Boone is also University Professor, one hour a week, and in his professorial special pleading, which he excludes from his activities as chairman of the Board of Education, he presents to the University and the world a new doctrine of health and economics, called: “Boonism” by his followers, and “The Complete Healing” in his text book.
The Rabbi expounds: “Boonism denounces metal money for a starter. Boone’s aversion to it has come through millionaires burying their money and bringing out coins one at a time. Boone advocates a special system of paper currency for an economic remedy, and as a means of abolishing millionaires. So Kusuko allows only metal money to be used in his places, which regulation Boone, after some contests, has accepted with a sense of humor, since he likes black coffee and cannot deny it and wants a jolly place to meet his friends. And meanwhile millionaires, though forbidden by the constitution to exist, keep on hiding money.”
According to the Rabbi:—“The most outstanding prescription in the personal health chapters of ‘The Complete Healing’ is the Apple Amaranth orchard. The devotee is to walk in the orchards summer and winter, breathing the breath of the bark, blossoms, apples, and leaves, with certain well-worded philosophic meditations. In general Boone condemns drugs, so there is a personal reason for making war on him on the part of Smith and Sims and their followers.
“The Amaranth Apple orchard, around the grave of the Sangamon County pioneer and saint, Hunter Kelly, is particularly esteemed by the Boone following.”
But I cannot imagine Boone or any remotely resembling imitator indulging in philosophic meditations. I could rather imagine him climbing a tree like a cinnamon bear, only with more speed and fidgets.
CHAPTER VIII
THE NEW SPRINGFIELD FLAG AND THE STAR PLAN MAP FOR WHICH IT STANDS, INCLUDING THE DOUBLE WALLS ON THE FAR BORDERS OF THE CITY, BUILT LONG AGO BY RALPH ADAMS CRAM.
May 4, 2018:—I make an early afternoon call on Avanel. First we mourn over the scene outside, for Apple Amaranths and all are nipped by the frost and from all over the United States come reports that the peach crop once more is blighted. Then Avanel is in her most “young ladyfied” mood and complains fondly of her father’s general code of behavior. I gather the impression that her ideal has no big black beard and no long curly oily locks, no fashion of getting angry. She is just the age when they palpitate between fond indulgence of “father” and black fury at his goat-like intractability to all plain suggestions that he make a change in himself. Boone being a widower and Avanel his only child, she is his shepherdess most emphatically.
Meanwhile Avanel hand-embroiders a gorgeous Springfield Flag and allows me to help her untangle several skeins of red silk and in general to play the idle dangler as well as I can. I am quite aware I do not do it in the off-hand manner I should. I am a little too heavy with the silk but she admits that I do not roar at the least tangle, as her father might.
Anyway, the flag is finished. And just as I begin to get what might be called “in earnest” with Avanel, a lot of disgusting young dandies, whose names I do not know, come in for tea. And I am obliged to stay and drink the stuff and I would rather drink rain water off the roof of a soot-factory, that’s what I would.
May 5:—I have seen in waking dreams, as I walk on the edge of New Springfield, at the prairie end of a shadowed deserted street, a great open door into the deep of eternity and, hovering above the great deep, Springfield, when it becomes the perfect and transcendent city. I look down upon towers so packed together in a sheaf and the flags so mighty, it seems but a fantasy of celestial flagstaffs and pinnacles. There are many flags of the International Government and many flashes of the Star Spangled Banner. But one flag stirs me the most. It is the one embroidered with the very silk and with the very same stitches I have seen Avanel put in with much silly chat so lately. It is the flag nearest. It is on a tower rising from the deep, a neighbor, it seems, I can almost touch. But as I look there are thousands of flags like it suddenly unfurled on a myriad pinnacles of the city below.