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By Root 1321 0

quill pens for his pupils to write with. He manufactured his own ink from the “ink balls” that grow on oak trees, boiling them in a little water and setting the liquid with copperas. The pupils always licked their pens as an aid to concentration before commencing to write, and this caused their lips to turn the blue-green color of the ink. It was easy to distinguish the literate from the illiterate Stay Morons: the latter did not have blue-green lips. During the Decade of Light, there arose almost a caste system based upon lip color, with those of deep blue-green lips at the upper caste, and those with natural lips at the bottom. It was possible to cross caste lines by kissing, and kissing became very popular, until in time the color of one’s lips was meaningless, and the caste system fell apart, and the Decade of Light came to an end, and Boone Harrison sat down for the last time, then stood up and went home to the county and town he was named after, and those who could read and write forgot how.

The schoolhouse was empty during the first years of the Second Spell of Darkness. Vandals broke its windows one by one, and someone stole the picture of George Washington that was its sole interior decoration. The pages of the McGuffey’s Readers, Ray’s Arithmetics and the Blue Back Spellers were employed as “asswipes” until they were used up. Bats and owls roosted in the ceiling of the schoolhouse, and were noctural. Everything was nocturnal. It was dark and often starless and even the moon was missing as often as not. Because all women are beautiful in the dark, all the girls and women of Stay More were ravishing, and were ravished. And because the darkness makes one invisible to one’s enemies, nobody had any enemies. It was a dark and peaceful and licentious time.

Then, one day (or night), for the first time since the coming of the “saddlebag preacher” who had pestered Noah Ingledew because of his treehouse and had been ridden out of town on a rail, an itinerant evangelist showed up in town. He discovered the schoolhouse empty and unused, and decided to convert it to a church. The hour of his first service was norated around the village, but when the hour came nobody showed up, except old Elijah Duckworth, who took a seat on the front bench, and waited. The preacher waited too, and when nobody else showed up, he asked Lige if he thought he should go ahead with the service. “Wal, Reverend,” Lige observed, “if I put some hay in the wagon and take it down to the pasture to feed the cows and only one cow shows up, I feed her.” So the preacher went ahead and gave his service, with a rousing full-length sermon. Afterwards he asked Lige what he had thought of it. “Wal, Reverend, I’ll tell ye,” said Lige. “If I put some hay in the wagon and go down to the pasture to feed the cows and only one cow shows up, I don’t give her the whole damn load.”

Later Lige spread word to the other Stay Morons that the preacher was a “Presbyterian.” The old-timers had a vague memory of the saddlebag preacher of Noah’s time, and they had vague associations of unpleasantness with him. The new-timers had never heard of a preacher, and this “Presbyterian” seemed very suspicious. So they stayed away from his services. Failing to get any further audiences, he began pastoring them individually, door to door. Presbyterians, he explained to them, were strong believers in predestination, but the Stay Morons couldn’t understand predestination any better than Presbyterianism. Trying to simplify it, the minister would shout, “What is to be, will be!” “Why, shore,” his listeners were apt to respond, “any durn fool knows that.”

The Presbyterian began to claim that, as evidence of his message, the world was predestined to be plunged into darkness during the daylight on a certain day soon approaching. Nobody believed him; nobody wanted to believe him, because the world was dark enough already. But on the day appointed (which the Presbyterian had previously learned about from astronomers in the East) there occurred a total eclipse of the sun which darkened the earth