Tyler realized like a lightning strike that he hadn’t even thought to ask. “What happened to the truck driver?”
“Oh,” Lorrie said, “He’s here too.”
* * *
Not half an hour later—the younger woman from the kitchen insisted on feeding Chris and Tyler more soup before they actually obeyed Lorrie’s injunction to get back upstairs—both boys were sitting in the bedroom where the driver was asleep, clearly medicated and just as clearly in far worse shape than either of them. He was not old. Tyler guessed late thirties, maybe early forties. His face was a square-jawed, flat-browed rectangle, with several days’ worth of dark growth on his cheeks.
He moaned and shifted under his sheets, and Tyler and Chris exchanged a worried glance.
It appeared the driver had received a great deal more care than either of the boys. One leg was in traction. It was carefully splinted and bandaged, even expertly so, but likely needed a cast. The man’s head was also swathed in bandages, and it looked like part of his head had been shaved to treat a cut along the back and side of it. The room smelled of antiseptic and something else Tyler couldn’t place—something herbal, he suspected. The scent was sweet and almost cloying.
“They should take him to a hospital,” Chris said, his voice strained. He was holding some emotion in check. Probably anger.
Or possibly fear.
“Or call the police,” he continued. “What kind of people spirit all the victims out of a car wreck and don’t tell anyone?”
“How do you know they haven’t?”
“Because if the police knew about this, they’d have been here. To write up an accident report if nothing else. And he would be in a hospital where he belongs.”
“I don’t know,” Tyler said. “I think these people are doing their best.”
Chris raised an eyebrow, but this time he didn’t explode. “It’s good to give people the benefit of the doubt. But you’re giving them too much benefit.”
“How do you know? It seems like they know what they’re doing.”
“I just don’t like how isolated they are,” Chris admitted. “It doesn’t feel right. Or . . . safe.”
“Safe? What danger do you think is here?”
Tyler asked the question in earnest. As much as he wanted to defend this community, Chris wasn’t the only one who sensed some danger lurking here. But he couldn’t name it.
“Like this,” Chris said, encompassing the room and the unconscious driver with a gesture. “Who knows how badly hurt this man really is? I believe they’re trying to take care of him, but what can they do without X-rays, or scans, or whatever? He could be dying. They wouldn’t know.”
Tyler pensively watched the sleeper. He didn’t look like he was dying. Just uncomfortable. Then again, his sleep might be a coma. And his face was ashen.
“It’s not safe for them either,” Chris went on. “All those women down there. If something was to happen to this guy, like he died because he didn’t get the right medical care, all those women would be implicated in the death.”
“Your problem, Mr. Sawyer,” said a third, unexpected voice, booming into the room and and making both boys jump, “is that you seriously underestimate our medical knowledge and ability to give care. And, I might add, you judge our policies without really knowing what they are.”
They turned. Jacob stood in the doorway, looking on both of them with an expression that was not exactly a frown—more like the smug sternness of a schoolteacher who had caught the biggest troublemakers in the class red-handed.
He strolled into the room, hands in his pockets. He wore hardy work pants and a striped, button-up shirt that was sweat and dirt stained. Cleary he’d just come in from the fields. “The women told me you had some questions,” he explained. “First off, several in our community are trained medical people. One MD and two RNs, in fact. They are capable of telling broken bones and signs of serious internal injury—and of discerning between a coma and sleep. He is sleeping, and he will wake up. We’re helping the sleep with a little something, because rest will heal him. We have, in fact, filed a police report. And if the situation warranted—which it does not—we would move him to a hospital. We are not careless.”
Chris’s mouth gaped as he looked for an answer, but he didn’t find one fast enough. Jacob’s next words startled his thinking off track anyway.
“After dinner, which I suggest you join us for since you’re so clearly on your feet, you can use the phone to call whoever you like. I’ll have the ladies bring you up some decent clothing.”
“I thought you didn’t have a phone,” Tyler blurted.
“Not one for general use, but we keep an emergency line. My wife was overzealous in denying you access to it. I’ve talked to her about that.”
He turned to go. “When your visit with our driver here is over, consider yourselves invited downstairs. Clothes will be waiting for you in your rooms. The family is coming in for dinner, and it’s a good opportunity to see our community as it actually is—not as you conjecture it to be, hmm?”
Tyler and Chris exchanged a wordless glance when Jacob had stepped back out of the room. They were almost afraid to talk. Apparently the walls around here had ears.
Although the walls had also, Tyler conceded, had some comforting things to say.
He wasn’t sure why he didn’t feel comforted.
Chris whistled. “I guess I got told.”
Tyler grinned, but it was halfhearted. “I guess you did.”
“Too bad our friend here wasn’t awake to hear it. He’d be glad to know he’s getting such good care.”
“I believe him, though, about all their training and stuff. They seem to know what they’re doing. And somewhere they’ve gotten a lot of meds,” Tyler said. Still not sure why he wanted to defend these folks.
“Yeah, well, I guess. Except I think he’s lying about the police report part.”
Chris stood. “Not that I blame him. If was in his position, I’d lie too. About that.”
* * *
Dinner was charming, homely, odd, and disconcerting—all at once.
When the boys made it back downstairs—stopping for a rest after they got dressed, as they were still weaker and more tired than either of them wanted to admit—most of the community was already indoors. The whole ground floor smelled like soup. Chicken and vegetable, with garlic and parsley. Fresh bread added to the delectable smell. Tyler found himself wishing for more solid food—he couldn’t get excited about soup after all that broth he’d been sipping—but suspected his stomach might not handle it well anyway. Children were everywhere, but well-behaved for the most part. A pair of boys were wrestling on a throw rug between the tables, but one of the adults quickly put a stop to it. There were more than half a dozen adults, most of them younger than Jacob and his wife. All were dressed alike: long skirts and aprons for the women, work pants and button-up shirts on the men. Beards were in strong supply. Lorrie had said there were five families, and that seemed about right, with lots of children between them.
They were, in a way Tyler had not encountered before, beautiful. In their set-apartness was a sweetness and wholesome innocence that made him want to argue against Chris’s impressions even more, to insist these people should just be protected and honoured.
When the meal was called to order—literally, by Jacob, who sat at the head of the main oak table—everyone scurried to his or her spot and stood at attention. Jacob led in a formal prayer, and everyone sat down at once. Tyler wondered if he might miss part of the choreography if he didn’t pay attention. And then he almost did—he reached for a bun from a bread basket in the middle of the table and drew his hand back just in time to avoid being the only person making any sort of move toward the food. All eyes were on Jacob instead.
“Nathan,” he said, fixing his piercing eyes on a young man about twenty-five who might have been his son, “tell us about your day.”
In measured sentences, Nathan did. He talked about wo
rk in the field and recounted something innocent and amusing that had happened with a ground squirrel. Everyone laughed, especially the women, whose eyes twinkled and shone.
Next Jacob called on another young man, and then on Miranda, and then on the woman they had met in the kitchen, the one who might be Miranda’s mother. Her name was Julie.
Each of them gave a similar story: work, something amusing, and then sometimes, tacked on the end, a lesson they had learned. The stories showed the sweetness in these people that Tyler liked. But there was a weird formulaic quality to them that set him on edge.
Equally strange, to him, was that no one cut in or interrupted or grabbed the ball of conversation and carried it in any new direction. They spoke only when called upon by Jacob.
Fair enough, Tyler thought; if everyone in here talked at once, it would be chaotic.
But alive, in a way that this wasn’t.
He silently rebuked himself for judging and tuned back in.
“Tyler,” Jacob said, making him jump, “tell us about your day.”
Tyler’s face grew hot. He had not expected to be called upon and was not sure what he would say.
And he knew he was expected to follow formula, and he didn’t want to.
“It was fine,” he said. “I’m getting stronger. Thank you all for your care.”
And that was all. He couldn’t tell if he had offended. But really, how could he have followed the formula even if he’d wanted to? He hadn’t worked, he had no funny stories about animals or small children, and the only moral he’d learned was to ask Jacob for permission to do things, not Lorrie.
Jacob stood, stretched out his hands, and gave a formal blessing upon the food and upon all those who sat at the table. When he sat back down, dinner commenced. So did general conversation, though it was quiet and surprisingly subdued, especially that coming from the children’s tables. Two mothers were serving, so they hovered over those tables and probably had a lot to do with how hushed the kids stayed.
For some reason Tyler thought of Nick throwing himself off the dock. And then of himself, as a child, wrestling through all the enormities of death and trying to live again. He wondered if these children ever had to wrestle with anything, and if they did, how they found room to do it.
Dinner was good—enormously satisfying, in fact. Tyler suspected his meds were wearing off. He was beginning to be in more pain, and it made sitting uncomfortable, but his appetite was coming back. Not a bad trade-off, he decided. If his pain got too bad he’d take a Tylenol. At least that would allow him to walk in a straight line.
When the hardworking community had finished dinner, the young men eating three bowls of soup in the time it took the women to eat one and some bread, Jacob cleared his throat.
Everything fell to an immediate hush.
“We are privileged to have guests with us,” he said, “hearing and seeing our way of life. I think they’re still a little resistant to our ways, but let’s all pray they come around.” Humour twinkled in his eyes like that was supposed to be funny, but Tyler’s face heated up again. Jacob resumed his speech without waiting for any response from either of the guests. “When we came out here ten years ago to escape the world and serve God and one another in simplicity, we faced a great deal of opposition from people who insist on following their own selfish, worldly ways. Persecution is not always easy, but it makes us stronger. Even amongst us, sometimes, there can be pressure to return to more culturally acceptable ways of doing things.” His expression burned, and Tyler suspected he was speaking to one or two in particular. Thankfully he didn’t call them out by name. “It’s up to all of us to rebuke those who err and remain faithful to our calling. The world is always at the gate, trying to lure us back in. But I hope we all remember how tawdry and wicked the world’s ways truly are.”
Tyler found himself with the urge to raise his hand and ask exactly what “ways” Jacob was referring to, but he didn’t. Something about the whole speech was making him uneasy. From the way Chris was fidgeting, he didn’t like it either. Maybe it was the implicit way the two of them were being identified as “of the world” and therefore dangerous.
You don’t actually know us at all, Tyler protested silently, aware that several eyes were on him. I wouldn’t call the Oneness worldly. Or culturally acceptable. And Chris—well, Chris was just Chris. Beating a path all his own like he always had done.
But the next thing Jacob said startled Tyler so much he nearly fell off his chair.
“It’s important for us always to remember who we are,” he charged his little community. “We are walking the true paths of God, in unity and simplicity. We are Oneness.”
Tyler’s protests drowned in a swamp of sudden confusion. He had known there was something different—spiritual—about these people from the start. They lived together like a cell and clearly took care of each other. They weren’t like the world.
They said they were Oneness.
Were they?
He was still trying to figure that question out when he and Chris went to the phone, in a small shack on a corner of the property, and tried to call home. The phone rang and rang, and Chris tried calling twice, until giving up after thirty minutes and storming inside.
* * *
Richard stood alone at the end of the pier, watching the sun set over the bay. Light touched water in a royal display of brilliant purple and orange. But at the moment, what his eyes saw mattered less than what he felt, what his spirit heard when he listened closely.
In the Oneness, every individual had a gift all his own. Many assumed Richard’s was prayer. He spent hours in it; he drew strength from it; he gained insight through it. But they were wrong. Prayer was not a special gift for specific individuals. It was an open door to all, an invitation into the deeper things of reality. It was like an ever-flowing stream, thought and sight and strength of the Spirit itself, and anyone could plunge into the depths. If they would.
But few did.
Young in his life as Oneness, Richard had determined to go in prayer as far as he could. He had been twenty-one, sober and serious but far too given (in his own opinion) to flings of fancy and wild self-indulgence. So he reacted as extremely as he could think to react: he denied himself food for forty days and forty nights and went out into a wilderness to pray. For that long month and ten days in June and July he camped in a tent in the mountains and learned how to listen, how to be carried away. It wasn’t like that at first. For more than twenty days he did not listen but talked, at first in his mind and then out loud when the silence drove him crazy. Realizing he had not come out here to listen to himself, he stopped talking for another three days and desperately tried to negate himself, to shut off his mind altogether so he could tap into the vast Unconscious. Boredom had been an issue even while he was still talking; now it threatened to derail the whole enterprise, and anyway, he couldn’t do it. The words and images that are a human mind do not turn off.
Then finally he realized they were not meant to, and that to pray was to converse; back and forth, talk and listen, give and take. He found new awareness of a stream that had been flowing around the whole time and took the first few truly exhilarating steps into discovering what it meant to be carried by that stream.
When he got home, back to the mid-size city cell where he’d been born into the Oneness, many treated him like a hero and a mystic, and it was silly. He still didn’t really know what he was doing. He hadn’t learned anything of substance; he had just begun to learn how to learn. That realization kept him humble, and still kept him humble, even though now, twenty-five years later, he had actually learned a few things and was more comfortable in the strange rush that was prayer than anyone he knew.
The orange on the water deepened, burnt and glowing, and the sun began to sink beyond the horizon.
Richard could feel the participation of others who were Oneness in the stillness, like vibrations along a vast symphony of strings. Some only skimming the surface. Some diving d
eeper than even Richard knew how to go. Prayer was a song, a continuously rising composition that had played for thousands of years, in heaven and on earth, and would play still when everyone he knew had passed into the cloud and taken up a new part in the music.
To stand on the edge of the water and feel the subtle strains was to delve into a peace that transcended events and circumstances.
Prayer did not always give actual answers.
But almost always, it gave peace.
Richard breathed deeply of the salt air and focused his heart on Tyler and Chris, on Reese and April, on Nick, and on the mystery of the battle they were fighting. Who and what and where and why—everything one should know before going into a fight—were blanks, or guesses. What exactly David had created and how it was affecting their lives now, he could not say.
But he prayed. The music groaned in his soul.
He lifted the groan into words, heavy, simple. Asking for help. It was not a flowery prayer. Those who truly prayed rarely did so verbosely.
A throat cleared behind him—some way back, but he heard it. He turned and smiled.
“Hello, Mary.”
She approached, glad for his permission. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“Then I will consider this a joining, not an interruption.”
“Fair enough.” She sat down on one of the concrete posts of the pier, looking out over the water and the sinking sun. The air was still warm, still enveloping.
“Have you learned anything from the Spirit?” she asked.
“Only the usual.”
She smiled. “All shall be well.”
“Yes.”
The smile faltered, and she sighed. “Little help at the moment, though.”
“I think it’s a great help,” Richard said. Not combatively, just telling the truth. “If I didn’t think that things were going to turn out right, I’d go hide under a rock, not fight this fight.”
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