Ceremonies Read online

  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.

  These places were real. A few, it was said, had even had stone walls around them once – places such as Harmony and Mt Jordan, and Zion and Zarephath, with round-the-clock Bible talk on the radio. Places such as Gilead, his destination.

  Kenilworth, Mountainside, Scotch Plains, Dunellen… they themselves seemed far from Jersey: names out of Waverley novels, promising visits of castles, highland waterfalls, and meadows dotted with flocks of grazing sheep. But the signboards lied, the books had lied, the Times had lied; the land here was one vast and charmless suburb, and as the bus passed through it, speeding west across the state, Freirs saw before him only the flat grey monotony of highway, broken from time to time by gas stations, roadhouses, and shopping malls that stretched away like deserts.

  The bus was warm, and the ride was beginning to give him a headache. He could feel the backs of his thighs sweating through his chinos. Easing himself farther into the seat, he pushed up his glasses and rubbed his eyes. The scenery disappointed him, yet it was still an improvement over what they'd just come through. Back there, on the fringes of the city, every work of man seemed to have been given over to the automobile, in an endless line of showrooms and repair shops for mufflers, fenders, carburetors, ignitions, tires, brakes. Now at last he could make out hills in the distance and extended zones of green, though here and there the nearness of some larger town or development meant a length of highway lined by construction, billboards touting banks or amusement parks, and drive-in theaters, themselves immense blank billboards, their signs proclaiming horror movies, 'family pictures,' soft-core porn. A speedway announced that next Wednesday was ladies' night. Food stands offered pizzaburgers, chicken in the basket, fish 'n' chips. Too bad the bus wasn't stopping; he'd wolfed down an omelet two hours ago, standing in the kitchen of his apartment, but he was already hungry again.

  With a sigh he turned back to his reading. He had brought a manila envelope bulging with photocopied articles from Sight and Sound and Cahiers du Cinema, enough for him to fake his way through still another week's installment of the film course he was teaching at the New School. Luckily that bunch wasn't hard to stay ahead of: art students, mostly, on transfer from Parsons, satisfying their English requirement by sitting through a dozen or so old movies.

  The bus was nearly empty, and he had a pair of seats to himself. No need to make halting conversation with some ignoramus who hadn't bought along a magazine to read. Around him all the other riders looked like Jersey types, blank-faced men and women in dowdy clothes, off on mysterious Sunday-afternoon errands. Farther forward sat two teen
age boys cradling knapsacks and caps, a fat woman and her equally fat daughter clutching shopping bags, an old man chattering nonstop to the driver, and one lone young woman whose face betrayed nothing, probably on her way to meet a lover, he decided, or returning from some wild night in New York. Toward the rear a large black woman gazed impassively ahead, already looking out of place. White folks' country here. In the row in front of him a pale red-haired youth with an armed forces duffel bag was fiddling with his radio: not a suitcase-sized monstrosity like the black kids carried or the tinny little transistor Freirs himself owned, but a solid grey plastic thing, souvenir of some PX. A song by Devo had just ended in a burst of static, and a voice announced the time: twelve fifty-seven in Z-100 land. They were passing another industrial park now, its wide black lots deserted for the weekend: an electronics firm, a cannery, a forbidding-looking plant labeled Chemtex. To the west the sky was nearly cloudless, flooding the bus with sunlight. Hot for May; perhaps a promise of worse to come.

  The Poroths' ad had mentioned electricity, but would that include air conditioning? Unlikely. But he supposed it would be good to be a little warm. Sweat the pounds away.

  He felt the bus slow slightly and saw a sign for Somerville approaching in the distance. He remembered the map he'd studied. They were halfway across the state.

  Now, gradually, there was a change in the land. At first it was only evident in the stores along the road: a farm supply house with burlap sacks of feed and grain piled against the porch; a tractor showroom; a sporting goods outlet with advertising placards for guns and ammunition in the window. Then, here and there, an occasional well-tended farm set far back from the highway, the distant farmhouse seeming to turn slowly as the bus went past, the trees or fenceposts along the roadside flashing by in a blur. The land was greener now, the acres of asphalt and angry-looking rust-red earth receding into the east. He felt something in him quicken. On the radio one row ahead the electrified pastorale of Jethro Tull was fading beneath a shrill, insectlike buzz, and the youth twisted the dial to something else. 'Then Jeremiah went forth out of Jerusalem,' the radio said, 'to go into the land of Benjamin, to separate himself thence in the midst of the people.'

  They were moving deeper into the country.

  He had never spent time in the country before. Where he'd grown up, in Astoria, northern Queens, there'd been playgrounds, empty lots, little green patches of lawn, but nothing that hinted of real nature, nothing for a boy to explore. It was a neighborhood where Cub Scouts had learned to read subway maps, where the closest things to wildlife were pigeons and grey squirrels.

  The only open land, besides La Guardia Airport to the north, had been Flushing Meadows Park and a cluster of enormous treeless cemeteries where various Freirs, Freireicher, and Bodenheim relatives lay buried. The park had been the site of two World's Fairs. It was mostly grass now, but a few of the pavilions remained, and Shea Stadium occupied its northern half. As a boy Freirs had spent hours sitting in a favorite tree beside one of the artificial ponds, watching planes come in and out of La Guardia. They'd come in all night as well, one every few minutes until early morning. On summer nights, standing on the roof of his apartment building, he could look to the right and see the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge glowing in the distance, and the Triborough to the left, with the lights of Manhattan behind it. A central Con Ed power plant had stood just a mile and a half away, a monstrous thing with five huge smokestacks, like some great beached ocean liner, and he'd always believed that it made the electricity for all those lights. The planes had been beautiful, winking in the darkness, and the noise hadn't bothered him much; he'd grown up with it. Manhattan, when he'd moved there after college, had seemed almost quiet by contrast.

  Paradoxically, like so many other children in New York, he'd grown up with the idea that what he loved best was the country. Phrases like 'the dark woods,' 'the forest primeval,' and 'the wide open spaces' had made him shiver with longing. He'd felt an inexplicable nostalgia at the pictures of farms and mountains in his schoolbooks; even a poster of bland brown Smokey the Bear was capable of moving him. At age six he had wandered through the parking lot behind his house stamping out cigarette butts, convinced he was helping prevent forest fires. Later, in junior high school, he'd been certain he wanted to be a forest ranger when he grew up; so had nearly half the class. He had imagined himself sitting all day in some solitary tower, reading stacks of books, gazing through binoculars from time to time, then slipping down the ladder, beardless young Jewish St Francis, to check up on the bears and feed the deer.

  Now, for all he knew, he was heading toward that very world, or at least that world's domesticated neighbor, and he was beginning to feel a little less certain of its rewards. The bus had left the highway back hi Somerville and had already made half a dozen stops in small towns and roadside depots – Clover Hill, Montgomery, Raritan Falls: bastions of silence and boredom where, on a Sunday afternoon in May, not a soul was to be seen except the occasional tall scowling man or hard-eyed woman in a pickup truck or station wagon, waiting for a passenger to disembark. These were towns without drugstores or banks, towns where the nights were for sleeping and homes went dark early. Kids here, he supposed, would build backyard tree houses and fortresses in the woods; they would join 4-H clubs, save up for their first rifles, and spend their teenage evenings driving up and down back roads, following their headlights while the roadbed bumped and dipped beneath their wheels.

  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.