Disciples

by Austin Wright

  That’s how I discovered the sex missing from my love. I did want it, the whole thing, in bed with Judy Field as if I had wanted it all along. If you are shocked, so was I. It was like discovering I was an adopted child. I fought it with denials. I do not want to have sex with this white woman, I said. I am not attracted. I am not perverse. If once I let myself into her spell what other unnatural charms and lures will I be open to? Yielding to this white woman would make me vulnerable to all white women, and who knows what ugliness would follow? What strange and alien attractions? Relatives, aunts, cousins. Old women, grandmothers and children. Freaks, women with mustaches and lizard skin. Men too, pretending to be women, pretty boy thugs. A chaos of rampant sexuality, how could I ever trust my feelings again?

  The reality of her presence at the bus stop restored my calm. I was glad to see her after all, I reveled in the pleasure of her winter jacket, the grace of her movement around the puddles on the bus stop floor, her familiar smile of recognition. It was not just any attraction I was feeling, it was this particular one. It had nothing to do with relatives or women with mustaches. The only thing was that she was white, and suddenly this was irrelevant. My sense of the difference between us which originally had been sexually almost like a species difference had been worn down by disregard and proximity until now I couldn’t find any trace at all. Instead just this sudden consciousness of sex on my mind, like the approval of someone in authority. As I drove her through the darkness of this country which I had discovered and was now introducing her to, I kept thinking sex sex sex. Like my clothes disappearing around my hips as I drove. Which livened and braced me even though it put new distance between us since I didn’t dare say what I was thinking. I postponed. Not tonight, let the time ripen. That was all right because we had business to do, a problem to solve, a job ahead of us. She was preoccupied. The evening was overshadowed by the morning to come. It was not until the next evening, Sunday, after a day of effort and concern, after we had driven out to the Farm and been turned away and had talked to the policeman and gone to the Hijack Café in Flynn for dinner, not until then that I felt in my hips again the question, has the time ripened? Driving back in the dark from the Hijack Café, Judy beside me on the country road with headlights flashing the bushes and tree trunks in the musing silence and I now stripped of all inhibitions not caring that she was not black, indifferent to that once primordial fact, restrained now only by my fear of what she would think. Yet not quite clear, not even yet. If it had been inconceivable to me until now, why wouldn’t it be inconceivable to her still?

  The only way to find out was try. If I had the courage. Thinking a false move would spoil what I now considered the most important friendship in my life. Quite apart from the racial question, she was preoccupied with her stolen baby. She would think me insensitive, coarse in feeling. We stood by her door before goodnight. I thought I saw an invitation in her eyes, but when I hesitated it was withdrawn, replaced by thank you, a hearty handshake and goodnight.

  I’ll try tomorrow, I said to myself, though I knew the invitation would not be repeated. When I got to my own room there was the red light flashing and the startling pair of messages from Oliver Quinn. I summoned Judy to hear them, and for a few minutes she was actually in my room, but it was different now with a project to think about. An adventure, with risks. A relief too, the opportunity for more heroics. Judy was worried about a trap, I pretended not to care. We called her father, who also thought it dangerous. That added to the glory though I foresaw that his joining us tomorrow would be another impediment, reducing my hope. I thought that was probably just as well, for this was serious business, this rescue of Judy’s baby, and it was selfish of me to be so preoccupied.

  You know what happened, how in the morning I went out to Miller Farm, met Oliver and climbed the mountain path with him and watched his unexpected terrible death. After which in an anticlimax they told me Judy could have her baby back. When I drove her back to the Farm to pick up the baby, to my amazement she decided to stay overnight for Oliver’s funeral. I went back to the motel alone to wait for Harry. I was angry, do you blame me, though the integrity of my anger was shaken by the recurring image still in my head of Oliver’s legs kicking out in the unsupported air before his plunge. This left me unsure of everything.

  This was my mood just before I made my decision, which I made that evening, to marry Judy Field when this was over. Clear the brush of both my prejudices and hers. Raise her child and have one of our own. People would notice, let them. I foresaw the enlightened community that would welcome us, a university or college town like the one I grew up in. I foresaw traveling in a car and going into restaurants and stopping at hotels. We would have wonderful friends. We would buy a house and prosper and live happily to a good old age.

  Meanwhile I waited for Harry, who would replace Judy as my company this evening. As I waited my cheerful idea faltered in the chill of the room or some mood working at a deeper level. I began to seethe without knowing what I was seething about. The longer I waited the more I felt as if my heroism had been silly and the whole trouble was punishment for breaking some law. What law I didn’t know, I could only guess.

  12

  Harry Field

  Wakened by the alarm at five-thirty, he shaved, packed, drove to the airport, ate in the food court. In Boston, he changed to a smaller plane, crossing the tarmac in the wind to get aboard. His legs bothered him. Even a short distance made them ache and he would slow down or stop and rest. Soon he would have to carry a cane and put a handicap sign in his car or worse.

  The smaller plane took him to a small New Hampshire airport halfway up the state. He had come to this airport for his father’s funeral twenty years ago. It was on a flat shelf cut into the hills above the town. The plane made a steep turn before coming in, giving Harry a view of the slopes with trees like bristles on the back of an animal and white driveways like thread curling up to toy houses from the narrow road.

  At the country airport the sun came and went, and clouds clung to the bulging mountains. There was a small waiting lounge with a food counter, a Coke machine and some benches. He rented a car and tried to call the Sleepy Wicker Motel, but David and Judy were out. He drove down to the town, then out across the state on the rural roads of New Hampshire. He passed fields and went through woods under trees. Climbed twisting roads and crossed flat stretches with hills on both sides.

  With broken layers of clouds and open sky, the ground patched with sunshine and shadow. Old barns and isolated houses and a closed boys’ camp on a lake with trees leaning over the water. From a plateau with small farms an abrupt vista of the higher mountains north, a jagged horizon a great distance away. Stopped to eat in a resort town, mostly closed this time of year, then continued to the higher White Mountains of New Hampshire. He crossed National Forest boundaries marked by brown signs. The weather darkened, the clouds closed in and truncated the mountains and turned their roots black. It made the countryside sad, while his windshield wipers squeaked.

  He reviewed the question of why he had come. He came because he couldn’t stand the waiting and suspense. Not a good enough reason for his daughter and her boyfriend. He came to help out, what kind of help could he give? He came because of the last straw, last straw of what? Anxiety. The strangeness of Oliver’s telephone message to David as reported by David last night. Come out and see Miller to get your baby back. Come David, not Judy. Not the front way, sneak through the woods. Intrigue, the flame of Oliver’s lurid and vulgar imagination. Harry didn’t like it. If you dwell on it go crazy, the psychopathic possibilities. If you think in such terms, Oliver’s message to David had all the look of a trap. He imagined that trap. He imagined it in many versions. David captured, David killed. Then Judy all by herself in the New Hampshire wilderness exposed to madmen. That’s why Harry came, he had no choice. He tried not to think about it, his own lurid thought rebuked by the impassive New Hampshire countryside through which he drove.

  The mountain
s were full of his father, who in the early years of the century used to climb and map them, and when Harry was a child brought him back trying to recreate them for him. They were full of menace from deep out of the past despite the serenity of Harry’s childhood. Everything he saw from the car window reminded him of things. Clouds steaming on the slopes of the decapitated mountains shivered him with loneliness. A path up into woods from the road recalled a path up to the cabin with his parents. He remembered the cabin, the cold uncivilized mornings, damp dropping out of the trees, the hiking expeditions through leafy wet ground, the slippery boulders along the path. He entered now a famous White Mountain notch, climbing for miles through white birch and pine and fir, the upward view blocked by the leaden sky until surprisingly it cleared exposing high cliffs, a sheer rock face in the sun. Followed soon after by a vista of the great mountains across a valley, full of American history and literature, peaks named after presidents, tan and beige and white with snow in the sun and rich with glinting rocky detail. His emotions followed the mountain weather just as in childhood, elation in the sunlight on the peaks, melancholy and depression when clouds closed down.

  The mountains were full of death stories, people dying on the slopes of Mount Washington Father of our Country within a few yards of the summit hotel that they could not find in the blizzard. They were full of Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose traveler one stormy night took refuge with a family in a house in the notch. After an evening of talk in which the traveler boasted of his future, they heard the rocks descending and ran out to the avalanche shelter. The rock stream parted, sparing the house but crushing the family and its ambitious guest in the shelter. He read about them in the mountain cabin in an old volume with a red cover and engravings, while his father, mother, brother, and sister also read under the kerosene lamp and the rain pattered on the roof and the wind moaned. The reading and readers and story and time of reading formed a unified knot in Harry’s memory. Now this trip to help his daughter would join the combination. Everything merged, his father’s climbing, the views from the summits, the rain on the cabin and the aura of death. As a child he kept his mountain gloom to himself, thinking it a weakness, but he knew now that for his father the gloom was as important as the joy, the deathly past as indispensable as the living future, and no experience could stand by itself.

  Driving made him dreamy and for moments he forgot his anxiety. He remembered Lena Fowler; whose letter from the past he still had not answered. He considered the distance between Wicker Falls and Anchor Island, where Lena lived. From the northernmost tip of New England to well down below Boston. The possibility of a quick trip to Anchor Island before going home, if they were able to solve this kidnapping problem. Big if. Reality questions, if the if iffed, what would they do when it did? David would take his rented car back to Bangor and fly from there. Harry would return his to the little airport where he got it, bringing Judy and her baby with him. A detour to Anchor Island would require him to leave them at the airport, a drastic move needing an excuse, for which nothing came to mind. But what if the if didn’t?

  How could this strange adventure have been avoided? Judy’s foolishness, getting pregnant by Oliver Quinn. Stuff of classic Victorian tragedy, how shocked his mother would have been, which to Judy was just silly. Her lack of history, despite her college education. She thought she was in the vanguard of something, a single mother, heroine, supported by celebrities and characters on television, whereas it looked to Harry as if she were only making the best of a mess. But it wasn’t the pregnancy or ensuing baby that made it a mess, it was Oliver Quinn, revealed as a madman. Whose fatal madness was perhaps only an extension of the madness of a guru named Miller. The question was, what kind of group is the group at Miller Farm? How did it compare with groups in the papers and magazines? Moonies. Buddhist monks. Cults that brainwash middle class children and live in communes singing chants. Doomsday groups in the back country waiting for Armageddon. Suicidal followers of fanatical leaders, Jonesville, Waco. Hate groups, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Aryan nations, the Ku Klux Klan. Armed militias preparing for civil war or race war. Survivalists to outlive Armageddon, with deep cellars and guns to keep everybody out. The Manson family.

  Be sane about what to expect. He was curious about this man who called himself God. What kind of charlatan or quack would go so audaciously among people? How would he make them accept him and why he would want to? In other circumstances Harry would like to interview such a person, ask him real questions, get into the machinery of his mind to see how it worked, and his followers. He was still seeking clues to the endless gullibility of people. He did not think such an interview possible. With nothing but Miller’s name to go by, Harry’s image of him was a balloon. A bloated oratorical man. Fill in the picture with greasy swollen cheeks, grinning pig eyes. Follow me, suckers, I’m your God. Harry knew how the interview would go. Miller would act his Godly part, and questions would slip away on the oily sluice of language. Impervious. It would be just another promotion, and Harry would feel ashamed for helping.

  He followed David’s directions through the papermill city of Endicott on the Androscoggin River, took a secondary road into the wilderness and got finally to the Sleepy Wicker Motel. The motel was beside the road, which was not well traveled, under large deciduous trees still bare and steep wooded mountain slopes on both sides. It lay now in gloom as the evening settled in low. He checked into the motel, got a room, called Judy’s room, no answer, then called David. You’re here, wait wait, David said on the phone, wait till you hear what happened. I’ll be right over. He sounded wildly and uncharacteristically excited. He came into the room looking mad.

  Where’s Judy? Harry said.

  She’s staying the night at Miller Farm, David said.

  What?

  She has her baby back, but she’s staying at the Farm until Oliver Quinn’s funeral tomorrow. Oliver, he died this morning. It was an accident.

  The deep relief and the shock. They talked it over and over. The news was violent, apart from the events. How defensively David described the accident. Right in front of his eyes, not ten feet away. He didn’t push him, he wasn’t even close, I’ll swear he wasn’t. The man who suggested he pushed him, well thank God he dropped that, because how could David prove anything when it was just the two of them alone? It made even Harry feel guilty. Why should that be? The mere hint that someone might suspect David of pushing Oliver on the waterfall even though quickly withdrawn seemed to Harry to implicate immediately not only David but Judy and himself, perhaps especially himself in some transcendental guilt that dyes events regardless of their causes.

  They talked, then lapsed into silence while time cooked. That was time’s job. It cooked the most outrageous and impossible happenings into a cake called history.

  Finally Harry called Miller Farm. He asked to speak to Judy and after a few minutes heard her voice. Hi Daddy. Are you all right, he said, are you safe, are you free?

  I’m fine, Daddy. I’ve got Hazy back and I’m so happy.

  And you’re spending the night with those people?

  They want me to stay for Oliver’s funeral, Daddy.

  Do you want to do that?

  It’s the least I can do considering he’s dead, she said. Daddy, they’re nice people. I like them. I even talked to Miller. He’s nice too, you’d be surprised.

  Miller is nice?

  He’s a sweet old man.

  He claims to be God.

  He doesn’t act like God, she said. He acts like a nice kindly old man.

  This roused Harry’s interest, if Miller should be different from what he had supposed. How would he like to be interviewed? he said.

  Oh Daddy, for heaven’s sake, Judy said. She laughed.

  A half hour later the call came to Harry in his room. The bell startled him like out of a sleep. Professor Harry Field, the man’s voice said. This is Miller at Miller Farm.

  Miller?

  I hear you want to interview me.

 
; Really? Harry said. Would you be willing?

  Why not? the man said. His voice was softly resonant with precise elderly enunciation. Harry thought it was a New England accent but then realized it was not that specific.

  I should tell you a couple of things, Harry said. I’ll approach you from a skeptical point of view and I don’t expect you to persuade me of your beliefs. I make a point of exposing frauds and charlatans. Not that I regard you as one.

  Relax, Miller said. I know your writings.

  You do?

  I’ll talk to you tomorrow when you pick up your daughter. You can ask anything you want. You don’t scare me.

  You don’t scare me either, Harry wanted to say but didn’t. He couldn’t believe Miller knew his writings, but he felt flattered anyway.

  13

  Nick Foster

  Oliver looked out the window. Hey Nick Oliver said look at this.

  I looked. I couldn’t see anything.

  Look in the woods behind the house. Above the big rock.

  I saw a face.

  Look at him. He’s a black man. See his black face.

  His face looked brown. It didn’t look black. But Oliver said it was black so it was black.

  Do you know what that man wants. He wants to take your baby away.

  I didn’t like the black man to take my baby away.