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By Root 1303 0

any “undecent” pictures anymore they reluctantly let him use the meeting house again, and he began showing stories of the great battles in the Bible, scenes of bloodshed and gore, flashing swords and decapitation, torture and pillage and scourging and mutilation. He packed the people in, and even the deacons themselves returned to his services, where they sat at their select bench with their eyes glued to the images, and one or the other of them would urge on the action with “Praise the Lord!” and “Amen!” and “Gawd git ’em!” As summertime wiped out the last trace of the long bitter winter, people came from all over Newton County to see Brother Stapleton’s shows; the meeting house wouldn’t hold them all, so he had to give matinées in the afternoon and candlelit productions at night. He even began the practice of passing a plate for free will offering, and gleaned enough coins to support Perlina and himself in fairly good style.

They lived happily ever after.

Chapter ten

The first general merchandise store in Stay More was the work and the business of Isaac’s younger brother, Christopher Columbus “Lum” Ingledew. We have caught only glimpses of him—his refusing to go with his mother to Little Rock, his helping Isaac build the mill and then handling the concession during the ceremony of the engine-firing, his serving as postmaster during the Decade of Light—he has not been conspicuous, perhaps because he was not marked with any specific characteristic comparable to Isaac’s taciturnity; Lum was not very talkative, but neither was he reticent: he said what had to be said, and did what had to be done, and one thing that had to be done was to build and operate a general merchandise store, because the population of Stay More was exploding. During the Second Spell of Darkness, fondness for ’maters and the concealing dark were a potent combination of factors fostering conception. Old Jacob Ingledew decreed that no more settlers would be allowed to immigrate into Stay More because it was so crowded already, and his decree remained the law, but even without further immigration the population went on exploding. A high incidence of inbreeding naturally resulted in the birth of a more than common number of defectives, usually idiots. The people of Stay More did not know that the origin of the word idiot, pronounced “idjit” or “eejit,” is the Greek idios, meaning private. The idiots of Stay More were not private; they were very public; they were allowed to come and go as they pleased.

Lum Ingledew’s general merchandise store was erected on the main road, near the mill, in front of the mill (shown in the rear of our illustration), but even after he finished it the people continued to use the mill as their communal gathering place, out of habit and out of respect for Isaac, although the porch and yard of the mill were now so crowded that a person couldn’t sit down. So, because idiots usually prefer to sit, or squat, or kneel, or recline in various postures, and because there was no room for them at the mill, they began to use the porch of Lum’s store. Our illustration does not show them there, but that is where they were. Lum didn’t mind, so long as they did not wander into the store and tamper with the merchandise. They were speechless and made no talk to distract him while he was waiting on customers. Although they were speechless and lacked full control of their faces and limbs, they nevertheless possessed curiosity, and liked to loll on the store porch watching the world go by. Lum had a barrel of black walnuts, and when he wasn’t busy waiting on customers, he would crack the walnuts, pick their meats, and distribute them among the idiots, because it was popularly believed that the black walnut, whose shell resembles the human skull and whose meat resembles the human brain, is a good cure for mental deficiency. For years Lum fed black walnuts to the idiots who frequented his store porch, but it never seemed to do any good.

Sportsmen from the cities, St. Louis and Kansas City and even Chicago, began coming to Stay More to hunt