Then, late morning after that second night on Windy Hill Road, with his meat all gone, Travis had an inspiration: he would go sign on with that New Faith bunch over at the high school. He’d heard over the months that they were actively recruiting. He’d heard that they had nice quarters for the members, and that there were a number of good-looking women among them, and he’d even heard rumors that they engaged in something called free love, which put him in mind of orgies, something he’d been rather fond of in the old times back when the porn websites were running. The New Faith people had done quite a job, apparently, renovating and outfitting the old high school as their settlement. They had lots of workshops on the premises like Bullock had, making useful things. The members all got regular hot meals, clean clothes, and even showers, since the old athletic facilities were still there and the town had a working, gravity-fed water system that didn’t require any electric to run.
One time back in October when Bullock sent him to town with a wagonload of sorghum horse feed for Einhorn’s store, Travis saw for himself that the New Faith had laid out impressive gardens and fenced-in paddocks and pastures on the old athletic fields. He took particular note of their horses and mules, as that was his area of know-how, and how sleek and clean they looked. Thus ruminating, Travis concluded that he should clean himself up and go over there forthwith to sign on. It was what used to be called a “no-brainer” in the old times. The only reservation he had was the religion part. He’d never been a churchgoer and didn’t have a whole lot of interest in pious matters, but he figured he could pretend easily enough and, after all, sitting on your butt in a pew and singing a few hymns wasn’t exactly hard work. You could probably even catch a few winks while the others had at it.
And so it was that when Brother Jobe returned to his personal office and quarters that afternoon, after consulting with Mary Beth Ivanhoe, he found Travis Berkey waiting on the bench in the hallway. Brother Jobe was in a hurry to layer on yet more apparel for a trip of about fifteen miles on horseback, with snow looking ever more likely. He ignored Berkey, who rose from the bench with his hat in hand, and simply swept past him. But Travis persisted and knocked on the door to the suite—once the school principal’s headquarters—as it practically closed in his face. Boaz finally answered, heard his request, sized him up, and reported to Brother Jobe, who was pulling on an extra pair of wool socks.
“There’s a feller out there wants to come over to us. Male, mid to late thirties, wiry but strong-looking, says he’s good with horses and stock.”
“All right, send him on in, but tell him I ain’t got time to waste.”
Boaz showed Travis into the private sanctum. Brother Jobe was putting on heavy, insulated construction boots factory-made in the old times. He listened to Travis’s story, which was some nonsense about his farmhouse burning down up to Argyle, and the wife and children gone up with it, and now he was bereft and without a family or a place to live and he’d had a dream where Jesus told him to join the New Faith.
“You say you’re good with animals?”
“Yessir,” Travis said.
“You got yourself some?”
“I’ve got a few cows, pigs, chickens.”
“Horses?”
“Uh, sure, two, uh, Clydesdales.”
“Uh-huh. I guess your barn didn’t burn down then.”
“No, sir, just the house.”
“Family all gone?”
“Like I said.”
“Any hands?”
“No, sir, I farmed it on my own. I’m not rich.”
“You say you come down here day before yesterday?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And you’re ready to move right in here, this afternoon?”
“Yessir.”
Brother Jobe pulled a wool tunic over his double layer of shirts.
“Mister, that just don’t add up,” he said.
“How’s that?”
“Well, who’s taking care of your stock while you been here? You just stash ’em in the barn without no feed or fresh water? Or you leave ’em out when a snowstorm’s coming?”
“I, uh . . .”
“Lookit here, son.” Brother Jobe held his index finger to the corner of his right eye. “Look right at my fingertip.”
“This a vision test?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
Brother Jobe was able to enter Travis Berkey’s mind as easily as walking into a toolshed. What he saw in there was a poor candidate for the brotherhood.
“We going to have to respectfully pass on your application.”
“Huh? I can’t join up? Why, I’m crazy for Jesus.”
“That’s good. He’ll guide and keep you. We don’t have no openings at present. Sorry. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I got some rather urgent business to see about. Boaz here’ll show you out.”
He left Travis Berkey there and hurried down the long maze of corridors to Mandy Stokes’s cell. Brothers Seth and Elam were waiting there along with Sisters Judith and Esther, who clutched bundles of clothing. The former were both veteran soldiers of the Holy Land War. Brother Amos, the duty guard, admitted Brother Jobe to the cell.
Mandy sat on the edge of the bed, alert, bright, apprehensive. He could see tension in the muscles of her slender neck, like wires under her pale skin. And in noticing, he imagined a length of heavy rope looped around it. He approached warily.
“Ma’am, something come up rather sudden and we’d like to move you to a safer location.”
“Here? In the school?” she said.
“No, elsewheres. Can you ride a horse?”
“Not really.”
“Well, I expect your education on that is about to begin.”
She shrank back.
“I’m afraid,” she said.
“I know you are. You going to have to trust me.”
“Where would you take me?”
“Away from here. A ways away.”
“I’ve prepared myself to answer for my crimes.”
“Mercy triumphs over judgment, girl. Self-judgment too.”
To Brother Jobe’s dismay, Mandy fairly exploded in sobs. He took a seat beside her on the bed and put his arm around her and she turned to clutch the awkward mass of him bundled in many garments. She gave off competing scents of clean laundry, summer fruit, and fear.
“Listen here, Miz Stokes,” he said quietly and his hand moved to tenderly cup the back of her head. “I can’t imagine what it’s been like for you, what you gone through with all this, but I done made up my mind to intervene, and we going away from here now. So I ask you to suspend all them mental preparations and get ready to ride. I got two of my best rangers coming with to guide the way and look out for our safety, and in another day, or two, or ten, or twenty days, this world is going to look different to you, I promise.”
She didn’t answer directly but her body stopped heaving.
“The sisters are standing by to outfit you for your journey,” Brother Jobe continued. “We putting you in men’s clothing for both comfort and disguise. We got a fine, calm mount for you and the country is very beautiful out there while there’s daylight. Will you come along now?”
She pulled herself off him, wiped the tears from her eyes, and nodded her head.
F
ORTY-NINE
Robert Earle and his family rode to the levee at Weibel’s farm in Tom Allison’s open chore wagon along with the Allison family. Robert and Tom sat up front on the spring seat while the others occupied cushions in the wagon box all under lap robes and with bottles of hot water. The wagon was drawn by two dainty Haflingers the color of caramel and marshmallow. Candle lanterns hung above the mudguard up front. The trip was but a ten-minute trot out of town on mostly level road and around the other side of Schoolhouse Hill in the last glimmers of twilight with snow falling sparsely and gently over the landscape. When they came upon Weibel’s big red farmhouse the windows were alive with light and two of his hired men waited at the top of the drive to take charge of wagons and horses. Many others were parked in the paddock beside a nearby barn.
Inside the old house, built in the boxy Italianate style in 1858, with its spacious rooms and high ceilings, seventy people in their best clothes, the prospering ones of the county, circulated around tables filled with roasts, ham, a turkey, smoked trout, chicken livers, puddings, gratins of potatoes and turnips, the ubiquitous corn bread, fritters and apple butter, cakes and pies made of scarce wheat hoarded over the year past, preserved fruits, walnuts, filberts, nougats and fondants, cider, beer, whiskey, and punch for the little ones.
Daniel Earle, a nervous weariness overcoming him, took a seat on a sofa in back of the big parlor and was content to observe the festivities with a glass of Weibel’s own Schoolhouse Hill cider. He marveled that the farmers had emerged from the disorders of recent times to become the wealthiest citizens of the region. When he was a little boy, the farmers all seemed old, beaten down, and poor while the men of affairs in town were car dealers and holders of the hamburger franchises. Daniel recognized that farming was not in his blood. All the talk at the levee was about the heinous, bloody invasion by one Donald Acker in Ben Deaver’s sitting room and the heroic defense by one Jack Harron, a little-known young man lately taken on as a servant by the polymath Andrew Pendergast. In fact, there was some dismay that Andrew was not present this evening to lead the musicians, Daniel’s father, Robert, now among them on fiddle across the room. They were, at that moment, playing the rousing English country dance tune “Portsmouth,” and a few couples were executing swings and figures to it. One of them was Britney, on the arm of Robbie Furnival, who loved to dance. Daniel studied her liquid movements with a gathering sense of ominous disturbance.
By and by, a barrel-chested towhead with a red beard the same age as Daniel took a seat on the sofa. It was Corey Widgeon, a classmate of Daniel’s all the way up into the final years of the high school before it shut down. Daniel wrenched his gaze away from his father’s girl.
“Hey, Danny,” Corey said and playfully performed a kind of hand jive around Daniel’s face that they used to do to torment each other as twelve-year-olds. Daniel pretended to be charmed by it. “I hear you’ve been all over out there in the country.”
“I guess I was,” Daniel said, and took a long draught of his cider.
“Where’d you go? What’d you see? Is it true the Chinese landed on the moon?”
Daniel struggled to formulate an answer. All he could do was crack a pained, artificial smile and pull in his chin as if he wished he could make his head disappear. His inability to answer his old chum frightened him a little, as though he were sitting on the lid of a box filled with demons.
“I don’t know, Corey. I saw a lot but . . . I don’t know . . .”
“We heard about Evan.”
“Yeah, Evan.” Daniel drained his glass and shook his head.
“He’ll be missed,” Corey said and all Daniel could do was nod. “I see Reverend Holder and his wife aren’t here tonight.”
“Yeah,” Daniel said. “They’re taking the news hard, I guess.”
They were not children anymore and Corey sensed Daniel’s unease, though not the intensity of it. “I’ve been working over at Schroeder’s creamery,” he said. “It’s pleasant work indoors in the wintertime. They could use another hand. They pay silver.”
“Thanks, Corey. Maybe I’ll come over and see about that.”
“And there’s a new tavern in town. The Jesus bunch opened it. Go figure.”
“I’ve been in there.”
“Let’s meet for a tipple some time.”
“Sure, Corey. That’d be great.”
Daniel had to get up before his head exploded.
F
IFTY
Brother Jobe and his rangers Seth and Elam, along with Mandy Stokes, made good time on their journey north into the highlands of Washington County, by turns walking and trotting up the old county roads. They encountered no other travelers this dwindling day of the old year. Snow started to fall in earnest after they passed through the moribund village of Argyle where, months before, store owner Miles English was discovered to be trafficking in boys for labor and sport and where he had hanged himself in a root cellar. Dead leaves clumped in the vestibule to the store’s doorway, suggesting it had not reopened since. There was no wind and the lilting snowfall mesmerized them as they pushed on in the winter stillness. Mandy rode a black mare named Jinx between Seth in the lead, followed by Elam, with Brother Jobe taking up the rear on Atlas the mule. They rode solemnly. Now and then Brother Jobe hummed a favorite hymn to himself swaddled in the cozy insulation of his cloak, scarves, woolens, and fur-lined hat.
They had departed around one-thirty in the afternoon. By a quarter after four they had crossed into the rural township of Hebron. The farther they penetrated the uplands, the more forested the landscape became and the wilder the forests. The bare treetops were hardly legible against the gray westering twilight when the travelers came upon a homestead in a dell on the lee side of Lloyd’s Hill that afforded a comforting sense of enclosure to the scene, as though nothing bad could find one who sheltered there. The homestead consisted of a yellow and white cottage in the Gothic style, with porches and pointed windows and bargeboards figured with trefoils in the gable end. A barn also painted yellow stood twenty yards to the left of it. Candelight within the cottage was visible from up on the road. Brother Jobe rode Atlas up to Seth in the lead.