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By Root 1393 0

would be another Spell of Darkness after them, but for ten years there was a plenty of light. The last of Isaac’s children, Perlina and Drussie, had been conceived when Salina climbed him in the dark of the First Spell of Darkness. During the Decade of Light, she no longer climbed him, for, as we may have noticed, she was over-fastidious about not being seen by her children, and it was at the beginning of the Decade of Light when John, her third son, happened to spot his mother climbing his father by the light of whale oil. He was about five years old at the time. Far from suffering any “primal scene” trauma from the experience, he thought it looked like some wonderful game, and as soon as his mother was finished, he climbed his father and said, “Do me.” Salina was shocked, and never again climbed Isaac during the Decade of Light. But little John frequently climbed Isaac and said, “Do me,” to which Isaac, being taciturn, could only reply “Not now, son,” which did not deter John from later climbing his father and saying “Do me” again. This was how John got his nickname, “Doomy,” which he had so much trouble outliving in later life. Most people always thought that the nickname derived from the air of doom that seemed to surround John throughout his adult life, but that is not the fact of the case.

Because Salina would not climb Isaac during the Decade of Light, he became restless. One day he spoke to himself. Being taciturn, Isaac did not like to talk, even to himself. But now he announced to himself, “I’m gonna git me a new jug, and drink till the goddamn world looks little.” Isaac, like many silent men, was a connoisseur of fine liquor. His father Jacob had once spoken of “whiskey so good you kin smell the feet of the boys who plowed the corn.” Isaac not only could smell their feet but also could identify them and tell what they had had for breakfast. He could distinguish corn whiskey by regions as ably as any French wine taster could distinguish the vineyards of France. Abler. And in the case of metheglin—variously pronounced “mathiglum” or “mothiglum”—which is a spiced variety of mead, he could not only distinguish between that made from honey and that made from sorghum, but also identify each of the spices. So, having determined to drink until the world looked little, he was determined to do it in style, and after reflection he selected Seth Chism’s sour mash, which was, perhaps, one might say, the Château Lafitte Rothschild of Newton County.

Seth Chism had ground his grain at Isaac’s mill, and Isaac had ground it with especial care because he knew the care with which Seth Chism would distill it. Being taciturn, Isaac could not very well ask Seth Chism for a jug of it, but Seth understood the only possible meaning of a palm full of coins, and wordlessly made the sale. Isaac took his jug into his mill, barred the door, and began to diminish the size of the world. Because he was such a big man, it required half of the jug to reduce the world to half its size. He wanted to continue, but realized that if he drank all the jug the world would be reduced to nothing, so he stopped, and began to test the half-world. There was a barrel of flour in the mill which he knew weighed two hundred pounds; he hoisted it and then held it overhead, convinced it weighed only one hundred pounds. Then he went outside on the porch of his mill and looked around. The trees were half as high, the creek half as full and wide, the blue dome of heaven half as far away. He started down from the high porch, but the top step seemed half as far as it was, and, stepping only halfway, he went over into a somersault and landed flat on his back on the hard ground below. The fall would have killed a man half his size, or broken half his bones, but all it did to Isaac was knock half his breath out of him. He lay there for a while, getting that half back, and while he was lying there a rider rode up, a stranger, a man not three foot tall on a stallion not eight hands high. The little man on the tiny stallion did not know that Isaac was taciturn, and asked him