T Klein: Ceremonies

We are not fancy people, but I can promise you three square meals a day, well prepared, just as we ourselves eat. Our farm is not yet a fully working one (we purchased it only in November), but by this summer we expect to be eating our own produce. We are lifelong members of the Brethren of the Redeemer, a religious order with adherents all over the world, though most of its membership is concentrated here in Gilead, with other settlements in

Pennsylvania and New York. Both my husband and I have attended college outside the community. We welcome the interest of those outside the faith and do not impose our beliefs on anyone.

We have no telephone, so if you cannot come to see us on May Day, please let us know in writing as soon as possible. If we don't hear from you, we'll assume you're coming, and Sarr will be there to pick you up – but I see I'm repeating myself! So in closing, I look forward to meeting you and hearing about life in New York.

Sincerely,

(Mrs) Deborah Poroth

P.S. Jeremiah is our prophet, and so your name strikes me as a very good omen!

Freirs had read the letter, with the rest of his mail, on the subway up to Columbia. He'd found something charming about the woman's tone; it was like getting a message from a pen pal in another country, complete with three exotic snapshots. Yet as he'd scrutinized the photos, tilting them forward and back in the subway's glare, he'd felt a faint twinge of nervousness.

The pictures were in color; but for that, they would not have been out of place in some long-forgotten album of the past. The first showed a dirt road bordered by woods, with pale winter sunlight slanting through pine boughs and the leafless branches of an oak. In a clearing on the left stood a small white clapboard house with an open porch in front, nearly level with the road, and a line of thornbushes making twisted shapes against one side. The porch was bare save for two narrow wooden chairs, one of them empty, the other occupied by a woman in a long black dress, her dark hair tied back in a knot, her face masked by shadows. On her lap rested something small and yellow, with a second at her feet; squinting at the photo, Freirs saw that they were kittens. The woman was sitting straight in the chair, staring directly ahead. The whole scene seemed touched with the stillness and silence of a Hopper painting.

Behind the house lay a tiny fenced-in garden, though neither flowers nor vegetables were in evidence. The picture looked as if it had been taken on a winter afternoon; Freirs hoped to find the place a good deal greener now. He could see, beyond the trees, an open field broken only by clumps of weed and sporadic knots of bramble. At its edge stood further pine and oak, rising in a dense forest.

The second picture showed another portion of the field, an arid patch of reddish earth and stubble. A small brook glistened blurrily along the distant edge. In the center of the picture stood a slim, bearded man, somewhat Lincolnesque in appearance, posed stiffly with a rake in his hand like a rustic in an ancient woodcut. By his feet crouched a fat grey cat, glowering at the camera. The man was clean-shaven above a fringe of dark beard; he wore a vest, homespun-looking black trousers, and a somewhat wrinkled collarless white shirt. He looked around forty. His face was pale and his expression somber, but Freirs thought he detected a hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth, perhaps for whoever held the camera.

The third photo was slightly darker than the others, as if taken when evening approached. At the edge of the picture stood the rear wall of the farmhouse, while squatting in the center was a low grey cinder-block structure reminiscent of an army barrack. It appeared to have two entrances, with a glass-paneled door near each end. Freirs suspected that it was a converted henhouse.

Beyond its roof rose a dark line of treetops where the woods began. The building faced away from them, looking out upon the lawn; the grass grew right up to the doorways without a trace of path, as if, till now, no one had had occasion to approach it. Most of the brickwork in front was concealed beneath a dense growth of ivy, which had already spread over the rims of the windows. These were bare and very wide, allowing a view completely through to the back, where the trunks of massive trees cut out the light.

Even on the crowded subway, there'd been something about the scene that had disturbed him. He still wasn't sure what it was.

The photos, with their air of isolation, were like souvenirs of another world, removed in time or space: early settlers, maybe, or backwoods Maine. It was hard to believe that they'd been taken only recently in New Jersey, in a spot less than fifty miles from New York.

A month ago, his picture of Jersey had been compounded of a long-ago rock concert in the Meadowlands he'd let his wife drag him to, a disastrous interview in Newark during his leaner postgraduate years (to teach, of all things, Black English to inner-city youths), and several Metroliner trips to visit friends of Laura's in Washington. He'd always imagined the state as one vast slum, grey with swamp gas and pollution, populated by ghetto dwellers and gangsters.

Somewhere beyond it, outposts of light, lay the monastic seclusion of Princeton and the boardwalks of Atlantic City, all taffy stands, convention halls, and casinos. Along its eastern edge, just across the river from New York, stretched a wasteland of oil tanks and marsh water, lit up redly here and there, deep into the night, by tiny sputtering flames.

But he'd been wrong. For the past weeks he'd been reading about the state, his interest piqued by the photos. It appeared that there was real wilderness out here after all, with deer, foxes, rattlesnakes, even a few bears. There were the Pine Barrens to the south, over a thousand square miles of them, where a man could walk all day without seeing a sign of civilization. The books told of places down there that outsiders never heard of, tiny little villages completely cut off from the rest of the state, with nothing but a church and a general store with one or two gas pumps out front. There were ghost towns, too, and towns with names like Hog Wallow and Long-a-Coming, and towns with dialects all their own. Some of them weren't even on the map.

To the west lay the Delaware Valley – there'd been a piece on it in Natural History – where, in a certain hollow just upriver from Philadelphia, one could still find relics of idols the Indians worshiped. In the hill country north of it rose Tackisaw Ridge, riddled with a network of hidden caverns. Hikers had found queer words and symbols carved into the rocks, but no one had managed to puzzle out their meaning, or even what language they were in.

Some of the towns were still just names to him – names like West Portal and Winterman and Vineland, which billed itself as 'the witchcraft center of America.' Others came complete with odd histories: Monson with its string of unsolved murders, and Redcliffe with its 'devil museum,' and Budd Lake with its reports, back in the forties, of a chanting heard on certain nights, echoing over the water. There'd been similar reports, ten years later, of a chanting near the Jersey City docks, and rumors of stone objects – 'ancient ceremonial artifacts,' the local papers called them – unearthed during excavations for the stadium in the Meadowlands.

And then there were the religious communities – pockets of ignorance, to judge by the descriptions: bearded men, black-robed women, and a polite fuck-you to strangers. It was astonishing that such places had survived, and on the doorstep of one of the biggest cities in the world.

But then, isolation, he'd come to realize, was also a state of mind, and an insignificant little village might easily be overlooked – except when, now and then, some journalist heard about it and decided it was quaint enough to warrant a photo and a few inches of copy. Freirs had read how, in May of 1962, the Times had 'discovered' one such religious community near New Providence. Its existence had never been a secret; it had simply been ignored, until one morning New Yorkers had picked up their papers and there it was: a town that looked much as it had in the late 1800s, when it was first settled. The old religion, the customs, the special schools for the children, they'd all survived unchanged. Farm work was done entirely by hand, town worship was held every evening, women still wore long dresses with high collars – and all this less than thirty miles from Times Square.