college—until I was about nine or ten years old, and had saved enough from my little earnings picking tomatoes to buy myself a barlow and join the other whittlers on the store porch, I had the impression that a “store” is a place where “stories” are told! Oh, of course I knew that the store sold things, and practically my earliest memory is giving Miss Lola Ingledew two pennies and receiving in return a large peppermint stick, but not long after that I went out Donald Harington 77 onto the store’s porch and sat on the edge of it and listened to Lion Jude tell the one about the babes in the woods, which like to have scared me to death. It was a Saturday afternoon. Years later, whenever I went to a movie on a Saturday afternoon, I remembered my first story at the store . . . and sometimes reflected, after a bad movie...