T Klein: Ceremonies

He wished he weren't wearing the chinos and blue workshirt, imitation L. L. Bean that here just looked phony and college-boy. Plus his goddamned gut hanging out. What Poroth and the others were wearing, that uncomfortable-looking black and white getup, a virtual uniform – was apparently what real country people wore. Beneath his shirt Poroth's broad back was probably as well muscled as any of the people Freirs knew who hung around $600-a-year health clubs or spent their leisure hours pumping iron at the Y. Though now that he looked at it closely, the shirt itself was sweat-stained and none too clean; was this the way the man attended church?

Poroth patted the metal flank of his beat-up green truck as if it were a farm animal. 'She probably isn't what you're used to,' he said regretfully. Freirs expected him to qualify this, to add some assurance of the truck's homely virtues, but the other merely swung himself up into the driver's seat and waited for Freirs to climb in beside him.

The pair of youths had just pulled out from the parking lot and disappeared up the road in their own truck, and once more the loudest sound to break the quiet was the regular metallic scrape from across the street where the mechanic labored over his engine. The man paused above some unseen part; then, as Poroth gunned the pickup's motor, he looked up, his face betraying neither friendliness nor interest. His beard looked somehow incongruous above the grease-stained overalls, a man out of the Bible attempting to pass for modern.

Poroth drove fast, either from a desire to impress or a simple impatience to be home. Thanks to the truck's height, Freirs enjoyed a commanding perspective of the road ahead. With every uneven-ness in the surface the two of them bounced on the springy black seat like cowboys on horseback; several times Freirs found himself reaching out almost surreptitiously to steady himself against the dented metal of the dashboard. He stole a glance at Poroth, whose skin, while rough, seemed surprisingly pale for one who spent most of his day working in the sun. Against the dark beard his face seemed all the paler. The beard, and the man's sheer size, made it difficult to tell his age. In the photo he'd looked as old as forty, but Freirs now suspected he was as much as a decade younger, perhaps as young as Freirs himself. He tried, in his imagination, to erase the beard from Poroth's chin and to do the same for the long, obviously home-cut hair. What sort of person would Poroth be in the city? Stick him in a three-piece suit, or on the subway with a briefcase beneath his arm, or sipping at a beer in some restaurant near Abingdon Square… No, it didn't work, he just wouldn't fit; he was too tall, too broad of shoulder, too obviously meant for outdoor labor. His very features were too stern, his brow thrust too far forward. There seemed no urban counterpart for him.

Poroth still hadn't asked him anything about himself, his interests, his impressions – none of the chat that Freirs would have offered a Sunday visitor. Had he done something wrong? Maybe Poroth had resented his snoozing in the graveyard.

'When you saw me resting back there,' he said, speaking loudly over the sound of the truck, 'I hope it wasn't also the resting place of some relative of yours.'

Surprisingly, Poroth didn't answer right away, and he gave Freirs a quick, unsettling look. 'Well,' he said at last, 'the fact is, pretty much everyone around here is related in one way or another. It's like a tribe – you know, a limited area with a few extended families. A sociologist would have a field day.'

Freirs heard the complicity in Poroth's voice – he'd been speaking as one educated man to another – and remembered what Deborah had written: Both of us have attended college outside the community. Clearly Sarr didn't want him to forget it.

'Sounds incestuous.'

Poroth shrugged. 'No more than any other tribe. Our order's pretty strict. And there are also Brethren living outside of Gilead, so it's not as if we only marry each other. My wife's from Sidon, over in Pennsylvania – an even smaller settlement.'

'You met at college?'

'No, we'd met years before that, at a Quarinale, a kind of planting festival. But we didn't get to see each other again till college. I was at Trenton, Deborah spent two years at Page. It's a Bible school.' He paused. 'We've only been back here for six or seven months. Deborah's still learning to fit in.'

'Is fitting in important?'

'Very.'

Freirs felt a stir of interest. 'I guess she and I will have a lot in common, then.'

Poroth darted him a glance. 'In what way?'

'We're both newcomers around here.'

The other mulled this over, frowning. 'I guess you're right. There are some strong personalities in Gilead, and a few people haven't really accepted her yet. It's all a bit new to Deborah. At this point, she's still trying to get all the families straight. There are faces to remember, names and relations-'

'Yes, I saw a lot of those names on the tombstones back there. Sturtevant, van Meer

'That's right. And Reid, Troet, Buckhalter, a few stray Verdocks-'

'That was the stone I fell asleep by,' Freirs said. 'Troet.'

'Ah, yes.' Poroth kept his eyes on the road. 'Actually, they were a distant branch of my mother's family. She's a Troet too. But that branch is gone now.'

'They all seem to have died at the same time.'

Poroth nodded. 'Some kind of fire, I think. The Lord works in strange ways.' He fell silent; then, as if realizing that this was insufficient: 'Fire's always been a hazard in the country. These days, though, people around here live pretty much the way everyone else does, and they die of the same things other people do – heart attacks, cancer, an occasional accident… all the usual things. Of course, they may live a few years longer, what with working hard, breathing clean air, eating food they've grown themselves.'

'Well, I plan to do plenty of hard work this summer,' said Freirs, settling back, 'but it'll be more the mental sort. Still, this looks like a healthy place to do it.' He patted his belly. 'Maybe I can even lose a little weight.'

Poroth smiled. 'I should warn you, Deborah's a good cook. I hope you're one who struggles against the temptations of the flesh.'

Freirs laughed. 'No better than the next man, I guess! You know what they say about the best way to get rid of a temptation.' He laughed again and looked over at Poroth, but the other was no longer smiling.

They had already passed through a lane of brick houses, square and unadorned, notable only for the absence of children's outdoor toys, junked auto bodies, and whimsical lawn decorations that Freirs had seen in front of other rural homes he'd passed today. Many of the houses were bordered by plots of land in earthen rows, dotted here and there with little shoots of green. Children tended garden beside their elders; they waved to Poroth as he went by, eyeing Freirs uneasily. A house was under construction, bearded men clinging to the framework like sailors in the rigging of a ship. They, too, waved, their faces impassive.

'I see there's no restriction against working on Sunday,' said Freirs.

'Far from it. We believe that labor's holy, and all days are sanctified by it. "For thou shall eat the labor of thine hands: happy shalt thou be, and it shall be well with thee."

'Amen,' Freirs said automatically, though Bible talk merely bored him, like words from a foreign text that had lost, in translation, some essential meaning. But at least he'd found a reason for the state of Poroth's clothes; every sweat ring was presumably a badge of honor.

They had been following the road over a slight rise of land, Poroth gunning the motor to maintain their speed. Now, on the farther side, they passed a sprawling red farmhouse and a barn that looked pegged to the earth by the broad silo beside it. Cattle grazed up and down the slope.