“Not to me.”
“Mary Beth ain’t like other people.”
“What’s her deal?”
“Look, old son. There’s real strangeness in this world of ours. Back in the machine times, there was so much noise front and back, so to speak, it kept us from knowing what lies behind the surface of things. Now it stands out more.”
“Am I ever going to understand what I just saw?”
“I don’t know as I understand it all myself. She has powers. It’s a dadblamed miracle. Probably a sort of curse too, for her.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
“I don’t know,” Brother Jobe said. “Ride with it. The truth will be revealed by and by. Like the old song goes: farther along, we’ll understand why.”
“Are you going to cooperate and come in with Loren and me this evening?”
“Sure I am. Didn’t I already say so? You just come by. I’ll be ready. Now about this Karp fella. He won’t let you search his premises for stolen goods. I ain’t even met the sumbitch, and I can tell you that. When you decide you want to bring him in, you come here and apply to Brother Joseph for assistance. You hear? He’ll know what to do.”
“We have to give Karp a chance to come in peacefully with us, first.”
“You ever study where God’s law diverges from man’s law?”
’Well, oddly enough, man’s law ain’t always grounded in human nature. Ain’t that a funny paradox?”
“I’m just trying to avoid a war.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you got too much Jesus in you.”
Fifty-six
I struggled with whether to tell Loren about my audience with Mary Beth Ivanhoe, the “precious mother” of the New Faithers, and decided against it. I felt it would only make him turn more hostile toward them. Anyway, I had not digested the experience myself. He asked if Brother Jobe had showed me around the place, and I told him they were building a warren of rooms in the old gymnasium.
“Sounds like they’re turning the place into a fucking termite mound,” was all he said.
With the help of Brother Judah, we got the two jail cells cleaned up on the second floor of the old town hall. They were across a center aisle from each other in the rear behind the old police offices, which had been closed down when the town moved operations to the building out on Highway 29 in 1983. The old police offices had most recently served as the dressing rooms for our community theater productions. Props and scenery flats from Guys and Dolls were still scattered about in there. Then it dawned on us that we had to furnish the cells with at least a bed and a slop bucket each. Judah said they had extra beds at New Faith and he’d fetch some over in a wagon. Meanwhile, Loren and I went to scare up some padlocks, which was not such an easy task, since a lock without a key was useless. Loren found an old combination lock in a kitchen drawer in the rectory. He remembered the combination because it had been on his locker at the health club he belonged to in Glens Falls for fifteen years. The other padlock wasn’t so easy. It took us a couple of hours. Finally we found one with a key in it in Claude Wormsley’s desk at the old water treatment plant. Once we had the locks, we scrounged a couple of lengths of chain from Tom Allison’s livery. By this time, Judah had gotten two beds delivered and our jail was open for business.
At quarter to seven, when we were confident that most everyone in town had come home from their places of work, we returned to the school where Brother Jobe “surrendered” to Loren in the lobby. He was lovingly surrounded by a couple dozen of his followers, who seemed more entertained than worried. One of the sisters handed him a big picnic basket, but as Loren prepared to bind Brother Jobe’s hands behind him with rope-we didn’t have any handcuffs-he gave me the picnic basket to carry for him.
“You don’t mind, do you?” Brother Jobe said, with a wink, as if this was all a show, which to some extent it was.
“Well it is supper time,” I said. “And, frankly, with all the scrounging and cleaning, we hadn’t made provision for meals yet.”
“That’s a heck of a way to run a penitentiary,” Brother Jobe said.
Another sister handed me a leather briefcase.
“His books and papers and like that,” she said.
“Might’s well turn out a sermon or two in stir,” Brother Jobe said.
He made his farewells and we paraded him all the way down Salem Street to the corner of Main Street and Academy, where the old town hall stood. Along the way, plenty of people sitting out on their porches or inside at their dining room tables saw us pass by with our “prisoner.” A few children playing out in the streets followed behind us for a while, until they began taunting Brother Jobe and Loren barked at them to “get lost” or he’d “lock them up too.” Robbie Furnival, one of the shaving victims, passed us by on his way home and volunteered to testify in any court proceedings. By the time we got Brother Jobe to the jail, we figured we’d made our point and word would get out around town that this dangerous character was in our custody, and there would be no more involuntary beard shaving or other affronts to civil liberties in Union Grove from the New Faith bunch.
Once up in the cell, though, Brother Jobe became irascible, letting his underlying annoyance show, and demanded various extra furnishings that perhaps we should have thought of ourselves but didn’t: a table and chair, which we got from the old police office, a jug of drinking water, a blanket, and a couple of candles. That took another hour of scrounging. Finally, we secured the door to his cell with a sturdy length of chain and ran the padlock through it. By that time, he had a napkin tucked into his collar and seemed pleasantly preoccupied with the fried chicken, corn bread, pickled okra, and other delicacies that the sisters had packed for his supper, not to mention a quart of cider, all laid out nicely on the table before him.
“We’ll come back later and tuck you in,” Loren said.
Brother Jobe just snorted and waved goodbye.
Fifty-seven
Jane Ann fixed us a quick supper of smoked trout with new potatoes and dill, and then we set off on foot for Karptown up the North Road, armed only with Bullock’s writs. The sun still hung above Pumpkin Hill when we set out, and it was a warm evening. Deerflies hectored us along the way. It was the first appearance of the year for these hateful pests, who went into orbit around your head and nearly drove you crazy before they came in for the painful bite. Near the turnoff to the Schmidt farm, where I had met up with Shawn Watling on that fateful morning weeks ago, we watched a pack of coyotes skulk out of the woods and cross the road perhaps twenty yards ahead of us. Several of them stopped for a moment to regard us and bared their teeth, then continued on their way and vanished into the trees on the other side. They were impressive animals. Over the years, it was said, the coyotes had been mixing with the red wolves coming down from Canada to our part of the country, where there were fewer people than there used to be. Judging by their size, it seemed that they were becoming less coyote and more wolf now. After seeing them, Loren and I cut ourselves a couple of stout walking staffs before continuing on our way.
When we got there, Karptown seemed a festive place. Formerly the Hill n’ Dale Mobile Home Park, it had taken on the flavor of something halfway between a frontier outpost and a medieval peasant village. For one thing, no cars or trucks were around. They’d all been sold for scrap during the Great Collection years ago. So the establishment was pleasantly inviting. The only motor vehicle on the premises was a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, a Sportster model, mounted totemically over the ceremonial entrance gate that they had constructed where the Hill n’ Dale original driveway met the road. They had nailed up horizontal timbers between two oak trees on each side of the driveway about twenty feet above the ground. The Harley was up there in a wheelie pose. It was painted black, decorated all over with feathers, and had some small animal skulls dangling on rawhide strips from the ape-hanger handlebars.