Epilogue
After a ten day journey along the coast, the caravan under Jonathan’s care reached their beloved town. They put themselves completely under his guidance, a post, he told them, that he would only assume for a short while, until their town was running smoothly again and a better government established.
His first and only command was that all the previous rules of the Church, and the Church itself, be abolished. There would be no more priests, no useless bureaucrats lording it over people’s daily lives, no chants, no more punishments by fire. The temple itself was now declared a civic center where all the people could now convene to decide their public concerns by discussions and by votes. Each person’s home was their own domain, to do with as they liked, as were their leisure hours, which were more plentiful now with the elimination of church services.
It took some time and much explaining on Jonathan’s part, just as it had been with his disciples, for them to grasp again the notions of personal property and freedom of choice. But all had not been forgotten in the last thirty years of slavery and simple human nature, watered again and encouraged, sprouted quickly back to life.
All the necessary tasks of feeding and maintaining the town were assigned to those who had done them before. But the fifty or so who had administrative posts in the Church hierarchy, Jonathan kept close by him for a new business, the restoration of the past.
In the very first week the entire contents of the basement of the Church were disgorged, brought out into the light of day and laid out for public view on the feast day tables in the temple square. The paint was scraped off and the large variety of objects, long unseen by the old and never before seen by the young, attracted all the townsfolk to gather around in their spare hours, milling about, like at a bazaar, full of talk and excitement.
Whatever was practical or pretty Jonathan himself, one by one, presented to each family as he met them at a table. He wanted to hear everyone’s story and know all their skills. These evening interviews, in front of all, took many weeks till everyone had their turn and their presents to take home.
What was left was used to decorate the temple itself, making it somewhat like a museum with its doors open to the public. Every wall, every table, had objects on it to serve as decorations or conversation pieces and a sign of a new prosperity. And now that talk was encouraged and without restraints, it’s hallways were busy and abuzz with happy chatter.
Food was still distributed freely and daily as in the past. But now with so many items of private property in circulation, the temple square slowly changed into a kind of emporium, where clothes and shoes and utensils were bartered. Jonathan didn’t re-establish hard currency as there was no mint, but after everyone’s assigned duties for the day were done anything they sewed or carved or crafted on their own was as good as gold for trade. This fostered craftsmanship and pride.
One afternoon Peter and Simon came hurriedly into the temple square. They were overjoyed to see Jonathan and their town restored to life. He put off his own return to the sanctuary, but not his plans for its improvement. He sent back a whole troop with the boys, Paul’s father and family, as promised, a small glasshouse disassembled along with two experts to get it up and running, and six more eager youths, three boys and three girls, with instructions to build more cabins and learn all they could, especially reading and writing from the others. He told them he would make the trip in another month when things were more settled in town. He still wanted his sanctuary to remain a getaway but also more of a self-sustaining colony. He figured the little valley and spring could support about twenty residents. His first disciples with their young babies he wanted safely there. They would be the kernel of a school and new sets of youths would be sent there for a time, to learn all they could about books and then return back to town, graduates.
As he was talking to his group one evening about his plans to revive letters and literacy and history, mentioning his limited supply of paper and ink, one of the older citizens chimed in and told him (much to his surprise and chagrin) how easy it was to make all the ink you wanted from crushed walnut husks and vinegar and salt.
The experiment succeeded and Jonathan’s plans exploded into the construction of a printing press, a house of books, where hundreds of volumes of the best books in his library could be reproduced. Word was sent to Paul to begin carving the letter blocks and for the others to focus their lessons on stitching and binding, and to send a few of the new youths back to town with these skills as soon as the fonts were ready, along with a few of his own choice books.
This new plan engrossed most of his waking hours and within months he had the press built, stationed in a large room in the temple, with many tables set up and ten of his ablest helpers learning the fine art of printing from scratch, with daily experiments, until the desired result was achieved. Soon it was a going concern. They used so much paper that two expeditions had to be made to pilfer the basements of the deserted town further down the coast and then the much richer (and fortunately untouched by fire) basement of the temple of Perth. On these two trips he also found boatloads of other treasures he wanted and so a weekly convoy of his three little boats sailed back and forth, with the regularity of the mail.
One fine day, almost a year into their new founded republic, a beautiful, long and sleek yacht sailed into their harbor. It had been spotted from a distance and Jonathan was summoned right away. But it didn’t cause the alarm that it might have with it’s white sails because on it’s highest mast, waving in the wind, rippled a green flag.
It was a ship from Sidney seeking a friendly resumption of commerce. Three delegates, dressed in old fashioned clothes, not white robes, stepped off the boat. They announced that a revolution had taken place, the Church was no more in their city and that they had come all this way to see how things were being run here and how he fared. In fact it was the report of Jonathan’s insurrection that had started their own conspiracy. The news of the great fire and his people’s escape had played upon everyone’s mind. Secret groups were formed, plans hatched, and at a happy hour the temple was stormed and the whole hierarchy of the church captured and arrested and soon tried, with some put to death, others allowed to swear off the faith and integrated into a new, democratic system.
Indeed the Church had done much of the work for them in the days immediately preceding this revolution. In their cramped reorganization, without any help or paint from the East they fell to infighting. They killed off nearly half of their own order in this bickering, as the only way they knew how to vacate a post for someone new was to burn the person holding it.
This was great news. They were welcomed by the whole town, shown all its progress, its innovations, and sent home a week later with two of Jonathan’s best aides and a whole cargo of books. He also told them that they had had one book all along, sitting in an aisle of their temple, ready to read.
It didn’t stop there. Plans were made to repopulate abandoned towns on the democratic model, as Sidney, (as it was once again called) was painfully overcrowded. And agents had been already sent out to the other parts of the Pacific, as far as the west coast of America, to spread word of the successful revolution and create more revolution, if possible. No word had come back yet but spirits were high, as the meltdown in the Church’s fortunes was everywhere the same.
Jonathan’s hopes had been fulfilled beyond his dreams, except two. He wanted to sail back to his Bay area one day and retrieve his own buried stash of books in the hills of Albany. He knew he could never do this alone but if the Church were overthrown and saner days prevailed, with the help of a few dozen men he could find and publish this treasure. He also dreamed of re-finding his old lost tribe north of Vancouver, but then that’s another story.
The End
