“I don’t. I hear the rumors, particularly about her and Johnny Starship. And I did see them together once or twice. But I still find it hard to believe Faith would get involved with anyone as immature as Johnny Starship. Although I always wondered about those extracurricular activities that seemed to take up her afternoons.”
“How do you mean?”
“Oh, she is never here until right before dinner. And then there’s what she said to me on my last birthday.”
“What was that?” Kane said.
Judith gave him an embarrassed grin.
“Well, even though we weren’t as close, we are still friends,” she said. “We still tell each other things. Or, I suppose, I still tell her things. I was trying to decide whether to start walking out with one of the older boys who’d asked me, and that started me thinking about love and marriage and sex and all that. So I was telling all this to Faith, and she gave me a funny look and said, ‘Don’t expect too much from sex. You might be disappointed.’ ”
“What did she mean by that? Do you think she is sexually active?”
The question seemed to throw Judith off stride.
“I have no idea,” she said. “This isn’t Iran. We don’t have the morality police checking on virginity.”
Kane sat thinking for a moment.
“Can you tell me what she was wearing last Friday?’ he asked.
Judith gave him a smile.
“I’ll bet you didn’t ask Matthew Pinchon that,” she said. Kane opened his mouth to reply, but she said, “That’s okay. Men and women are the same in that way here as everywhere. Men see a pretty girl and think about what she’d look like without her clothes. Women look at her and wonder how they’d look in her clothes. Faith was wearing black corduroy pants, a white turtleneck sweater, white wool socks, and black walking shoes. She had a dark-blue down coat, black overboots, and a white knit scarf and hat.”
“Whew,” Kane said, “that’s as good a description as a cop could give.”
“We all know one another’s clothes very well, Mr. Kane,” Judith said. “None of us has that many outfits. Ostentation is not Christian.”
“Okay,” Kane said, “thanks. You young people have given me a lot to think about.”
Judith got up and started for the door, paused, and turned.
“Can you answer a question for me?” she asked.
“I can try,” Kane said.
“What’s it like, living out in the world?”
“The truth is,” Kane said, “I don’t really know yet.”
10
For I have been a stranger in a strange land.
EXODUS 2:22
KANE SPENT THE REST OF THE DAY IN INTERVIEWS WITH the adults of Rejoice, checking names off Thomas Wright’s list as he went. He had no trouble finding people, because they were all in public places, working. Kane dodged through the clear, crisp, thirty-below air, going from building to building and cornering them, introducing himself and asking questions that the workers seemed perfectly willing to answer without any fear of losing time from their tasks.
Some of the work was necessary to keep a community the size of Rejoice going: cooking in the cafeteria, medicating in the clinic, tending to livestock in the barns, gardening in the greenhouses, teaching in the school, and a half dozen people handling the paperwork that any modern American town, no matter how isolated, generates in the twenty-first-century.
Most of the rest seemed to be involved in making items to sell during the next tourist season. People knitted and sewed, threw pots and worked in wood, even ran a small printing plant, which, that day, was producing color post-cards of a Devil’s Toe ablaze in summer flowers and foliage and bathed in the summer sunshine that lasted nearly around the clock. There was apparently no end to the gewgaws tourists would buy, and Rejoice seemed determined to supply any imaginable legal want, and to keep the profits thereof. It was, Kane thought, like visiting Santa’s workshop, if Santa made moose-poop swizzle sticks.
Kane talked to the schoolteachers, the town’s doctor, and a sampling of the residents and got, when he added it all up, nothing useful. Faith put no strain on Rejoice’s social fabric, raised no questions troubling to its religious consensus, and spoke only when spoken to. The town’s account reminded Kane of what people said when one of their neighbors was revealed as a mass murderer: He was such a quiet, polite young man.
The town was, of course, concerned when Faith went off to the regional high school, concerned both for Faith, among all those outsiders, and for what she might bring back to the community. But Faith didn’t start smoking or wear revealing clothes or go Goth, and she spoke of her experiences outside Rejoice in steady, judicious, slightly superior tones, reassuring the adults that she was a solid young woman and that their way of life really was superior to that of those who lived outside.
Faith insisted to one and all that she was attending the high school because its course offerings would better prepare her for the Ivy League college she planned to attend, and explained the extracurricular activities that kept her away from Rejoice in the afternoons as extra polish for her résumé. Her first year at the school, she’d played Mrs. Gibbs in the school’s production of Thornton Wilder’s
Our Town,
been co-chair of the canned-food drive, and worked as a copy editor on the student newspaper,
The Devil’s Toe Imp.
As important to the adults of Rejoice were the things Faith had not done. She had not become a cheerleader, a position they were confident her personality and beauty would have won for her, or joined the girl’s basketball team, which would have suited her natural athleticism. With their skimpy costumes, either of these pursuits, the town agreed, would have exposed more of Faith to the world than Rejoice would have been completely comfortable with. That, plus the fact that she did not allow herself to be seduced by the secular teenage world of makeup and boys and parties, reconciled the residents of Rejoice to her choice.
After a year, the town was confident in Faith’s ability to mix in the outside world without harm to herself or to them. Once that threat was removed, and the novelty of having a Rejoice teenager in the regional school wore off, the town paid less attention to her comings and goings. So what Faith’s extracurricular activities were this school year, no one could say exactly.
The only off note in this chorus came from a couple of twenty-something men Kane talked with, cornering them one by one in the cafeteria when they came in from some outdoor labor for a warm-up. They made a point of saying that Faith seemed to spend a lot of time with Johnny Starship—“Can you believe that name? What a wuss,” one of them said—who they figured was just biding his time before taking over the family business of doing the devil’s work. Careful questioning by Kane revealed that each of the young men had harbored hopes of winning Faith for himself and, although she had disabused them of this notion in the nicest possible way, were still hurt by the rejection. Feeling that there was nothing wrong with himself, each chose to explain it by believing that she was interested in some other male.
The nonsmitten adults had another view. If Faith was spending time with Johnny Starship, it was during the day and in school, where, despite what you sometimes heard about American public schools, they didn’t believe anything seriously sinful could be going on. Besides, the contact didn’t seem to be hurting her and could only help him. Everyone agreed that Elder Moses Wright couldn’t have been happy about his granddaughter spending time with the spawn of his sworn enemy, but it is, they pointed out, a Christian’s duty to proclaim the Good News. Doesn’t the Bible say: “Sing unto the Lord, bless His name; show forth His salvation from day to day”?
Kane was sitting in his small interview room turning all this over in his mind when Thomas Wright found him.
“I don’t mean to interrupt,” he said, “but it is time for the evening gathering.”
Kane got to his feet, and the two men walked out into the community hall.
“Have you learned anything?” Thomas Wright asked as they moved through the thickening crowd toward the front of the room.
“Only that your daughter was well liked and respected,” Kane said, “although what I heard did raise a few questions I’d like to ask you.”
“After the meeting,” Thomas Wright said. “If you’ll stand here.”
Kane found himself in the front rank of a crowd facing the front of the room. After a couple of minutes, during which more people straggled in, Thomas Wright stepped out and turned to face the crowd.
“We are at the end of another day of working in the vineyards of the Lord,” he said, raising his voice to be heard in the back.
“Praise God,” the crowd answered
“Let us hear the Lord’s words,” Thomas Wright said, and his father, Bible under his arm, stepped out.
“My text today,” he said, opening the Bible, “is from the Gospel of Saint Mark, chapter four, verse eleven.”
“Speak to us of God’s word,” the crowd replied.
The old man looked straight at Kane, then dropped his eyes to read: “ ‘And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the kingdom of God: but to them that are without, all things are done in parables.’ ”
The old man closed his Bible, fastened his gaze on Kane again, and expanded on his theme: the superiority of those who believed over those who didn’t, Rejoice over the outside world, and self-reliance over depending on outsiders. Kane locked his gaze with the preacher’s and stood there, a slight smile on his lips.
There was no telling how long that might have gone on if the crowd hadn’t started fidgeting. Moses Wright, in tune with his audience like any showman, sensed its unease, wrapped up his homily and, with one last look at Kane, stepped back into the crowd.
His son took his place. He looked unhappy.
“Once again, it is good to hear one of the possible interpretations of God’s words,” he said, bringing a titter from his audience and a scowl from his father. “Now, who has matters to be brought before the meeting?”
What followed was a mishmash of progress reports, complaints, and news, delivered by people in the crowd, some of whom stepped forward in the same manner the Wrights had, others who stood where they were and spoke. The community gave a prayer of thanks that two of its members serving in Iraq remained unharmed and a third was recovering from her wounds in Germany. It said another prayer for the safety and success of the basketball teams on their way to Anchorage. The rest of the proceeding seemed to Kane to be wholly secular: production reports, plumbing problems, plans for the spring and summer. There was some discussion of the wisdom of opening an espresso stand in Devil’s Toe, those for it stressing the profits to be made, and those against it voicing the community’s aversion to nonbiblical stimulants. No vote was taken.
When everyone had had a chance to speak, Thomas Wright stepped up again and gestured to Kane to join him. Kane walked up and turned to face the crowd. Seeing so many people in one place, all looking at him, made Kane nervous, but he fought to keep an easy smile on his face.
“As you know,” Thomas Wright told the crowd, “a member of our community, my daughter, is missing. The Council of Elders has decided that her disappearance merits investigation that is beyond the abilities of anyone here. So we have employed Nik Kane here to look into it. I know he has talked with some of you already, and may want to talk with others. I urge you to cooperate with him, to answer his questions fully and truthfully, and to aid his efforts in any way you can. For now, though, I would simply like you to bid him welcome.”
“Welcome, Nik Kane,” most of the crowd said. Moses Wright and a few others kept their lips pressed firmly together.
“Let us go now, walking in the light of the Lord, until we meet again in the morning,” Thomas Wright said.
The crowd broke up, several members making a point of going to shake Kane’s hand.
“Elder Moses Wright seems to have forgotten his duty to strangers,” one middle-aged woman said. “The Bible says, ‘Thou shalt neither vex a stranger nor oppress him.’ ”
“And elsewhere,” her companion, another middle-aged woman, said, “ ‘Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.’ ”
Kane laughed.
“I appreciate the welcome,” he said, “although I don’t pretend to be an angel.”
“Neither do we,” one of the women said, “but others still call us that.”
Kane was swept along into the dining room, where he ate spaghetti and meatballs at a long table filled with Rejoice residents of all ages and occupations. They asked him so many questions about life in Anchorage that an elder had to intervene, laughing. “Please, give Mr. Kane a chance to eat. We wouldn’t want him to go hungry to answer our questions.”
Kane found his dinner companions to be an odd mixture of innocence and sophistication, able to talk knowledgeably about national politics and economics, but completely unaware of things like property taxes or the price of a loaf of bread. They got their information, he learned, mostly from the radio, which meant mostly from talk radio and, thus, mostly from the rantings of right-wing white men. So they thought the larger world was much more dangerous and threatening than it was, much more sinful, much more strident and partisan, much less friendly and compassionate. Most of those who had more recent experience of the outside world had come to Rejoice to escape it, their own fears and disappointments reinforcing that view. Kane’s suggestions that this might not be a full picture of the outside world were met with skepticism, so he gave that up and used the time to try to learn more about Rejoice.
What he found out was that the community was hardly monolithic. Most of those at his table were unreservedly Christian in their beliefs and fundamentalist in their practice, but some were less so. That the two groups had worked out a satisfactory relationship was clear, and it appeared to Kane that a person could live quite happily in the town by respecting the forms, if not embracing the content, of Christian fundamentalism. Among the strictly religious, there was a wide variety of opinion on both religious form and content. Some sided with Moses Wright’s stubborn adherence to a literal interpretation of the Bible, while others upheld the principle that each person was his own interpreter of the Holy Writ.