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By Root 1313 0

and hauled the grain to his mill, and built up the fire under his boiler, and hooked up his engine, and ground his grain and meal. The people left the porch of the mill and drifted off, and did not come back until he had shut down the engine. Birds, rats and mice infested his mill and ate through the gunny-sacks and devoured his grain and meal and flour, but fled when he started the engine again. It was a choice: no pests but no people, or people and pests. He opted for the latter, and let the birds, rats and mice have his grain. By and by, he became almost content, sitting among the people, listening to them talk about him. The seasons passed, seedtime, grain and harvest. But after another harvest, the people began to complain among themselves about the back breaking job of grinding their grain in stone mortars, Indian-fashion. Isaac listened to their grumblings for as long as he could stand it, and then he reviewed in his mind his stock of choice profanities until he had picked the one that seemed to him choicest and most profane. He stood up and uttered it, loudly. Then he asked,

“How come y’all don’t bring yore #@%&*# grain to my #@%&*# mill?”

The people grew silent, staring at one another and at Isaac. All of them suddenly realized that he was there, where they had forgotten that he had been. This embarrassed them greatly, and they remembered all the things they had said about him, and they all began to get very red in the face, and to slink down in their chairs, and one by one they put their tails between their legs and crept away. Soon each of them returned, carrying upon their backs or their mules’ backs gunnysacks filled with grain. Isaac fired his engine and ground their grain, and grew prosperous over the years, running the mill day and night; he had to hire two helpers and train a new fireman. It was not until his old age, in our own century, after Stay More had seen the coming of a newer and commoner kind of self-propelled engine, that Isaac Ingledew finally learned the reason why people had ever been reluctant to come to his mill: not that they were afraid of the sight or sound of his engine, but rather, as his middle-aged daughter Drussie expressed it to him one day, “I reckon folks back in them old-timey days just couldn’t stand fer no kind of PROG RESS.”

Indeed, she was right, not alone about that instance of resistance to progress, but to the entire history of Stay More, nay, the entire history of the Ozarks. Everything new, everything progressive or forward-looking, was anathema to those people, and who are we to fault them for it? “Stay More” is synonymous with “Status Quo”; in fact, there are people who believe, or who like to believe, that the name of the town was intended as an entreaty, beseeching the past to remain present. Today, Colonel Coon’s newfangled engine is an antique; after his death, it was transferred to Oren Duckworth’s tomato canning factory, where it powered the conveyor belt for a generation, but has been out of use and rusting for half of my lifetime.

It was in the generation of Isaac, also, that Stay More and the Ozarks experienced the first serious fuel shortage, called the First Spell of Darkness. All of the lamps, as we have seen, were fueled with bear’s oil, but as the human population increased the population of bears decreased. Isaac himself shot the last bear of Stay More, and when that bruin’s lard was all used up, the people experienced their first blackout. It was very dark, and the moon wasn’t scheduled to reappear for two weeks, and it was the hottest part of summer, so that fireplace light was uncomfortable. Most people simply went to bed, but this indirectly caused a population explosion which in turn would lead to a future depletion of fuel. Isaac’s oldest sons, Denton and Monroe, ran around in the dark yard of the dogtrot catching lightning bugs and putting them into a glass jar, but this kind of lamp was feeble and temporary, since the boys didn’t know what the bugs ate and didn’t feed them, and they died. In an emergency, someone could always make a torch