T Klein: Ceremonies

He tried to imagine a place like Gilead, tucked away up one of those roads, hidden in the less settled part of the county in a region of woodland and marsh. Unlike the towns he'd just passed through, it would be truly self-contained, turned inward, its inhabitants wary of the shopping centers and uninterested in their rural neighbors. For the first time, he could see how such a place might survive, even in a county as fast-growing as Hunterdon. It would need little from the rest of the world, nor would it offer much. Outsiders would have no reason to visit, unless, like him, they deliberately sought it out. Those born into the community would never leave it; all their friends and relations would be nestled right there beside them. The land would thus be locked up tight, the area closed to newcomers -and, considering the religion practiced there, closed to new ideas as well. TV might be regarded as the devil's tool. Telephones, for all he knew, might also be proscribed; certainly the Poroths did without one. Yet even if they'd had a phone, how useful could it be if there was no one outside town to call? Lines of communication meant nothing if they weren't used; and these would not be. So Gilead would live on in its isolation, following its own peculiar paths until, in the course of time, it would simply be ignored, overlooked, and -he wondered if in fact this were already true – all but forgotten.

'I brought you into a plentiful country,' the radio was saying, the words singsong as if from years of repetition, 'to eat the fruit thereof and the goodness thereof; but when ye entered, ye defiled my land, and made mine heritage an abomination.'

For the dozenth time he considered changing his seat. The youth one seat ahead of him, hunched glassy-eyed over the dials, had turned the volume down at Freirs' request, but the preacher still sounded as if he were speaking at the top of his voice. It was a Bible station out of Zarephath, and hot for Jeremiah. The town lay miles to the east, but the voice, though strident, had an unsettling intimacy about it, as if the man himself were crouched just inches from Freirs' face; he could almost smell the gamy breath and feel the spray against his skin. He'd had his fill of jeremiads, all this fire and spit and brimstone was beginning to give him a headache, but he felt curiously reluctant to ask the youth to turn the volume down again. Superstition, maybe; in a country of believers, you didn't interfere. And there was a kind of fascination to the rhythm of the words, even if their meaning was a mystery; it was like listening to a recording of one of Hitler's speeches. Besides, he liked the idea that people out here made so much of Jeremiah. He'd never cared much for his name before.

The Poroth woman had commented on it, the coincidence of names. He wondered what she and her husband would be like, and what they'd think of him. The woman, at least, sounded eager for company.

Reaching into the pocket of his jacket on the seat beside him, he withdrew the envelope containing her letter and the snapshots. He studied her face in the photo, holding it up to the sunlight streaming down beside him. It was hard to tell for sure, maybe it was just his lonely imagination, but she looked rather pretty, and younger than she'd first appeared. Maybe he should start thinking of her as Deborah.

The husband? Rather gloomy-looking. Not much humor there. But of course he was still little more than a cipher.

He looked at the third photo. This screened-in former chicken coop was where, quite possibly, he'd be spending the summer. It looked serviceable enough, yet there was something about it, he'd felt it from the start: something that disturbed him.

Perhaps it was the all-enveloping ivy, or the squat shape of the roof, or the way the shingled eaves hung low over the doorways. Or.. . yes, that was it – the windows. The windows in the back. They were too big, and too near the trees, and the trees seemed to press toward them in a way he didn't like. While the front windows looked out upon a comfortable expanse of lawn bathed by the pale rays of a late afternoon sun, those in back seemed to open on another world, a twilight of tangled branches and shadowy black forms. They offer no protection, he decided.

Later he would wonder what had prompted such a thought, and what there was to be protected from. But at this moment, with the photo before him and the bus bearing him toward that very scene, all such questions fell before a single overriding conviction: It isn't right to build a house so close against the woods.

Its outskirts had become the haunt of bargain hunters, a busy region of shopping centers and showrooms, but the town of Flemington was quiet on this Sunday afternoon, though cars still lined the parking lots of the churches at the edge of the business district. Farther up the street the bus stopped before a red-brick card and candy shop. New Jersey Lottery stickers on the window and commercial notices fluttering from a bulletin board by the door. Several passengers filed off, the youth with the radio among them; the lone attractive girl had long since disappeared into one of the small towns back down the road. With a hiss of air brakes, the bus continued on past the venerable white pillars of the Union Hotel; then a bakery, odd star-shaped loaves in the window; a real-estate office with its shades drawn; and the old county courthouse, beyond whose worn stone steps the killer of the Lindbergh baby had been tried. At the end of the street stood the offices of the local daily, the Hunterdon County Home News. Next to them a funeral parlor's awning reached toward the sidewalk.

The bus followed the main road as it curved westward, the stores and municipal buildings giving way to handsome suburban houses with gables, ornate shutters, and broad well-tended lawns, which in turn gave way to freshly plowed fields, pastures where cattle grazed, and occasional patches of woods. Abruptly the bus veered north, leaving the main road for a narrower one that twisted between tall hedges like the footpath it may once have been. It wound past small, shaded bungalows half hidden by trees and secretive little lanes where foliage blocked the view ahead. Down one of these the bus turned, branches scraping at its sides. The lane cut through a stand of cottonwoods and over a gentle, sparsely forested rise choked with ground ivy and brambles. Beyond it, winding away from each side of the road until they were lost amid the trees, ran what appeared to be the ruins of an ancient stone wall. As the bus passed through them, Freirs felt as if he were trespassing onto private ground.

The way continued through a lane of cottonwoods and maples that looked as if they'd been there for centuries. Behind them stood a succession of dark-shingled houses, three on one side, four on the other – dwellings without ornament, obviously old, with lawns trimmed neatly and glimpses of gardens in back. Just past them the road suddenly widened and came to an end at another running perpendicular to it, forming a T. Facing the intersection stood a rambling white clapboard building with a wide front porch and a Post Office sign by the doorway. Behind it, and apparently attached, rose the tall rust-red pillar of a grain silo and the black gambrel roof of a barn, its weathered shingles curling in the sunlight.

The bus slowed as it came into the intersection and pulled noisily up to the building. In front of it Freirs could see three old-fashioned gas pumps and, along one side, what appeared to be a loading area, with broad ramps leading up to a garage adjoining the barn. By one of the doorways stood a dusty little tractor and a wagon piled high with bags of grain. An empty pickup truck was parked ahead, near the pumps, with another parked farther back, in the shadow of the barn. Both trucks looked decades old, like the car he'd noticed in a driveway down the street; their paintwork was dark, lacking all decoration and chrome.